Labor

In this piece Dani Leventhal recounts to camera her experiences of living and working in Israel, the fabled land of milk and honey of childhood lessons. With time spent in a metal factory and a battery farm for chickens, her harrowing tale includes stories of sexual harassment and sick birds. Against this background, there are idyllic images of bees and flowers, cows and calves, intimate caresses, dead birds. Every thing is worthy of Dani's gaze, and is transformed by the encounter, becoming more human or sacred, and we are closer to the pain and beauty of being alive. 

Little Radek, the step-dancing Bolshevik; Machera, the Andean Robin Hood, and Maria Spiridonova, the Russian socialist assassin are your guides for Past Leftist Life Regression therapy. In this third Inner Trotsky Child video, narrator Lois Severin— a former Trotskyite turned suburban housewife—attempts to radicalize the personal fulfillment and self-help scene.

Dream Nightmare is from Martine Syms’ Kita’s World series. Kita enacts the performances of everyday life in a hyper-digitized world. The character’s roles range from meditation guru to cultural commentator, and she speaks directly to questions of consciousness within the systems of labor, race, technology, and institutional failure. To the cognitive dissonance of Siri mishearing her speech, to the terror of (mis)representation, to the instinct to reconnect with nature.

Strike Anywhere is a video essay that takes as its point of departure Swedish "Match King" Ivar Kreuger, whose privatization of financial crisis management strategies bears a direct relation to late-20th Century policies implemented by the IMF and WTO. Between 1917 and 1932, Kreuger capitalized on shifts in global financial markets to control over 200 companies and establish matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries. At the height of his success, Ivar Kreuger was worth approximately 30 million Swedish kronor (the equivalent of 100 billion USD today).

Videofreex member, Ann Woodward, provides a bread-baking lesson.

What do a luxury automobile, a cymbal, and a wall clock all have in common? What are the diverse attachments and experiences produced by those who make these things and those who consume them? What exchanges take place through the object itself—sensually, esthetically, abstractly? We often forget that most of the things we use are made by the labor of others, often in distant places, living dramatically different, diverse lives. What do these objects mean to them? How does their labor, their aspirations, their sense of alienation or satisfaction connect to ours?

Hirsch’s most ambitious film to date and the pinnacle of his trilogy, Nothing New depicts the epic rescue mission of a man whose parachute is caught on electricity power lines. Involving hundreds of participants in a desolate field facing the Jordanian border in the Jordan Valley of Israel, this communal cinematic endeavor aims to re-unite, if only for a brief moment, the collective spirit of the socialist Kibbutz movement in Israel, a movement that has undergone significant ideological modifications.

Short Circuit is an experimental documentary—a semi-autobiographical rant that challenges the obsolescence of human labor at the vortex of the machine and digital ages. Through a flow of images, text, and sound, the mechanical and the electronic clash in the thought processes of our protagonist. Is the global revolt of the machines at hand?

This video examines the iconic World Wide Web branding of the global marketplace, which creates disconnection and contrasts with the labor system in society.

Shot in video-8 at the 1988 Chicago Auto Show, this work examines the artist's personal history with automobiles against the back-drop of an auto plant closing in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The personal stories of real life relationships between people and their cars is dramatically counterposed to the glaring commercialism of the automobile industry and the economic crisis that industry has imposed on the American union workers.

A garage in central Portland, Oregon is the setting for this conceptual re-working of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The garage owner Jay, mechanics and neighborhood denizens serve as narrators, reading lines from the novel that focus on death, love, social inequality and the relationship between individuals and the universe.

In the late 1960s Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father's Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and authoritarian Stalinist Pseudo-socialism. The film is about a South Korean video artist who comes to a North Korean art residency to help bring Juche cinema into the 21st Century.

Looking like a 1970’s version of “Rosie the Riveter”, Mogul takes on the persona of an artist who makes a living posting billboards on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. As Mogul recounts her climb up the billboard “ladder”, she realizes that the only way to truly make a “name” for herself is to create her own billboard. And so she does.

The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.

In this world, motion capture technology translates movement into data that can be unbound from the human body. Yvonne’s No Manifesto becomes a framework for understanding the existential impact of this new dataset. What happens to movement when it is divorced from affect and feeling? What happens to dance without the basic premise of embodiment and breath?

115 years later, a(nother) remake of the Lumiere Brothers pseudo-actuality film La Sortie des usines Lumière. This time around our factory is a job site, a construction site peopled by thousands of Southeast Asian laborers, a neo-Fordist architectural production site that manufactures skyscrapers like so many cars.

Workers Leaving the Factory - Ten Days that Shook the World – downloaded, repeatedly recompressed and reversed V.1 is a 13-minute re-edit of the film Workers Leaving The Lumière’s Factory in Lyon.

Company Line is a film about one of the first predominately Black neighborhoods in Mansfield, Ohio. The title, Company Line, refers to the name historically used by residents to describe their neighborhood, located on the north side of town close to the old steel mill. The Company Line began during the post–war migration of Blacks from the south to the north in the late 1940’s. The neighborhood was purchased in the early 1970s and its residents were scattered throughout Mansfield.

In the summer of 1996 we filmed application training courses in which one learns how to apply for a job. School drop outs, university graduates, people who have to be retrained, the long-term unemployed, recovered drug addicts and mid-term managers – all of them are supposed to learn how to how to market and sell themselves, a skill to which the term “self-management” is applied. The self is perhaps nothing but a metaphysical hook from which to hang a social identity.

This film originated as an expanded portrait of artist Carol Bove as she created four monumental sculptures commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One week after filming began, New York City went into its first pandemic lockdown. Filmed against the backdrop of the progressing pandemic, Medium evolved into a meditation on materiality and the artist as a medium through which ideas move into the world.

Kipnis describes this tape as "an appropriation of the aesthetics of both late capitalism and early Soviet cinema—MTV meets Eisenstein—reconstructing Karl Marx for the video age.” She presents a postmodern lecture delivered by a chorus of drag queens on the unexpected corelations between Marx’s theories and the carbuncles that plagued the body of the rotund thinker for over thirty years. Marx’s erupting, diseased body is juxtaposed with the “body politic", and posited as a symbol of contemporary society proceeding the failed revolutions of the late 1960s.

Three factories. Three radically different modes of production. One of the world's largest prosthetics factory, far removed in the mountains of Germany; a small haute-couture glove atelier in southern France, where each glove is made by hand; and a distressed jeans factory in central Turkey, where about 2000 pairs of jeans are produced daily, reveal paradigms of contemporary production, organization, and labor.

Ten thousand women marched down New York's Fifth Avenue on August 26th, 1970, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote. The march was part of a "Women's Strike for Equality" organized by veteran feminist leader Betty Friedan.

Lead is a tale of an early 20th Century Robin Hood, based on a story by James Williams, involving jumping trains and throwing coal off for needy Southerners.

Cast: Chris Barkley, Hassen Mahamud, Kenny West, James Williams. Cinematography: Jonathan Taee. Sound: Ayesha Ninan.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

THE DRESS: is a projection prop created for a performance piece at the Art Institute in 1984. It was installed in March 2021, suspended in front of a building on the Bowery as both a memorial to my grandmother, a Hungarian immigrant and master seamstress, and to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, of 1911, which occurred a few blocks north of this site.

-EJay Sims

A woman raises her voice and gives a painful and endless speech that with time becomes even more overwhelming, because her words are heartbreaking and permanent impressions in the collective memory, stabbing with words an old Mexican film, a celluloid that tears apart until its disappearance.

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.