Date: 1986 Running Time: 25:05
In the same style of channel surfing, Michael Auder's TV America links popular television, news and commercials. Auder creates a fascinating dynamic between his private observations and the content of media images, revealing the intent of the mass media to obscure and influence our own observations and opinions.
The Photo
TV Boris and Video Misha is a Hungarian television program about the attempted Soviet military coup of August 1991. Produced for Maygar TV's monthly "Videoworld" series, TV Boris and Video Misha features two prominent Hungarian critics (Akos Szilagyi and Peter Gyorgy) engaged in a fasci-nating discussion about the failed coup, its major players, and the role of television in shaping the course of modern history. Illustrated by rarely seen Russian home video footage, the tape offers a unique and insightful analysis of the way in which media has revolutionized revolution.
Excerpts from the program:
"The shapers of modern history don't need to be heroes, but rather
moving
images. They need not answer to [an] immor-tal God, but rather to
the immortal
television viewer.
The politician or political style that is unwatchable is inherent-ly
doomed to
failure."
"An information revolution, not an industrial revolution, initiated the changes in the Soviet Union.... Alligned on one side: proclamations, manifestos, official notices. On the other side: western television, private Russian studios, independent video crews and their images." "The demise of the Moscow 'word putsch'...meant the end of the anti-modern, eastern, totalitarian-word-empire.... Yeltsin arrived on top of a tank, like a modern alter-ego of Saint George, the dragon-slayer. This image became the iconographic motif of the Soviet media revolution."
Date: 1990 Running Time: 10:10
Breaking with the traditional documentary format, and using tools from the low and high-end of the technology, Birnbaum episodically views recent events of student activism in the United States. Princeton University Take Back The Night is a study of the 1987 "Take Back The Night" march on the Princeton University Campus. Birnbaum's treatment of the original student-recorded VHS footage reveals this demonstration as having the potential to develop political awareness through personal experience. The students attempt to put across a historical message, the protest of any form of violence against women.
Take Back The Night represents men and women in solidarity with one another, marching against sexual violence of any kind, while specifically focusing on violence in the Princeton community.
Date: 1973 Running Time: 6:22
Television Delivers People focuses on the political import of broadcasting as corporate monopoly and imperialism of the air. The content is presented ironically, for the message criticizes its medium while remaining within it. It provides an example in itself of the seduction of advertising. Musak is played while [a text] that Serra has excerpted from television conference [transcripts] rolls down a blue background in white lettering. For example, "Control over broadcasting is an exercise in controlling society." And: "It is the consumer who is consumed. You are the product of t.v."
The Photo
Date: 1986 Running Time: 5:35
Through fragmented narrative, Tender Detachment examines some of the painful aspects of female adolescence, including the anxiety which comes from the bold sense of betrayal caused by friends grouping and labeling (Fat girls, clever, pretty, etc.). Goldson juxtaposed aspects of girls' experiences with the institutions that mold them such as school and family's well as expectations about sexuality and ability.
Date: 1991/92 Running Time: 50:00 Director/Producer/Writer/Editor: Knut Gerwers Country of Origin: Germany Produced with support from : Det Danske Videovaerksted and Medien Operative Berlin Production assistant: Eva Resch Camera assistant: Michael Huch Actors: Stephen Ruediger, Ralf Steikert Music: Paul Modler Titles: Jens Steinert, Knut Gerwers
Slaves of Inheritance, Part 2: TestamentMaschine reveals the parallels between the military campaigns of Germany in 1945 and the United States in 1991. Gerwers uses images from various documentaries, feature films, and staged scenes to demonstrate that the same stories are continually played out although the faces and actors are new. Footage of European refugees is set against that of refugees fleeing a war-torn Persian Gulf. Countries have changed alliances, Gerwers implies, but legitimized violence in the name of national interest is still being planned and performed.
Dealing with the issue of war and government orchestrated public hysteria, this video also attempts to reanimate art which is already burdened by over-interpretation. Gerwers combines different sounds and media with documentary material and movie scenes to evoke hidden meanings.
