Spiro traveled for one year on the backroads of the southern United States gathering footage for this mobile video project. Accompanied by her dog Sam and a video camera, she travels from Virginia to Texas and back. Her van (which breaks down frequently) serves as office, apartment, editing suite, and runabout.
Indians In Brazil is an educational series for Brazilian public schools that invites students to experience cultural diversity. Four teenagers are invited to discover a new world and participate in Indian daily life in two different communities. They show their emotions, curiosity and fears, and are surprised by their new friends.
Transexual Menace takes its title from the name of "the most exciting political action group in the USA"—transgendered people who are defining themselves, demanding their legal rights, and fighting for medical care and against job discrimination. Considered by von Praunheim to be the “most fascinating [project] in my long life as a filmmaker,” Transexual Menace is a sensitive and carefully crafted portrait that deals with issues openly and honestly. “I was able to earn the trust of many who are often reluctant to be interviewed.
Matt Wolf returns to Joe Brainard's iconic poem I Remember (1970) in this videowork. His archival montage combines audio recordings of Brainard reading from the poem, as well as an interview with his lifelong friend and collaborator, the poet Ron Padgett. The result is an inventive biography of Joe Brainard, and an elliptical dialog about friendship, nostalgia, and the strange wonders of memory.
A documentary about Holt’s public installation work Dark Star Park in Arlington, Virginia, this video is about the process of developing and building the park. It includes commentary from the architects, contractors, foremen, and engineers who worked on the project, as well as with people who frequent the park. Holt transforms a site of urban blight into an aesthetically stimulating spot that addresses environmental issues.
Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation.
LYNDALE is a story of shifting family dynamics, told through the relationship of two brothers. Shot on ten different video formats, this experimental documentary is both the story of a Chicago family, and a record of the digital revolution in the early 2000s. The piece takes place over a six-year period during which filmmakers Oli Rodriguez and Victoria Stob shared a house with Rodriguez’s brother, Jeff.
Woman as Protagonist: The Art of Nancy Spero is an invigorating look at the 40-year career of acclaimed feminist artist Nancy Spero, who, in her own works, is concerned with “rewriting the imaging of women through historical time.” With Spero’s own voice as narration, this documentary tracks her development as she matured against the grain of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art when “there wasn’t room in the art world to make way for political or activist art.” This tape includes footage of the artist at work on installations in the United States, Northern Ireland, and
A journey that begins in a Kansas City hotel and ends up in New Mexico. The bumpy ride is fuelled with libidinous juices as it lurches through college dormitories and sun-baked ghost towns. Rocks are lifted and things crawl out for all to see.
An examination of venture capital, Nothing Ventured documents the tough negotiations that take place when entrepreneurs and bankers meet.
Storms threaten to tarnish the Golden State as I wander through the rooms of my apartment, seeking a high in the lowering barometric pressure. Many mementos create a series of flashbacks to warm the cockles in our most secret places—some of those places being blatantly revealed in this cockle-warming picture.
The Ruling Classroom documents a social studies experiment played out by seventh graders in Mill Valley, California. The students reorganized their classroom as an imaginary country until the principal staged a coup and brought the classroom republic to a halt. The educational experiment was the brainchild of teacher George Muldoon, who suspended the normal social studies curriculum in order to let his students learn about government by constructing it for themselves.
Executive Producer, Suzanne Lacy; Director, Steve Hirsch; Editor, Doug Gayeton.
From the performance Freeze Frame: Room for Living Room by Suzanne Lacy, Julia London, Ngoh Spencer, and Carol Leigh, San Francisco, 1982.
Cande and Pancha’s daughter Maria Luisa and Marisela and Cachuchas’ daughter Veronica believe their fathers are locked in a competition for grandchildren. It’s now 3-0 Cande. Several years later, Cachuchas gives me a lesson in car repair then with Cande considers the change in score, 4-2 Cande.
