Death and Dying

A surreal vision of one man's endeavor to contact the spirit world and come to terms with nightmares of a mysterious death.  A séance is orchestrated according to instructions written in 1920 by revered parapsychologist Hereward Carrington, voiced here by novelist Lynne Tillman.  Roses, seen as light by spirits, are placed in the room but these flowers are plastic; a requisite round table is surrounded by wooden chairs that remain empty despite stern warnings to never sit alone.

A daughter leads her mother on a rope while they take a walk, looking for a place where the mother can bid her final farewell. Before she leaves, they have a picnic, she sings a song, and they chat about the family. An absurd domestic drama played out against the background of a summer’s day by the seaside.

The distant future. An orbital facility of unknown origin. Here, the debt of taking a life will be finally repaid…. through resurrection. The victims of military violence across time are systematically brought back to life and guided through the all-too-familiar facility. As a staff of identical ushers draws back layers of confusion and pain, the freshly resurrected gradually become aware of the reality of their corporeal reinsertion: perhaps the world of the living is not a world at all; to be alive in this place may merely be an exhibit.

The dog in dreamland? Or at least one of us is…

–– Ken Kobland

A film titled Dance Movie (or, alternatively, Rollerskate) appears in many Warhol filmographies, but no work with this title has been found in the archive. The lost film, starring dancer Fred Herko, was shot in 1963. A year later, Herko leaped out of an open window while dancing to Mozart’s Coronation Mass in C Major. Inspired by descriptions of the missing film and the memoir of Herko’s best friend, the poet Diane Di Prima, Goddess of Speed poetically reimagines the last days of the young performer.

Lament is a collaboration with video artist James Byrne. Movement material is adapted from Eiko & Koma's 1984 performance work Elegy. Sound mix by Eiko & Koma.

Commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN and made possible with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation, St. Paul, MN. 1986, Eiko & Koma, James Byrne, Walker Art Center. Videographed July, 1985 at the Triplex Theatre, New York, NY. Edited in 1986. 

Respite consists of silent black-and-white films shot at Westerbork, a Dutch refugee camp established in 1939 for Jews fleeing Germany. In 1942, after the occupation of Holland, its function was reversed by the Nazis and it became a 'transit camp.'  In 1944, the camp commander commissioned a film, shot by a photographer, Rudolph Breslauer.

Pandora is one who communicates to the human world the powers of the night. These are glimpses of her visions.

The Videofreex conducted this interview with Fred Hampton, the Deputy Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, in October 1969, just over a month before he was killed by the Chicago police.

In the aftermath of a death things may seem very quiet, but there are struggles going on so deep not even those who struggle can recognize them.  This film looks and listens for signs of those struggles.  Psychoanalytic interjections consider the nature of time and rumination, and are used to step outside of the terribly interiorized state of mourning.

-- Jennifer Montgomery

In the late 1970s, Walter Naegle was walking to Times Square to buy a newspaper when he ran into a striking older African American man on the corner. Walter says that “lightning struck” and his life changed forever at that moment. The man on the corner was Bayard Rustin.

Tanaka passionately evokes the loss of her mother by visually recreating the ominous and disempowering feeling of isolation that accompanies mourning. The tape enunciates the painful phases of grieving: the claustrophobic results of dealing with the inevitability of death, the transitional void where one is lost between the comfortable orientation of one’s world and Nothing, and the new sense of clarity where images from the past resurface from the abyss of forgetfulness.

The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. A metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. A place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.

Habit is an autobiographical documentary that follows the current history of the AIDS epidemic along dual trajectories: the efforts of South Africa’s leading AIDS activist group, the Treatment Action Campaign, struggling to gain access to AIDS drugs and the daily routine of the videomaker, a veteran AIDS activist in the U.S. who has been living with AIDS for more than ten years.

Vanessa is based on the untimely death of Vanessa Jordan. A work about loss and Michelangelo.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

This sensualist's dream follows Louise Brooks look-alike Rodney O'Neal Austin on his search for the Beloved. From the cabaret to opium dens and dancing graces this homage to early sound film explores a world teeming with the mysteries of longing and death. Music by Trance Mission and Minnie Pearl Necklace.