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Jonathan Glazer is a highly esteemed director hailing from England. Despite working in film since 1994, Glazer has only produced feature films at a rate of about one film per decade. Like Ridley Scott, Glazer spent most of his career creating commercials. Having a strong sense of visual storytelling is an important aspect of commercials, as one needs to sell a product in a 30-second spot.

Glazer is very accomplished in that sense, consistently creating very stark yet evocative imagery for his commercial work, and that certainly carries on into his filmmaking. Glazer has also been hugely influenced by Stanley Kubrick, and that can most clearly be seen in his music videos, which exist as visual tone poems and homages to the late director. Kanopy hosts Glazer’s more recent short films, and our DVD collection carries his feature-length projects.

November is Native American History Month, so I wanted to focus on a Native American creator who centers their work around the Native American experience. Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) does just that. As a multimedia artist, Hopinka skirts the line of video artist and filmmaker while also branching out to the mediums of photography and text-based works.

His videos are non-narrative collages, layering together tangentially connected images of landscapes, sky, snippets of interviews, ceremonies, archival footage, portraits glitched into abstraction, scrolling text and spoken word. All those pieces fit together to tell the story of many Indigenous groups, which history forcefully scattered across the country. Kanopy hosts one of Hopinka’s feature-length projects, but much of his work is available to explore on his artist website.