The Photo
Date: 1991 Running Time: 11:00 Production Company: B Movies, Inc Performer/Text: Lydia Lunch
Beth B's Thanatopsis is a fierce but somber video on the inevitability of war in our testerone tainted world order: new, old, or otherwise. "Thanatopsis" means 'a meditation on death,' and [Lydia Lunch's] cool rage comes forth in a poetic voice overlay as the camera follows her through her nightly routine of makeup removal, tea drinking and sleep. Intercut with these homey [black-and-white] images are brief [color] views of Lydia in full garb, her red hair and lips identifying her as the very enemy the warmongers, of whom she speaks, wish to quell. "More than a meditation, this is a call to arms; but instead of offering a cartoon version of an avenging angel, Beth B and Lydia [Lunch] present their heroine as someone just like you and meta woman moving through the grind of her life as the desperation rises inside her. Thanatopsis suggests that each of us carries, deep within us, the magic language that could overturn history.... Although it offers no method for speaking those words, it urges us to try. " (Ann Powers, SF Weekly)
Date: 1990 Running Time: 8:48 Producer: Robert Beck, J. Litchfield Production Company: Love Movement Productions in association with THE KITCHEN/8mm Video Council Music: Stephen Vitiello, Shin Shimokawa Text: Peter Bowen, Robert Beck
The Feeling of Power opens with an overview of the different ways video has been institutionalized in American culture: namely, as a repository of collective memory; as a security and surveillance device; as music entertainment; and, through network television, as purveyor and guardian of "family values." Superimposed on footage illustrating the above are a series of succinct statements relating to the AIDS epidemic and to the accessibility of the camcorder, along with a critique of advertising and mass media representation; together, these brief statements assume the cumulative impact of a manifesto advocating video activism. The tape then launches into an unedited video segment documentating an ACT-UP demonstration at Trump Tower. The activist group, ACT-UP, has consistently used video to bear witness to its efforts to fight AIDS and to police the police, as it were.
The Feeling of Power illustrates just this. In effect, by including footage of this demonstration, the tape becomes what it espouses.
Date: 1984 Running Time: 23:30
Featuring reconfigured television footage from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics amidst an amplified collage of found sound, the tape subverts the sensual celebration of perfect bodies in action, and culminates as a series of sadomasochistic contests in which agony out-muscles ecstasy.
"The underlying principle behind appropriation and 'scratch' video of this kind is an inclination to subvert, artistically, the political ideology reflected in the industrial source of the material and TV entertainment." (Bob Riley)
Date: 1981 Running Time: 30:35
"...The Lessons" are variations on the theme song from Episode Three of the television opera Perfect Lives. It introduces the four principal characters in cameo performances. The video and music techniques unique to the seven episode series are presented in four seven minute portraits of Isolde (Marie Isolde), Raoul de Noget (No-Zhay), Buddy (The World's Greatest Piano Player) and The Captain of the Football Team (His parents call him Donnie). "...The Lessons" is primarily a vivid visual experience the piano score, voices and percussion supply a steady pulse for the video variations but don't claim centerstage.
The video images surge and flow at such a rate that glimpses of a table set with crystal glasses, a cowboy passing a porch, or a zoom on a mid-western road amidst green fields merely suggest a narrative without settling down for a sustained piece of action. "As a total music drama, part beatnik, part minimalist, part entertainment, the work is incredibly rich. You could spend hours sifting through the musical or visual cross references, interpreting the ensemble as a structuralist commentary on itself, or simply bathing in the torrent of mutually reinforced sensations pouring from the screen."
Date: 1986 Running Time: 57:44
David Cale's feature-length performance monologue, The Redthroats, incorporates three of his best known stories "The Weirds," "Swagger," and "Welcome To America"recounting with painful intensity a repressive English childhood, his flirtation with male prostitution and his relief, fear and anxiety to finally be on the airplane that will take him to America.
Date: 1986-1987 Running Time: 81:18
Weather Diary 1 (80:00): This feature-length tape documents one month in a trailer park/motel in Oklahoma. The tape follows passing weather systems and the parade of people passing by.
Weather Diary 2 (70:00): In a motel in El Reno, Oklahoma, George observes the weather and copes with leaky air conditioning, food shopping, loneliness, television, and eating, among other things.
Date: 1973 Running Time: 33:15
In the early 1970s, Acconci produced a large number of tapes, including Theme Song, which played off the intimacy of the video viewing situation and dealt with the conventions of direct address. The wide-angle lens distorts Acconci's face, making it bulge forward on the screen, thus breaking down the separation between screen and viewing space. Occasionally he shifts his body so that we can see his legs shrink away by means of the distorting lens. The disproportion between head and body emphasize that this is a mental seduction, a verbal barrage, but with the body still behind it all. The use of popular song lyrics puts a distance between Acconci and his words; he insists on his sincerity with someone else's words. Acconci makes us aware of the complex set of conventions governing the direct address of the viewer/ listener. The singer (Bob Dylan) constructs a listener who is in passive agreement. Acconci is not so presumptuous; he desperately courts our assent. He needs interaction, something the video medium neither permits nor desires. It dooms him to failure.
