Jeffrey Skoller
Jeffrey Skoller (born 1958) is an American filmmaker, scholar, and curator known for his experimental films and writings on historiography and memory in cinema. His films, including Nicaragua: Hear-Say/See-Here (1986), The Malady of Death (1994), and The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors (2018-2025), BLEND experimental and documentary forms, while his book Shadows, Specters, Shards (2005) has been praised for its theoretical insights into avant-garde cinema and its materialist representations of history.
Early life and education
Skoller was born in New York City. He earned his PhD in Cinema Studies from Northwestern University in 2001. He holds an MFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute (1983) and a certificate from St. Martin's College of Art in London (1979).
Academic appointments
Skoller was a founding faculty member in the Film/Video/New Media department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1998 to 2005. He served as Director of the Cinema and Media Studies Program at Wellesley College in 2010-11. He taught at UC Berkeley in the Film & Media Dept from 2005 to 2023, becoming Emeritus Professor in 2023.
Films, exhibitions & contributions
Skoller’s films, video works, photography, and installations have been exhibited at venues including the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), Museum of the Moving Image (NY), Whitney Museum (NY), JP Getty Museum (Los Angeles), P.S. 1 (NY), Anthology Film Archives, the Gene Siskel Film Center, and festivals such as the Latin American Film Festival (Havana), Mannheim Film Festival, and International Experimental Film Festival (Athens). Skoller co-curated the Alternative Visions and Documentary Voices series at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive for nearly 20 years and programmed series at the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago) and OtherCinema (San Francisco). He has lectured on avant-garde and documentary film at institutions including Shanghai University, University of Thessaly (Greece), University Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina), Brown University, University of Chicago, JP Getty Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Berkeley Art Museum.
He has served on the board of Canyon Cinema, including as Treasurer (as of 2022) and from 1982 to 1994. His films blend experimental and documentary forms to address history, memory, and political conflict. Nicaragua: Hear-Say/See-Here (1986, 64 minutes, 16mm), shot in Nicaragua in 1985, questions media misrepresentations of the Sandinista revolution. The Malady of Death (1994, 43 minutes, 16mm) adapts Marguerite Duras’s story about desire and alienation, described by the Chicago Reader as “lyrical, hypnotic, and incantatory.” The Promise of Happiness (2016, film and installation) and its exhibition Postscripts to Revolution at Southern Exposure Gallery (San Francisco, 2016) address the afterlife of revolutionary images.
The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors includes Pt 1: Hiroshima (2019, digital), featuring Joseph Fischer recounting his experience as a U.S. Naval seaman in Hiroshima post-atomic bombing, examining his 1945 photographs. Occupation Diary (2025, 40 minutes, digital) portrays Alex Matthews’ role in the Greek guerrilla resistance during [...] occupation, winning Best Experimental Film at the London Greek Film Festival. In 2025, Canyon Cinema acquired The Unimagined Lives and digitized older works.
Selected publications
Skoller has published in journals including Film Quarterly, Discourse, Representations, Afterimage, Cinematograph, and World Records, focusing on history and political memory in experimental, documentary, and animated film.
Books
- Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
- Postwar: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg (editor). Blackdog Press, 2010.
Selected articles & chapters
- “I Want to Speak With My Time: Radical Biography in Abigail Child’s Acts and Intermissions,” Found Footage Magazine, Issue #8, October 2022.
- “iDocument Police: Contingency, Resistance and the Precarious Present,” World Records, 2020.
- “Present-Time: Reflections on Durational Art,” Representations, Special Issue: Time Zones, 2016.
- “ReAnimator: Embodied History, and the Post-Cinema Trace in Ken Jacobs’ Temporal Composites,” Pervasive Animation, AFI Film Reader, Routledge Press, 2014.
- “Making It Un-Real: Contemporary Theories and Practices in Documentary Animation,” Guest Editor Special Issue, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2011.
- “Memories of the Revolution: Filmmaking as Mourning Work,” Los Fantasmas de Ñancahuazú, Viper’s Tongue Books, 2010.
Critical reception
Skoller’s scholarship and filmmaking explore relationships between film and contemporary art, radical aesthetics of the political avant-garde, and representations of history in essay films, experimental documentaries, animated documentaries, and expanded cinemas. His writings on filmmakers like Daniel Eisenberg, Abigail Child, Ken Jacobs, Charles Burnett, Patricio Guzman, and Claude Lanzmann have been noted for expanding the boundaries of what is understood as experimental film. Reviews of Shadows, Specters, Shards in Film Criticism, Leonardo, and Screening the Past praise its theoretical insights into avant-garde films’ construction of historical narratives, emphasizing its relevance to postmodern historiography. His essays in Afterimage and Millennium Film Journal are cited for contributions to poetic historiography and avant-garde cinema.
See also
- Historiography
- Marguerite Duras
- Avant-garde film
- Experimental film