Filmed directly from the screen of a smartphone using a language translator app that has been told to translate from French into English, Steve Hates Fish interprets the signage and architecture in a busy London shopping street. In an environment overloaded with information, the signs run riot as the confused and restless software does its best to fulfill its task.
The New York City summer is fueled by the sultry emanations of hot air that tumble off the tongues of potential thespians as they attempt to decipher the gastric guesswork embedded in the prose of the pre-production process. The video camera flits across the boroughs of NYC in a splash-dash sojourn of sumptuous banquets and bohemian bombast, while the down-to-earth wisdom of the seeing impaired helps to guide the protagonist into detours of wisdom befitting his putrid project.
Palestine, April 15th-16th 2007
Moving from one hotel in Bethlehem to another in East Jerusalem, the filmmaker encounters a series of problems involving a ceiling, a video camera and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Dirty Pictures is the seventh episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world's hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.
Attempting to apologize for the lack of good weather in Weather Diary 3, George arrives in Milwaukee only to find the drought back in full swing. Since there’s not enough good weather, the tape becomes a social diary against the backdrop of the Motivation Of The Carcasoids project.
The splendor of a mountain lake is clouded by the musings of a brain in memory mode. The head relives the heartbreak of suburbia and the vacancies that fill every motel on the edge of nowhere. The body moves through a rainbow palette of indelible stains that color the journey with the hues of heaven and hell.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
This real-time video-meets-digital-animation trilogy of shorts features the highly excited and mildly delusional Joe Gibbons. As the phony, Gibbons recounts his influence among rock legends Iggy Pop and Brian Wilson. Brilliant superimposed computer animation by Emily Breer provides an additional layer of biting commentary.
This title is only available on Kip Fulbeck Selected Videos: Volume One.
A holiday video of good cheer and feline ferocity, this annual tradition of videotaped festivities centers on the oriental and occidental tidbits that make the season worthy for bipeds on wheels as they pedal from one calorie laden event to another. Along the way we meet many champs and chumps as they chomp away at the remaining moments of 2003. Ahead lie the lumpy treats of a New Year in need of NutraSweet.
Psykho III The Musical is an intriguing play on the tension between “authentic” and “pop” camp. This celebration of artifice was originally written, directed, and produced by Mark Oates as a stage musical parody following the release of Psycho II in 1983, and was performed at the East Village’s most notorious nightspot — The Pyramid Club. In 1985, after a wildly successful run, Oates reached out to longtime friend and Downtown video artist Tom Rubnitz to produce a video adaptation of the stage musical.
"Starring an inflatable wig holder that I got at a car boot sale in Bremen, Germany, this film began as a demonstration of different film animation techniques, but evolved into a bizarre improvised narrative in which the head escapes from the violent clutches of a mixed-up model girl, is sent to Poland in a wicker basket, where it has a nice holiday (I took it on holiday to Poland with me and animated it in the countryside), and finally returns on the ferry."
-- Jennet Thomas
Super 8 film, cut-out animation, model and object animation.
A high-pitched melodrama featuring the noise saturated spiritual journey of a vegetarian youth embroiled in big city shenanigans and occult extravaganzas. Along the way we meet a crippled and lovely conservationist, fiery latin lovers, a Loch Ness monster and a wide assortment of characters from the gutter and the galaxy. There is a seance and a seduction at Castle Kebrina along with a glimpse of Armageddon and a repetitive message from the future that booms new age nuances into the snap, crackle and pop stew.
A bullet fired by two children travels on and randomly, intervening in a series of scenes in Oursler’s quirky, dismal puppet land. The bullet kills a suicidal man, re-aligns an antenna, strikes a prize stud bull, and ultimately impregnates a woman by passing through her neighbor’s left testicle, then lodging in her ovary. In this metaphor for the spread of violence in society, the bullet represents destructive forces of accidental death and the sexual forces that create new life.
Rubnitz’s short cooking clip showcases a chicken casserole recipe from the kitchen of Elaine Clearfield. All you need is chicken, rice, a packet of Lipton onion soup mix, a can of cream of mushroom condensed soup, and water!
This title is only available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.
Fantasy Suite was the last standard definition video I made from VHS tapes. Like WHS VHS #1, I made it to premiere at Roots & Culture’s Zummer Tapez, and speed manipulation figured heavily into its construction (the Bachelor material was not interesting or even tolerable at normal speed, but slowed down slightly, it became fascinating to me). Shana Moulton’s work was a strong influence on this video (I programmed my piece to play after hers in the Zummer mixtape), hence the animated facial masks and SkyMall imagery.
Cameras aim and click in this breezy short that blows hot and cold kisses to the "Big Apple" below and the maple leaf above and beyond the northern border of this great nation. Harmonize with the hairy (bleached or flea-powdered) as they smoke or yelp in unabashed abandon to the tune of time zones we all share.
When everyone has forgotten the romantic refrains of the Internationale sung in different languages, Pablito, a blue front Amazon parrot, capable of living to 100 years old, will remember. He rings bells and is learning to whistle, hum and sing the Internationale in French, Spanish and German.
Covid Messages is a video in six parts, based around broadcasts of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 press conferences. The work focusses on the British government’s attempts to eliminate the virus through the use of magic spells and rituals. While the pandemic spreads and the death toll rises, the Prime Minister makes repeated errors of judgement. Exasperated by his many mistakes, the spirits of the dead rise up and intervene.
Scenes from a vacation. Music comes on loud and clear and washes over a series of visual impressions of the land and the sky and the faulty plumbing that submerges porcelain bottoms in a sea of unmentionable froth.
This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.
Taking queer artistic license, Dougherty and Leslie Singer together portray a gay male playwright who took 1960s London by storm. The result is a witty play on narcissism and split personality that captures the banality of stardom while paying tribute to promiscuity and transgression. Filmed in black and white pixelvision and color video, this tape continues Dougherty’s exploration of counter-culture identity through lesbian portrayal, the same ingenious bait-and-switch device seen at work in the lesbian portrayal of the Beatles in her earlier tape, Grapefruit.
The Bible Belt is exactly what its name implies: a belt attached to a bible that comes with a sturdy brass buckle, in the name of "Jesus", dipped in gold. We've created a special television spot of a televangelist selling the belt. Edited as a typical day of channel grazing and zapping, the televangelist plays between "real" television preachers and scrambled porn.
Magenheimer’s video explores the bounds of narrative and the illusion of received wisdom in the seven minutes and twenty-two seconds it takes to rob a house. Here, images of medieval art, popular cinema, and “live” news reportage speak candidly to the constructedness of all storytelling traditions.
Now Let Us Praise American Leftists is an experimental video animation that seeks to eulogize and ridicule the American leftist movement of the past century. Foregrounding the exclusionary nature of American leftist politics, and its persistent refusal to allow more diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation to enter into the larger political daialogue, the video presents representations of American leftists as they are: men with mustaches.
A voyage through a California Christmas that begins in the turd-smeared streets of San Francisco and ends in a botanical wonder of ethnic endurance and faith. A journey that incorporates pelicans, palaces, and platters of plenty. A season of joy bloated with the ephemeral gasses of religious fermentation and the iconography of a movie-land Madonna.
As a video journal shot by George Kuchar’s students in his Underground Drama class at the San Francisco Art Institute, George Kuchar Goes to Work offers a unique glimpse into the frenzied chaos that was his directing method. Documenting the production of a new video with the help of his class, Kuchar orchestrates everything from women in cages and flaming baby dolls to explosive blood splatters and ballet dancing. A high school student also happens upon the set during a visit to the college.
The place where my students and I confront each other and glimpse into a world infiltrated by beloved infidels.
