Jonathan Douglas Duran

Jonathan Douglas Duran (born May 15, 1980) is an American writer, filmmaker and multimedia artist. A life-long Surrealist, Duran considers his work inseparable from the revolutionary, philosophical and political ideologies of the movement.
He is the creator and CEO of Surrealist Gesture, an American based multimedia production studio and co-founder and CEO of Subvex film studios, an American independent film production studio. He is a vocal supporter of open source content creation and the use Creative Commons licensing practices to distribute his work.
Life and career
Jonathan Douglas Duran was born in Kansas City, Missouri. From a young age he was exposed to the world of cinema and avant-garde art by his parents; he has been quoted as saying that while growing up, around the age of 11, Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange was his favorite film . His ambitions as an artists grew out of these formative years, an avid reader from childhood Duran's first love was writing, however after reading Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon Duran insisted on seeing one of the author's film, his father obliged with the single Anger film in his collection; Invocation of My Demon Brother. After viewing the film Duran decided to start making short, experimental films. Also around this time he first read Andre Breton's poetry which inspired his lifelong study into the Surrealist movement.
Film
Duran has made numerous short and longer form films throughout his life on a variety of formats, ranging from 8 mm film to High-definition video, most of these films are nonlinear narrative and silent.
Selected filmography
* Desperate - 1996
* Pull All the White Strings (from your trashy heart)- 1999
* Woman - 2003
* The Human Verb - 2007
* God Rest, Ye Merry Gentlemen - 2008
* Pop Tart - 2009
* images/dissonance - 2010
* Distorted Ghosts (dance for death) - 2010
* Paradise Circus - 2010
* Open - 2010
The Auteurs' Garage
In November of 2008 Duran helped to create a sub-site to the popular film social networking site (at the time named 'The Auteurs'), named "Garage" . The site was designed to bring exposure and credibility to independent filmmakers from all over the world. Eventually he took on the role of editor for their "Production Notebooks" , a collection of essays and anecdotes written by filmmakers discussing their creative processes. In 2010 The Auteurs, with The Garage, was awarded a "Movie and Film" Webby Award for being voted best movie site online.
Subvex
In May 2010 Duran, along with the other original creators of the Auteurs' Garage and outside filmmakers, including Remodernist filmmaker Jesse Richards, founded their own production company which they named "Subvex" . They described Subvex as follows:

Subvex is an international collective of multi-media artists. Currently based in New York, Paris and London. Subvex produces independent films, advocates the occupation of new spaces for the projection of films that would otherwise struggle to receive distribution in a mainstream market, and emphasizes the development of ground-level cultures around new waves in contemporary film making. Subvex embraces and seeks to cultivate the viral, open-source, copy-left content models which will shape the future landscape of artistically pertinent media creation, consumption and proliferation.

An eclectic, globally disparate family of cinema creatives with wildly differing views on most things aesthetic, they nonetheless all share one key perspective— they understand that the mainstream film industry is a largely written book, dictated by money and the pursuit of profit.

Subvex then exists to commission, curate, showcase and produce cutting-edge media and vanguard cinema— to give life blood to a new wave of creative action in film production. We collaborate. We pool funds for film productions. Often we pitch not just one production at a time, but multiple productions that share the monies raised between the directors.

The broad-sweep emphasis is on encouraging independent control of the means of production, improving upon economies of scale and seeking alternative tactics and routes for distribution, including (but not limited to) live events and screenings outside of the traditional cinema/theatrical environment. The ultimate goal is the creation of a global platform for new and sometimes radical work by filmmakers and audio-visual artists.

We then aim to bring a wider context to this work so that the work may thrive, and allow the filmmakers to build a direct relationship with a dedicated audience through the development of cutting edge media websites and professional networks.

Duran then devised and organized the first Subvex production; a collaborative, anthology film which was presented under the tentative title of "The Subvex Exquisite Corpse 8mm film Experiment" . His concept was to play a cinematic version of the old Surrealist Parlor game known as Exquisite Corpse, a game in which different artists collaborate on a single piece by each contributing their own parts without knowledge of that the other artists are contributing. The result is a collage of disparate and often times, incongruous aesthetics which in turn make the larger whole take on new, unplanned contextual meaning. The film's budget was collecting through crowd funding. The feature length film is produced by sending 8mm film and cameras out to directors from all over the world and to make the film more interesting Subvex allowed the public, who funded the film, to be given producer's credits and also inform the director's style to a certain degree by offering up "rules" which the filmmakers would have to follow while creating their films (such as 'all editing must be done in camera', for example).
Subvex pulled together some of the best avant-garde, independent filmmakers still currently working to collaborate on the project, people such as Amos Poe, Jonas Mekas, Bill Morrison, Lav Diaz, Nina Menkes and Nabil Shaban amongst others. This anthology film project is unique in the aspect that the filmmakers do not proceed with their productions knowing how, where or why their short films will fit into the larger whole.
Big Screen Project
In mid 2010 Subvex became one of the original content programmers for 'The Big Screen Project',http://bigscreenproject.org</ref>, a non-profit organization based out of Manhattan, New York who have installed a thirty foot tall HD LCD screen on 6th avenue in Manhattan. Subvex programs content ranging from independent to established world filmmakers,offering a unique venue for independent filmmakers to showcase their work and gain exposure to large audiences. Original content created specifically for this ongoing collaboration is in pre-production, planning stages as of late 2010.
Teaching
Duran spent approximately five years teaching film appreciation courses
, to eventually having his students take part in the creation of a film themselves. The project this eventually led to was titled "The Human Verb", a feature length, silent film completely improvised and made with non-professional actors, no external lighting of sound equipment and the entire technical crew consisting only of Duran himself. His direction consisted of telling people in front of the camera to do whatever came to his mind depending on the location they were in - later on, during the editing process he added intertitles to the film, creating his own loose story based on automatic responses to the action on-screen. The actors were never informed of what their 'characters' were doing or 'saying' until they saw the completed film.
Writing
Duran writes Fiction and non-fiction material in roughly equal measure, ranging from poetry, short stories, screenplays, novels, manifestos and literary/cinematic criticism.
He has self published and released under Creative Commons licensing, at least two books under his legal name including a collection of fiction and non-fiction work entitled "I Am the Fire that Flares up Again", as well as an original novel "Libido Sciendi" - a story set in early nineteenth century France concerning a group of individuals inspired to revolutionary actions by the political and artistic teachings of (at the time) new art movement known as Surrealism.
Duran's poetry has also been published in print and online in various publications.
Multimedia visual art
Duran began painting in his early teens and continues to work, mostly in oils, to this day. He has been the subject of numerous solo gallery shows in and around the Kansas City area. These shows usually consist of multimedia works ranging from painting, photography, sculpture and audio/visual installation pieces.
Music
Along with creating music and being sound designer for his films, Duran has also released albums under the names "Process" and "I Stand Alone". Duran also works with bands in collaborative capacities by creating remixes and visual components to their work, such as videos, cover art and performance pieces.
A collection of his work ranging from the past decade can be found on the compilation album "Enharmonic Intervals", available for free under a Creative Commons license, or on a "pay what you will" model from Bandcamp and also from regular, monetary based online retailers such as amazon.com and iTunes.
His music can best be described as arhythmic organized noise, or commonly referred to as industrial music or experimental music.

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