Alan Berliner

Berliner lives in Manhattan with his wife Shari and son Eli. On a personal level, he struggled with insomnia most of his life leading to a domino effect of painful challenges associated with always feeling tired and zombie-like. His relationship with late evening hours is conflicting because on one hand, it’s the time of day he’s most tortured struggling to fall asleep tossing and turning in turmoil, however, on the other hand, it’s the time he feels most invigorated and creative allowing him to create all of his films. As a result of this, Alan created all his films in the night.

On his latest film, First Cousin Once Removed, see the article by María del Rincón, Efrén Cuevas and Marta Torregrosa, "The Representation of Personal Memory in Alan Berliner's First Cousin Once Removed", Studies in Documentary Film, 2018, vol. 12, n. 1, pp. 16-27. Postprint version here. Available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YntGfr4CzMdr6GrMDzb8/full

Berliner's experimental documentary films, First Cousin Once Removed (2013), Wide Awake, The Sweetest Sound (2001), Nobody's Business (1996), Intimate Stranger (1991), and The Family Album (1986), have been broadcast all over the world, and received awards, prizes, and retrospectives at many major international film festivals. The San Francisco International Film Festival called Berliner, “America’s foremost cinematic essayist.” The Florida Film Festival called him “the modern master of personal documentary filmmaking.” Over the years, Berliner's films have become part of the core curriculum for documentary filmmaking and film history classes at universities worldwide, and are in the permanent collections of many film societies, festivals, libraries, colleges and museums. All of his films are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

In July 2013, Berliner was awarded the Freedom of Expression Award by the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. In 2006, the International Documentary Association honored him with an International Trailblazer Award “for creativity, innovation, originality, and breakthrough in the field of documentary cinema.” Berliner had also been a recipient of a Distinguished Achievement Award from the IDA in 1993. In 2002, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture presented him with a Cultural Achievement Award in the Arts, and he was the recipient of the Storyteller Award from the Taos Talking Picture Film Festival in 2001. Berliner's films have won awards at many major international film festivals, and he has received retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, and many other museums and film festivals all over the world.

Berliner is a recipient of Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Jerome Foundation Fellowships, and has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He's won three Emmy Awards and received six Emmy nominations from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Berliner has also served on several non-profit foundation funding panels and various international film festival juries, including the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Documentary Jury. He is on the Board of Directors of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Martha's Vineyard Film Festival.

In 2002, Berliner was an artist in residence at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where his interactive multi-media installation, The Language of Names opened in February 2002 and ran through October 2002. He was also commissioned to create a large-scale interactive sculpture based on Gathering Stones for Holocaust Museum Houston which was on exhibition from March through August 2002.

To learn more about Berliner, see the book The Man Without the Camera: Alan Berliner's Cinema, edited by Efren Cuevas and Carlos Muguiro (2002). The book, in English and Spanish, is available online for free, courtesy of the publisher, at http://dadun.unav.edu/handle/10171/28018 or at http://alanberliner.com/press_and_publications.php?pag_id=87

Berliner's interactive video installation, Gathering Stones (1999), based on the tradition of placing rocks on tombstones when visiting Jewish cemeteries, was commissioned for the exhibition, To The Rescue, Eight Artists in an Archive, which premiered at the International Center of Photography Midtown in New York City in February, 1999, and will travel to art museums in Miami, Houston and San Francisco. His second one-person exhibition, The Art of War, held at The Stephen Gang Gallery in March, 1999, featured an innovative interactive sound/image interface using images projected from the ceiling onto a "screen" composed of 150 small white audio speakers arranged in a grid on the gallery floor.

Audiofile (1993) and Aviary (1993), both ground-breaking interactive audio installations were exhibited at the Walter Reade Theater Gallery at Lincoln Center and at Anthology Film Archives (Seoul/Nymax) in 1994. His first one-person exhibition, Found Sound: Audio & Video Installation Works featuring the premieres of Critical Mass (1996) and The Red Thread (1996), was held at Sculpture Center Gallery in New York City in March 1996.

In 1987, during a two-month artist-in-residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, New York, Berliner premiered a sound performance work titled Microfilm and Others. His video sculpture, Late City Edition (1993) was shown as part of a curated exhibition titled, The Concrete Signal: Video as Sculpture at Gallery 148 in October, 1993, and at the Fine Arts Gallery at Wake Forest University in February, 1995. A selection of his audio/video installation work was included as part of the curated exhibition, Body & Technology: International Technology Art in June 1995, held at the Dong Ah Gallery in Seoul, Korea.

Berliner was born in Brooklyn, and raised in Queens. Berliner earned in 1977 a BA with highest honors, from Binghamton University, cinema, and in 1979 MFA (with highest honors) from the University of Oklahoma, School of Art. He is currently a faculty member at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he teaches a course entitled, "Experiments in Time, Light and Motion."

In addition to his work in film, Berliner has also produced a substantial body of photographic, audio and video installation works. His early "para-cinematic" photographs, scrolls and collages were exhibited at the Hunter College Art Gallery, The Collective for Living Cinema, and The Munson Williams Proctor Institute in the early eighties. Cine-Matrix (1977) part of an exhibition titled, Franes: Two Dimensional Work by Film Artists, held at the Hunter College Art Gallery in 1980 was reviewed in Art Forum.

Alan Berliner (born 1956) is an American independent filmmaker. The New York Times has described Berliner's work as "powerful, compelling and bittersweet... full of juicy conflict and contradiction, innovative in their cinematic technique, unpredictable in their structures... Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life."