Date: 1980 Running Time: 41:10
A video-disk prototype in the form of a video album, "360!" is an eight-part video album that re-creates a vital relationship between music and image. Completed in 1980, this work originally consisted of seven visual songs and four musical/ narrative sections. The current version has been edited to include the best of "360!" and features the music of Don Christensen and Jody Harris of the Raybeats as well as Relativity in Shock Theater, a performance by Heyward and Boston-area musicians Dana Moser, Alan Bern, and Matt Darriau.
Date: 1987 Running Time: 14:27
The Thundering Scream of the Seraphim's Delight couples computer- generated holography and off-the-wall instrumentals to go beyond music video convention. This work concentrates almost entirely on tactile actions: close ups focus on fingers plucking, striking, and sliding along the strings of the electronically-altered double bass. Changing visual and aural traditions is a key idea here as the bass itself, rather than its surroundings, takes on different hues and colors according to moods the music evokes. In this videotape even the bow doesn't have to be a bow in the traditional sense. It can even be an emery board.
Date: 1993 Running Time: 6:00 (in English)
Towels and tubes, tiles and tension. A conceptual art installation, made by artist Ricardo Becker, is lively interpreted with powerful images and a strong original soundtrack.
Somewhere between videoart, videoclip and documentary, this piece brings to the pixel screen a new dimension in what video can do to art. The video media is used as a language to express the author's very personal view upon the artist's work.
Date: 1986 Running Time: 3:30
Top of the Pop is a satirical music video performed by Jessica Harper that looks at the disposable pop culture phenomenon through disposable record executives, performers and purchasers.
Loosely autobiographical, Foreman plays himself in Total Rain, acting out his own aesthetic, his private psychological position, and his own moral dilemmas vis-a-vis the material and ethereal worlds. The narrative also features performances by the director's longtime friends and colleagues, Ron Vawter and Kate Manheim, who act as provocateurs.
The Photo
This award-winning tape, recorded in the Paris subway, portrays a dream-like state of "anonymous regard." Melitopulos focuses on isolated, mechanical details and the blank faces of commuters as they wait, as if in a state of suspended animation, for their trains to arrive. A beautifully constructed study of modern alienation, Transfer presents subway advertising, architectural details and bored commuters in dimly-lit, grainy images that suggest they are mere phantasms. Melitopulos writes, "[In Transfer] the experience of fainting is created and interpreted as an emotion without memory.... In this world of sensations, mass media images slink in easily, [barely distinguishable from the subjects they ostensibly address].... The grain of the video image is enlarged until scanning patterns, similar to the deja vu images researched by psychoanalysts, [are visible]."
Date: 1979/1980 Running Time: 27:30
Gorewitz explores the essence of place through image processing in this collection of five short works:
"Records traveling through the U.S. during the winter of 1978-79 and being [affected] by societal and personal transitions." (Shalom Gorewitz)
"Records a trip through the desert mountains of southern Spain to the village of a faith healer." (Shalom Gorewitz)
"An attempt to synthesize diverse feelings about Israel." (Shalom Gorewitz)
"Walking, spinning and standing still in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and La Guardia airport in New York." (Shalom Gorewitz)
"Hallucinogenic experience of the Florida Everglades." (Shalom Gorewitz)
Date: 1980 Running Time: 47:00
This non-narrative docu-collage is based on the language of TV stars. Matthew Geller portrays a nutty professor and Judy Rifka a sultry singer in a parody of docu-dramas that examines how memory and information intersect. Action alternates between diagrammatic and didactic constructions, and throbbing collage section suggest a schizophrenic breakdown. True Cross Fire cuts between live documentation, old war footage, dramatization, and a film/video animation technique developed specifically for this production.
Twenty Twisted Questions is the most complete retrospective of The Residents' work yet to be compiled. Originally created for laser disc, the material has been broken down into three broad categories: Video and Film Art; Performance Art; and Music and Graphic Arts.
The Video and Film Art (30:00) portion contains all of The Residents pioneering music videos as well as excerpts from longer works; Performance Art (13:30) consists of three brief documentaries covering each of The Residents three touring performances; The Music and Graphic Arts (10:30) section has been described as an "electronic discography" and charts twenty years of Residents' releases with twenty 30-second music samples accompanied by the animated cover graphic from each release.
