Film or Videomaking

Making art and movies becomes the overall thrust of this foray into hives of humming wanna-bees being all that they can be thanks to the magic of chalk and cinema. Through it all there trudges the arthritic frame of he who samples the honey pot along with gobs of eggplant parmigiana, etc., etc., etc.

Videofreex

After the Bar with Tony and Michael

An early example of video erotica from the Videofreex. A group of naked people lounge around smoking and listening to music. A male and female couple is making love on the floor in a room full of monitors. The couple talks about sex and videotape, and the woman says, “Cameras turn me on.”

Eric Siegel

Afghanistan Before the Wars

In 1972 Eric Siegel, an early pioneer of video art, set out on an extreme adventure driving from Europe six thousand miles overland to India. He was one of the first people to use the revolutionary new technology from Sony Corporation, the Portapak. This was the first small portable video camera/recorder combo that was the predecessor of today’s camcorders. Together with his friend Anthony they documented the trip. This video is the portion of the trip that took them through Afghanistan, one of the most exotic places along the way.

Dani Leventhal

9 Minutes of Kaunaus

"Inside a Lithuanian synagogue, young Domas Darguzs regales the filmmaker with a whispered, wide-eyed account of mythical events, while the film cross-cuts to images of farm-life. Kid brother of an Israeli soldier, Domas's stories are part fantasy, part hopeful ruminations of a courageous, young mind interrupted only by an impatient adult."

--KJ Mohr

Dani Leventhal

54 Days this Winter 36 Days this Spring for 18 Minutes

Dani Leventhal gathered material for 9 minutes each day, then condensed it down to this 16-minute video montage of impressions which has a cumulative effect, accessed and read differently depending on the mental connections the viewer makes. It is presented as short scenes: documentation of the quotidian, on-camera monologues, and performative or expressive shots that are constructed. The material, while mostly generated as a diary, is heterogeneous enough to include just about any kind of footage.

Ben Coonley

3D Trick Pony

An audience-interactive demonstration of Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing experiment, and a 3D review of loosely related principles of subject/spectator empathy.

Note: should be viewed through 3D glasses. See http://store.yahoo.com/rainbowsymphony/an3dglasreda.html

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.

Nicolas Provost

Storyteller

Storyteller recomposes aerial shots from the Las Vegas casino skyline to create a slick, artificial world, reminiscent of science fiction. At first glance, the viewer might think of jewelrylike space ships floating slowly through the universe. When the camera zooms in on building and architecture, the detailed glitter and kitsch of the city hypnotically reveals something of pure beauty and madness.

George Kuchar

Jewel of Jeopardy

Linda Martinez stars in this sequel to the horror series, which relishes in colorful detail the misadventures of Sherry Frankenstein. Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the viewer is plunged into a world of young and old as they tackle the monsters within and without. Chock full of entergetic scenes filled with all the opulence that only $600 could purchase, this epic of good gone bad will stun you with its massive verbosity and visual voracity. The plot deals with Ms. Frankenstein's mission to save the body and souls of strumpets in heat.

Marie Losier

Bird, Bath and Beyond

"I don't put myself into my movies because that would be too much--my pictures reflect my own feelings. So hopefully it's entertaining. Otherwise I can't bear looking at them, ha ha!"
--Mike Kuchar

In this dream-portrait of Mike Kuchar, he floats through his memories as the sea, space and sky drift past. Wrapped in odd costumes, he frolics with the imaginary creatures surrounding him, and recalls the creatures of his own imagination.

George Kuchar

Burrito Bay

This video diary/travelogue centers on a tropical trip to Acapulco where yours truly hits both sand and surf with maximum impact. The actual movie that's being documented throughout this video bit the dust via a hard-drive malfunction, so this is almost all that remains (so far) of the doomed yet enjoyable venture. We all donned bathing suits and splashed our way through heaven and hell as Miguel Calderon directs the cursed venture in skimpy attire amid other scantily clad examples of electro-graphic expertise.

Ken Kobland

Buildings and Grounds/ The Angst Archive

"...a rumination, a series of borrowed 'dialogues' out of an ongoing argument with myself. It meanders, mentally and physically, reflecting on the conditions of being human; on transience, consciousness and desire. It uses landscapes as provocations, as sites of contemplation. And between the landscape and the thought, i.e. between the radical presence of the physical world and the idea, there is, more often than not, a distance, disbelief or irony."

--Ken Kobland

Jem Cohen

Building A Broken Mousetrap

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT/SUMMARY: This film centers around one performance, when Holland-based musicians, The Ex, visited New York to play a concert. This performance is intercut with city scenes, first from Amsterdam and then New York, of construction sites, street life, and protests against the Iraq war and the Bush administration. The construction site scenes relate to the band's dedication to music as a realm for collaborative building and creative destruction.

Video Data Bank

Bob Snyder: An Interview

Bob Snyder is a Chicago-based composer, video artist, and author who has been experimenting with sound and video synthesis since the ’60s. As a musician, his interest has always been in the relationship between music and visual imagery. In Snyder’s work music is the central generative source of meaning, although he also creates a dialogue between sound and images of nature and architecture. Interview by Rafael Franca.

Les LeVeque

Backwards Birth of a Nation

Backwards Birth of a Nation is a re-editing of D.W. Griffith's 187-minute film, Birth of a Nation (1915), into a pulsating 13-minute black and white phantasm. By means of structural strategies of condensation, the frame by frame inversion of black and white, and playing the resulting work from end to beginning, an apparition is brought forth where images of racism float to the surface and are contextualised as a part of the flow of United States history.

Long Beach Museum of Art

The Artists: Part 1 (Belinkoff, Krusoe, Holmes, and Clark)

This video features California artists: drawer and painter Deanne Belinoff, sculptor and poet Sana Krusoe, wood relief carver and painter Palema Holmes, and New York-based video artist Shirley Clark.

The Artists: Part 1 was produced in concert with the exhibition Four Solo Exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1988. The artists are introduced by LBMA’s senior curator Josine Ianco-Starrels. The video presents and contrasts the diverse styles, media, and personalities of these four women artists.

Film or Videomaking

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