City

Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.

Do Not Circulate, an experimental short film, attempts a structuralist and materialist approach to unraveling the entrails of a collective media memory. Paced by an essay as a relentless voiceover, the film rips footage that challenges the materiality, ownership and legal boundaries of documentation.

South Circular first shows us two women, in the shadow of nondescript ruins over the Tagus river in Lisbon. Three disparate elements, then — a female pair, a structure in ruins and a river surrounding Lisbon and winding through the city’s outskirts — lay the foundation for a historical inventory of a military defense line that with time assumed a different role and another meaning.

The scene: the industrial neighborhood of Gowanus, Brooklyn.

The players: wind, a flooded road, passersby, and birds...

The time: shortly before the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

A fragmented view of a city provides this poetic examination of disclosing and withholding—what is and isn’t seen, and once it is seen, how is it read?

Using the Islington Gazette and local pigeons as my guides I strolled, re-strolled, and strolled some more along the Essex Road: updown, downup. Paving stones, buses. Railings railings railings. More buses. Abandoned dummies and mystery blotching on the concrete – is that gum or lichen? – as shadows sundial the day away.

A combination of live action, stop motion and table top animation – my contribution to Essex Road IV draws on the glee of motion through cinematic artifice: a 25 fps flick book of a film.

A Memory of Astoria, commissioned for Museum of the Moving Image, is an impressionistic portrait of the blocks surrounding the Museum in Astoria, New York. Artist Ezra Wube walked the neighborhood to observe the area’s confluence of cultures, focusing on everyday moments, sights, and sounds. He reconstituted these experiences into a poetic visual collage, inserting himself as a silhouetted observer exploring the memories of his walks.

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."

Toxic pigments of lust stain an artist’s brush as he struggles against lurid colors on the canvas of his life, – a "life" in brick jungles wit sordid, dark alleys on neon-lit avenues where he got lost… Will he, can he, find a new, unsoiled canvas on which to paint a better life?

In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.

It is TIME at a street corner in London... A collaboration between filmmaker Roderick Coover and writer Deb Unferth, this short marks the textual disintegration of the speaking clock in an unnerving portrait of technology, power, and the urban environment.

Urban parks consist of two major elements: nature and man-made forms. Parks play an important role in the urban environment, offering relief in everyday life. While parks provide green spaces, they are not natural spaces; they are highly designed. Nature and Geometry in the Park is a series of short videos that explore parks, focusing on form. Case 3 features WNYC Transmitter Park, a relatively new park located on the waterfront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which opened in 2012.

San Francisco is a city where the virtual and the real co-exist. It is both a center of multi-media and Internet activity, and a city with a vibrant street life and commitment to public space. Awakening From the 20th Century explores these issues by asking the questions: Is life becoming virtual? Are we witnessing the end of the city? Will the computer replace the automobile?

This title is also available on Chip Lord Videoworks: Volume 2.

Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, the prison, and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape.

Gravity Hill Newsreels: Occupy Wall Street comprises Jem Cohen’s twelve-part series as a continuous and complete compilation. Cohen, who witnessed the New York occupation from day one, borrowed a digital camera and started gathering footage in subsequent weeks. Initially acting upon an instinctive impulse to document and be guided by the events of the movement through quiet participation, Cohen’s documentation took a more public and expansive form through an agreement with the IFC Center, a local movie theater.