Date: 1986 Running Time: 53:45 Produced by: Carlota Schoolman, for The Kitchen
Two Moon July is an hour-long arts and entertainment special featuring new video, music, dance, performance, film and visual art. The program integrates the work of five videomakers, three visual artists, two choreographers, two performance artists, five composers and one filmmaker.
Live recordings of performances and visual/media installations are collaged with prerecorded video. The primary location is The Kitchen at its former home in Soho.
Featured artists include: Laurie Anderson, Michel Auder, Dara Birnbaum, Jonathan Borofsky, David Byrne, Bruce Conner, Brian Eno, Molissa Fenley, Kit Fitzgerald, Philip Glass, Bill T. Jones, Arto Lindsay, Joan Logue, Robert Longo, Evan Lurie, John Lurie, Tony Negueira, John Sanborn, Cindy Sherman and Bill Viola.
Date: 1982 Running Time: 16:00
"...A montage of the kind of accelerated American landscape seen from an automobile, [U.S. Sweat] has the sort of strong political overtones found in the talking narratives of Stevie Wonder and Grand Master Flash. Make no mistake, this psychedelic [tape] is a thoughtful allegory of modern times. It begins in the strip-mined landscapes of Kentucky and factories of Tennessee (colored and cut to look unpleasant) and ends in New York. The flow of travel (real time shots of vehicular and urban landscapes) is inter-cut with deliberately alarming events, places and sounds that interpret what is seen. The sound supplies another layer of meaning, as do Gorewitz's use of a colorizer and synthesizer and his idiosyncratic, agitated, multi-dimensional editing." (Ann Wooster, Afterimage)
The Photo
Date: Recorded (in Chiang Dao Mountain) 1986 Running Time: 18:45 Edited in 1991 in New York Performers: Lo Me Akha Translator: Opas Saenya Translation read by: David Lameless
In Un Chien Dlicieux, a Burmese man in the Golden Triangle of Northern Thailand remembers Post WWII Paris and the last moments of surrealism. Lo Me Akha returned to Paris with a team of French anthropologists after their visit to his village in 1946. While working with Michel Leiris, he became friendly with Andre Breton and his circle of surrealists. In a series of vivid recollections, he speaks about their encounters, Breton's interest in "otherness," and how he arranged to coax Breton into breaking a deeply-rooted French taboo. A related cooking demonstration follows. Un Chien Delicieux raises questions about truth in documentary cinema and of western culinary ethnocentrism, and utilizes a false form of ethnographic representation and translations to highlight the problematic of both avant-garde fascination and anti avant-garde positions of ethical representation.
Date: 1985 Running Time: 29:30
The visual material in this tape was recorded by scientists to document head trauma experiments on primates. It was then distributed by P.E.T.A. in the belief that taxpayers have a right to see to what use their money was put, and in the hope that the evident pointlessness of the experiments will inspire protest. It becomes clear during the course of the tape that the careless methodology of the experimenters invalidates any results they obtain; that the procedures violate codes for the handling of laboratory animals; and that their practice is a contradiction of their published statements.
The lab scientists' attitudes are also a curiosity: They display the primates with flaunting cruelty-reminiscent of children's behavior toward their toys in home movies. The federal government later investigated the laboratory in the videotape.
According to MICA-TV, "Cascade/Vertical Landscapes is a distillation of the way we tend to experience the American landscape: in brief glimpses from car windows, on escalators, from glass elevators, rushing across corporate plazas and in shopping arcades. The work is structured around a continuous series of vertical camera moves... that highlight American architecture, which seems to be photographed rather than inhabited."
Cascade is a continuation of MICA-TV's work collaborating with photographers, sculptors and painters. As in the case of earlier videotapes, they have identified specific visual and aural themes which effectively translate the collaborating artists' intent to the video medium. Dike Blair, Dan Graham and Christian Marclay each deconstruct and then reassemble elements of our culture to create their work. Cascade integrates the work of these artists as layers of graphic icons, architectural imagery and sound over a seamless revolving background.
Date: 1972 Running Time: 19:40
Joan Jonas' "Vertical Roll" is one of the classic artist's video-tapes from the early 1970s. "A tape without edits, Vertical Roll uses one of the primary technical features of video, the vertical roll that results from the [confluence] of two out-of-sync frequencies, the frequency sent to the monitor and the frequency by which it is interpreted." (Joan Jonas, Scripts and Descriptions 1968-1982).
Jonas uses the rolling pictures structurally and rhythmically, allowing it to create perceptual illusions.
