Humor

In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.

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: 

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:

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.

Shooter explores the idea of overt manliness, exposing it to be a flaccid gesture and an exercise in posturing. In the video, I assume the persona of a metal head wandering an urban landscape, making threatening yet empty gestures to passersby to create an exaggerated sense of power and machismo. I use three different songs by Motorhead, that are never allowed to get past the opening guitar riffs, to further construct a sense of masculinity that falls back onto itself. I also utilize humor to facilitate exposing the paradoxes contained within my actions.

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.