Described by the New York Times as “an extraordinarily personal essay that struggles to explain and understand what went wrong in the director’s relationship with his father, Ray, a car dealer,” My Father Sold Studebakers is an auto-biographical work in which the artist reveals a wealth of familial relationships and problems. The tape is comprised of old home movies, family photographs, and candid interviews with the Sweeney family.
In this video, made soon after the death of his mother Stella, we accompany George to the wake, and on to a trip to Albert Maysles holiday home on Fisher's Island.
"Deep waters flow around the living, dead and inanimate objects that bring this picture to life on the wide screen tapestry of electronic reality. Come and join the young and old of eastern energies as they bask in the sun and shadows of past sins and future fortunes. See how the other side lives and devours the fruits and nuts that pepper this great nation with neon nutrients worthy of Broadway and beyond!"
Scenes from the Micro-War explains, "The worst of times—riots, famine, war—could be just around the next corner and, in the battle to survive, this family is going to be battle-ready from here on in." This fractured narrative follows the misadventures of a family hypnotized by Reagan’s Space Wars, state terrorism, and Rambo/commando fashions, as the family has shifts from consumerist unit to military training force.
The Bus Stops Here is an experimental narrative about two sisters, Judith and Anna, plunged into depression by their struggle to gain control over their lives. Narrated by Judith’s counselor, The Bus Stops Here traps these women in a narrative in which their unmediated voices are rarely heard; instead, the viewer learns about them only through the interceding power structures of narrative, family, and psychiatric establishment.
"Despite the didactic promise of its title, Carl Elsaesser’s new film will not teach you how to complete this obscure action. The phrase itself, at once ridiculous and noble, is pleasure enough, and its tone fits perfectly on a work that walks a thin, dandyish path down the border of farce and elegy. Another pleasure: it isn’t about anything, though it’s of quite a lot. Of fathers (who might teach one how to run a trotline, or sit on a porch, or disappear); of other films (particularly a pair by adopted fathers Michael Snow and William E.
five more minutes is an exploration of grief. Two women spend an afternoon recreating lost time. What begins as play-acting breaks open into a world where the tenderness and sorrow of having to say goodbye exist untempered.
"It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were, but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves."
Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, this video drama explores the thrills and terrors of the Big Top as a travelling circus comes to town bringing with it the promise of cotton candy, eternal youth, and high-flying beefcake. A mother and son become enmeshed in a web of sin and sawdust, licorice and lust, as a town confronts its own hideous image in a maze of mirrors at a carnival of lost and found souls.
Space Ghost compares the experiences of astronauts and prisoners, using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration: sensory deprivation, the perception of time as chaotic and indistinguishable, the displacement of losing face-to-face contact, and the sense of existing in a different but parallel universe with family and loved ones.
Physical comparisons such as the close living quarters, the intensity of the immediate environment, and sensory deprivation, soon give way to psychological ones: the isolation, the changing sense of time, and the experience of earth as distant, inaccessible, and desirable. The analogy extends to media representations that hold astronauts and prisoners in an inverse relationship: the super citizen vs. the super-predator. Astronauts, ceaselessly publicized, are frozen in time and memory whereas prisoners, anonymous and ignored, age without being remembered.
A vain, self centered mother competes with her daughter in the world of carnivorous men and sleazy movies.
Based on the filmmaker's autobiography, You Are Here examines the search for home within our era of transnational displacement. As the son of Italian immigrants, the filmmaker examines notions of home and belonging within the context of his ethnic origins, but also extends this in relation to his identity as a gay man. The film chronicles his trajectory from his familial home in Italy, to his native Canada and beyond, and weaves a compelling portrait shaped by memory and the realities of the present.
"An autobiographical reflection on his unassuming name leads the filmmaker down a wayward path through family photographs, personal archives, and internet searches.
La Mesa explores the intersections of memory, identity and queer desire. It recreates fragmented and romanticized stories of a childhood in rural Mexico as told by the artist’s father. These disjointed vignettes are interwoven with queered reenactments of scenes from popular culture. The artist casts himself in the old Mexican films and American Westerns he grew up watching with his family in California. He appears as the romantic lead opposite the male actors, including Pedro Infante, Mexican national hero and the filmmaker’s childhood crush.
Gone is a two-channel installation based on the second episode of An American Family — the landmark PBS verité documentary about the Loud Family of Santa Barbara, California. Dougherty has created a free-form variation on the theme of parental visits to wayward queer children by mapping the dialogue and plot onto a contemporary community of artists and writers in New York today, paying homage to the art underground and the city itself.
Originally part of a multi-media installation at the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, King Anthracite documents the lives, work, and early deaths of Lithuanian immigrants (including Kybartas’ ancestors) who mined the Pennsylvania coalfields at the turn of century. Oral histories of miners detail their impressions of the United States and the hardships they encountered, including black lung disease and other occupational hazards that turned wives into widows and children into orphans.
County Down is a cross-platform, episodic, digital video, exploring an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community, coinciding with a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug. A rave-culture period-piece that harnesses the unwarranted optimism of the 1990s, County Down presents a society so obsessed with novelty and consumerism that it euphorically sews the seeds of its own destruction. Tracking the genesis of our current political climate, the ensemble cast banks on cultural appropriation and a constant din of micro-aggressions.
Take a peek at scenes extracted from a videomaker's life. See him amid the glittering domain of glamour being given an award for his work visual work. Meet some of his family, including the "furry ones" – (his cats and rainbow coated dog), and stroll along with him into the deep woods at twilight.
Martha Rosler tackles mainstream media's representation of the case of surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead.
Kiss The Boys And Make Them Die explores how memory, sexuality, and the self are created and enforced through the family story. The video chronicles how the social act of loving women becomes channeled into narratives of incest, desire for the mother, loss of the father, separation from the family, death and self-destruction. In this work, sexuality, difference and language are paralleled with haunting memories of a childhood ghost that both desires and hates women.
A series of intimate video-8 vignettes depicting the fierce love between Malverna and Sandi, 88 and 22, grandmother and grandson. The two playmates dress up drag-esque for this moving portrait of a woman’s lifetime struggle with gender and sexuality. Since Malverna's death, Tomboychik has become a living memorial to the intensity of her spirit.
My Mother Married Wilbur Stump is a video family album compiled by Skip Sweeney, a founder of San Francisco’s Video Free America, an alternative media facility. The video documents a discussion between the artist, his mother, and sister about their step-father, Wilbur Stump.
Scenes from the Micro-War explains, "The worst of times—riots, famine, war—could be just around the next corner and, in the battle to survive, this family is going to be battle-ready from here on in." This fractured narrative follows the misadventures of a family hypnotized by Reagan’s Space Wars, state terrorism, and Rambo/commando fashions, as the family has shifts from consumerist unit to military training force.
Tales of a Future Past is a video about a giraffe and a zebra who fight over an undefined baby creature, in hopes of making it one of their own species. Using toy masks and a sparse theatricality, Cecelia Condit creates a contemporary reflection on species extinction and the lonely, silent world that will ensue from it.
While moving through the streets of Paris, a brother and sister confront their incestuous past under the watchful eye of their female taxicab driver. An exploration of vertical montage, this digital video was shot in one long take with live rear-screen projection. English dialogues are adapted from a short story of the same name by Violette Leduc.
Artist Rabih Mroué looks back at old audio recordings, which were made by him and his parents to be sent as audio letters to his brother while he studied abroad. The old recordings become the site of a political critique of the packaged values of communism, resistance and martyrdom.
This title is only available on Radical Closure.
