Humor

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.

Shooter explores the idea of overt manliness, exposing it to be a flaccid gesture and an exercise in posturing. In the video, I assume the persona of a metal head wandering an urban landscape, making threatening yet empty gestures to passersby to create an exaggerated sense of power and machismo. I use three different songs by Motorhead, that are never allowed to get past the opening guitar riffs, to further construct a sense of masculinity that falls back onto itself. I also utilize humor to facilitate exposing the paradoxes contained within my actions.

"Finn seamlessly blends actual space footage with his own lovingly handcrafed and carefully art directed scenes of Eastern Block cocktail parties, field hockey teams and space capsules. With a propulsive, playful score by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke, as well as likely the strangest version of "The Trolley Song" ever recorded, the film is an endearing delight."

--Mark Olsen, Indiewire

A summer sojourn is fleshed out for maximum solar exposure in this video travelogue of sun, sea and epidermal exhibitionism. The states of mind and geographic localities are awash in a flow of imagery that rushes in on a tide of both Pacific and Atlantic origins. The people and places that bathe in this magnificence add both a sacred and profane froth into the salty brew; a witches brew of sculpted creations bubbling up with volatile violations from the depths of unfathomable needs.

Using the first color video camera, the artist questions where the devil might be hiding, and then takes a nighttime swim.

Behind the skyscraping walls of a neon lit asylum, the frustrated inhabitants therein erupt and engage in a psychological waltz that couple fact with fantasy in ways that open windows of the madhouse to the sanity of daylight.

This title comprises Grip of the Gorgon (2001), Midnight Mass (2006) and Celestial Murmurs (2006) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

"Combining the comical with the absurd, I created six funny faces to animate the images of Japanese vowels while differentiating between 'image', 'letter', and 'voice'."

— Takahiko iimura

"iimura deconstructs our coherence as he shifts between the English roman alphabet and Japanese characters, interjects spoken Japanese, and manipulates the computer images of his features.  The images often take on geometrical shapes, others recall the classical images from Japanese woodcuts of Samurai warrior grimace."

— Robert West, Curator, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC

Three insightful and funny vignettes highlighting Segalove's father's quirky traits, habits, and interests.

Skating softly, but carrying a big stick, performer Kristin Elliott engages in an interlocking series of skits involving simple, slapstick activities performed by a pristine outdoor pool and in a venetian blind windowed corner of a room.  Bodies of water - an aquarium is transported into the interior space - become a major link between these two settings.  These containers of water end up functioning as both wombs and graves.

An electronic variety show featuring poetry, theatrics, dance, songs, and a plot concerning the cultivation of literary innocence and the preservation of Rondo Hatton's memory (a horror actor in 1940s B movies). A dense work made even denser by staged incompetence. Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute.

This classic feminist tape deviates from David Byrne’s and Jonathan Demme’s popular 1980s versions of suburban life, True Stories. Rather than poking sarcastic fun at the woman locked in the split-level, Suburban Queen poignantly evokes a daughter’s longings. Portraying the relationship of a mother and daughter inextricably bound yet puzzled by each other’s lives, Faber recounts her frustration with her mother’s depression and passivity, and her fantasy of how her mother might transcend these conditions.

A daily chronicle of the Ashaninka community during the rainy season, recorded on video during a workshop in a village on the Amônia River in the state of Acre. The involvement of the filmmakers with the Ashaninka community makes the film go beyond a mere description of activities, reflecting the rhythm of the village and the humor of its inhabitants.

Direction and photography by Valdete, Isaac, and Tsirotsi Ashaninka, Llullu Manchineri, Maru Kaxinawá, Nelson Kulina, Fernando Katuquina, and André Kanamari; edited by Mari Corrêa.

In Ashaninka with English subtitles.

“Christopher Wilcha’s fascinating feature-length video reminds us how seldom we’re allowed to see certain businesses operating from the inside. Wilcha, a 22-year-old college graduate and alternative-rock enthusiast, was hired by the Columbia Record and Tape Club—apparently as a fluke—to help launch a whole new niche-marketing division, which brought him face-to-face with the contradictory meanings of the term ‘alternative’ once it’s been embraced by the mass market.

A deliberately tasteless drama about televangelist scandals.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

A newly re-mastered collection of 17 vignettes and performances to camera, produced during 1974-75. Some use props and sight gags to preposterous effect; others star Man Ray, lapping milk from a glass, stopping marbles and dropping balls. Many of the pieces feature off-screen dialogue, including a comparison of the differences between audio- and videotape, and video and film.

Contents:

Nocturne, 7:49

Stalking, 2:06

Audio Tape and Video Tape, 2:04

Dancing Tape, 5:27

A colorful and sinister tale of hypno-therapists delving into the quagmire of UFO abductions, and wallowing in the subconscious muck of their own primal urges. A sprawling saga of consuming passion performed by enrollees of the San Francisco Art Institute under the direction of Professor George Kuchar in Studio 8.

A prop-filled encounter with a young fantasy filmmaker eventually becomes muffled by an earwax problem I develop; but not before the viewer is dragged through Studio 8 where my class and I are concocting a sordid, high school melodrama. 

A rockin’ talkin’ pony and its human companion examine the evolution of Halloween games, from the ancient rite of bobbing for apples to the contemporary spectacle of American football. Confronting liminality on 3rd down and long, the pony BRINGS IT TO THE HOUSE.

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

This episode includes: two more adverts, considerations of the future, a multiple projection spectacular in miniature, a riverine jaunt, much fog, and an ending x 2.

This is the fourth and final episode in The Variations cycle.

A Fourth of July celebration ignites the Id and unleashes a digital demon hungry for imagery of the young and the restless to appease the contraption it sees through: the cannibal camcorder in a state of carniverous conniptions!

Various scenarios are envisaged where a rescue might be possible. Props include a hoist, a trolley, various doors and windows, ladders and a length of hose. It is unclear whether our two heroes help or hinder one another. What is certain is that no rescue is in sight.

This title is also available on HalfLifers: Rescue Series and HalfLifers: The Complete History.

Psychologically disturbed Professor Herville (Joe Gibbons) analyzes the literary classic Moby Dick. He gives a tour of the Herman Melville Museum and makes much ado about the book’s Oedipial themes. Breer mixes in footage of the Hollywood adaptation starring Gregory Peck and her own irrepressible animation.

This title is also available on Emily Breer: Classics Exposed.

"A refreshing look at karaoke, psychedelic dance moves, and donuts all mashed together into a small and swinging film about a man who considers his private thoughts and private jokes worth sharing with a large audience. And it's unlikely that many would disagree."

--Impakt Festival, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2001

This title is also available on Jim Finn Videoworks: Volume 1.

A California winter turns the left coast into a brew of foaming festivities while landlubbers leap for joy in the spray of salty slurpings.

A friend visits from Canada and we relive the past as the future becomes more and more obscured by a cloud of burning vegetation wrapped in cigarette paper and exhaled by a pair of lungs unable to supply a brain with the necessary oxygen (mercifully) to remember the past.