In the 1980s He was co-director of the Lower East Side film venue Films Charas, and a board member of The Collective For Living Cinema. His work from this time was included in MoMA's survey on the history of 8mm and has been recently preserved by The Warhol Foundation and Anthology Film Archives.
In 1984 he traveled to Berlin to shoot the Rosa Von Praunheim produced Vampire Film, Der Bis directed by Marianne Enzensberger.
Beginning n 1987, he served as the Director of Photography on a series of short films and feature documentaries including Let's Get Lost by Bruce Weber which won the Venice Film Festival Critics Award and an Academy Award nomination for best documentary.
Soon after his career took on directing commercials and music videos (for Iggy Pop, Malcolm McLaren, REM, B52s / Apple, Nike, Coke, etc.).
In 1989 he co-founded the production company Epoch Films with Mindy Goldberg. Since that time he has produced a serial project of installations exhibited at MoMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, MOCA Los Angels, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Musée dʼart Moderne de la Ville Paris, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam.
He has made collaborative work with artists including Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, R.H. Quaytman, Christian Philipp Müller, Josiah McElheny, Nicolás Guagnini, Karin Schneider and Anthony McCall. In 2004 he completed an 8 screen film installation on architectural cinematography commissioned by Rem Koolhass that traveled with the OMA retrospective CONTENT.
His work is in the collection of MoMA, MOCA Los Angeles, The Reina Sofia in Madrid, The Hessel Museum and Anthology Film Archives.
In 2005 Preiss cofounded the experimental gallery, ORCHARD in New York. His program there was instrumental in the founding of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, where he currently serves on the board.
His 2012 experimental feature film, STOP was a selection of the 50th New York Film Festival and in 2014 his first feature narrative Low Down won the Sundance Film Festival for cinematography and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival for best actress: Elle Fanning.
Preiss is currently in preproduction on a second feature film and working on new collaborative projects with Josiah McElheny, Leslie Thornton, Nicolás Guagnini and Madeline Hollander.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).