The threat of disaster heightens the shallow into prominence, making their eventual fall all the more poignant as we see through their protective garments to view an eager beaver on the prowl. But beavers build and rebuild, damming back the catastrophes that threaten us all with their sinister seepage.
You never thought that Franco-American relations could be so fun! A French thriller in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade, getting it on with Roger Corman's from-the-hip philosophy.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.
In a fictional conduit space, language and function are recontextualized as the HalfLifers struggle to re-assess the nature of their mission while engaged in an eternal cycle of maintenance and communication routines.
Alienation in academia beneath the chandeliered opulence of a political correctional facility that caters to clashing cultures with chicken fajitas and carefully worded alphabet soup. Features George at the Flaherty Seminar and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Behind the skyscraping walls of a neon lit asylum, the frustrated inhabitants therein erupt and engage in a psychological waltz that couple fact with fantasy in ways that open windows of the madhouse to the sanity of daylight.
This title comprises Grip of the Gorgon (2001), Midnight Mass (2006) and Celestial Murmurs (2006) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
As with his predecessor Ernie Kovaks, everything is fair game for ridicule in Dibble’s gentle and eccentric humor. Skillfully manipulating the video image in these brief sketches, Dibble gives us his view on subjects ranging from the practical application of Newton’s law, to the prospect of video dating. Born Yesterday includes:
1. Newton’s Law, 00:45
2. Mr. Dibble, 01:16
3. Three Things, 01:49
4. Video Dating, 05:38
5. Cantankerous Television, 3:44
“It’s spring, it’s spring, and I feel I’m giving birth myself, to something monstrous, something ugly.” Gibbons enters the woods to begin his destructive campaign against spring, snapping the buds off trees while babbling maniacally. Sabotaging Spring is an impressionistic peek at Gibbons’s paranoid fancy; he explains the facts of life, evolution, and whistling to his dog Woody.
This title is also available on Joe Gibbons Videoworks: Volume 1.
Colors swirl and shift amid pulsating blobs of light as a voice from the past takes us on an antiquated journey to the future and beyond. Revel in the mysteries of gizmo-channeled visuals and contactee gibberish as the geometric unknown gyrates before thine own eyes.
In this faux-recreation of a home-shopping network, Al Gore and George W. Bush offer you a 'super-premium' collectible lamp commemorating the 2000 presidential election.
"The gerbil has long been associated with New World capitalism because of its incessant energy. The Golden Age of Hollywood takes on the history and evolution of this delightful household pet."
— International Film Festival Rotterdam (2003)
— "Jim Finn's Wüstenspringmaus, a well-sprung, rear-screened account of a gerbil's life in the '70s."
— Guy Maddin, Film Comment, January (2004)
This title is also available on Jim Finn Videoworks: Volume 1.
A tour of literary scraps that litter the highway of lost souls in search of publications to be publicized. The crush of printed pulp as it smears its way through the various media that feed off its symbols and excesses. The lust of writers made pure by the whiteness of the sheets they imprint with the shadow markings of their Smith-Corona contraption as it keeps pounding late into the night.
“Christopher Wilcha’s fascinating feature-length video reminds us how seldom we’re allowed to see certain businesses operating from the inside. Wilcha, a 22-year-old college graduate and alternative-rock enthusiast, was hired by the Columbia Record and Tape Club—apparently as a fluke—to help launch a whole new niche-marketing division, which brought him face-to-face with the contradictory meanings of the term ‘alternative’ once it’s been embraced by the mass market.
One minute, two mysteries: The shelf-life of genius and why we try to make pictures when, as Robert Lowell put it, "No voice outsings the serpent's flawed, euphoric hiss.
This title is also available on Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 3.
A mother sews; a son yearns for meat; a friend relives the past via glamour shots of a forgotten slab of cheesecake that ferments off-camera. A slice of life with the bowl of cherries missing. A brief visit to a corner of the world that locks itself away with crunchy carbohydrates and six-inch protein protuberances.
This science fiction adventure centers on the interaction between a crew of Earthmen and their seduction by the love-hungry Amazons of the red planet, Mars. The tale is brought to life with all the opulence that an $800 budget can produce and the young cast of non-actors live up to their fullest foibles as the plot thickens with a mix of romance and wartime action intertwined with a musical number or two. The ambitions were high and the necklines low in this effects-laden tribute to pulp fiction fantasy and intergalactic intercourse.
This rapid-montage music video for John Sex’s song “Hustle with My Muscle” portrays the singer as a ladies’ man with ample endowment to share. “Can you handle all the man below my belt?” he provocatively asks.
This title is only available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.
Brave new shopping worlds are being created. What have mall owners, architects, surveillance technicians, and supermarket workers done to turn human subjects into pure streams of consumers, into the perfect inhabitants of shopping mall paradise?
Bill Murray and Christopher Guest lead a behind-the-scenes tour of the 1976 showdown between the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers. This irreverent view of football and America's number one sports event examines the "Woodstock of corporate America" from the viewpoint of the players, the wives, the fans and the media. The big business of sports, the high stakes, the pressures, the cost in health and happiness are all covered in this kaleidoscopic view of another American ritual.
"I just can't resist trying to empathize with animals and plants. I think that in the process of attempting to learn what it's like to be an animal or plant, I learn more about what it means to be human."
--Sam Easterson
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.
A wide-ranging look at pictures I collect on my walls and in my head. A look at pictures I concoct with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute, and objects d’art collected by those whose picture is taken by my picture-taking machine.
“To master the one-minute time span requires considerable discipline, and few pieces, if any, had been shaped as genuine miniatures—most having the appearance of being extracts from larger works. The notable exception was John Smith’s Gargantuan, which was not only the right length for the idea, but actually incorporated a triple pun on the word ‘minute.’”
— Nicky Hamlyn, “One Minute TV 1992”, Vertigo (Spring 1993)
"A wonderfully witty example of how to conduct pillow talk with a small amphibian."
— Elaine Paterson, Time Out London
The rocks are red, the mood is blue, the sky is big, and the scars on the earth run deep as a man and woman shop incessantly for nature's bounty and the trinkets of a vanishing culture.
A college girl runs rampant through young lives at Sarah Lawrence College and leaves behind the rubble of shattered souls and deflated desires that litter the halls of learning-by-hard-knocks!
In a world of Internet and high technology, there still remains something so arcane, so simple and extraordinary, so absolutely incredible as a circus of educated fleas. Marvel at Maria Fernanda Cardoso's work as the powerful Brutus (The Strongest Flea on Earth) pulls a locomotive that weighs 160,000 times his own weight. See the flea ballerinas dressed in micro-tutus, dance to the rhythms of Tango! Hold your breath as the highwire artists defy gravity on the tightrope and swing precariously on a miniature trapeze.
