“Nicky is seven. His parents are older and meaner.” A Place Called Lovely references the types of violence individuals find in life, from actual beatings, accidents and murders, to the more insidious violence of lies, social expectations, and betrayed faith. Benning collects images of this socially-pervasive violence from a variety of sources, tracing events from childhood: movies, tabloids, children's games (like mumbledy-peg), personal experiences, and those of others.
Taiwanese artist Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954) tackles conceptions of racial assimilation in American culture, examining the political underbelly of everyday situations that affect the relationship between individuals and society.
A photographer comes to my home to take pictures and gets a lensful. His mouth and his shutter snap away as I aim my finest attributes at his cold and hard equipment.
A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a re-cataloguer, a gay man, a watcher, an impersonator. He passes his time collecting images that he puts before us – his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we share his cloak of invisibility, both a benefit and a curse.
In the late 1970s, Walter Naegle was walking to Times Square to buy a newspaper when he ran into a striking older African American man on the corner. Walter says that “lightning struck” and his life changed forever at that moment. The man on the corner was Bayard Rustin.
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.
Setting her pixelvision camera on herself and her room, Benning searches for a sense of identity and respect as a woman and a lesbian. Acting alternately as confessor and accuser, the camera captures Benning’s anger and frustration at feeling trapped by social prejudices.
This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1.
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.
Here are two short movies with one tall boy who is sometimes happy, sometimes sad and always reflective… He has something to share with you…..Watch and you’ll understand.
This title comprises The Boy Upstairs (2019) and The Guy Next Door (2019) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Increasingly invasive questions are asked of a series of lesbians, both couples and a single lesbian, to complete the Longform Lesbian Census. From "big boxes of dildos," and "political lesbianism," to only being able to have six cats at a time, this playful video looks at the current state of lesbian lives. Is the Government of Canada finally interested in Lesbian citizens? Or are these interviewers just trying to find girlfriends?
Through a stack of personal journals, this video reconstructs a biography of the South Dakota-born, New York City-enlightened artist James Wentzy. Tracing his days starting out as a struggling artist and later involved as an AIDS activist, the video provides an intimate portrait of a neglected hero. Wentzy reads from journals and shares old family snapshots and notebook sketches. “I hope I don’t die of sainthood,” Wentzy jokes in an entry from 1990—the pivotal time when he was becoming involved with ACT-UP and beginning to live healthier after the revelation of his HIV-positive status.
A short, hilarious cooking mantra, featuring Sister Dimension, The "Lady" Bunny, RuPaul, David Dalrymple, Lahoma Van Zandt and Maria Ayala. "Where's the pickle? That's the surprise!"
This title is only available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.
Dirty Laundry speculates upon the buried narratives of gender and sexuality in Chinese-Canadian history of the 19th Century, when Chinese communities were almost exclusively male. A story about a chance late-night encounter between a steward and a passenger on a train interweaves with documentary interviews with historians and writers and historical documents brought to life. The video poses nagging questions about the personal and political stakes in the writing of history and in our interpretations of the past.
The Look of Love: A Gothic Romance is an experimental video/audio collage in four acts. Performing in various guises, Suzie Silver embarks on a quest for the magnificence—and horror—of desire and pleasure. Her female characters are caught up in a cascade of subtle and spectacular cinematic images of sexual desire between women.
Glenn Belverio is an independent filmmaker and drag artist who lives and works in New York City. In 1990, he began producing and co-hosting the popular Manhattan Cable series The Brenda and Glennda Show, a talk show that mixed activism with comedy as it took drag out of the clubs and onto the street. In 1993, the show became Glennda and Friends, a post-queer task show featuring provocative co-starts such as gay pornographer Bruce LaBruce and guerrilla scholar Camille Paglia.
TREYF “unkosher” in Yiddish— is an unorthodox documentary by and about two Jewish lesbians who met and fell in love at a Passover “seder”. With personal narration, real and imagined educational films, and haunting imagery, filmmakers Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky examine the Jewish identity of their upbringings and its impact on their lives.
Inventing freedom as they roam, videomaker Ellen Spiro and her dog Sam go west in a vintage Airstream trailer in search of elderly dropouts and their dogs who have pulled out of society and into by-the-side-of-the-road trailer communities. Our mutt narrator tells his tale, sharing his thoughts on America’s smells, the foibles of humans, and his view of aging as another journey. In unplanned meetings with gray nomads, psychic misfits, and free spirits, Roam Sweet Home takes the myths of growing older and turns them on their head.
The two-part video Gender Cruise on the Circle Line involves Brenda and Glennda leading a group of drag queens, drag kings, and other gender nonconforming people on a three-hour ride on the Circle Line boat around Manhattan.
Rubnitz’s tape celebrates and documents an early installment of the “storywig-in,” shot nearly a decade before the feature-length documentary. Presenting the festival during its Tompkins Square Park era, when the 1960s themes were still played up, the tape combines live performance footage with off-stage interviews and music video reverie. Featuring The “Lady” Bunny, Lypsinka, Frieda, John Sex, John Kelly, Baby Gregor, Hapi Phace, Taboo, and many others.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
Open Conch is a spell for pleasure and queer desire.
Open Conch takes fragments from portraits of lesbians and queer identified women from Bonn in spaces they requested to be recorded in. Choices include houseboat homes, kitchens, dining room tables, bridges, tunnels, graffiti and other public spaces. A main character with pink hair follows the conch to find what is actually natural; such as circles of women dreaming, the slaying of the patriarchy by a red wooden sword and the calling in of queer love through movement, fabric, sound and circle.
The temperature in your eyes will rise when you contract ‘FEVER DREAMS’ and experience the haunted mayhem contained therein.
This title comprises The Stone Boy (2011), Nonsensical (2014), and Coffee, Tea, and Wizardry (2015) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.
-- Mike Kuchar
From 1970 to 1972, Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America recorded the private life of a not-so-average American couple-Carel Row and Ferd Eggan. She is a porn actress and filmmaker; he is a bisexual junkie. The video verite camera captures the desires and frustrations of their evolving relationship and their responses to the ongoing videotaping exercise. The tape, a study in "the effect of living too close to an electronic medium," reveals attitudes and discussions that also render it a fascinating social document of the west coast counterculture.
“The moon, the sometimes dark street, trees, it's warm […] at last, a certain eroticism possible (that of the warm night).” When Roland Barthes visited China in 1973, he jotted down some notes that would become part of his Travels in China (Carnets du voyage en Chine), an underplot of desire in his imagination of the country.
