Film or Videomaking

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, Subject to Change

In early 1969, inspired by the raw energy of their Woodstock tapes, a CBS television executive named Don West commissioned the nascent Videofreex collective to produce a new kind of TV program with "contemporary relevancy" to be aimed at the youth market.  Armed with the latest portable video equipment, and with their travel costs funded by the TV company, the Freex travelled America taping the alternative cultural events and happenings that took place along the way. 

Videofreex, To the Circus

The town of Lanesville, NY was home to the Videofreex for more than ten years, and their house was know as "Probably the World's Smallest TV Station."  This overview details the regular activities of the collective and their work, and includes examples of productions they made for the Media Bus project.  Russell Connor hosts the program and interviews various Media Bus members.

Includes:

Videofreex, Soup in a Cup

A Japanese Kabuki-influenced performance piece, shot in the woods in Winter. A masked woman emerges from a snowy forest and approaches a stone dwelling, where another woman is waiting.  The pair enact a tea ceremony in silence. 

In the next scene the tea tray appears in the road, and then disappears after a car passes.  Image processing magic.

Please note, production year is approximate.

Videofreex, Shirley Clarke and the Camera

Parry Teasdale, David Cort and Chuck Kennedy visit The Kitchen in New York looking for Shirley Clarke, and bump into Steina and Woody Vasulka who are overseeing a show in progress.  A few doors down they find Shirley in her studio, dressed in white and full of energy.  She shows them around, pointing out monitors and lighting set ups.

Parry shows her an arm-mounted video camera he has made and bought along for her to try out -- the first time she has seen one.  Amid lively banter, Shirley jokes about how one day cameras will be small enough to store on a wristwatch.

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, Mes and Youse

A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person.  The exercise is repeated by Nancy Cain and Bart Friedman as the music speeds up.

Crossing Paths with Luce Vigo, Jem Cohen

A portrait of Luce Vigo, film critic, educator, and the daughter of pivotal French filmmaker Jean Vigo. Commissioned by the Spanish documentary festival, Punto de Vista, the film incorporates Luce's memories of her extraordinary life, reflections on her father, and images of Northern Spain.

Village, silenced

A re-working of Humphrey Jenning's 1943 seminal docu-drama The Silent Village wherein coal miners from the Wlsh village of Cwmgiedd re-enact the Nazi invasion and annihilation of the resisting Czech villagers of Lidice. Principal focus in this re-mix is upon the way sound is used as a mode of social control.

POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg

This three-disc DVD box set contains Eisenberg's four thematically connected films - Displaced Person, Cooperation of Parts, Persistence, and Something More Than Night - made between 1981 and 2003, exploring the ongoing implications of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the relationships between the past, present and future, and how the meanings of events transform over time.  The disks are accompanied by a booklet with a contextualizing essay by Scott Durham and an artist interview with Domieta Torlasco, along with titl

Something More Than Night

1. The idea that a film about a city, a quiet, architectural film no less, can tell us anything that we don’t already know about urban life at this point in our new century is perhaps a bit arrogant. But the city is an organism that changes constantly; our knowledge of it is provisional at best. So a film that examines the urban environment under the cloak of darkness must presume to reveal a reality that we don’t know, and tries to dispel projections and fears that are for the most part located in the imagination... in a memory of film, television, or the novel.

white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston

white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is a stroboscopic work made from fifteen films starring Charlton Heston. Each film has been algorithmically condensed down to thirty seconds in length. These fifteen condensed movies have been frame-by-frame chronologically organized and metrically inter-cut with two Heston film frames followed by two white frames.

Notes on the Death of Kodachrome

This piece purports to be about the discontinuation of the much-loved format, Kodachrome, and with it the further endangerment of super-8 film. But it has other agendas of reclamation and personal reckoning that are its true subject matter.

Deliver

Like a generation of viewers, I was profoundly affected by Deliverance.  But I have always been troubled by the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey. Hence, my version is played by women: myself, Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, and Meredith Root, all experimental filmmakers who work as academics. While faithful to our respective male characters, we also play ourselves.

Empire of Evil

This high octane drama that I made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute chronicles the moral decline of it's heroine, as the love of a man she obsesses over drives her over something else: a cliff into hell.  It's a free fall all the way to the bottom destination, and there's a heck of a lot of nice looking, young people along for the ride.