Date: 1980 Running Time: 50:00
Video 50, a made-for-TV work by noted theater artist Wilson, consists of 100 thirty-second episodes which can be viewed separately or in groups, with a playing time ranging from 30 seconds to 50 minutes. These programs can be used to fill short time periods in regular television schedules, or played in their entirety as a feature work.
Video 50, a highly imaginative, visually stunning, frequently humorous collection, has been broadcast in varying formats in Germany, France, Belgium, and Switzerland, and has also been exhibited at various video festivals and museums.
Date: 1985 Running Time: 54:15Video Album 1 introduces the obsessive themes the pervade KucharUs video work. Photos of friends, stories, food, Mike Kuchar, the San Francisian landscape and Blackie the Cat.
Date: 1987 Running Time: 55:15"In this tape, a diary of events that occurred while my friend, Curt McDowell, was in the hospital, I show a whole grab bag of visits with friends and co-workers in film. You get to tag along with me and bump into a lot of San Francisco residents and movie makers, plus people who happened to be stopping by for one reason or another." (George Kuchar)
Date: 1987 Running Time: 46:00
"Curt McDowell was alive for about a year after getting out of the hospital and these are the last video sequences I took with him. It is not a sad tape... you get to attend an Easter picnic in the country with Greek people and meet a whole assortment of filmmakers. It's sort of how the world looked out here during that period-at least the world within a couple of miles from my apartment." (George Kuchar)
"[Kuchar's] homage to hisIdeceased friendIhas the sort of immediacy, richness of detail, and authentic relation to daily life that most video art lacks. [He] successfully re-captures the edgy, unpre-dictable thrill of discovery that used to be associated with video experimentaion." (Christine Tamblyn , Afterimage)
Date: 1984 Running Time: 58:05
"Devyatkin's Video from Russia was telecast over Los Angeles ABC station on the eve of the 1984 summer Olympics. It's as rare an example of an independently produced documentary getting network airtime as it is a spontaneous, unsupervised look at the comrade in the street. This tape travels from Moscow and Leningrad where it drops in on a Bay Ridge-style disco with a Rasputin-like DJ to Kiev, Volgograd, which one woman still refers to as "our beautiful Stalingrad", to Lenin's birthplace Ulyanovsk." (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)
Date: 1981 Running Time: 13:25
THE CONVERSATIONALIST PRESSED FOR THE FACTS. CATASTROPHE WAS INEVITABLE. A PRIMAL SOUND HERMETICALLY SEALED IN ITS SKULL WAS MASKED BY CHOREOGRAPHIES AT PLAY BETWEEN BRAIN AND TONGUE. THE LINGUIST EXPERIENCED A SEPARATION OF PRESENT TENSE AND LOST ALL MOTORSKILLS. LAPSING INTO NONSENSE. THE SOUND RUSHING FROM ITS MOUTH DUPLICATED THAT OF A STREAM NEARING A LARGE BODY OF WATER. (Script excerpt #50 from Videograms)
Abstract black and white images go through subtle transformations as Hill recites short passages whose simplicity and compact nature resemble Haiku poetry. With the passages being variously concrete and abstract, descriptive and metaphoric, the images themselves become alternately illustrations and counterpoints.
In this video, as he does in his other works that explore the text/image dichotomy, Hill uses the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, a pioneer video effects tool, to expand what he calls, "the notion of an Telectronic linguistic."
Date: 1988 Running Time: 5:25
Virginia Dare went down in history as the first recorded white birth in the American colonies. Her family was part of the Roanoke Colony, which disappeared soon after her birth and was never heard from again. This experience is recalled here in Virginia's rhythmical incantation, which calls up disjointed and layered images of water, violence, and healing, thus suggesting her rebirth beyond the historical fact of her death.
Date: 1984 Running Time: 83:15
Her face adorns the cover of a book. She wears a direct gaze, adamantly askew hair, and a full welcoming mouth, all of which are framed by a fur collar. The book is The Freud Journal of Lou- Andreas Salome... a fascinating glimpse at Freud and his circle in the early years of the twentieth century.
When Friedrich Nietzsche met Lou Andreas Salome he asked, From what stars have we fallen to meet here? On the radio the appropriately named Madonna bleats You are my shining star to a lover who, in the next installment, makes her Feel like a virgin, makes her feel unsoiled by sex, shiny and new; to Madonna's old fashioned girl riff Lou-Andreas Salome plays the intellectual and sexual adventuress, she privileged the Terotic hour and woman's ability to allow for physical affection.
