Amid the greenery of what should be a White Christmas, there sits the blackness close to my heart; and beyond that there bellows a legion of behemoths who know not shame nor guilt. A homeless herd of heaven on earth that smell of fish and exotic ports of call. A call I fail to heed.
John Smith, throughout his 40-year career, has approached the moving image from film, video and installations, generating a tremendous body of work that’s as diverse in its topics as it is in its methods. Weaving between early structuralist film and more personal, diaristic, documentary approaches to the places in which he lived, most notably London, his output is both broad and varied.
Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.
Love is in the air as newlyweds chomp on cake, brides marry werewolves, and hatchets fall on adulterous heads. Amid the real-life romance is mixed the real-life business of directing my film students in a tale of run-away passions for the silver screen.
In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.
This final weather diary travels through some rough inner and outer domains. Social interactions blend more smoothly than the clash of air masses which threaten to clobber a prairie town in a vortex of violence.
Flashbacks and flashpoints flare-up along with thunderheads that loom and boom with vibrations of doom, their every move charted with vivid vibrancy on videographic maps which detail developing devastation.
Desire and death are in the air along with some aromatic wisps of ethnic edibles, so be sure to sniff it all.
Legendary filmmaker George Kuchar, in between trips to the bathroom, visits three Bay area friends: an eccentric filmmaking couple who produce zombie movies, and performer Billy Nayer.
As the camera looks out through a barred window and the clock strikes four in a Swiss city, the death of Yasser Arafat provides the starting point for a journey back in time.
Throwing Stones is the third episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.
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 meditation on the nature of “Nature” and the uncertainty of “Cause and Effect.”
“Originally (like most of my earlier film work) this was a performance piece: text performed alongside the projected image. A complex and absurd ‘story’ about a man who thought there was something wrong with his eye. He goes to the doctor, who can’t help him much, but he finds a way he can operate on himself with uplifting yet troubling results.”
—Jennet Thomas
Super-8 and 8mm, film mattes, painting directly onto film, and model/object animation.
Nancy Cain interviews an upside down chin face about Women's Liberation, asking "Where do you stand on the subject?" The chin face professes to be happy with her lot, and says she enjoys living alone with her cat.
This video was shot in the Prince Street, New York loft/studio used by the Videofreex.
A drama, enacted on the cornfields of Iowa, of a woman haunted by the legacy of her mother and the acts that lead to mom's downfall on the banks of a river. Unable to follow a different path to drier terrain, the heroine over-lubricates both inside and out and gets stuck in the muck.
A Day for Cake and Accidents features a cast of animal characters — each of a different, though often indeterminate, species — who struggle with impending astrological despair and engage in absurdist dialogs, confessing various melancholic desires and transgressive secrets in poetic cartoon abjection.
A Day for Cake and Accidents is the third in a series of short collaborative animations.
Failing Up describes career advancement despite bad decisions, bankruptcies, and intellectual mediocrity. In this short film, the Manhattan real estate holdings of the King of Failing Up are catalogued and synced to a soundtrack that suggests how it feels to be one of his subjects.
Whip pans, zooms, lens twists, and bursts of stop-frame animation transform eight minutes of borrowed audio from Home Alone 2 (a film that features a cameo of the current US President) into a political work of slapstique concrete.
Ireland, October 20th 2007
The filmmaker returns to the city where he made the first video in the series and looks back at the events of the past six years.
Six Years Later is the eighth episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.
Produced at the San Francisco Art Institute, and featuring a few musical numbers, this jungle drama deals with a commercial corporation infiltrating the Amazon to sell beauty aids to the indigenous peoples. Witch doctor magic and political intrigue run rampant in this hot house environment, and men and women deal with the beast within and without.
Defiantly humorous in its tone, Delirium reflects Faber’s mother’s personal experience with what has been classified as “female hysteria.” While never reducing her mother’s condition to a single explanation, Delirium firmly and convincingly links her illness to the historically embattled position women hold in a patriarchal culture. The video layers haunting imagery and humorous iconoclasm, referencing everything from television episodes of I Love Lucy to Charcot’s 19th Century photos of female hysterics.
A window or two on the outside world is not enough, especially when you have such a lousy view of things as I had in this Oklahoma residential care home. The majesty of the console-model TV gave new dimension to the concept of time and space, and shrank it all down to a 21-inch lump of nature—a 21-incher that didn’t smell and permeate the atmosphere with discomfiture. A meditation on the elsewhere and wanting to be there.
Hokey Sapp Does SPEW features Kate Schechter performing her invented media personality Hokey Sapp interviewing some of the luminaries at SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, a queer zine convention hosted by Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago in May, 1991. SPEW brought together artists, writers, editors of zines, performers, video-makers, activists, and bands from throughout the US and Canada, and marked the explosion of queercore subcultures through unabashed fashion, outrageous politics, humor, and joy.
Rosie Cutler, a middle school lunch lady, and TJ Fortune, a outcast student, have an unusual relationship. Mystically-minded and gender ambiguous, TJ recoils into an abandoned warehouse where he builds a massive sculptural shrine from discarded objects and trash. Through a dream Rosie makes intimate contact with a trans-worldly being who she hopes will bridge the gap between real and imagined to reveal truths about our world.
The San Francisco Art Institute's 100th anniversary is absorbed into this portrait of alumni in the heat of creation and pasta softening.
In New Report, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy are reporters at WKRH - the feminist news station that is "pregnant with information." As Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), these two lesbian feminist artists stage reports on and with their friends, their social herstories, their nerves, and their bodies. It is urgently broadcast live to the newsroom and out to their studio audience.
Netherlands, January 29th 2006/January 29th 2007
Hamas have just won the Palestinian elections and a chocolate bar in a Rotterdam hotel room eventually reminds the filmmaker that there are more important things going on in the world outside. Exactly one year later he returns to the same city and checks in at a very different hotel. Pyramids/Skunk is a double episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.
Because of the War things were changing. Very few toys or games were left and music was almost over. Tap water was tasting female and television only came in nasty spasms…
A surreal and sometimes comic meditation on how war affects the hopes and dreams of ordinary people.
Return to the House of Pain documents my walking through the turf and sludge of the Big Apple and many worm holes... I chomp my way back west and gnaw on all that sinks stomachward and beyond in vertiginous aching.
