Film or Videomaking

This sprawling drama about a group of country folk sucked into the fashion world of magazine layouts and romantic intrigue features a cast of glamorously garbed gals and good-natured bumpkins. Produced in collaboration with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the picture delivers high-octane antics fueled by the $800 budget and creative desperation typically inherent in these types of endeavors. The cast is large and labors valiantly with the high speed shooting schedule and color saturated subplots.

Linda Martinez stars in this sequel to the horror series, which relishes in colorful detail the misadventures of Sherry Frankenstein.  Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the viewer is plunged into a world of young and old as they tackle the monsters within and without. Chock full of entergetic scenes filled with all the opulence that only $600 could purchase, this epic of good gone bad will stun you with its massive verbosity and visual voracity. The plot deals with Ms. Frankenstein's mission to save the body and souls of strumpets in heat.

In 1959, Jean Rouch directed the film La Pyramide Humaine. Situated between fiction and documentary, Rouch’s work presents his attempts to initiate a debate between two groups of students from the Ivory Coast, a white group and a Black group. A precursor to cinéma vérité, this often forgotten film served as the starting point of The Four Chambered Heart.

Red Chewing Gum is a video letter that tells a story of separation between two men, set within the context of the changing Hamra, a formerly booming commercial center. The video looks at image making in relationship to consumption and the possession of desired subjects. It examines issues of desire and power, and the attempt to capture fleeting time.

An episode from a Lebanese TV series entitled Image + Sound.  Each episode in this groundbreaking program was based on paralleling TV news images alongside staged events. This episode was shot at the St. Georges church in Beirut before its renovation.

The Embassy deals with the codes of representation used by the former Portuguese colonial power over the West African country Guinea-Bissau, and with modes of memory production. It shows a photo album depicting the perspective of the Portuguese colonist, who photographed with documentary diligence landscapes, people, architecture and monuments in Guinea-Bissau in the 1940s and 1950s.

Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found by the artists within a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found. The work explores the potential of chance, creating portraits of particular places by building formal, narrative, and musical connections between images and sounds, linked by the random discoveries of the tape samples.

A Palestinian filmmaker is writing a script in his New York apartment during the first Gulf war. As much as he tries to shut himself off from the exterior world, images of past wars in the Middle East come back to haunt him.

This title is available on Radical Closure and for single screenings upon request.

Freed overlays the signal from two cameras pointed toward one another. Each camera is panned around to reveal a domestic environment. In a monosyllabic call and response Freed, along with her fellow operator, describe the content of the frame as the cameras move. During the piece, Freed and her collaborator present a contemplative series of observations into what is clearly an ongoing experiment. In discussion, Freed notes that the two cameras are not alike and create different imagery - they joke about both being transfixed to the monitor and suggest the cameras see more than they do.

An audience-interactive demonstration of Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing experiment, and a 3D review of loosely related principles of subject/spectator empathy.

Note: should be viewed through 3D glasses. See http://store.yahoo.com/rainbowsymphony/an3dglasreda.html 

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.

Parry Teasdale, David Cort and Chuck Kennedy visit The Kitchen in New York looking for Shirley Clarke, and bump into Steina and Woody Vasulka who are overseeing a show in progress.  A few doors down they find Shirley in her studio, dressed in white and full of energy. 

white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is a stroboscopic work made from fifteen films starring Charlton Heston. Each film has been algorithmically condensed down to thirty seconds in length. These fifteen condensed movies have been frame-by-frame chronologically organized and metrically inter-cut with two Heston film frames followed by two white frames.

a little girl dreams of a new pluralism meanwhile the old war continues V.1  2009, 67:00

"I don't put myself into my movies because that would be too much--my pictures reflect my own feelings.  So hopefully it's entertaining.  Otherwise I can't bear looking at them, ha ha!"
–– Mike Kuchar

In this dream-portrait of Mike Kuchar, he floats through his memories as the sea, space and sky drift past. Wrapped in odd costumes, he frolics with the imaginary creatures surrounding him, and recalls the creatures of his own imagination.

Morayngava: the “design of things.” Yngiru: the box of the spirits, the films, just like xaman dreams. This is how the Asurini define video, which has just arrived in their village. After discovering that it is possible to store their images, the old men lament that they never stored images of their ancestors and decided to register the initiation of a xaman, a tradition threatened by new times.

Directed by Virginia Valadão and Regina Müller.

In Assurini with English subtitles.

A cinematic firestorm of found footage and pilfered Hollywood images, Mike Hoolboom’s hallucinatory Tom – described by the filmmaker as, "Cinema as déjà vu, or déjà voodoo" – pays mesmerizing experimental tribute to the life and work of friend and fellow avant-gardist Tom Chomont, and was selected by a national panel of film critics as one of Canada’s Top Ten of 2002.

A video about the conception of video and of life itself. This work suggests that all that is conceived transcends the division between the external and interior worlds.

In Portuguese with English subtitles.

In this interview video and performance artist Nancy Buchanan discusses her feminist and political work. Buchanan comments upon the advantages of video over performance in terms of accessibility—the ability for her videos to circulate and reach audiences she physically cannot, and their brevity and completed form—and her strategies to create an atmosphere for change. This Video Portrait features two of Buchanan’s videos in their entireties: the anti-nuclear weapons work An End to All Our Dreams (1982) and the more straightforwardly feminist Webs (1983).

Dramatically Repeating Lawrence of Arabia is a re-edit of David Lean’s 217-minute orientalist “classic” Lawrence of Arabia into a 15-minute hallucination of repeating masculinized poses, costumes and dramatic gestures. An algorithmic structure condenses and frame-by-frame remixes the original film into a cycling of divergence, convergence and momentary mirrorings.

In this interview, Basma Alsharif (b.1983) examines the multiple ways in which her work engages with the notion of nomadism. Beginning with a discussion of how she initially came to video through photography, Alsharif describes how this transformation of her practice required a translation of artistic sensibilities.

In 1973, Dan Sandin designed and built a comprehensive video instrument for artists, the Image Processor (IP), a modular, patch programmable, analog computer optimized for the manipulation of gray level information of multiple video inputs. Sandin decided that the best distribution strategy for his instrument "was to give away the plans for the IP and encourage artists to build their own copies.

Materials: 3378 hi-con, Laser engraver, Exacto knife

Shot at the Film Farm in Mt.Forest, this comedy is a quest about performance, educational voiceover, analogue filmmaking, ASCII, language, ethics of ethnography and narrative storytelling under a metaphor of instructions to farm land.

Text by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wikihow/shoot-film.

In the late 1960s Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father's Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and authoritarian Stalinist Pseudo-socialism. The film is about a South Korean video artist who comes to a North Korean art residency to help bring Juche cinema into the 21st Century.

Return of the Black Tower was conceived as a 'response' film to John Smith's 1987 classic short experimental film, The Black Tower.

"Barmy, baffling and weirdly funny,... an elliptical, satirical examination of contemporary belief, as much as it is about the problem of art as an incommensurate, incommunicable experience."

— JJ Charlesworth, Time Out London

Divino explains how he got introduced to video. “Filming is my profession; that’s what I was born to do... not for the work with the axe. I wasn’t born to plant. I already said this to my wife.” Today, Divino dominates the language of video and its filming and editing techniques. He also talks about working in partnership with his community.

Directed by Divino Tserewahu; edited by Tutu Nunes.

In Portuguese with English subtitles.