The psychoanalytic writing of the last third of [Salome's] life ranged from papers on feminine sexuality and on anality ...to her most celebrated work, The Dual Orientation of Narcissism. She seemed intent on mixing intellectual activity with the enjoyment and disappointments of daily life, or, better still, to see these not as separate arenas but as a piece of a single cloth. But history provides us with a more lopsided reading of her life, recording less about the weight or lightness of her intellectual work and more and more about her role as a muse and desired object to a generation of great and not so great men. She seemed to be their locus of exchange, a charming conduit and, of course, a great listener who dispensed feminine intuition with a kind of juicy grace. She broke Nietzsche's heart, was Rainer Maria Rilke's Tolder woman and Freud's confidante.
This description of Lou-Andreas Salome as the focus of a particular type of male attention brings us to Virtual Play: The Double Direct Monkey Wrench In Black's Machinery, a videotape by Steve Fagin. It is about Andreas Salome in that it places itself in various positions around her figure. These can be read as segments, viewing that vary from truncated soap operas to touristic slide shows to lessons on how to cook a chicken and build a doghouse (to name a few). The images are blanketed with a sound track that jumps from speech to song and forms a generally rich kind of ruckus. Rather than constructing a rigid chronological narrative, Fagin's surrounding views range far and wide and join the eloquences of the tableau with the elemental clarity of a comic strip...focusing on language and how it asserts or effaces notions of fact and fiction, clarity and confusion. (Barbara Kruger, Artforum)
The Photo
Date: 1977 Running Time: 39:20
In Vital Statistics... women's dual consciousness is acted out. In the primary scene, a woman's body is measured in a clinical setting and compared with standard measurement. Voiceovers, symbolic scenes, and photographs suggest the implications of enforcing social standards of measure-mentQwhether by the state through its police functions or, more informally, by "common sense." The scope of the videotape expands beyond the standards of appearance to outright social control.
Date: 1978 Running Time: 35:46
In this three part work, Howard Fried develops a complex definition of the avant garde, described in terms of a marine landscape and a hot water heater. (Vito's Reef separates the avant garde from the masses.) This is further portrayed through a variety of language play and teaching games, which involve the director, a young woman athlete, and the video artist's son. Fried uses a boxing lesson to teach his son the meaning of charioscuro. They use it a lot; they used to.
Date: 1981 Running Time: 10:00
Nares created a tornado-like catastrophe with a hand-held camera, a shooting ratio of three-to-one and remarkable timing. We see only the objects floating through space and never the hands that propel them. But Waiting for the Wind is more than a technical tour de force; it shapes a powerful paradox: filmmaking control is used to evoke the terror of a world completely out of personal control.
The Photo
Date: 1991 Running Time: 85:00
Independently executed over six years, WAX or the discovery of television among the bees combines compelling narrative, in the realistic/fantastic vein of Thomas Pynchon or Salman Rushdie, with the graphic fluidity of video technique. The result is an odd, new type of story experience, where smooth and sudden transpositions of picture and sound can nimbly follow and fuse with fantastical, suddenly changing, and often accelerated narrative. The result resembles storytelling in animated film. Yet location photography and archive research form the backbone of the piece. WAX... provides an example of a new type of independent "electronic cinema" that will become more common as the decade progresses.
WAX.... is set in Alamogordo, New Mexico (1983), where the main character, Jacob Maker (David Blair), designs gunsight displays at a flight simulation factory. Jacob also keeps bees. His hives are filled with "Mesopotamian" bees that he inherited from his grandfather (William S. Burroughs). Through these bees, the dead of the future begin to appear, introducing Jacob to a type of destiny that pushes him away from the normal world, enveloping him in a grotesque miasma of past and synthetic realities. The bees show Jacob the story of his grandfather's acquisition and fatal association with the "Mesopotamian" bees in the years following the First World War. The bees also lead Jacob away from his home out to the Alamogordo desert, slowly revealing to him their synthetic/mechanical world, which exists in a darkness beyond the haze of his own thoughts. Passing through Trinity Site, birthplace of the Plutonium bomb, Jacob arrives at a gigantic cave beneath the desert. There, he enters the odd world of the bees and fulfills his destiny. Traveling both to the past and the future, Jacob ends at Basra, Iraq, in the year 1991, where he meets a victim he must kill.
"Winningly strange video narrative from a singular talent....Authentically peculiar.
