In this interview, political and social theorist, Terry Eagleton (b. 1943), shares stories of his Irish upbringing and British education, and sums up his current engagement with art theory, leftist politics, and spirituality under capitalism. With reference to Henry James, Frederic Jameson, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, among others, this interview spans a vast landscape of literature and social theory.
A Body in Fukushima is a film created by dance artist Eiko Otake consisting of still photographs, inter-titles, and an original score. Photographs are selected from tens of thousands taken by historian/photographer William Johnston of Otake alone in the surreal landscapes of post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima, Japan. Otake edited the film and sound, which includes original music by Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington.
A found footage film with no found footage. A study in aphorisms: The Sad Tropics, un-attributed master paintings and mis-attributed artifacts alongside the history of denim. Signs, myths and legacy are questioned and revised.
... it's not what it used to be.
a personal album and homage, in my own way, to an influential film ... a closet-cleaning scrapbook of beloved photos and oddities ‐ and the gift of fire.
–– Ken Kobland
The passage from Germany to the United States influenced by moments lived during WWII era Germany.
To better understand what he has, filmmaker Cam Archer revisits former subjects, rephotographs them, and seeks new inspiration.
This feature-length video follows several inflicted characters and recounts the ways in which they find resolve. A series of entropic scenarios held together by an attraction to failure and its spectacle describe the characters' malfunction - their inability to fulfill personal desire. Compelled by the consequences and rewards of their attempts they question their own trajectory. Using elements of melodrama, performative monologue and traditional narrative structure Ponytail presents a unique society of characters that destroy the distinction between memory and invention.
These are the ghosts of a haunted civilization, a culture of progress that hides the social and political horror behind the Olympic Games. These are the haunted figures in the Capitalocene era. A sinister dance of macabre abstraction. Part of the Hauntology series.
Each year, crowds of Turkish, Australian and New Zealander tourists travel to Gallipoli, Turkey for a modern day pilgrimage. They honor their fallen soldiers who lost their lives in the Gallipoli/Çanakkale Campaign—one of the bloodiest conflicts of World War One—, which is considered as a defining moment in the establishment of the Turkish nation state as well as the beginning of national consciousness in Australia and New Zealand. With heightened emotions, they move around the historical battlefields, graves and war monuments with the help of guided tours tailored for each community.
This experimental documentary chronicles Janice Tanaka’s search for a father she has not seen since she was three years old. Possessing only sketchy information—that he had protested the internment of Japanese Americans citizens after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by writing letters to the President, that he had been arrested by the FBI and subsequently diagnosed as a schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies and institutionalized—Tanaka searched for her missing father for three and a half years.
Ann Cvetkovich is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of a number of books and works also with documentary film, memoirs, music and dance performances, and visual art. Her work focuses on feminist and queer theory, affect and feeling, trauma, theories of the archive and oral history.
The video series Not Once began with the recording of personal stories by local Icelanders, about specific locations or a sense of place. The resulting stories vary greatly, from incredibly intimate and vulnerable, to more commonplace and closer akin to tourist experiences. Hechtman then visited the locations in order to record video footage on site. When the audio and video are coupled together, a new sense of personal narrative is created, transforming one experience into another, and ultimately creating a third: the viewer’s experience.
Not Once includes:
The video traverses the history and the memory of a place shared by both the Hočąk and the settler. Red Banks, a pre-contact Hočąk village site near present day Green Bay (WI) was also the site of Jean Nicolet’s landing, who in 1634 was the first European in present day Wisconsin. Images and text are used to explore this space alongside my grandmother’s recollections. Each serve as representations of personal and shared memory, as well as representations of practices and processes of remembrance, from the Hočąk creation story, to Jean Nicolet’s landing, to the present.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
Tell Me About Your Mother investigates matrilineal lineage, domesticity and creativity. Intimate and conversational, seven female artist friends and colleagues of mine—mostly boomers—recount their mother’s creative influence upon them. Additionally, each woman discusses the unique way(s) she distinguished herself from her mother.
"Blight was made in collaboration with composer Jocelyn Pook. It revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. Until 1994, when our houses were destroyed, both the composer and I lived on the route of this road. The images in the film are a selective record of some of the changes which occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work.
Produced in former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia & Montenegro, Slovenia), Austria, USA, Canada, 1999-2003.
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.
Shot in video-8 at the 1988 Chicago Auto Show, this work examines the artist's personal history with automobiles against the back-drop of an auto plant closing in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The personal stories of real life relationships between people and their cars is dramatically counterposed to the glaring commercialism of the automobile industry and the economic crisis that industry has imposed on the American union workers.
The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable is a mutable and evolving series of experiments in collaboration. Negotiating differences of race, time, culture, ethnicity, religion and gender, the artists seek to maximize the potentials of their encounters.
In(sul)ar marks the dichotomy between reality and fiction, by creating meta-images of an imagined island, where time and space are confused with each other. In(sul)ar reflects the relation between space, memory and history, as well as the mapping of the body and its relation with architecture, and identity. A women walks through spaces of ruin and old erased memories in spaces located in Azores, an Island in the Atlantic which is at the crossroads in between Europe and Africa.
Notes for a DejaVu is a paramnesic experience of the images where Jonas Mekas still lives and we can hear him comment on the memory of an imaginary trip to Mexico. This film is shot with an expired 16mm celluloid during a popular protest. This is a movie that remembers. This is a political movie.
sometimes, among the rubble of the endless forgetting and re-membering of our personal and collective histories, an artifact emerges. a clue, a document. hard evidence. maybe we struggle to contextualize these fragments, maybe we marry them to other fragments and build new narratives in an attempt to squint back through the past and explain to ourselves how we got here. the information is a short exclamation mark of a video, fragments asserting themselves as whole auto-ethnographies.
Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer is a two-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the two channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
