The first part of my professional life was dominated by my involvement in film, video, performance, and related arts. Some of my earliest immersion into production was through Pittsburgh Filmmakers; I studied at the famed film school at New York University, and later at the San Francisco Art Institute. I’ve exhibited my films widely, throughout North America as well as Europe and South America, in venues from pop-up neighborhood cinemas to broadcast television to university halls, from movie theatres to art galleries to major museums.
“Irwin is witty and ingenious in his exploration of the resources of the medium.” (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times)
“Irwin is a mature film artist who explores the medium as it can relate to and inform the average intelligent viewer. He seems to approach the creation of his films much as if he were a painter who uses appropriated imagery and text to confront the audience. The confrontational nature of Irwin’s work relates it to the films of Michael Snow and even more specifically to the work of artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger.” (Will Torphy, Artweek)
You can get a sense of my early days as a working artist and filmmaker from these two interviews:
I don’t currently make films, other than an occasional thing just for my own amusement or to capture a moment. An example of that is below, a four-minute video I made in August 2020. It captures an idyllic afternoon my wife Jill and I spent on the Hudson River. Even though it was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and nobody was going anywhere, we were able to take small day and weekend trips like this, and I wanted to record the feeling. It’s funny, it is a throwaway piece, a small thing barely more than a gesture, but it reflects a style and sensibility I’ve brought to some of my film work since the very beginning. In fact, in many ways it is quite like a film I created in 1979, shot not on water but in the rolling farmlands of central Pennsylvania, that received serious exposure including a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So yes, the work remains, but the context shifts.
My films are out of circulation, but you can get a sense of what they were about from the following collection of excerpts on selected works from published reviews and feature articles.
By The Lake
“Blends Irwin’s assortment of visual techniques to depict a chance meeting between an unsuccessful farmer and an experimental filmmaker. In By The Lake he delicately reveals the questions and issues that the farmer and the artist are each living with, and how they effect the control each experiences over his own life. What ultimately makes the film richly powerful is the connection between the characters, how they stumble onto both common ground and unbridgeable gaps, and that the farmer has all the good lines.” (Michael Fox, Film Month)
“A moving evocation of one’s choices to comply with or resist social forces that impinge upon personal expression and self-determination. By The Lake juxtaposes images of the material world with manipulated imagery in order to question the nature of interpretation.” (Will Torphy, Artweek)
The Big Red Auk
“The Big Red Auk gives evidence of both Irwin’s preference for humor and imagination in the medium, and the filmmaker’s preoccupying love of image for its own sake, as well as of the shoestring school of filmmaking. The three-minute work blips along spasmodically, a filed in semi-darkness brightened by haphazard, colored geometric figures and blurred humanoid images, centered over a recurring central flash of pithy, mostly monosyllabic text whose cerebral undercurrent is sparked by sexual innuendo.” (Calvin Ahlgren, San Francisco Chronicle)
“The scratched-on-celluloid text of The Big Red Auk creates a densely beautiful texture that seemed aesthetically determined more by Irwin’s ambitious penchant for experimentation than by a desire to inform his audience. Seamlessly created.” (Will Torphy, Artweek)
I.D.N.O.
