David Obermeyer

Portraits of Chuck’s cats and friends, as well as a self-portrait.

While making a hot dog in a restaurant, David Obermeyer reflects on class and labor.

In 1978, Northwestern University film professor Dana Hodgdon created an experimental film based on a phonetic alphabet. He recruited 45 students and faculty members to join him in speaking a single phoneme, which he filmed on 16mm color film. Each phoneme had an example that was an ideological loaded term: revolution, theory, language, Marx, Brecht, and so on. Then, using an optical printer, he excerpted the phonemes and edited them into words and sentences.