Chief Pedro Mãmãindê (who directed the proceedings and the shoot itself) describes the necessity of strengthening the girls of his village by secluding them after their first menses. After several months, the village throws a party, with singing, feasting, and the ritual abduction of the girl by an allied village. When the Nambiquara of Mato Grosso see videotape of themselves performing this ritual, the excess of Western clothing makes them uncomfortable. The ritual is then re-enacted with traditional body painting and adornment.
come lontano is a perverse historical romance in which two lives are exposed, inter-mixed, doused with sentiment, and — hopefully — redeemed. The work revolves around a central ‘couple’ — Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas. There is a third main character, an ambiguous villain made of steel, glass and rubber. Each member of our central couple has her/his own external distractions which impinge — to varying degrees — on their brief, ecstatic encounter. This encounter was in fact a cinematic collaboration; it’s product the film Medea (1969).
It's not my memory of it is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. Mobilizing specific historical records as memories which flash up in moments of danger, the video addresses the expansion and intensification of secrecy practices in the current climate of heightened security. A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979.
This 12-minute video by Tom Palazzolo and Chicago writer Jack Helbig tells the story of the recently discovered Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier. Though she was unknown in her lifetime, her extensive body of work is rewriting the history of post-World War II American street photography. The video, told from the point of view of Maier herself, recounts her life and work, from her childhood in France to her move to NYC in 1951 and subsequent relocation to Chicago, where the majority of her work was done.
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.
As a "Post-Mexican” performance artist operating out of the US for over 20 years, one of my conceptual obsessions has been to constantly reposition myself within the hegemonic maps. Whether this map is the Americas, the larger cartography of art, or my personal biography, one of my jobs has been to move around, cross dangerous borders, disappear and reappear somewhere else, and in the process create "imaginary cartographies” capable of containing the complexities of my multiple and ever-changing identities, voices, communities and performative bodies.
A thirty-three minute video odyssey documenting one woman's search for the miracle of the Virgin Mary. A must-see for recovering Catholics and their families and friends worldwide. From Italy to Portugal, from France to Georgia, from Iowa City to Peru, Miracle recovers a newly-minted set of the Seven Deadly Sins on the way to immortalizing the latest modern religious trend: "Spiritual Tourism." Rated S for satirical.
Sylvia is a portrait of the civil rights pioneer Sylvia Rivera for her memorial service in 2002, as told by her chosen family immediately following her death. "A veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, Sylvia was a tireless advocate for all those who have been marginalized as the 'gay rights' movement has mainstreamed. Sylvia fought hard against the exclusion of transgender people from the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York, and was a loud and persistant voice for the rights of people of color and low-income queers and trans people." --SRLP.org
Animal Attraction is a documentary about the relationship between people and animals that questions the way we project our hopes and desires onto our pets, and ascribe human qualities and attributes to their gestures. The video was inspired by the plight of the filmmaker who was frustrated by the obnoxious behavior of her cat, Ernie. As a last resort, she gave in to a friend's suggestion to contact an animal communicator. This is her journey with interspecies telepathic communicator, Dawn Hayman, from Spring Farm CARES, an animal sanctuary in upstate New York.
Arguably, the most successful of the four “Gerald Ford’s America” shows was “Chic To Sheik,” a TVTV tour of the private culture of the official Washington. Lead by Megan Williams, they blithely move around an official White House tea for Betty Ford at the beginning and cavort at the Shah of Iran’s birthday party at the Iranian Embassy at the end. Shot with almost open access because this was when even public people, in private, were innocents before a documentary camera. Washington Post Society Editor, Betty Beale, leads the way. A gem.
In the wake of Lord of the Universe, TVTV planned to cover the impeachment of Richard Nixon, but, unfortunately, Nixon resigned. The group made a ninety-degree turn to covering the “first hundred days” of the Gerald Ford administration, a cavalcade of photo ops and campaign appearances. In Part One of the four-part series, entitled WIN (referring to the Ford slogan, “Whip Inflation Now”), TVTV goes on a whirlwind across-country trek with Ford, stopping in Sioux City, Iowa, Salt Lake City, and Portland. The show is more about Ford’s public than Ford.
Traders Leaving the Exchange, A Guard and the Street V.1 is a 15-minute unstable remix of a video I shot in 2000, and edited in 2011, of the "members" door of the New York Stock Exchange as the traders were leaving at the end of their workday. A security guard is positioned in front of the "members" door. The shot is a close up of the door and the guard taken from across the street, busy with traffic and pedestrians.
