History

This tape, shot in April 1971, documents the making of a WNET/13 TV show about video collectives and how they use the new video technology.

In this interview, political and social theorist, Terry Eagleton (b. 1943), shares stories of his Irish upbringing and British education, and sums up his current engagement with art theory, leftist politics, and spirituality under capitalism. With reference to Henry James, Frederic Jameson, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, among others, this interview spans a vast landscape of literature and social theory.

For the November 13, 2015 opening of the Hiroshima Panels by Iri and Toshi Maruki at Pioneer Works, Eiko performed her solo in honor of the Hiroshima Panels and their creators. Japanese-style painter Iri Maruki, born in Hiroshima, and Western-style painter Toshi Maruki, who went into Hiroshima city just three days after the bombing. The artists decided to paint the panels together, which illuminate the human experiences of the Atomic Bomb. They spent 30 years painting the fifteen Hiroshima Panels, six of which were on display at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Based on Emanuel Admassu's essay Menged Merkato, an architectural analysis and historical journey of the largest open-air market in Africa, located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Merkato was developed during the Italian occupation of Addis Ababa to segregate the markets of the locals and the newcomers. Unlike the earlier circular formation which centered the royal palace, Merkato was built on a grid which allowed for a dispersed flow facilitating dynamic interactions and exchanges.

"A meditation on history, memory, and change in Central and Eastern Europe, Buried in Light is a non-narrative journey, a cinematic collage. Cohen’s “search for images” began at a time of extraordinary flux, as the Berlin Wall was dismantled—opening borders yet ushering in a nascent wave of consumer capitalism. What he saw struck him as a profound paradox: the moment Eastern Europe was revealed was simultaneously the moment it was hidden by the blinding light of commercialism.

How Little We Know of Our Neighbours is an experimental documentary about Britain's Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy. At its center is a look at the multiple roles cameras have played in public space, starting in the 1880's, when the introduction of the hand-held camera brought photography out of the studio and into the street. For the first time one could be photographed casually in public without knowledge or consent.

The film suggests a link between three political figures from the history of Mexican resistance: the Soldadera (woman guerrilla fighter), the Zapatista (member of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation), and the Normalista (students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School).

Broadcasters across Ireland and Britain have entered into a blackout strike. The workers are transmitting a programme bringing censored voices back onto the airwaves.

"In the late 1980s, as violence continues in the north of Ireland, censorship is increasingly being enforced on British and Irish television. In response, broadcasters have entered into a blackout strike, occupying several stations and transmitting a programme bringing censored voices back onto the airwaves."

A woman stands on top of a hill in Namibe desert in Angola, looking into an extensive horizon of a vast desert, she signals the hope of crossing these borders symbolizing the repossession of the land and the regaining of a lost identity. The landscape as pathology is explored through these images; how past violence manifests in the landscape of the present, both intrinsically and symbolically. We live in a present space, but one that bears the marks of its history. As much as we occupy places, they have the capacity to pre-occupy us.

“Trying to think the revolution is like waking and trying to see the logic in a dream...”.

TVTV's inside view of the 1972 Republican National Convention made broadcast history. While network cameras focused on the orchestrated renomination of Richard Nixon, TVTV's rag-tag army of guerrilla television activists turned their cameras on to the cocktail parties, anti-war demonstrations, hype and hoopla that accompanied the show.

An experimental documentary comprised of regional vignettes about faith, force, technology and exodus. Eleven parables relay histories of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough, violence, messianism and resistance, all occurring somewhere in the state of Illinois. The state is a convenient structural ruse, allowing its histories to become allegories that explore how we’re shaped by conviction and ideology.

The film reexamines J. Robert Oppenheimer's speech at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1958. I Was There is a trilogy of experimental documentary films that explores the problem of radiation, our society's fading collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the unresolved debate between ethics and science. These series concern the immediate effects of weaponized nuclear technology, as invisible poison, on the human body.

A wide-screen video diptych of scenes shot during two different periods in Moscow––old footage from 1990 and newer from 2009. There's no linear narrative as the "story" is told principally in the juxtaposition of the two images of the city with this almost 20yr gap. It runs 31 minutes as a single screening, but it is meant to be seen as an installation since its visual theme, from an American perspective, is the recurring cycle of Russian upheaval. It is also principally a "fractal" piece, meaning that its story is replicated in every scene.

–– Ken Kobland

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

In 1939, Westinghouse made a film about a small-town family visiting the New York World's Fair. Trapped inside that film was a completely different film that shows a mysterious alternate universe, revealed by Bryan Boyce’s own patented brand of narrative deconstruction and evisceration.The outcome is an absurd and chilling drama of a family transfixed by the technological wonders that would soon transform consumer society.

Transmission from the Liberated Zones is an experiment which brings together Swedish statements and documents, accessed and presented by a boy through a low-fidelity feedback channel — an optical dimension created to move through time, and between tepid and tropic encounters.

The project presents the blurring of the Green Line for Israelis and its consolidation for Palestinians, through important planning and legal decisions.

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.

Footage from the May Day 1971 events in Washington DC. Davidson, a Videofreex member, gets arrested, and what follows is rarely seen footage of the inside of the detainment bus and the jail cell, videotaped by an arrestee.

In the second part of the Classics Exposed series, a neurotic scholar (Gibbons) leads a "buggy" ride tour through historic Charleston where, according to the professor, Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis after taking a wrong turn on his way to Hollywood. Live-action with six-legged animation.

This title is also available on Emily Breer: Classics Exposed.

...after the war.

Billion Dollar Bimbo: A Musical is a story of a young Hollywood actress’s psychological roller coaster ride through loss and redemption. One day on set the actress witnesses her mother collapse in the middle of shooting. Thinking her dead, the woman quickly spins out of control, immediately descending into drug use and promiscuity. The daughter’s depression-induced mania is assuaged when the mother recovers, but only briefly. When the mother quickly dies, the forlorn daughter plummets again into hopelessness and seeks solace in religion.

With a combination of Hollywood, European, and Israeli film; documentary; news coverage; and excerpts of 'live' footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) critiques representations of the Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West. The video mimics the dominant media's forms of representation, subverting its methodology and construction.

We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S.