My Mirrored Hope (1963)

My Mirrored Hope is Sokoloff’s best-known film, now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The piece is one in a series of Schmidt-focused films made in the summer of 1963, the year Schmidt may have been at the height of his ecstatic, weather-beaten powers. It was an important time for both men. Being commissioned by the Lannan Foundation to make the Schmidt film series enabled Sokoloff to switch from an 8mm to a 16mm camera. As for Schmidt, his dream houses, originally born as fairly conventional buildings in the 1950s, had grown, through his daily attachments of newfound objects, to their most mammoth proportions. These houses were not pragmatically planned as residences, and a few short years later, they would all burn in electrical fires. Soundtrack: Alexander Scriabin's "The Poem of Fire," and the voice of Clarence Schmidt.