Like something from the network vaults of an alternative universe." (William Gibson)
Date: 1991 Running Time: 60:00 Production Company: The Kitchen & BMCC Performers: DANCENOISE, Lavender Light Choir, Richard Elovich, Robbi MacAuley, John Kelly, Bill T. Jones and Karen Finley
We Interrupt This Program was aired as a live television broadcast on Dec. 1, 1991. The program was produced in cooperation with Visual AIDS, a non-profit organization which has established December 1 each year as "A Day Without Art" in order to call attention to the devastating impact of AIDS on the nation's arts communities. While most arts organizations close shop on this day to dramatize the loss of so many creative talents, The Kitchen joined forces with Deep Dish TV and the Borough of Manhattan Community College to produce a "live" television program focusing on AIDS education. The program, which also featured moving testimonies and acts of public mourning from artists and arts administrators, was linked via satellite to public access stations throughout the USA.
Date: 1986 Running Time: 90:00
An exploration of today's media landscape, John Jesurun's "White Water" employs three performers, twenty one-stage video monitors, five channels of images, and a dynamic soundtrack by New York's acclaimed phonograph artist Christian Marclay in this fast-paced tale of unexplained phenomena and information over-load. This theater work, which made its New York premiere at The Kitchen, features Valerie Charles, Larry Tighe, and Michael Tighe (who are all veterans of Jesurun's 1985 productions "Deep Sleep" and "Shatter- hand Massacree") taking on double roles as the three video talking heads and on-stage actors. In a series of dizzying verbal exchanges and dramatic confrontations, the performers and video images, representing a TV talk show host, a lawyer, a doctor, and a priest, interrogate a child who has witnessed a vision during a rash of unexplained events. Among the apparitions the boy sees is a woman floating in air, clothed in light, and speaking in strange tongue. She tells him to pray and drink water from a certain spring. Others follow and some believe they have been cured from ailments. Amidst the frenzied verbal and visual rhythms characteristic of Jesurun's work, White Water uses this dramatic premise to examine the ways in which information is exchanged in a media-saturated society.
Date: 1984 Running Time: 33:15
Gary Hill's "Why Do Things Get in A Muddle? (Come on Petunia)" is a playful, palindromic meditation on the structure of meaning. Hill sets his domestic drama in a living room, where a professorial father sits reading the paper while his Alice-in-Wonderland daughter plays with her toys. When daddy tells Alice to straighten up her things and get ready for bed, she engages him in a Socratic dialogue about the difference between things being tidy and in a muddle. Hill takes his texts from "Through The Looking Glass" and Gregory Bateson's, "Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind."
The fact that for long stretches the father/daughter pair sound like they are on Quaaludes lends the scene a mysterious--not to say muddled-- quality. After a while, though, you realize that Hill had his actors says their lines backward, then reversed the tape word for word. Everything daddy and Alice do from then on demonstrates the magical qualities of this simple trick, a gyroscope leaps up from the table, the father unties his tie very precisely backwards, a cloud of powder swoops down on a table and parts to reveal Alice inhaling it back into place.
In a final twist, Hill and Bateson point to storytelling in general as creator of order and meaning: "'There are millions and millions of muddles, but only one, Come on Petunia,' Papa pronounces. 'But daddy,' Alice answers, 'the same letters might spell Once upon a time!'"
Date: 1985 Running Time: 27:30
Chosen as Best Video in the Twelfth Annual Village Documentary Festival, My Mother Married Wilbur Stump focuses on the second marriage of Sweeney's mother Bernardine at age 54 to the 75 year old, legendary piano bar player and alcoholic Wilbur Stump, as well as the anxiety of Bernardine's conservative daughters. Her remarriage was also complicated by having to reconcile her Catholic beliefs and her love for this man, a veteran of seven marriages, all of which Bernardine managed to have annulled, with the Church's approval.
Even after Wilbur's death, Bernardine still surrounds herself with historical memorabilia of her second late husband's piano performances, home movies and family albums. According to the director, "my mother's ironic love story, its impact on her children, and her insatiable desire for family documentation forms the basis of [this work]."
Date: 1982 Running Time: 22:00
Stringing together several stories, Windfalls deals with the process of retelling: A saxophone player recounts his experience of over-stepping the bounds of musical protocol in a jam session; another character tells about being swindled for a hot TV; a computer technician describes coding systems while someone draws a weather diagram of swirling arrows. Windfalls depicts an uncertain and chaotic world alongside the theories and stories we invent to rationalize our daily experiences. The tape's subtitle, "New Thoughts on Thinking," points to Geller's preoccupation with information systems and the manner in which information is taken in, stored, and retrieved.
Date: 1984 Running Time: 19:08
This full-blown narrative was made with the most limited use of language and a strict economy of means. The piece opens with the arrival of "the woman next door" moving into her new apartment. She is oblivious to the spying of her male neighbor, who fast becomes fixed on her.
