Consumer culture

A deceased hoarder, reconstituted through technology, recounts a difficult childhood as inhabitants of a virtual world struggle to reconcile materialistic tendencies. A scientist leads an effort to understand the passage of time, but the data is unreliable. The question remains, what happens to our things after we are gone?

Laura Parnes

County Down

County Down is a cross-platform, episodic, digital film exploring an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community that coincides with a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug. Mirroring rave culture and the unbridled optimism around technology during the 1990s, County Down presents a society so obsessed with novelty and consumerism that it euphorically embraces its own destruction.

Ximena Cuevas

Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas

Video Data Bank is proud to present the wonderful work of prolific video artist Ximena Cuevas in our latest DVD box set, Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas. This four volume box set features 25 videos by the award-winning artist, spanning 21 years, and is accompanied by a 75-page booklet containing the following essays that examine aspects of Cuevas’s work:

Les LeVeque

Traders Leaving the Exchange, A Guard and the Street V.1

Traders Leaving the Exchange, A Guard and the Street V.1 is a 15 minute unstable remix of video I shot in 2000, and edited in 2011, of the "members" door of the New York Stock Exchange as the traders were leaving at the end of their workday. A security guard is positioned in front of the "members" door. The shot is a close up of the door and the guard taken from across the street busy with traffic and pedestrians.

-- Les LeVeque

Videofreex

Tuned In, Turned On! Videofreex Tape the World

Formed in 1969 at the legendary Woodstock Music Festival by David Cort and Parry Teasdale, who met while taping the events with the newly available Portapak video equipment, the Videofreex (also known as "the Freex") were one of the very first video collectives. After working together to pitch a program to the major broadcasting station CBS, they toured the country interviewing counter-cultural figures of the day, including Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panther party, and Abbie Hoffman, so called leader of the Yippies.

Videofreex

Money

Taped on Prince Street in Soho, New York, Skip Blumberg creates a one-word performance. Shouting the word "Money" over and over, he attracts the attentions of New York's finest. The crew attempt to explain to the policemen that there is no public disorder as the streets were empty when they began to tape.

The video is an unwitting early example of the reaction of the state to the use of video cameras on the streets.

Videofreex

Chicken Dinner

The Videofreex tape a group of young people working on a farm run by Chris Locke and his wife in Shandaken, NY. After learning how to take care of the chickens, they are taught how to kill and pluck one. Later they sit down for a communal dinner, and one of the group exclaims "Mmmmm, tastes good!"

Sterling Ruby

COOK

Transcription of voice over from COOK: "I’m a chemist/I’m a cooker/ I’m a manufacturer and a distributer/I’ll do whatever the fuck I want in the privacy of my own home."

A disguised and threatening voice repeats this rhythmic slogan over found footage of meth labs seized by law enforcement. Made in 2003, this video remains eerily relevant, addressing the violent and irrational impulses underlying the American Dream of free enterprise.

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

Daniel Eisenberg

The Unstable Object

What do a luxury automobile, a cymbal, and a wall clock all have in common? What are the diverse attachments and experiences produced by those who make these things and those who consume them? What exchanges take place through the object itself—sensually, esthetically, abstractly? We often forget that most of the things we use are made by the labor of others, often in distant places, living dramatically different, diverse lives. What do these objects mean to them? How does their labor, their aspirations, their sense of alienation or satisfaction connect to ours?

Bobby Abate

A Party Record Packed with Sex and Sadness

A high & low fidelity record of obsessions past & present. A hooded man named Cobra Commander (drawn naked) and a boy with black glasses. A fanged woman named Shadow-La and a girl in a rose colored wig. Belinda (Heaven on Earth), Madonna (Live to Tell), and headphones (worn naked). An airport terminal. Home. The Montgomery Ward catalog circa 1980. That orange bedspread, that red flowered couch.

Paweł Wojtasik

Pigs

A close-range look at pigs living on a farm in Las Vegas, Nevada. The pigs, individually and as a group, become a metaphor for humanity as they go from leisurely wallowing in the mud to the wildness of a feeding frenzy. In a key shot, a pig confronts the viewer with a prolonged, enigmatic stare, as if questioning the very nature of human/animal relationship.

“Marvelously abstract and perfectly concrete.”

-- The Jury of the 2011 Hong Kong International Film Festival

Paweł Wojtasik

Dark Sun Squeeze

Dark Sun Squeeze is a darkly meditative exploration of a sewage treatment plant, revealing the hidden rhythms and bizarre journey of raw human waste. The images of flowing waste speak of decay, destruction, of madness inherent in excessive consumption. At the same time they reveal the redemptive side of detritus, its regenerative potential, the sublime that exists in the abject.

“Paweł Wojtasik delivers the final word on the absolute value of news, money, politics and just about everything else.”

-- Holland Cotter, The New York Times, Oct 1, 2004

Benj Gerdes, Jennifer Hayashida

Strike Anywhere

Strike Anywhere is a video essay that takes as its point of departure Swedish "Match King" Ivar Kreuger, whose privatization of financial crisis management strategies bears a direct relation to late-20th Century policies implemented by the IMF and WTO. Between 1917 and 1932, Kreuger capitalized on shifts in global financial markets to control over 200 companies and establish matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries. At the height of his success, Ivar Kreuger was worth approximately 30 million Swedish kronor (the equivalent of 100 billion USD today).

Harun Farocki

The Appearance

"The head of a Berlin advertising agency explains his proposed strategy to his potential client, a Danish optical company. The communication strategy that we ultimately came up with as a basis or any creative act or means of communication has three headings. The first is 'relevant, not arrogant'; the second, 'varied, not uniform'; and the third is, 'creative, not pushy'. These are essentially translations, strategic translations of your basic requirements and your analysis of the market, as well."

-- From the transcription of The Appearance

Harun Farocki

Indoctrination

This film is about a five-day seminar designed to teach executives to "sell themselves" better. This course, designed for managers, teaches the basic rules of dialectics and rhetoric and provides training in body language, gesture and facial expression. The aim of selling something has always been a principle of mercantile action. Yet it was only through the marriage of psychology and modern capitalism that the idea of selling oneself was perfected.

-- Lutz Hachmeister

Consumer culture

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