Expedition/Travel

One of the earlier video diaries where George vacations in Colorado, reflects on scenery and animal life and visits people. "

Frisco anxiously awaits the pyrotechnic birth of a New Year while the remnants of holiday greenery still burn bright in all the right places. One of those places gives shelter to an Abyssinian animal of lethargic nature, while all about her the rumblings of tummies in turmoil foreshadow the gluttony of her bipedal guardian.

Made in Germany, October 14th, 2004

While the Iraq war continues, a day's sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small.

Museum Piece is the second episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world's hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

Like a generation of viewers, I was profoundly affected by Deliverance.  But I have always been troubled by the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey. Hence, my version is played by women: myself, Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, and Meredith Root, all experimental filmmakers who work as academics. While faithful to our respective male characters, we also play ourselves.

A Japanese student is taken by his teacher to the land down under from Frisco (LA) and gets to meet the mighty that fuel our lust for entertainment and art with gregarious gusto. The viewer gets to share the wonders that confront this stranger in a strange land as the locals do what they do best: appear loco yet lubricated for vocational wisdom.

Colors swirl and shift amid pulsating blobs of light as a voice from the past takes us on an antiquated journey to the future and beyond. Revel in the mysteries of gizmo-channeled visuals and contactee gibberish as the geometric unknown gyrates before thine own eyes.

Alienation in academia beneath the chandeliered opulence of a political correctional facility that caters to clashing cultures with chicken fajitas and carefully worded alphabet soup. Features George at the Flaherty Seminar and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

Reeves explores his personal journey to seek the center of existence through the teachings of Eastern religions. India is the source of images for his message about the eternal wheel of existence—life and its continuous process of change.

“Reeves uses a digital imaging technique… in which images seem to be composed of a series of almost fragmented yet fluid stills, and all movement becomes a procession of shadows.... This gives a powerfully ethereal quality to the piece, one that underscores the theme of human existence.”

For four years in the 1860’s, half of the United States was held hostage by an unrecognized white supremacist republic. Shot on 16mm in national military parks, swamps, forests and the suburban sprawl across the former battlefields, the film follows General Grant’s path liberating the southern United States. Part travelogue, part essay film, part landscape documentary, it moves from the Texas-Louisiana border to a prison island off the coast of New England.

In Barbier’s meditative journey through India, she deconstructs the myth of the objective documentary by using textual commentary and off-camera remarks to address the problematic relationship of observer to observed. Framing the images through the artist’s subjective and distinctly female point of view, she explores images of women working, sweeping, cooking, and tending children in direct juxtaposition to men who sit, relax, and observe the spectacle.

Moving towards an unknown destination, a group of anonymous passengers float through an unidentified landscape. Built from Cohen’s archive documenting his travels, the film can be seen as a curious parable. The film's subheading refers to the Old Testament, Daniel chapter 11, verse 40:  “And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.” 

There’s lots cooking in the city-by the-bay and the waters smell good too as the viewer sails off to Sausalito for home-made bread and gets an ocular whiff of oriental cuisine. The eyeball is treated to many tasty items as the Pacific itself churns like an overtaxed tummy in preparation for a blowout. There are Christmas lights and holiday fireworks and furry playmates being squeezed by the overstuffed. It’s all in good cheer and definitely good taste as the spinach pies flaunt their iron-packed punch to the gut and a bittersweet/hot & sour merriment stalks the salivating.

This is a later reworking of original video documenting the goings-on of the village, Tlocalula, Mexico in 1973.