Altamira is the paleolithic and post-human experience of the bloom of cinema. The cinema in a cave, the lightning of his presence, the fire of his birth. The paleolithic and post-human intermittence of the life of cinema. The sacred and contingent permanence of cinema. Part of the Hyperkinetic and Hauntology series.
Concentrating on abstract shapes and color value, Animation 2 is a record of images manipulated through computer animation. By recording the data screens of the animators and the voices of the controllers, Sonnier discloses the process of making the video.
“This tape is about media, and it seems totally unedited, because we hear him talking over the intercom with the engineer… The engineer interjects, ‘Do you want to save any of this stuff?’ Yes, indeed; Sonnier saves and shows it all, the whole process.”
Primate Cinema: Apes as Family is a drama made expressly for chimpanzees – and the chimps' reaction to its screening at the Edinburgh Zoo. Chimpanzees watch television as a form of enrichment in captivity. But no filmmaker had made a film for a specifically ape audience.
Video in the Villages presents its recent progress, its indigenous workshops for training and production. Founded in 1987, the project began with the introduction of video to indigenous communities that produced documentaries for their own purposes. In 1995, the opening of a space on educational TV in Cuiabá led to “Indigenous Program.” Since 1997, Video in the Villages has invested in the formation of the first generation of indigenous documentary filmmakers through national and regional workshops.
Directed by Mari Corrêa and Vincent Carelli; edited by Mari Corrêa.
During Videofreex member David Cort's travels to Jerusalem, a scene was shot in a hospital where a female patient is having electrodes attached to her body. The cameraman gets on the cot and has the electrodes attached to him as they talk about making a brain feedback machine for use at home. The next scene records the cameraman walking the streets of Jerusalem. People passing by interact with the camera.
Private photos of an exploitation film matron (Doris Wishman) in action highlight this collection of summer fare that features a wide range of image-makers pursuing their dreams. From the confines of Hell's Kitchen to the wide-open vistas of New Mexico, the video aims its savage eye at civilized civilians in the heat of digital desire. Take this tour of image driven locals in locales that shimmer in the heat of Hollywood halitosis: the whispered sleaze of tabloid tinsel-town.
Media artist Cyrille Phipps has been involved with numerous alternative media and lesbian activist projects, including Dyke TV and the Gay and Lesbian Emergency Media Campaign. Her video projects include Respect Is Due (1991), Black Women, Sexual Politics and the Revolution (with Not Channel Zero, 1992), Our House: Gays and Lesbians in the Hood (with Not Channel Zero, 1992), Sacred Lives, Civil Truths (with Catherine Saalfield, 1993), Dreaming Ourselves...
A foley artist creates sounds for a film featuring a dressage horse and dissolves into their own imitation. As the character in the film, played by the gender fluid performer Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau seems to transform into a gender-defying centaur, the film reflects on the boundaries between the human and the animal as well as on fictional gender roles and their transcendence. Shot on 16mm film, Passage alludes to Eadweard Muybridge’s pre-cinematic experiments with horses.
Written, Directed, Produced & Edited: Ann Oren
After the screening of his film Wai'á rini, the power of dream in other Xavante villages, the people of Aldeia Nova from the São Marcos reservation asked Divino to make a film on the same ritual, the Wai'á ceremony. In this ceremony the young men are initiated into the spiritual world to develop their curative power. This is a new experience for Divino, as he has to shoot in a different village, but also find a way to try new tricks and to develop his editing skills.
Various languages.
Direction and photography: Divino Tserewahú
A five-minute video collaboration between Dani Leventhal and Steve Reinke.
This tape was produced by Artists TV Network, documenting a symposium that included composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, writer Richard Kostelanetz, and video artist Nam June Paik with art critic Dore Ashton serving as moderator. This freewheeling symposium taped before a live audience ranges from individual reminiscences to discussion of then-current art community concerns about music, literature, theater, art, dance, video, and technology.
Unable to locate the grave of Letine—leader of a 19th century acrobatic cycling troupe (and buried locally)—I went home and wondered.
And then I made this film.
Equal parts experimental animation, stylised domestic drama, and autobiography accompanied by reflections on mortality, filmmaking, and magic. Plus more.
— Paul Tarragó
"Between March 1972 and February 1977, the Videofreex aired 258 television broadcasts from a home-built studio and jerry-rigged transmitter in an old boarding house they rented in the tiny Catskill Mountain hamlet of Lanesville. It was a revolutionary act in defiance of FCC regulations — the first unlicensed TV station in America."
An experimental portrait of a lighting stand-in and body double for a famous Hollywood actress, and a glimpse at the behind-the-scenes of cinema production
Music by The Velvet Underground.
Made with Ian Bourn.
A depiction of the forced development of a hothouse flower. Organic growth is progressively overtaken by a more sinister mechanical process.
"The makers manage very convincingly to wrong-foot the viewer in just five minutes in this minimalist, lyrical film about a blossoming flower."
—International Film Festival Rotterdam (2000)
"A film of a disarming seeming simplicity which enigmatically prompts reflections on its meaning and its use of media."
A major figure among underground filmmakers, Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) boasted a prolific career that spanned more than 50 years and 300 films. His personal, independent films range in length from nine seconds to several hours, and contemplate such fundamental issues as form, life, and death—most famously in Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Dog Star Man (1961-65), and The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971). His early writings and journals about filmmaking are collected in Metaphors on Vision (1976).
A childhood experience is projected on a shadowy wall of a former movie theatre. A racist cinematic trauma passed between friends and family is remembered among the rustling of leaves and reflections of trees on an iPad screen. An essay about how past and present interrupt one another like movies being perpetually edited.
The crowded streets of New York City turn into fictive, cinematographic scenery. Provost is playing with our collective memory, its cinematic codes and narrative languages - questioning the boundaries between a staged, suggested reality and authentic fiction. Although filmed with a hidden camera, Plot Point presents a highly dramatic construction with overly sophisticated images and a subtle but tangible urge in the soundtrack.
Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before. --Neil Karassik
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.
In Hyperthermia the cinematic body becomes overwhelmed by the luminous projection of outside political factors, causing the internal temperature of the celluloid to rise to dangerous levels.
Backwards Birth of a Nation is a re-editing of D.W. Griffith's 187-minute film, Birth of a Nation (1915), into a pulsating 13-minute black and white phantasm. By means of structural strategies of condensation, the frame by frame inversion of black and white, and playing the resulting work from end to beginning, an apparition is brought forth where images of racism float to the surface and are contextualised as a part of the flow of United States history.
This tape, shot in April 1971, documents the making of a WNET/13 TV show about video collectives and how they use the new video technology.
Video in the Villages presents its recent progress, its indigenous workshops for training and production. Founded in 1987, the project began with the introduction of video to indigenous communities that produced documentaries for their own purposes. In 1995, the opening of a space on educational TV in Cuiabá led to “Indigenous Program.” Since 1997, Video in the Villages has invested in the formation of the first generation of indigenous documentary filmmakers through national and regional workshops.
Directed by Mari Corrêa and Vincent Carelli; edited by Mari Corrêa.
An architect and urban planner by training, Dara Birnbaum began using video in 1978 while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she worked with Dan Graham. Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum recontextualizes pop cultural icons (Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79) and TV genres (Kiss the Girls: Make them Cry, 1979) to reveal their subtexts.
