zachpuls

Nowhere Else (2021-2024, 18 min)

During the dark pandemic days of January 2021 when almost all of the bars closed down for the winter and both of my roommates had left to hide out in Texas, my job took me from my apartment in Ridgewood way out to a pizza shop in Hell’s Kitchen, where I started work at 6:30 in the morning.

One day, a real blizzard showed up on a Monday and I got an extra day off so I grabbed a videocamera and put on some boots and a few pairs of pants then went out walking around the block behind my house under the freight train overpass. I met a guy who lived across the street who wanted to sell me a 35mm camera and followed him into his garage full of old stuff. I listened to him talk while he drank a Budweiser can and then bought his camera and went back home.

I filmed with my phone through the lens of the new camera and began experimenting with other lenses in front of other cameras. I pulled out a VHS camera that I got off of a yard sale near my mother’s house a few years back. That worked surprisingly well, other than the battery. And then I started taking out all my old mini-DV tapes, hoping to organize and find material that I had never used.

Two tapes I found from a weeklong trip to Italy with a school group from my high school days. I had filmed about two hours of material, not really sure what it would amount to, but as I tried cutting in clips from walking around Rome and Pompeii, these videoed ruins somehow felt like they spoke to the bizarre emptiness of Manhattan during those days.

Earlier in the spring, I brought a camera to work and drove back through Times Square when almost nobody was there. The billboards were mostly filled with thankful greetings to the health-care workers.

There were also tapes from high school where I filmed around my mother’s at-the-time new house, after she married my stepfather. The videos seemed to speak to a confusing loneliness as well as a hope that I had something to express and that this camera was one way to try to do that.