Throughout the 1980s, Preiss carried a standard 8mm Bolex camera and practiced the discipline of shooting film every day, hovering at the edge of home-movie sentimentality and in-camera techniques synonymous with experimental film culture. While never filming with the strict intention of producing a movie, Preiss would in hindsight find groups of reels with a consistent atmosphere, which became distinct works. Of the films made this way, Boy Town turned out to be the most prophetic – organized around the filmmaker's daily routine on the Lower East Side, it documents the site of several future projects.
Twins is structured around two sets of footage. The first was shot by Guagnini and Schneider in Lower Manhattan in September 2001, both before and in the direct aftermath of 9/11; the second, filmed by Preiss, was shot in the period after the attack on the Twin Towers – it focuses largely on an area around the West Side Highway, close to his home, a route taken by trucks transporting debris from Ground Zero. Preiss’s response to Guagnini and Schneider’s assembly was to use it as an editing score so that the two sections would be durational twins. The combined film pivots around the opening images taken by Guagnini and Schneider of the mirrored bridge connecting the North Tower with 7 World Trade Center. The transition of meaning in this footage in the moment of destruction of the towers, is echoed in the diaristic weight of material shot after 9/11, pervaded with a sense of anxiety and absence.In its entirety, STOP is comprised of four half-hour programs, distilled down from 2,500 100ft camera rolls of 16mm film. Shot over a seventeen-year period and edited in 2012, the images are of Preiss's own life, and the alternating subjects of family, friends and travel follow the strict chronology of a singular camera roll. Some subjects recur while others exist as discrete episodes. Yet strikingly all serve as the background to STOP's central subject of identity, reflected in the home-movie protagonist of Preiss's child, whose gender self-determination is documented across the film, as if in waves.
Seen together, the films Boy Town, Twins and STOP (Part 1) form a narrative of Lower Manhattan and the looming affects of 9/11, a time-loop occurring in which formal aspects of Twins pre-empt the editing of STOP, while part one of the latter film ends with the collapse of the Twin Towers.
