Ivan Ross

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Ivan Ross (born October 31, 1982 in Eden, North Carolina) is an American filmmaker.

While he began making videos and films much earlier, his first notable work was a three-part series entitled "Clean-Shaven Man," starring Matt Robinette. This work, focused on an anemic high-school student, was the first video to exemplify Ross' interest in subverted narrative structure and biographic allusion.

In 2002, Ross made his first major achievement, a structuralist biography of the experimental scientist Robert Hooke. The film, entitled "A Selective Presentation of Robert Hook's 'Micrographia,'" garnered the praise (and bewilderment) of his peers and a notable screening at a Portland film festival the following year. The film contained a number of elements that have since become Ross trademarks, including the use of Harry Nilsson's music, deadpan narration, and on-screen text. The film, divided into chapters (chapter index, chapter index), also signified Ross' interest in using film to convey literary form.

The year also signified a number of other major events in Ross' life, including a tense trip through the American South that would inform much of his later work in some capacity. He also completed "Dead, Dead, Dead," a short black & white film involving a friend repeatedly getting hit by cars on a busy intersection in Upstate New York.

Yet, at the time, no one could anticipate Ross' follow-up, "An Icefarmer's Wife in Spring." This film, completed in 2003, was the crystallization of Ross' aesthetics. Involving allusions to Wilhelm Reich's orgone theory, the hollow earth, and the golden age of silent comedy, "Icefarmer's Wife" dealt with the profound loneliness of the glacial Hudson region during winter.

In yet another unexpected move, Ross completed "Gonter Goodbye," dealing with the romantic desperation found in the letters of a Civil War soldier. The film also served as a sly treatise against the Oxford-English dictionary's knowing exclusion of the word "gonter," a significant word of the American South, appearing in the work of William Faulkner.

The following film continued the story from "An Icefarmer's Wife in Spring," and they are often shown as a pair. "Tachistoscopular Lucubrations" from 2005 is without exception Ross' crowning achievement in Ross' own genre of "personal structuralism." This film dealt with an enormous scope of themes, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, Lee Hazlewood, the Greek language, Sweden, Steele MacKaye (Ross has completed a soon-to-be-published thesis on this figure), Americana, Hollis Frampton, optical printing, pre-cinematic devices such as the tachistoscope, and a yoke of fetters. It was shot, on location, in Pennsylvania, New York, Maine, and New Jersey.

2007. A banner year for Mr. Ross. Upon entering the University of Chicago's estimable film program, Ross began his life-long partnership with Fire Escape films. The first film of this fruitful financial arrangement was entitled, "Peter Hermit Hi-Fi: Tribute to Sol Levine and the Mayos." It reaquaints the audience with Richard Shaver, the protagonist of several of Ross' earlier excurcsions. Now a successful book-binder living in Chicago, Shaver is confronted with a mysterious manuscript from a voice from the distant past.

In early 2008, Ross stunned the Ohio art community with his one-man show, "Closed for Renovation", which combined elements of Hegelian neo-Marxism, the use of unaspirated voiced retroflex occlusives in the Devanāgarī alphabet, and at least one scene adapted from the first episode of "My Mother the Car", all set in a post-apocalyptic future where a rag-tag team of former Waffle House waitresses struggle to survive in a partially submerged Dunkin Donuts. While well-received, and currently short-listed for the prestigious Finknottle Prize, at least one critic noted that "the underwater scenes were crudely faked".