A thirty-three minute video odyssey documenting one woman's search for the miracle of the Virgin Mary. A must-see for recovering Catholics and their families and friends worldwide. From Italy to Portugal, from France to Georgia, from Iowa City to Peru, Miracle recovers a newly-minted set of the Seven Deadly Sins on the way to immortalizing the latest modern religious trend: "Spiritual Tourism." Rated S for satirical.
The filmmaker accepts the challenge of the philosopher and changes not only a table but also chairs, shoes, jugs, teapots and almost everything else lying around his house.
"What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it and then when someone looks at it again changes back? But one feels like saying – who is going to suppose such a thing?"
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969)
The sun pretty much shines throughout this romp back East as waves crash against a land of plenty while the residents bathe in its nutritional offshoots. The artist Mimi Gross is seen sketching away while pets are pampered and the hefty get even bulkier on the vitamin-drenched shores of cranberry-bushed opulence. Even the city folk dabble in the colorful gaiety of multi-textured menus that create a montage of sea, sand, and crab dishes fit for a kingly queen. Relish in the splendors of a New England seascape and escape to New York with a tummy hungry for culture cramming.
A trip to Winnipeg introduces the viewer to moments of Canadian cuisine and to the easily digestible tidbits that make up the WNDX Film/Video Festival. Come join the movie buffs as they beef up on eye candy and tummy truffles, all the while indulging in a masticating miasma of minutia that's easy to swallow. Wash it all down with some river views and Mr. Coffee secretions and you'll get a taste of the treats that await all who head north to appease the more southerly rumblings of the human anatomy.
Burns and Discenza continue to battle invisible forces with the use of various children’s toys, cars and a mechanical digger, a paddling pool, rubber rings and ladders. Eventually they escape the scene of their distress in a hatchback car.
This title is also available on HalfLifers: Rescue Series and HalfLifers: The Complete History.
Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.
Which celebrity do you most resemble? For artist Kip Fulbeck, this question starts a rollicking ride that is part autobiography, part family portrait, part pop-culture survey, and all Disney* all the time. Watch as Fulbeck documents his uncanny resemblance to Pochahontas, Mulan, Aladdin, and other "ethnically ambiguous" animated characters. Both hilarious and touching, this educating video examines the muting of race in mainstream media and its effects on multiracial Americans. *Disney is a registered trademark of Disney Enterprises, Inc.
In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.
“A spoof on current art attitudes [that] stretches the definition of what can be considered art. Because the late 1960s and early 1970s were periods of innovation, using the human body as art, making process equivalent to product... [etc.], Baldessari questions that very sense of originality and exploration by taking it to its (rather mundane) limits. By taping a stick at one end, then picking it up at the other, he is both questioning and spoofing what constitutes art.” —Marcia Tucker, “John Baldessari: Pursuing the Unpredictable,” John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981)
Taped during the summer months in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. This vacation video explores the restrictions imposed by dietary fears and the need to appease fresh and rotten appetites. Encompassing both the splendors of a maritime nature and the land locked decadence of the delicacy dependent, the viewer is catapulted from a big city environment to a resort town mentality of mellowness and salt encrusted habits.
It's the season of joy once again and this video depicts the tasty and the troublesome in big, heaping spoonfuls. Witness a social whirlpool of whipped confections and stripped confessions tastefully prepared in soupy symbolism. See man and domesticated mammals share in the bounty of a cosmopolitan cornucopia. Feast your eyes and ears on the snap-crackle-and-pop culture of a city simmering in smut. Swallow it all in the 4:3 format and good luck in the digestive department.
A young painter, and his somewhat slower roommate, talk of paranormal occurrences in a room of charcoal canvasses and ephemeral renderings. Eavesdrop on the improbable and the impossible (BUT TRUE!).
"Brite Tip explores the indoctrination of children and police through an assortment of cross-fades, wipes, and other stock transitions. A highly danceable essay on breastfeeding."
—Gavin Smith
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.
“Living in Los Angeles is like being on vacation, or in a coma. I don’t really like it, but it’s so pleasant I don’t want to leave. I’ve only had one idea since I’ve been here and that was to video a cake in the rain in MacArthur Park. But it’s only rained once, briefly in the night, and I was asleep, and dreaming of snow.” —Steve Reinke
Less than two minutes long, this short tape makes playful and surreal use of video’s editing capabilities. Set to a sped-up version of The Band’s “The Weight” – complete with the falsetto vocals, and accelerated tempo that come with time manipulation on records – is a series of rapid, alternating washes and split-image cuts overlaying and juxtaposing the faces of the freex upon one another. Male faces and female faces fuse, the exact identity of the individuals becoming dissolving into ambiguity.
It’s the first day of autumn, and Gibbons can already smell death in the air. Leading us and his dog Woody on a walk through a cemetery, Gibbons voices his obsessive thoughts of death and destruction saying, “I want to be a leaf; I want to fall from a great height and crush whatever I land on.” Waxing weirdly philosophical, Gibbons satirically tries to impress the concept of mortality on his dog; the video, shot in Pixelvision, approximates his dog’s black-and-white vision.
Two young women confront careers in a world of violence, lust, and show-business. This student/teacher co-production I made at the San Francisco Art Institute is a colorful collage of digital dementia.
In this surreal experimental narrative, there’s something wrong with a patch of sky. As it travels over Southern England, objects cast up into it come down hugely enlarged, bloated. Meanwhile in London, the patch is in fact a troubling scab on a crippled old man’s head. As the scab develops, all he can do is wait, going through the changes, led on gently by the idiot-savant son with his childlike multiple identities.
“I thought perhaps you’d like to see a demonstration of the new massage chair that we just got in. It — the reason for its — it looks revolutionary, it doesn’t look really like a typical massage chair, and that’s because I think Mies van der Rohe had a part, or at least he was a consultant, to the firm that designed this…”. William Wegman opens the video short titled Massage Chair with this grand statement to describe what looks like an ordinary plastic chair. At first the artist’s head is cut from the frame, but he eventually sits down to “demonstrate” the extraordinary qualities of the chair.
George Barber doffs his cap to the 20th anniversary of Scratch Video with What’s That Sound?, a mesmerizing montage of questions, answers, and the cries and screams of people caught in a disaster movie. The work uses as its starting point, the film Airport '77 where, improbably, a jumbo jet sinks to the bottom of the sea. What follows is a clever amalgamation of absurd linguistics, cries and shouts, highlighting the artist’s permanent fascination with speech, and human reaction to out-of-the-ordinary situations.
A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person.
A pro-domme gives her friend a freshly shaved head. In return she gets a buzz cut. A client gets to be a (bound) fly on the wall.
This title is also available on Chicago Sex Change: 2002-2008, A collection of Minax's early videos that together create a punk-documentary tapestry of young queer life in Chicago in the early 2000s.
Meet local San Francisco artists and the pets of the culturally inclined, as George prepares to take a trip.
"This piece is sort of a prologue to East by Southwest. I prepare for that trip while visiting local artists here in San Francisco. You get to see unique sculpture by Mike Rudnick and meet the offspring and pets of the culturally inclined. There is also a gallery encounter with the late filmmaker, Curt McDowell, who attends an opening of his photomontages."
--George Kuchar
A black cat and a polka-dotted string puppet frolic amid the painted backdrops of a happy universe, while outside, in the real world, the reality washes away amid the onslaught of H2O and granulated granite. A merging of the plastic and the profane.
An ex-student of mine opens up in the privacy of her home and shows me her etchings (watercolors) as we talk of art and things that slip under the fabric of daily attire. - George Kuchar
