Found Footage

In this wry confessional video, Steve Reinke appears — shirtless and lavishly tattooed — in a basement, playing archival clips and delivering arch disquisitions on his filmmaking and the ways in which images represent his engagement with the world.

Ouroboros: Music of the Spheres is Chapter 3 of Mysterium Cosmographicum.

"Positing a linear continuum, with 'nothing' at one end of the spectrum and 'something' at the other, at what point does 'nothing' become 'something?'"

X-Mission explores the logic of the refugee camp as one of the oldest extra-territorial zones. Taking the Palestinian refugee camp as a case in point, the video engages with the different discourses — legal, symbolic, urban, historical — that give meaning to this exceptional space.

Animal Charm's Ashley seems to develop a conventional story about a modern mother and wife with typically modern desires. But the insertion of incongruous soap opera scenes soon ensures that the seductive images take on an absurd and oppressive charge. “The antiseptic cleanliness of the imagery has a superficial appeal, but begins to feel claustrophobic — or toxic — after prolonged exposure.”

An allegory recycling images from the past, still relevant to the present moment.

“Horses are lucky, they’re stuck with the war same as us, but nobody expects them to be in favor of it, to pretend to believe in it.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

On December 1^st 1990, watched by the world's media, construction worker Graham Fagg of Dover climbed through a hole in a chalk wall 40 metres below the seabed of the English Channel, shook the hand of Philippe Cozette of Calais, and shouted "Vive la France!" On June 23^rd 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union. Inspired by a message for motorists on Eurotunnel trains, Song for Europe is an underwater celebration of Britain’s connection to mainland Europe.

A re-working of Humphrey Jenning's 1943 seminal docu-drama The Silent Village wherein coal miners from the Welsh village of Cwmgiedd re-enact the Nazi invasion and annihilation of the resisting Czech villagers of Lidice. Principal focus in this re-mix is upon the way sound is used as a mode of social control.

The Picnic is a film made with found footage about a couple enjoying a beautiful day, food, sex, a blanket, long walks and a firearm.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

O, Persecuted turns the act of restoring Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian Militant film Our Small Houses into a performance possible only through film. One that involves speed, bodies, and the movement of the past into a future that collides ideology with escapism.

Appropriated network-TV footage of Jimmy Carter’s "I see risk" speech from the 1980 Democratic Convention meets Reagan’s gloomy inaugural ride through D.C.: "If you succumb to a dream world, you’ll wake up to a nightmare."

This title is also available on Presidents and Elections.

The Prognosticator (Or, We Are All Pythagoreans Now) is Chapter 1 of Mysterium Cosmographicum.

The 2008 iteration Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2008 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.

Moving Stories strings together scenes of passenger aircraft in flight.  In this short study of the dramatic and narrative power of image and sound, Provost manipulates cinema language and reaches, though minimal means, a strong, emotionally loaded result.  With a limited number of images, an absorbing soundtrack, and a suggestive story line, the viewer's imagination is stimulated to the maximum.

A Wet Finger in the Air, a single-channel video, assembles appropriated footage of bilingual weather reports from 1980’s through 1997-era Hong Kong TVB and Pearl broadcasting stations into a hypnotic, randomized loop that repeats every hour. While these reels may invoke a kind of nostalgia, Sia's interest centers more on locating atmospheric and weather changes as a metaphor for the similarly unpredictable and slippery turns of history. The artist metaphorically raises a wet finger in the air to judge the invisible direction of the times.

English and Cantonese.

"This video continues the journey from the final sequence of Ask the Insects. We turn away from the graveyard, enter the schoolyard, approach the old crippled tree spinning, and sit under it to draw a little cartoon for The New Yorker, while — through some sort of temporal displacement — New Year’s resolutions are being made."

Year of the Spawn is an archival collage inspired by the synonymous song by the “gay church folk” band The Hidden Cameras. Wolf interpreted the song as an anthem for doomed youth. Having recently finished the historical film Teenage, Wolf collected over 100 hours of archival footage, featuring early 20th Century adolescents. Much of these historical newsreels feature bizarre and mysterious outtakes. These forgotten scraps became the fabric for this foreboding and melancholic music film.

"Brite Tip explores the indoctrination of children and police through an assortment of cross-fades, wipes, and other stock transitions. A highly danceable essay on breastfeeding."

—Gavin Smith

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.

A hyper-collage endurance test of sado-masochistic proportions, mixing an anthology of corporate video music with a feng shui video.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.

A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist re-make/drag show, circa 1992.

This flashy drama about theater life was made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute and follows the various personalities that make up the show-biz milieu of a fictitious city on a fog bound coast. The fog is thick and so is the plot as it plunges into a series of dramatic interludes which include musical numbers, war scenes, ballets, and erotic shenanigans involving the living and the animated dead.

Playing off the notion of “interactivity”, Utopia poses itself as a video game plugged into the social consciousness of contemporary California. The viewer/player seemingly makes choices from the menu offering utopian or dystopian realities; however, the score is always the same: the winner loses, and vice-versa. Features Rachel Rosenthal as the host of a macabre interactive game that pushes the boundaries of performance and interactive media.

The 2008 iteration Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2008 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.

Most of the moving images produced for science, industry, commerce, and medicine are seen only by specialized audiences, and are then discarded soon after they are made. Rumour Of True Things is constructed entirely from such moving image ephemera, including computer games, weapons testing, production lines, monitoring, and marriage agency tapes. Rumour Of True Things is a remarkable anthropological portrait of a technologically-based society obsessed with imaging itself.

Fuelled by lavish doses of disjointed hyper-editing, super-talented Jim Bailey dances with wild animals in Animal Charm's hot and exciting performance of "Fever."