Disaster and accident imagery set to music composed and written by Ned Sublette for Michel Auder.

From its fiery outset, Brooding Angles is decidedly gothic and the mood anxious. It is a dark rumination on the specter of authority, resistance and paranoia marking the close of Reagan's second term in office.

Born in 1945, Auder came of age during the 1960s, a decade as tumultuous in France as it was in the United States. The decade culminated in the student/worker strikes of May 1968 that shut down the city of Paris. Auder's value system was in many respects shaped by this anti-authoritarian milieu.

Its remnants are to be found in his preponderance with issues violence and conflict as they serve to question moral progress. The soundtrack's ominous melody is recycled from footage of cellist David Soyer that can be seen in A Portrait of Alice Neel.

My Love is made with text and drawings by Niki de Saint Phalle. Alongside Made for Denise, from the same year, it is one of Auder’s first 'video letters'. Auder reads the poem and edits in the images of the drawings and text from de Saint Phalle’s book of the same name with his own video footage, creating a new type of video poetry and, as Auder's voice says in the piece, displaying “a new invention of video reality.” These early montage sequences with their associative structure, layered soundtracks and sequence of imagery are essentially literary in character and show the influence of poetry on Auder’s work.

The thrill of cocaine becomes a metaphor for the consumption of images in this short montage. The title and lyrics come from Auder´s friend and 2001 Prix Goncourt winner Jean-Jacques Shuhl. The piece is composed entirely of still photographs from a variety of books and magazines that simultaneously reveal and feed an addiction to spectacle.

With a source that is once removed, Auder's scopophilia is symptomatic of society at large. The song is performed by legendary chanteuse Ingrid Caven. Suffused with a bittersweet melancholy, Canven's seasoned voice compliments Auder's selection of images which dwell on the themes of death, destruction and desire.

The melody is classic cabaret performed by a piano/violin duo who dramatically heighten the works already dark eroticism.

A portrait of the North Yungas Road (alternatively known as Grove's Road, Coroico Road, Camino de las Yungas, El Camino de la Muerte, Road of Death or Death Road) leading from La Paz to Coroico. The road was built in the 1930s during the Chaco War by Paraguayan prisoners. It is one of the few routes that connect the Amazon rainforest region of northern Bolivia, or Yungas, to its capital city. Because of the extreme drop-offs of at least 600 meters (2,000 ft), single-lane width––most of the road no wider than 3.2 meters (10 ft)––and lack of guardrails, the road is extremely dangerous. Here, Auder documents the trials of a journey on the infamous Road of Death.

Auder considers this chapter of the Chronicles a collaboration between himself and Broadway producer Van Wolff who was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

With only a couple of weeks to live, Wolff asked Auder if he would document his farewell to friends and family. The footage was taken over a two day period, December 24th and 25th of 1971 during Wolff's final radiation treatment and his subsequent release from the hospital. It is both a portrait and a meditation on death which is captured in the details.

The journey to chemo is a particularly astounding passage consisting of long takes through the hospital's endless corridors broken only by jumpcuts that somehow seem to protract the experience.

Despite Wolff's casual demeanor in the face of death, the piece captures his strength, dignity, arrogance and ongoing concern with success. The work is bracketed by two cameos – Charles Mingus and Jack Nicholson – who stop by to pay last respects and bid Van adieu.

Unlike most documentary video work, Auder’s latest piece does not give the viewer one of his, e.g. the artist’s – experiences; rather he gives the viewer the sense that the viewer is doing the looking and the experiencing him or herself. The passively held camera records not dispassionately, but without judgment. The subjects of Auder’s work give us a picture of humanity that is so close to the truth that it is disarming. 

When Auder is catching the image of scenes devoid of humans, the work does not grow more impersonal rather, it becomes more private. The train we are riding on (and it is us who is now ridding on it, not Auder) zips by at speeds that seem unstably fast yet it is just exhilarating – it does not threaten our desire just to look and experience. Auder’s voice is not present. 

And that lack of presence becomes his greatest talent. As the artist, he is the transparent medium though which we pass seamlessly into a world that he has gently given to us. We see the church scene in St. Petersburg and we see the people in the Buddhist temple in Taiwan. They are talking to one another completely without the discomfort that is generally seen in documentary scenes, where those being videoed display the self-editing behavior of the self-conscious and inhibited human.