Alfred Guzzetti (born 1942) is a maker of documentary and experimental films and tapes. His work has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Margaret Mead Festival, and other festivals in London, Rotterdam, Germany, Spain and France, as well as in installation settings in New York, Copenhagen, and Santa Monica.
Education
Alfred Guzzetti was born in Philadelphia and attended the public schools there. He earned a BA from Central High School and a second BA from Harvard College. He studied at Birkbeck College, University of London, as a Marshall Scholar, and received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard University, where he now teaches.
Career
Following a series of films for theatrical productions, Guzzetti's experimental short film, Air, won first prize in its category at the 1972 Chicago Film Festival. Afterwards he embarked on an autobiographical cycle that included the feature-length Family Portrait Sittings (1975) and Scenes from Childhood (1979), both premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art. These led to further autobiographical films, including the recently completed The Gifts of Time (2018), and to collaborations with the photographer Susan Meiselas and filmmaker Richard P. Rogers, with whom he co-directed Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1985) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991). These were political and historical documentaries and prompted later collaborations with Susan Meiselas on Reframing History (2004) and A Family in History, which includes Living at Risk plus a set of 20 short films entitled The Barrios Family 25 Years Later. In the late 1980s he began a series of conversations with anthropologist Ákos Östör that resulted in Seed and Earth (1994), a portrayal of life in a Bengali village, and Khalfan and Zanzibar (1999), which poses the question of an individual's relation to his culture. Both of these were made collaboratively with Östör and anthropologist Lina Fruzzetti. Around 1993 Guzzetti became interested in the experimental possibilities of the new small video formats and began a series of videos that included What Actually Happened (1996), Under the Rain (1997), A Tropical Story (1998), The Tower of Industrial Life (2000), which was shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Down from the Mountains (2002), Calcutta Intersection (2003), History of the Sea (2004), and most recently, Still Point (2009) and Passage (2018). This experimental strain is related to his collaborations with composers, including his contributions to Earl Kim’s Exercises en Route (1971), as well as to Kurt Stallmann’s SONA (2005). He also work collaboratively with Kurt Stallmann on Breaking Earth (2008), a gallery installation for 11 channels of sound and 5 video projections; Moon Crossings (2011), for 15 instruments, electronics and video; the single-channel Time Present (2013); and Among Rivers (2019) for 7 projectors, 28 loudspeakers, and four performers. With composer Ivan Tcherepnin he created the 16mm film Sky Piece (1978)
Selected filmography
The Gifts of Time (2018) 78 minutes
Time Present (2013) 17 minutes
Time Exposure (2012) 11 minutes
The Barrios Family Twenty-Five Years Later (2011) 131 minutes
Still Point (2009) 15 minutes
Reframing History (2006) Night Vision (2005) 2 minutes América Central (2004) 7 minutes History of the Sea (2004) 15 minutes Calcutta Intersection (2003) 10 minutes The Tower of Industrial Life (2000) 15 minutes Khalfan and Zanzibar (1999) 25 minutes A Tropical Story (1998) 9 minutes Under the Rain (1997) 10 minutes What Actually Happened (1996) 9 minutes The Stricken Areas (1996) 9 minutes Variation (1995) 5 minutes The Curve of the World (1994) 8 minutes Seed and Earth (1994) 36 minutes Rosetta Stone (1993) 10 minutes Pictures from a Revolution (1991) 92 minutes Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1985) 58 minutes Chronological Order (1985) 4 minutes Scenes from Childhood (1980) 78 minutes Family Portrait Sittings (1975) 103 minutes Air (1971) 18 minutes