Fred Camper: Dreams of Lost Wholeness; A Short Documentary About an Artist

I call myself Serious Artist Person on my YouTube channel (youtube.com/c/BrianHischier), a tongue-in-cheek reference to the (apparently comical) intensity with which I (incautiously) approach art, film, aesthetics, philosophy, old comic strips, Fallout 4, you name it. But Fred Camper, the artist at the center of my short film Dreams of Lost Wholeness is a truly serious artist person, and I have the utmost respect for him and his work.

Since 2008, I’ve admired the work of Fred Camper, a Chicago-based artist, film critic, Stan Brakhage expert, and Criterion Collection contributor (essays on the Stan Brakhage and Rossellini/Bergman DVDs, in case you want to drop a perfect penny). Over the years, Fred and I have had many long conversations about film, art, and life in general. In March 2021, Fred began a large work entitled "Weeks and Months," and which he finished shooting in December 2022. During this time, I asked Fred if I could film him at work when he came down to visit me in the Chicago suburbs in the spring of 2022. He was excited by the prospect of photographing the suburban wilds that many of us inhabit. He was a stranger in a strange land, and I was able to document our time together. Fred also sat down for an interview about "Weeks and Months," and about film and art in general.

The results of that week in May are presented in this short documentary, the title of which comes directly from Fred himself. My only regret is that I didn’t manage to capture one of his famous jokes on video. Next time, Fred.

To give you the merest taste of the complexity and achievement of Fred’s work, I share this decontextualized quote from our old pal Schopenhauer, which could describe Fred’s work from beginning to end: “…genius consists in the ability to know, independently of the principle of sufficient reason, not individual things which have their existence only in the relation, but the Ideas of such things, and in the ability to be, in the face of these, the correlative of the Idea, and hence no longer individual, but pure subjective knowing.” [1]

Look at Fred Camper’s work and read some of his film criticism at fredcamper.com.

The specific "Weeks and Months" which he shot in the video are visible here (https://fredcamper.com/A/WeeksandMonths/).  

Thank you for watching. If you like my work, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, Serious Artist Person, https://www.youtube.com/c/BrianHischier.

[1] Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol I, Sec. 37, p. 194