Landscape

China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to "be wired" and in turn, to be connected, in today's global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire--in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China--and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct.

Going Around In Circles continues Holt's interest in perception and point of view. A board with five circular holes is placed in front of the camera. The holes are covered and uncovered to reveal five people enacting a set of activities that involves walking between five spots and turning in circles.

The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.

“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”

-- Graham Harvey, Animism

Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.

"A group of students and teachers gather in an historical mansion in the woods of West Virginia for a week-long retreat in spoken Latin. I observe and I participate while navigating the errata with my camera."

— Sky Hopinka

Here You Are Before the Trees is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

Here You Are Before the Trees traverses Indigenous presence in the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and the areas in-between. Each screen focuses on different homelands and their complex relationships with history, landscape, power and institutional means of oppression. 

The fear of bridges.

The Situated Cinema Commission Project for WNDX - Winnipeg’s Festival of Film and Video art

Director of photography: Eric Cinq-Mars

Consultant: Daniel Watchorn

Music: Frères Lumières

Design: Sébastien Aubin

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.

C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 is a collaborative video and performance work by artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski. Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) present a full-spectrum video, set to a score by rock quartet Kinski.

Rosa Barba’s work Disseminate and Hold investigates man-made geographies and landscapes, and how these are often deeply enmeshed with political agendas and utopian visions.

Performance artist/sculptor Ana Mendieta used the raw materials of nature: water, mud, fire, rock, and grass. The consciousness of her politics and the poetics of her expression fill her work with an emotionally charged vision that is powerfully conveyed in this posthumous video profile. Drawing upon the raw spiritual power of Afro-Cuban religion, Mendieta used her art as a ritualistic and symbolic activity to celebrate the forces of life and the continuum of change.

An homage to Chicago's East 95th Street Bridge, Calumet Fisheries and to a couple of the city's infamous brothers.  The take-out shack, originally glimpsed in the background of a scene from The Blues Brothers, still operates.  It has become a real-world portal to a cinematic past.  Propped along the edge of the 95th street drawbridge, the building is framed by the towering infrastructures of the Chicago Skyway and Calumet Harbor.

In 2012, eteam visits Mars and Moon Townships in Pennsylvania. Using a documentary approach, they position themselves as cultural anthropologists who view the towns as if they were simulated environments on Earth, training grounds for eventual living on the planet Mars and Earth's satellite, the Moon.

eteam's book-form reinterpretation, Buzz Cut, will be included with every institutional purchase at no additional charge.

Beach House is a film about a unique example of rural modernism built on the UK coast of Suffolk by the architect John Penn. As well as being an architect, Penn was a painter, musician and poet. Beach House is one of nine houses Penn built across East Suffolk, each of which features designs of uncompromising symmetry, adhering to the points of the compass in their positioning in the landscape.

In this interview, African American filmmaker and DJ Ephraim Asili (b. 1979) discusses his upbringing, education, and creative process. Born and raised around the city limit of Philadelphia, Asili’s childhood and adolescence were imbued with hip hop music, Hollywood movies and television.

Diary of time spent in Oaxaca, Mexico over several years.

White Sands is an experiential film installation on the visible and invisible manifestations of the nuclear industry on the land, air, water and people of New Mexico.

Cinematography: Liz Cash
Hand Film Printing: Sylvain Chaussee, Niagara Lab
Sound design: Stephen Vitiello 

White Sands is available through Video Data Bank as a three-channel composite. 

Logging and approximating a relationship between audio recordings of the artist and his father, and videos gathered of the landscapes they both separately traversed. The initial distance between the logger and the recordings, of recollections and of songs, new and traditional, narrows while the images become an expanding semblance of filial affect. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.

This video shows the design and choreography of Eiko's three-channel installation on one screen. Each video was shot in California by Alexis Moh and Marjorie Hunt during a creative residency at UCLA in April 2019. 

In a gallery, three sequences are projected on three different adjacent walls or shown on three monitors separately. Eiko "choreographed" 17-min sequences of three videos, considering the overall dynamic and how they are aligned. This is a shortened version.

Documentation of Eiko performing in the installation space is available by request.

This absurdist, microscopic film noir follows the activities of an underground network of ill people, desperate to create alternative methods of self-care in a world where natural resources are disappearing. While examining the meaning of health, disease, and well-being in the post-industrial world, Apple Grown In Wind Tunnel imagines the development of a culture at the margins, linked by illicit radio broadcasts, toxic waste sites, the highway, and ultimately by the overwhelming desire to find a cure.

The third in a film triptych, Lefkosia was shot from within UN controlled territory on the border between south Cyprus and the Turkish occupied North. Like the previous two parts, this episode explores the landscape’s composition along the current borders of Europe. It presents a silent camera traveling along a heavily guarded border, where even photography is forbidden without permission.

This title is only available on Radical Closure.

In Tree Song, Eiko & Koma continue their exploration of the body as a part of the landscape and the landscape as an extension of the body. Trees have been symbols of resilience, rebirth and portals through which spirits pass. Tree Song honors the iconography of trees and the primal mysteries of landscape and the human body.

Originally part of a larger sculptural installation using prospector's tools, this tape reenacts the search for "Olga," a miner's wife who disappeared on her honeymoon in 1936. As Paul and Marlene Kos call out, "Olga... Olga...", the camera scans the Wyoming wilderness, and their search becomes ritualistic, the repetitive calls building in intensity and breaking down into chanted moans.

Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan.

A hallucinatory portrait of a man traveling from Finland to Greece in search of the utopian summit described in René Daumal's Mount Analogue (1952) - a fictional mountain floating in the sea. Equal parts non-fiction cinema, concert film, road movie and spirit quest, our protagonist's journey is accompanied by immersive musical performances from Finnish guitar trio Olimpia Splendid and American percussionist Greg Fox.

Director / Editor / Camera Operator - Ben Russell
Steadicam Operator - Chris Fawcett

"...a rumination, a series of borrowed 'dialogues' out of an ongoing argument with myself. It meanders, mentally and physically, reflecting on the conditions of being human; on transience, consciousness and desire. It uses landscapes as provocations, as sites of contemplation. And between the landscape and the thought, i.e. between the radical presence of the physical world and the idea, there is, more often than not, a distance, disbelief or irony."

–– Ken Kobland