Here You Are Before the Trees is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
Here You Are Before the Trees traverses Indigenous presence in the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and the areas in-between. Each screen focuses on different homelands and their complex relationships with history, landscape, power and institutional means of oppression.
Set in East Berlin in 1977, this short experimental documentary interviews the Dadaist artist Hannah Höch as she reflects upon her experiences living and working during in 1920s Berlin. Höch compares the sociopolitical landscape of Berlin in the 1970s to its romanticised past of the Wiemar Era, while questioning the usefulness of nostalgia as an emotive tool.
Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a mircrocosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.
"... Basma Alsharif’s Home Movies Gaza, a film that captures the impossibly politicized domestic sphere of the Gaza Strip, under the constant hum and buzz of overhead drones."
This final weather diary travels through some rough inner and outer domains. Social interactions blend more smoothly than the clash of air masses which threaten to clobber a prairie town in a vortex of violence.
Flashbacks and flashpoints flare-up along with thunderheads that loom and boom with vibrations of doom, their every move charted with vivid vibrancy on videographic maps which detail developing devastation.
Desire and death are in the air along with some aromatic wisps of ethnic edibles, so be sure to sniff it all.
Jonas intercuts scenes of the Nova Scotia countryside with images of a studio set-up reminiscent of a di Chirico painting. The soundtrack includes both music and spoken excerpts from a journal Jonas kept while travelling in Nova Scotia. I Want to Live in the Country ultimately deals with observation and fantasy, living in the country, and the stifling aspects of the city and one's art.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
In November of 2004, I was invited to spend a couple of weeks in Cinque Terre (a string of towns along the Northern Mediterranean Italian coast). The area has been listed as a World Heritage Site, by UNESCO, because of its exquisite coastline and the hill towns which cluster on its rocks. Indeed, one is easily overwhelmed by the place, the extraordinary beauty of the light and color, the geometry of the towns and the incredible way humans have inhabited the landscape.
Immaterial Terrain is a film made by Emily Richardson along a seven-mile stretch of the UK coast between Sizewell nuclear power station and the mythic drowned city of Dunwich. Camera in hand, over the duration of a year Richardson repeatedly walked this coastline. These walks – pilgrimages and acts of protest – structure a film that documents a singular and fragile landscape at an uncertain moment. Plans to expand the nuclear power station at Sizewell will have a lasting impact on the environment.
The idea of suspension is evoked on shifting registers – as levitation, cessation, preservation, and suspense – and located in sites whose identities slip as we track through a space within a space.
Camera, Edit, Sound Design: Deborah Stratman
Scroll: T’ang Yin
Dolly: Matthew Thompson
First there is a stop at Salt Lake City and a massive dose of theological imagery that prepares the viewer for the hellish landscape to come—a land of igneous outcroppings and noxious emissions peopled by mammals of exquisite bulk. A countryside plundered of its potatoes by behemoths who head for the hills with their bounty of starch and iron. Follow them to the heights of Yellowstone National Park and the depths of Pocatello, Idaho. Follow them if you dare!
Museum collections of various kinds are the object of artist Dana Levy's ongoing, consistent study in the past decade.
A hallucinatory portrait of a man traveling from Finland to Greece in search of the utopian summit described in René Daumal's Mount Analogue (1952) - a fictional mountain floating in the sea. Equal parts non-fiction cinema, concert film, road movie and spirit quest, our protagonist's journey is accompanied by immersive musical performances from Finnish guitar trio Olimpia Splendid and American percussionist Greg Fox.
Director / Editor / Camera Operator - Ben Russell
Steadicam Operator - Chris Fawcett
The Island Weights is a two-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the two channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
J. Morgan Puett is an internationally renowned artist living on a 95-acre compound in the deciduous forests of northeastern Pennsylvania. Touching on ideas of creative domestication, radical pedagogy, and a critical engagement with one’s environment, Ms. Puett describes her unique home, which she calls Mildred’s Lane.
“It (J. Morgan Puett: A Practice of Be(e)ing) tells a unique story of an important artist that truly lives her art. It’s an exclusive biography of a woman who is widely known to the art world but, as yet, undiscovered by our culture.”
—Roderick Angle
Logging and approximating a relationship between audio recordings of the artist and his father, and videos gathered of the landscapes they both separately traversed. The initial distance between the logger and the recordings, of recollections and of songs, new and traditional, narrows while the images become an expanding semblance of filial affect. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.
Just a Soul Responding is a four-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the four channels presented in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
A familiar landscape comprised of big box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing, intimacy, and radical change. Celebrities are observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. An enigmatic protagonist reveals little moments of subjectivity that escape into the piece like a contaminant, rupturing the view and evidencing the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.
Caught by video on a mountainside, Swiss cows compose and orchestrate a bell sonata.
This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.
A voyage into the labyrinthine memories of a Uitoto man, who worked for the drug Lords in the Colombian Amazon back in the 80s. Following his path between the forest and the ruin of a Narco's mansion imitating the Carrington mansion in the soap opera Dynasty, the film unfolds the hallucinatory account of a near-death experience.
...a "mordantly nostalgic" sojourn across America. A landscape of mute streets, empty rooms and serene fields; the remains of a civilization which has momentarily disappeared.
–– Ken Kobland
This work was restored and revised in 2022.
A collaboration with writer Luc Sante made in Tangier, Morocco, a city where neither of us had ever been. En route from the airport to the city center, we found ourselves amazed by the landscape outside of the car windows; a massive construction project under way in all directions. While not in itself unusual, we were by struck dumb by the epic scale and seemingly incomprehensible plan of the development and were drawn to return together to this puzzling zone.
-- Jem Cohen
Leafless is a poem of textures about becoming familiar with a significant other’s body in reservation with its landscape.
“But the sun is also fierce; neither graceful athlete nor geometrician’s dummy will embody Apollo, the idol of light.”
- Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956)
Jake Wells, a professional tattooist, DIY drone builder, FPV (First Person View) flight hobbyist, and possibly the world’s first RC (Remote Control) Christian Minister, shares some of his stories and ideas regarding the connection between religion, drone technology and his personal struggles.
"Let Each One Go Where He May is the stunning feature debut of celebrated Chicago-based filmmaker Ben Russell. Having its world premiere in Toronto, the film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, tracing the voyage undertaken by their ancestors, who escaped from slavery at the hands of the Dutch 300 years prior.
The Making and Unmaking of the Earth turns to geology as both a metaphor for and a psychic container of women's emotional states and embodied experiences of physical pain. Combining archival footage of earth processes with interviews describing mysterious physical experiences and emotional attachments, this film explores how everything we bury deep inside eventually speaks through the geology of the body.
Performance artist/sculptor Ana Mendieta used the raw materials of nature: water, mud, fire, rock, and grass. The consciousness of her politics and the poetics of her expression fill her work with an emotionally charged vision that is powerfully conveyed in this posthumous video profile. Drawing upon the raw spiritual power of Afro-Cuban religion, Mendieta used her art as a ritualistic and symbolic activity to celebrate the forces of life and the continuum of change.