The piece is so steeped in alienation and voyeurism that its most painful and serious moments are also its most banal and laughable. It is about an outgoing woman and about a man whose life is so restrictive, that every sound she makes, every glimpse he catches of her as she leaves the building, becomes in itself a monumental event.
Date: 1990 Running Time: 14:02
In this work, which can only be described as an experimental documentary format, Luis Valdivino extolls the plight and the brief history of illegal aliens crossing the Mexican border into the U.S. Using many pieces of found footage and text, the paranoia of "aliens" in our land is revealed with vengeful wit.
Date: 1986 Running Time: 24:30
Produced in association with the CAT Fund of Boston, this work features William Wegman as the professional photographer teaching the ever naive Mike "Michael Smith" the tricks of the trade. Former CAT Fund director Kathy Rae Huffman states that World of Photography "presents a parody of the American idea of instant success and identity and a commentary on contemporary issues of content and image. Mike's lack of insight, his empty vision, and lack of energy are travesties, and subliminally question politics and style. Wegman's droll attitude and self-satisfaction [characterize] what happens when experience is able to make even the most ordinary object interesting. World of Photography is a microcosm of a larger, more significant American problem: the identification of a generic formula to establish the right image and achieve individual lifestyle (with as little energy as possible)."
Date: 1993 Running Time: 7:21 (Portuguese with English subtitles)
Going thru Chaves' entire career as a painter, the video creatively goes from outer space and asteroids to ground surface and below in a trip filled with intriguing images and the original music of Jards Macale, one of Brazil's most inventive musicians.
The Photo
Currently used by the San Francisco Rape Treatment Center as a training tape for service providers, this award-winning interracial date rape drama examines would-be rapists' interpretations of a woman's innocent gestures of friendship and warmth. Leigh, a filmmaker, and Russell, a performance artist, combined their talents in this ground-breaking portrayal of sexual assault, and provide a satirical point-of-view of interracial sexual perceptions. This interdisciplinary performance team uses the power of video to overturn the myth of female denial. Yes Means Yes, No Means No marks one of the rare productions whereby the rape of an African-American woman by a white male is portrayed cinematically, and from a feminist perspective. The wide range of elements, from impressionistic photography to Jungian symbolism, describe the contradictions of what is often referred to as date rape.
Date: 1985 Running Time: 6:30
Joan Blair begins this tale about longing for companionship with a collage-style survey of a seemingly prehistoric terrain. In the narration that follows she talks about the pet she's always wanted: "I want an animal, kind of like a friend and kind of like a piece of ass...." She decides on a dinosaur. In a verit style interview that contrasts sharply with the fantasy she spins, she imagines how her talking pet dinosaur entertains her with recollections of the Ice Age. Following a series of dreamlike visions, she dances with the dinosaur to a song by The Wailers.
Date: 1974-1976 Running Time: 94:50
During the 1970's, Martine Barrat collaborated with street gangs and the members' families in New York City to produce films and videos with stories told by the otherwise unheard voices of the ghetto. Barrat taught gang members to use the video camera, and collectively shot over 100 hours of footage. This video features the Roman Kings of the South Bronx in a mock trial by peers at a gang hangout. Here a gang member is examined for mugging an old woman near the clubhouse.
The crime in this case is not so much robbery as it is robbery in front of the clubhouse, an error that could jeopardize the Kings' security. Prosecuting and defense "attorneys" perform for the camera, but later become violent as a way of disciplining one of their own.
Date: 1986 Running Time: 25:00
In this audacious video, Michel Focault and Tennessee Williams have an affair in Orillia, Ontario, and get caught up in the Canadian washroom arrests of 1983. This fictional mixed-media performance tape uses humor, pop music, and 100 rolls of toilet paper to document an infamous case of police surveillance that destroyed the lives of those men caught.
Date: 1986 Running Time: 6:30
Zoe's Car, featuring original score and lyrics composed by Jill Kroesen, combines live action footage with computer-generated animation created on Quantel's Harry Paintbox. This work is based on a period in Lister's life when her daughter Zoe, then two, received an endless supply of junk mail in response to a mail-order for "Fifty Farm Animals" at the bargain price of just $2.98. Zoe, received not only the animals, but also fantastic offers and potential winnings of cash, cars, and jewels. One notification said that she had won a car, which would be delivered by a "local dealer" when she chose the color. According to Lister, they "spent a lot of time 'Looking for the Loopholes,' (the theme song). There didn't seem to be any and we are still waiting"