RICKY D’AMBROSE

For a new short film: a few images, some found, others invented. I’ve given the film a title (*Object Lessons, or: What Happened on Sunday*) and a kind of premise: an American art collector’s estate plans to build a glass house that will permanently memorialize the collector’s many prints and paintings. The spot selected—several acres of undeveloped parkland in upstate New York—was the site of a young woman’s murder, the circumstances of which have been exploited for political purposes by the founder of a far-right populist party called National Advance. I imagine the film consisting of a series of landscapes, joined by examples from the art collector’s personal holdings as well as scraps of printed newspaper commentary on the park’s history and its intended use. I’d like to find a way to include the American composer Frederic Rzewski’s piano piece The Road, especially this section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNfNTB1vC0

Stills from *Object Lessons, or: What Happened on Sunday*. Written, produced and directed by Ricky D’Ambrose. Cinematography by Barton Cortright.

From the visual reference file for *Object Lessons*. I often save and classify film stills that I especially like, such as these. Sometimes, the images serve as references for future projects.

Draft design for National Advance campaign poster.

From a set of eighteenth-century reproductions of a book of sixteenth-century erotic engravings, published in Italy as *I Modi*. The collector in *Object Lessons *is meant to have specialized in early pornographic prints, such as these.

Newspaper clippings that will appear in the finished film.
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Ricky D’Ambrose was born in 1987, in Livingston, New Jersey. He is a filmmaker and writer in New York. His first feature, NOTES ON AN APPEARANCE, is distributed in the United States by Grasshopper Film.