Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives

ENERGY OF DELUSION: KEITH SANBORN

February 21 – February 23

February 21-23, 2025

This retrospective – his first in New York City in decades – surveys the work of film- and video-maker, artist, theorist, writer, and translator Keith Sanborn. The series includes his rarely-screened film cycle, KAPITAL! (1980-88), the numerous short films and videos he’s made from the early 1990s till now, and several brand-new works, including his “Mack the Knife”-themed epic, DREADFUL PENNY DREADFUL.

Throughout his career, Sanborn – who studied or worked with experimental filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits, and later served as a programmer for the legendary Buffalo film venue, Hallwalls – has engaged deeply with contemporary philosophical thought and media theory. He has shown a particular commitment to the life, writings, and film work of Guy Debord, translating numerous texts of Debord’s, as well as those of René Viénet, Georges Bataille, Gil J. Wolman, and others. Debord’s influence is critical to Sanborn’s moving-image work, which displays a rare and inspiring combination of philosophical/theoretical inquiry, formal inventiveness, media savvy, and dry humor. Often working with found footage from highly disparate sources (imagery from films both mainstream and experimental, as well as news footage, advertisements, and more), which he manipulates and interrogates in trenchant and unusual ways, Sanborn also makes brilliant use of onscreen text and intricate sound collages. His films and videos are sophisticated and disarmingly funny commentaries on our media-saturated society.

“Keith Sanborn is a filmmaker who questions the representations produced by cinema and television. He questions films in order to create spaces for reflection around these representations. He examines American society through its media from film to film…by immersing himself in a cinematographic tradition, strongly renewed by the situationists, which consists of working from found sequences in order to put them back into circulation in other ways. This work oscillates between pillage and misappropriation and is inspired by a set of practices that we find both in Bruce Conner and in the Lettrists, as well as in the more political films of the Situationists. Each of Keith Sanborn’s films simultaneously offers at least two parallel discourses, one which affirms through the choice of sequences a love of cinema while the other deconstructs the mechanisms from which the films function.” –Yann Beauvais

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