History

Art Spiegelman was born and raised in New York, and began working as a cartoonist while still in High School. He attended the State University of New York in Binghamton, where he studied Philosophy. Spiegelman, who continued to work as a cartoonist, mainly in underground publications, throughout his schooling, has long been acknowledged as one of our era's foremost comic book artists. However, it was Maus, published in two volumes in 1986, that first brought his work to a mass audience. Maus tells the stories of a Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany and his son.

The vanishing point of Images of The World is the conceptual image of the 'blind spot' of the evaluators of aerial footage of the IG Farben industrial plant taken by the Americans in 1944. Commentaries and notes on the photographs show that it was only decades later that the CIA noticed what the Allies hadn't wanted to see: that the Auschwitz concentration camp is depicted next to the industrial bombing target.

This video is a 7-minute single channel piece consisting of two monologues: the first is a speech prepared for Richard Nixon in the event of a moon landing disaster in 1969, the second is the final words of the computer HAL from the film 2001.

This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

Futures for Failures is a double narrative of failure: architectural and social. Archival footage from a demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe building in St. Louis manifests as the materialization of modernity’s failure. Meanwhile, an intimate voiceover recounts a moment of laughter erupting during a stranger’s funeral, staging anachronous conversation between the disappeared and the disappearing.

Dachau 1974 was recorded on Korot’s visit to Dachau, Germany, the site of the former concentration camp, in the Fall of 1974. What she saw when she arrived was a sanitized former prisoner camp that was now a tourist site. Organizing the material she recorded at the camp for a four-channel work based on weaving structures, she created a non-verbal narrative work that moves the viewer from outside the camps walls, into barracks, past crematoria, to a quiet pastoral scene in its final images. This 24-minute work focuses on the architecture that remain

A nostalgic glazier shows off his knowledge and expounds his theories. Taking glassmaking processes and history as its central theme, Slow Glass explores ideas about memory, perception and change.

A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity.

The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology, and influence is told by piecing together 20th century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes of flute, acoustic guitar, and mellotron contrast with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Mary Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey.

Under the spell of the alphabet, the silent figures of a past that has not been forgotten persist, a pedagogical reconstruction of a contradictory nation in transit as well as the emergence of a background color that delimits the contour and the persistence of ancient figures that have not been forgotten. This is part of the educational film cycle.

Spanning 500 years of colonial destruction, Nosferasta tells the story of Oba, a Rastafarian vampire, and Christopher Columbus, Oba’s original biter, as they spread the colonial infection throughout the “new world.” Formally a vampire film and series of installations, the stylistically impressionistic Nosferasta examines the guilt of being complicit in imperial conquest, while also acknowledging the difficulty of unlearning centuries of vampiric conditioning. At its core Nosferasta asks, how can you decolonize what’s in your blood?

A woman recounts her story of the mass exodus of Palestinians from Jerusalem. Beginning with the arrival and ending with the departure, the tale moves backwards in time and through various landscapes. The events are neither undone nor is the story untold; instead, Farther than the eye can see traces a decaying experience to a place that no longer exists.

With an all-female cast, featuring Suzie Bright as John Lennon, Cecilia Dougherty's Grapefruit plays with the romanticized history of the iconic Fab Four, gently mocking John and Yoko’s banal squabbles and obsessive rituals of self-display. Based obliquely on Yoko Ono’s book, the piece works on many levels to reposition this mythic tale of the Beatles by casting '80s women in mod drag—effectively mapping the lesbian sub-culture onto heterosexual mass culture.

In this spoof program produced for Lanesville TV, the premise is that a “Sheik” has come to buy all the land in Lanesville. Videofreex member Carol Vontobel reports that the sheik (Bart Friedman), escorted by his real estate agent (Parry Teasdale) is approaching people in the community and asking to buy their homes. An unknown Lanesville local chauffeurs them around, and the Videofreex interview Mr. Benjamin, Mr. And Mrs. Kelly, Mr. Lloyd, Mr. and Mrs. Ginsburg, and others from the Tavern.

A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces - of grafitti'd marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls - hand-processed in red, green, and blue.

Before his legendary proto-cinematic studies in motion, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned to document the United States Army’s war against the Modoc tribe in Northern California in a series of stereographs, many of them staged. Alternately unnerving, meditative, and explosive, Black Glass examines the entangled histories of visual technology and the genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations by white settlers through a violent collision of image and sound.

Pat Ward Williams’s socially charged works confront issues of race, often dealing specifically with African American history and identity. Using a variety of photographic processes, video, audio tapes, assemblage and text, Williams layers meanings and images. Her subjects range from the autobiographical to the public, often combining documentary techniques with personal responses. “When I make photos about my family, I think my family is not a lot different than other peoples’ families, so that is a way people can access my work...

For their first collaboration, artist duo eteam and the Hong Kong Puppet and Shadow Arts Center have developed a powerful opera-play that combines ancient stories and analog story-telling technologies with the digital tools and scripts we have available now.

Shot in October 1969, this tape gives an inside view of the workings of late-sixties radical groups and the debates going on within their ranks. At a meeting of Yippies, there is a discussion about the nuts and bolts of fundraising through benefit concerts and events in an attempt to finance support efforts related to the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial.

The distant future. An orbital facility of unknown origin. Here, the debt of taking a life will be finally repaid…. through resurrection. The victims of military violence across time are systematically brought back to life and guided through the all-too-familiar facility. As a staff of identical ushers draws back layers of confusion and pain, the freshly resurrected gradually become aware of the reality of their corporeal reinsertion: perhaps the world of the living is not a world at all; to be alive in this place may merely be an exhibit.

The urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find fortune in alluvial gravel are part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, ore smelters, former city officials and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot on location in Dawson City, Yukon Territory.

Between 1892 and 1927, almost 16 million people came to Ellis Island attempting to immigrate to the United States.

"Living on the slopes of the volcano Vesuvius is a strange contradiction: always in stress and yet also sleepy, waiting for what might happen. In close cooperation with the Osservatorio Vesuviano and several inhabitants of the 'Red Zone' of the volcano, Rosa Barba constructs a lyrical portrait of this area, which shelters Mafia members and illegal Chinese immigrants. Historic footage, measurements, maps, and aerial shots try to capture what is always uncertain."

Through dancing, The Motherfucker's Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools while they dance. Bush also dances with a smirk across the screen while announcing a war that would destabilize a whole region.

For the past 20 years Alexis Smith's mixed media work has explored primal American myths: the open road, the bad/good guy/gal, the quest for romance, and the search for paradise. This portrait of the artist explores the roots of her thought and work, and was produced in conjunction with her exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, held in November 1991.

The Diaspora Suite

Since the Gulf War in 1991, warfare and reporting it have become hyper-technological affairs, in which real and computer-generated images cannot be distinguished any more. With the aid of new and also unique archive material, Farocki sketches a picture of the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and shows how war technology finds its way into everyday use.

-- International Film Festival catalogue, Rotterdam (2004)