With Cold Harbor, Donigan Cumming uses a minimum of elements to create a powerful anti-war message. Initially, the video seems enigmatic, almost abstract. An amateur Handycam moves tentatively around a hospital room, panning and zooming from the view out the window to the dark-skinned old man lying on the bed. The image is shaky, blurred, often out of focus. Off-screen, a radio or television blares the news.
Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version) is an experimental documentary about "The Western Hostage Crisis." The crisis refers to the abduction and detention of Westerners like Terry Anderson, and Terry Waite in Lebanon in the 80s and early 90s by "Islamic militants." This episode directly and indirectly consumed Lebanese, U.S., French, and British political and public life, and precipitated a number of high-profile political scandals like the Iran-Contra affair in the U.S.
The desire to own and name land and the pleasures of seeing from a distance color this personal survey of the history of mapmaking in the New World. There There Square takes a close look at the gestures of travelers, mapmakers, and saboteurs that determine how we read - and live within - the lines that define the United States.
This found-footage video looks at the demagogic aspirations of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace, concluding with Donald Trump. American history is filled with such characters. In the past, they have all been defeated by stronger democratic forces that refused to acquiesce to authoritarianism. Today the future of this authoritarian urge as represented by Trump and the MAGA movement is uncertain.
Go-Rilla Means War is a filmic relic of gentrification featuring 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished Black Civil Rights Theater in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After finding the film unfinished and un-canned on the floor of The Slave Theater, Campbell collaborated with the unknown director (presumably amateur filmmaker Judge John Phillips who owned the Slave Theater) to finish the film.
The four‐part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds.
"Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind."
—Harun Farocki
Strike Anywhere is a video essay that takes as its point of departure Swedish "Match King" Ivar Kreuger, whose privatization of financial crisis management strategies bears a direct relation to late-20th Century policies implemented by the IMF and WTO. Between 1917 and 1932, Kreuger capitalized on shifts in global financial markets to control over 200 companies and establish matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries. At the height of his success, Ivar Kreuger was worth approximately 30 million Swedish kronor (the equivalent of 100 billion USD today).
On April 30, 2019, Eiko and Alexis Moh, one of Eiko's collaborators in The Duet Project, visited the Manzanar Historical Site. Manzanar was one of ten American internment camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during the World War II. At the peak (in September 1942), 10,046 Japanese Americans were forced to live in Manzanar.
This video was shot two days after Manzanar Pilgrimage commemorated its 50th anniversary on site.
Half tongue-in-cheek absurdism and half deadly earnest, Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition continues New Red Order’s ongoing project of “culture capture,” recruiting viewers to participate in a program of practical strategies to counter the “salvage mindset,” which sets aside Indigenous culture and sovereignty by consigning it to the past.
Footage of a May 1970 rally featuring political speakers, including members of the Black Panther Party. Abbie Hoffman talks about fighting imperialism at home, and the Chicago 7 Conspiracy Trial. As the crowd chants “Free Bobby Seale,” the Videofreex attempt to interview several National Guardsmen. We see young black men talking to the troops, with one man telling a Guardsman, “I’ve got nothing... I went to Vietnam for you."
El Zócalo is an observational portrait of Mexico City’s central Plaza de la Constitutión during one day in August. Soldiers, Aztec dancers, clowns, food vendors, protestors, rain, dogs, tourists, kites, balloons, and dignitaries all meet in the public space of the Zócalo. This documentary presents daily life in one of the largest and most vibrant urban centers in the world, but it begins with a dream of history and ends with a dream of the space full of people for a Zapatista rally.
Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, The Measures explores the metric system’s origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution. Along the way, Goss and Perlin consider the intertwining of political and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.
The story of the anti-Vietnam War movement from the perspective of James R. Roebuck, the first African American president of University of Virginia’s Student Council. Over a ten-day period of unprecedented student upheaval in 1970, Roebuck confronted a series of political challenges and existential dilemmas. This budding activist and future U.S. representative was the quintessential militant insider whose cool temperament and ideological flexibility proved quite useful as UVA appeared on the verge of imploding from within.
A Walk with Nigel is a video essay that constructs a dialogue between two artists from two different times, between movement and stillness, between speech and silence. An archaeological study of a community, reawakening the archive in the present. A materialist study of streets and social relations.
Shot over one day, this program records the events and protests in Washington DC on May Day, 1971. This was the day when one of the most disruptive actions of the Vietnam War era occurred in Washington, DC, when thousands of anti-war activists tried to shut down the Federal government in protest at the War.
A feel for the mood in the city is gained during the first half of the video with shots of the city from a moving car in traffic. Protestors, city residents, and police are captured on tape, along with exciting and moving shots of the day's actions and arrests.
Workers Leaving the Factory — such was the title of the first cinema film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, this still-existent sequence depicts workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon, owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, hurrying, closely packed, out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. Only here, in departing, are the workers visible as a social group. But where are they going? To a meeting? To the barricades? Or simply home?
Louis Henderson’s work focuses on anti-colonialism and criticizing the neocolonialisation of cyberspace. Born in England in 1983, he graduated from London College of Communication and Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains. He recently finished a post-diplôme at the European School of Visual Arts.
Give it Back: Stage Theory’s point of departure is the détournement of Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley (1850), a 9 foot tall, 348 foot long proto-cinematic moving panorama commissioned by and based on the contemporaneous notes and drawings of 19th century amateur archaeologist and glorified grave robber Montroville W. Dickeson — who spent 12 years of his life traveling the Mississippi River and digging up Indigenous burial mounds.
Big_Sleep™ explores problems in our archival urges. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow—creating and relating interface absences. These gaps suggest that no amount of hard drive space can defy mortality.
It's not my memory of it is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. Mobilizing specific historical records as memories which flash up in moments of danger, the video addresses the expansion and intensification of secrecy practices in the current climate of heightened security. A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979.
A re-working of Humphrey Jenning's 1943 seminal docu-drama The Silent Village wherein coal miners from the Welsh village of Cwmgiedd re-enact the Nazi invasion and annihilation of the resisting Czech villagers of Lidice. Principal focus in this re-mix is upon the way sound is used as a mode of social control.
Sites Unseen is a 16mm film of the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, a photograph of a great Aunt who died in Treblinka, and my late grandmother eating her morning cornflakes.
Music by Zeena Parkins
As If the World Had No West tells of the journey of a young woman who travels through the desert and who, through her relationship with the Mirabilis, ancient plants, listens to the cosmos. She listens to her elders, the earth, fire and air. The drought calls the rain, the ashes show the way, the plants tell her the stories of colonization, of the beginning of the world when the desert was still scrubland and there were trees and flowers.
"The human ear. A gatherer of energy. A gatherer of sound. RPMs and BPMs. Satellites go up to the sky."
In the video Satellite, Nelson Henricks combines found footage and techno beats to question western society's ongoing obsession with science, technology and the future. Juxtaposing images derived from old educational films with absurd, aphoristic slogans, Henricks offers up a witty, entertaining and provocative commentary of our need to make sense of everything, at any cost.
A portrait of Luce Vigo, film critic, educator, and the daughter of pivotal French filmmaker Jean Vigo. Commissioned by the Spanish documentary festival, Punto de Vista, the film incorporates Luce's memories of her extraordinary life, reflections on her father, and images of Northern Spain.