“I.D.N.O. employs a collaged technique of carefully interwoven broad painterly gestures composed of image and text. Using words that blip on screen for just over a second, the technique demands intense concentration on the part of the viewer. A sound track of altered noises and garbled speech accompanies the animation and written text, creating a demanding interplay of elements.” (Will Torphy, Artweek)
“In camera-less, direct-marking techniques, I.D.N.O. poses a series of sequential, additive queries and responses to the audience.” (Anthony Reveaux, Artweek)
“I.D.N.O. is challenging both visually and intellectually with the residual impact of a self-analysis as we consider how much we ‘see’ and ‘comprehend’ when we look at words and images.” (Catherine Sullivan, SECA Catalogue, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
Hat Boxing
“Hat Boxing is not only funny but represents a clever kindling of the viewer’s imagination.” (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times)
“One of the most effective ways that Irwin engages the viewer is through his generous use of humor. Although at times the humor is dark and the audience reaction uncertain. Hat Boxing, for example, is a fifteen minute wicked joke. The story is carried on the soundtrack as a radio play which includes murder, attempted suicide, adultery and other indoor sports. The visuals play off the soundtrack, using children’s toys and 1930s pulp comics to illuminate the absurdity of the plot. Underneath the mischievous wit Irwin makes some pointed comments about the illusions we go to great lengths to maintain about the ones we love.” (Michael Fox, Film Month)
My Day
“The most accessible of Irwin’s films is My Day. The narrative is written out one word at a time, and it is punctuated by stroboscopic flashes of such familiar images as a milk bottle or a cereal bowl.” (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times)
“My Day is an eight-minute excerpt from the film component of a collaborative performance created by Irwin, comedian Robert Arriola, and sculptor Bruce Hogeland. Its subject is the ironic contradictions between an actor’s (filmmaker’s?) creative life and the mundane daily existence he endures in order to pay his bills. This film journal is considerably more personal than Irwin’s earlier works. Consisting of spoken narrative spiked with psychosexual revelations, My Day systematically utilizes common generic black and white symbols flashed on the screen to create an aural and visual rhythm that is continuous and lulling.” (Will Torphy, Artweek)
Let’s Be Pals!
“Let’s Be Pals! engages in an amusing and accessible dialogue with the audience about the nature of the film experience.” (Scott MacDonald, Afterimage)
“Despite its conversational tone, Let’s Be Pals! is essentially a philosophical meditation on the nature of films. Pals!, which consists of an ersatz verbal dialogue with the audience and the artist himself, asks: ‘Why are you here? What do you want from me?’ and then posits a judgement Irwin may often consider but seems to reject: ‘A film must be easy to look at, to the point.'” (Will Torphy, Artweek)
The Auction Film
“Dinty Moore and James Irwin have a notion that there’s something particularly red, white and blue about Franklin County auctions. Whether it’s a cattle auction or a sale on the courthouse steps, there’s something of a social event behind it all. So Moore and Irwin have produced a film about them. More than just capturing a visual display of auctions, they are setting out to explain why this slice of culture has survived.” (Robert Vucic, Hagerstown Morning Herald)
“Shows an interesting kaleidoscope of the people, the ones doing the selling, the ones doing the buying, and those who just watch.” (Dave Dunkle, Chambersburg Public Opinion)
The Role of the Observer
“A fragmented narrative which pretends to be autobiographical, The Role of the Observer asks audiences (‘observers’) to examine themselves, who they have been and their ‘roles’ in the process of change, including sexual and social roles now and in childhood.” (Mary Guzzy, The Independent)
“Formally it reminded me of the collage work of Bruce Conner while its narrative structure seemed a cross between Stan Brakhave and Sam Fuller. There is indeed a menacing quality to the work at times explicit (the homage to The Cat People) at other times simply ‘overtonal’ (as Eisenstein might say). The film is, in any case, very engaging.” (Bruce Jenkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
“What struck me the most, I guess, was its tendancy to use a great deal of what’s been happening in independent film and film criticism in recent years; the mixture of forms and modes, the use of found footage, home movies, dreams… and of course the ideas of history as construction. A well-made film, put together with care.” (Scott MacDonald, Utica College)
No Family Pictures
“That the filmmaker is male is never disguised and has much to do with the meaning of the film. When not actually on screen, the artist’s presence is made clear by a variety of image manipulations which remind the viewer that film is a physical, pliable medium. No Family Pictures is itself an example of what it advocates — low-cost media available to everyone. It questions why small format media are not taken up more often as a tool in education, and particularly as a weapon for women to forge their own identities in the media landscape.” (San Francisco Cinezine)
