In the fall of 1986, Richard Fung made his first visit to his father’s birthplace, a village in southern Guangdong, China. This experimental documentary examines the way children of immigrants relate to the land of their parents, and focuses on the ongoing subjective construction of history and memory. The Way to My Father's Village juxtaposes the son’s search for his own historical roots, and his father’s avoidance of his cultural heritage.
This video diary visits two sites that exhibited my visual works this past year, culminating at the VOLTA ART SHOW in N.Y.C., where I sold some paintings and a photograph.
The underling theme of the diary deals with some bloating, scarring and beefcake exposure while on the road to an acting gig where I'm scheduled to play a BI-SEXUAL, paraplegic in heat.
There are some in depth scenes of me working out the romance/sex routines with a young and attractive, male co-star. The all-girl crew appears to be getting off on the whole thing and I don't blame them!
Medicine Bundle is about a bundle that was used in my family to heal my Great Great Grandfather from a smallpox epidemic and a life threatening wound from a gatling gun used against him during the Battle Of Cutknife Hill in 1885. The bundle was again used in 1918 when my Grandfather contracted the Spanish Flu as a baby. It was buried in an unmarked grave to protect it from grave robbers, but the spirit within the bundle has continued to protect our family from more modern psychological effects of colonization like depression.
Attempting to apologize for the lack of good weather in Weather Diary 3, George arrives in Milwaukee only to find the drought back in full swing. Since there’s not enough good weather, the tape becomes a social diary against the backdrop of the Motivation Of The Carcasoids project.
"Look at a landscape and imagine a different one there. Touch the body and let it slip from memory. Imagine a desert when what you see is winter. The filmmaker evokes a territory where fragile shifts—the links between things, emotions, and places—materialize and dematerialize."
—Nicole Gingras
This title is also available on Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 1.
A son discreetly records fleeting moments in his parents’ suburban home. An intimate portrait of a stable life lived according to the rules of society.
Annie Lloyd is a daughter's poetic documentation of the last few years of her mother's life and an intimate portrayal of the creativity and wisdom of old age.
This title is also available on Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 2
A music-filled tour of Christmas good cheer overtakes this gastronomically oriented excursion through the winter season of discontent and yuletime yearnings craving ignition.
A very chatty array of people along with still photos and a loose-tongued cab driver, make this a leisurely stroll through my social life of several years ago.
Miller & Shellabarger, their breath made visible by the cold of a refrigerated room, exchange breath with each other.
This title is only available as an excerpt on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
In Precious Products we are subtly reminded of this country’s obsession with consumerism and narcissism. George, with his ever-present video-8 camera, attends an opening of Precious Products—an exhibition of artworks satirizing art as commodity. He leaves the art world of San Francisco to spend a Christmas holiday with friends in their opulent home. Ironically, this is the home of a celebrity (another kind of commodity), Russian defector/ballerina Natalia Makanova. Surrounded by all the luxuries of life and Makanova’s image, George muses about death.
From childhood memories to recurring nightmares, Nine Fish attacks and illuminates the indecision and confusion surrounding euthanasia and care of the elderly in the United States. In this deeply spiritual and personal video, director Kip Fulbeck chronicles his Cantonese grandmother's physical decline and its continuing impact on his family. The shifting complexities of personal identity, family communication, and cultural assimilation are explored through nine semi-fictional stories.
This latest work from the ReStack’s pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape.
In the aftermath of a death things may seem very quiet, but there are struggles going on so deep not even those who struggle can recognize them. This film looks and listens for signs of those struggles. Psychoanalytic interjections consider the nature of time and rumination, and are used to step outside of the terribly interiorized state of mourning.
-- Jennifer Montgomery
"An autobiographical reflection on his unassuming name leads the filmmaker down a wayward path through family photographs, personal archives, and internet searches.
Jennifer, an intelligent but insecure 14-year-old student at a boarding school, seduces her married dormitory counselor, a photographer who has offered to teach her about his art and winds up shooting her in the nude. She is naive, and he manipulates her into an affair that eventually is discovered. Years later, as the photographer is being investigated by the FBI, the adult woman remembers her first love as a case of herself watching the artist who watched her.
“[Segalove] pursues her self-analysis via the popular culture and TV addiction of her youth: seeing JFK shot on TV, falling in love with the TV repairman, being glued to the tube while suffering from the requisite bout of mononucleosis, and associating the memory of watching her parents kiss with the soundtrack of Dragnet.” —Marita Sturken, “Revising Romance: New Feminist Video,” Art Journal 45 (Fall 1985)
Shifting Positions is a semi-autobiographical/fictional trilogy exploring becoming queer later in life, my father's dementia, and our mid- and end-of-life crises. The selling of our family home of forty years prompted the making of the first section, entitled 'Last Home', which investigates the ways memories and spirits inhabit a house. In the remaining two sections— 'Napping' and 'Behavior Of Fascination'—the relationship between father and daugther is looked at through 'home movies' and documented intimate moments of private life. —Kathy High
Laurel Klick and I were members of the feminist art program at CalArts and became close lifelong friends. Laurel is behind the camera as I recount my one-sided flirtation with a guy who worked at CalArts in the equipment “cage” - the cage where I checked out the video Portapak - the Portapak we utilized to record my anecdote. My story about an everyday interaction would become a trademark of my work. “Laurel and Susan” was not edited or presented publicly until 2022.
Segalove relates a tale from her childhood of a man's exposure with text (“the painter wagged it at me right here”), while an arrow blinks over a shot of the house where she grew up. Segalove narrates: “I looked down and expected to see a can of green paint. I saw a pink penis instead, peeking out of the fly of his pants... I wondered how it had got so pink; had he painted it too?” This and four other memorable stories are humorously presented in a series of video one-liners.
The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily life. McDowell was dying from AIDS-related illnesses during the production of the diary.
“An elegy for McDowell, the videowork captures Kuchar’s mournful remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the young filmmaker. But it also has the inquisitive charm, perverse humor, and quirky candor that places Kuchar’s visual expressions in a gritty niche all their own.”
I Stare at You and Dream is a slice of life melodrama that journeys to the core of interrelationships. This film juxtaposes and links the lives of four people: the filmmaker, Susan Mogul; her friend, Rosie Sanchez; Rosie’s teenage daughter, Alejandra (Alex) Sanchez; and Ray Aguilar; Susan’s-on-and-off boyfriend. Tender and unflinching, each character gradually reveals their desires, wounds, and romantic entanglements in the context of their everyday lives.
The artist visits with seven cosmetic surgeons specializing in blepharoplasty (cosmetic eyelid creasing surgery) in the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills area for initial consultation sessions. The doctors demonstrate different reshaping options and comment upon the prevalence and success rates for different Asian nationalities while Tran presents statistics and facts in text that frame the consultations.
This title is also available on Tran, T. Kim-Trang: The Blindness Series.
My Mother’s Place is an experimental documentary focusing on the artist’s mother, a third-generation Chinese-Trinidadian who at 80 still has vivid memories of a history lost or quickly disappearing. She conveys these with a storytelling style and a frankness that is distinctly West Indian. A tape about memory, oral history, and autobiography, My Mother’s Place interweaves interviews, personal narrative, home movies, and verité footage of the Caribbean to explore the formation of race, class, and gender under colonialism.
This latest work from the ReStack’s pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape.
