Film or Videomaking

Videofreex, Interviews in the Street II

This program features a selection of pre-recorded segments from five three-hour long live broadcasts made during the Democratic National Convention in New York City in 1976. It includes interviews with politicians and members of the media, as well as footage from the convention floor and demonstrators outside of the convention, led by Vietnam War veteran and anti-war activist Ron Kovic. The video was produced by a conglomerate of independent video producers, which included many of the Videofreex, under the name "Image Union.”

Interface

"Harun Farocki was commissioned by the Lille Museum of Modern Art to produce a video about his work. His creation was an installation for two screens that was presented within the scope of the 1995 exhibition The World of Photography. The film Interface (Schnittstelle) developed out of that installation. Reflecting on Farocki's own documentary work, it examines the question of what it means to work with existing images rather than producing one's own, new images.

Have a Nice Trip Ibantu!: Indians in Brazil, Part One

Indians In Brazil is an educational series for Brazilian public schools that invites students to experience cultural diversity. Four teenagers are invited to discover a new world and participate in Indian daily life in two different communities. They show their emotions, curiosity and fears, and are surprised by their new friends.

 

When God Visits the Village: Indians in Brazil, Part Two

Indians In Brazil is an educational series for Brazilian public schools that invites students to experience cultural diversity. Four teenagers are invited to discover a new world and participate in Indian daily life in two different communities. They show their emotions, curiosity and fears, and are surprised by their new friends. Part Two of the series, When God Visits The Village, sees the teenagers invited to visit the Kaiowá people in South Mato Grosso. Expecting something similar to the Krahô village they had earlier visited, they are, at first, shocked.

Imitations of Life

"It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were, but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves."

Imbé Gikegü, The Scent of Pequi Fruit

It's the time of celebration and merriment in the Alto Xingu. The dry season is coming to an end. The smell of the damp earth is mixed with the sweet perfume of pequi. But it has not always been like that: if it had not been for a death, the pequi would possibly not exist. Linking the past to the present, Kuikuro filmmakers tell a tale of dangers and pleasures, of sex and betrayal, where men and women, hummingbirds and alligators build a shared world.

Direction: Takumã and Maricá Kuikuro

Photography: Takumã, Mariká, Amuneri, Asusu, Jairão and Maluki

PAS DE DEUX DE DEUX

The orchestra begins and a male and female dancer move from opposite sides of the stage. The dancers embrace and begin the White Swan pas de deux from the ballet Swan Lake. However this is not the ballet as it is normally performed. The choreography has been re-staged so that in every single frame the two original dancers have been replaced by the bodies of four new dancers. The movement remains continuous, the characteristics of the dancers’ movements and gestures the same, but in each frame a different person occupies the dancers’ body spaces.

Parry Teasdale: An Interview

Parry Teasdale is a founding member of the early alternative media group Videofreex and its off-shoot Media Bus. More recently, he published a historical memoir, Videofreex: America’s First Pirate TV Station and the Catskills Collective That Turned It On (1999). Interview by Kate Horsfield

Papillon d'amour

By subjecting fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon to a mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.

Operation Atropos

Operation Atropos is a documentary about interrogation and POW resistance training. Director Coco Fusco worked with retired U.S. Army interrogators who subjected her group of women students to immersive simulations of POW experiences in order to show them what hostile interrogations can be like and how members of the U.S. military are taught to resist them. The group of interrogators is called Team Delta, and they regularly offer intensive courses that they call "Authentic Military Experiences" to civilians.

No Is Yes

A combination of experimental and narrative approaches which explore the commodification of rebellion as it is marketed to youth culture, through the eyes of two drug-dealing, teenage girls from Brooklyn who "accidentally" kill and mutilate their favorite alternative rock star. Their obsession with murders and makeovers and their confusion between fashion and transgression lead these girls into a world where nihilism is bought and sold, and rebellion is impossible.

No Damage

No Damage is a composition made out of fragments from over 80 different feature and documentary films that show the architecture of New York City--its architectural presence as captured on film over eight decades. Lifted out of their original context and juxtaposed in groups, these scenes reveal their emotional implications: grandeur, glamour, the wake of modernism, post-modernism and, most recently, post 9/11 sentimentalism. A number of particular clips that resonate such emotions enter into a non-verbal discourse on age, status, functionality and aesthetics.

Nancy Buchanan: Video Viewpoints

In this interview video and performance artist Nancy Buchanan discusses her feminist and political work. Buchanan comments upon the advantages of video over performance in terms of accessibility—the ability for her videos to circulate and reach audiences she physically cannot, and their brevity and completed form—and her strategies to create an atmosphere for change. This Video Portrait features two of Buchanan’s videos in their entireties: the anti-nuclear weapons work An End to All Our Dreams (1982) and the more straightforwardly feminist Webs (1983).

Music at Night

A five-minute video collaboration between Dani Leventhal and Steve Reinke.

Movie Memo

Private photos of an exploitation film matron (Doris Wishman) in action highlight this collection of summer fare that features a wide range of image-makers pursuing their dreams. From the confines of Hell's Kitchen to the wide-open vistas of New Mexico, the video aims its savage eye at civilized civilians in the heat of digital desire. Take this tour of image driven locals in locales that shimmer in the heat of Hollywood halitosis: the whispered sleaze of tabloid tinsel-town.