Leighton Pierce Trailers
CARBON TrailerWasp Radial TrailerSouth Los Angeles Street Trailer
Leighton Pierce, born John Leighton Pierce, is an American experimental filmmaker who works with film, video, sound, and installation. He is also the Dean of the School of Film/Video at CalArts since the summer of 2014. He is best known for his impressionistic technique in video imagery that creates a hypnotic effect as well as his use of sound design. The motif of water is dominant in his work and gave the name to the video series "Memories of Water". Pierce looks for inspiration in his immediate surroundings. He has stated that "in the simplest terms, a film or a video can be considered to be a meaningful experience in time. As a filmmaker, I take that as my mission: through the use of image and sound, I am composing an experience for the audience".
Most Popular Leighton Pierce Trailers
Total trailers found: 47
23 April 2024
Pierce has recently created hundreds of short reflective loops to stimulate subtle alterations in states of mind.
01 January 1988
An elegy, this is a poetic film about the dissolution of memory - not as concrete recall of the past, but as a reconstruction and recontextualization of a fading image that is transformed through time.
01 January 2002
A struggle to hold on to the world, the various worlds we try to inhabit. Shot in the south of France during the fall of 2001.
01 January 1997
These partly diaristic, partly poetic pieces are the first three completed segments in a long series of films and videos.
17 March 1992
Red Shovel is an impressionistic documentary focussing on a few moments in a small town along the coast of Maine on the Fourth of July (American Independence Day).
19 September 2006
A woman moving in the water and the gaze of a man, both seen from beneath the water, elaborated by the vectorizing force of sound, lead the viewer toward an effervescence of feeling - a desire for merge among the knowledge of separateness.
01 January 1980
A film about editing, rhythm, and a bit about character.
01 January 1991
"While not addressing the issue in a very overt manner, this piece has something to do with the thrilling and 'awful' process of actively engaging in perception and how we oscillate between forgetting and remembering that activeness as we age.
01 January 2001
A small moment from a children's Halloween party is taken as material for an exploration of folded time.
01 January 2004
Evoking a small fraction of the felt complexities of life, Pierce works with the question of absence and what of a person remains in the memory and imagination when that person is absent.
01 January 2016
One of several video sketches made with the rule that the piece must be completed in less than 90 minutes.
01 January 1986
A film about subjective experience. This film should be viewed as one would look at a painting or listen to a symphony.
23 March 2010
A simple task executed with ambiguous intent.
01 January 1996
The videomaker was very tired for the 18 months prior to the making of this video. This short piece hints at some of the reasons.
19 September 2002
A brief impression triggers an emotion echoing with memories of the past and anticipations of the future.
01 January 2010
An arhythmic riff on Bill Wither's "Aint no Sunshine." All sound was pulled from that recording. The image is from a walk around a pond near my former house in Iowa (at the time).
15 January 2008
Stone Moss is composed entirely from digital still images and is a segment of a much larger and multifaceted work titled Agency of Time, a 3 tier, long-term project consisting of a symphonic mutli channel video/sound installation, a series of single channel works and a photography book.
23 January 2002
Dad and daughter at the water race of an abandoned monastery. The scene pivots on her words: “Look, dad,” she says; Water through her fingers.
24 August 2018
Deck brings emphasis to the bodily experience of temporality. The principle of harmonized rhythm underpins all of Pierce’s work from the shooting (live animation) performance, to its editing and sound design, and finally in situating its reception.
21 March 1991
"Shot between 11:00 and 1:00 over a series of Thursdays while my infant son slept, this piece has something to do with the sensory pleasure of momentary solitude in a domestic setting.
30 March 2022
Part of UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), a series made with, on, and for the phone. Looking to the sky for threats and salvation.
19 September 2003
How does one evoke a deeply felt emotion without simply representing it or describing it? This is the first in a series of videos that will explore that question.
01 January 2001
Made in the weeks after 9/11, 2001, this is a meditation on resurgent nationalism and a distressing march toward war.
20 April 2000
Looking outward, this is a segment from a series revolving around the relationship between Pierce's son and daughter.
01 January 1984
The old man circles outside, looking for water with a dousing rod; the young woman circles inside, moving through a labyrinth-like house, dimly lit, all rooms connecting.
01 January 1992
Short film by Leighton Pierce.
01 January 2002
Dissipation, dissolution, changing states. It is easy to apply these concepts to something like water; much more difficult when considering emotion and family relationships.
01 January 1989
An impressionistic documentary on the small town cafes in the rural Midwest. While the cafes function as a focal point for many aspects of the rural subculture, they also reveal the limits and somewhat closed nature of that culture.
01 January 1987
While interweaving complex images, a dense stereo soundtrack and brief interviews with local people, "On the Road Going Through" is designed to provide a portrait of a fragment of rural life in Iowa.
21 March 1998
A not-so-still life in the backyard with children, water, fire and a few other basic elements. While the ultimate effect is poetic and transformative, it is simultaneously a study in the laws of optics - an exploration of refraction, diffraction, diffusion, reflection and absorption.
01 January 1981
A character study showing the dissolution of the characters sense of self. The structure is based loosely on a pantoum structure in poetry.
01 January 1993
An impressionistic painterly study of the work/play involved in learning simple things.
01 January 2000
This is a one minute demonstration of the present.
01 January 2003
An impressionistic documentary on the Piazza San Marco in Venice.
01 January 1984
Taking place in a laundromat, this film is an exploration of territoriality, paranoia and voyeurism. The space itself exerts an oppressive force on the characters as they strive to define and maintain their individual semi-private spaces in an essentially public place.
01 September 2010
This is one short piece in a collection of 15 that will explore representations of consciousness. Retrograde Premonition looks and sounds like floating mind, the vicissitudes of thought, feeling, and the senses.
22 March 2023
An acoustically rich and visually stunning point of view on America from the vantage point of a fourth floor loft at the edge of Skid Row in LA.
01 January 1994
Short film by Leighton Pierce.
01 January 1995
"The slow and subtle repeated rhythms of daily life provide the material for this 12 part film. The pace is slow with the intention of inviting viewers into a more visceral and less verbally analytical state of mind.
01 January 2007
Number One engages the experience of elasticity between varying states of mind. The contrasts in this multi-image piece -- shifts between frenetic chaos and calm order, between an intense central focus and a diffuse periphery, between hard and soft, fixed and fluid, concrete and abstract -- are all developed not in opposition to each other but rather, in an interwoven, multilayered relation to each other.
19 September 2010
An impressionistic journey of subjectivity as one submits one's self to an image maker. A woman offers herself as the source of an image to a female painter.
07 September 2014
Pierce meticulously weaves the warp and weft of image and sound leading the viewer into a conscious meditative state.
21 November 2025
The warning to Icarus: to apply moderation, humility, and wisdom to the use of the technology his father developed, remains more relevant than ever.
11 March 1983
The man, the woman and their multiples share the same space at different times while being in different places at the same time, creating a paradox of existence.
01 January 1982
A bank robbery repeats several times, each time within a different context and from a different point of view.
