3 Peonies is a brief, poetic 16mm film of a simple sculptural action. What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. The reverence for beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field painting of high modernism that, in many cases, eschewed the banality of such ‘natural’ beauty.
To better understand what he has, filmmaker Cam Archer revisits former subjects, rephotographs them, and seeks new inspiration.
“When I moved to Hudson Valley, NY state in 1984 after being tied to Tehching Hsieh in his ART/Life: One Year Performance, I began meeting remarkable elders over 80, and sometimes 90, years old. They became my mentors, guides, friends, helpers and spiritual directors. I took hours and hours of my footage to video artist Tobe Carey and he and I collaged it together collaboratively to make this document of these helpers along the way.”
--Linda Montano
...a meditation on a familiar New York city space in which memories, fantasies and the maniacal intertwine.
With David Warrilow and Nancy Campbell.
–– Ken Kobland
Ann Cvetkovich is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of a number of books and works also with documentary film, memoirs, music and dance performances, and visual art. Her work focuses on feminist and queer theory, affect and feeling, trauma, theories of the archive and oral history.
Morel's Yellow Pages focuses on secretive and destructive actions and image making. The title references The Invention of Morel (1940), Adolfo Bioy Casares’s science fiction novel, which informs the work. The artist brings together her research into the use of Baltra Island as an air base for the US army during World War II, and aerial surveillance photographs of the islands, using film footage, documents, and factual information collected during her trip to the Galápagos. Morel's Yellow Pages interweaves fact and fiction, covert and imagined activities.
"This is the first of a set of pieces that involve combining a series of electronic video process recordings, musics, texts and appropriated materials. These multiple elements, simple and tricky grammars, trigger expanding electronic narratives. The trajectories and drags of multiple narratives color the electronics and visa a versa.
Each year, crowds of Turkish, Australian and New Zealander tourists travel to Gallipoli, Turkey for a modern day pilgrimage. They honor their fallen soldiers who lost their lives in the Gallipoli/Çanakkale Campaign—one of the bloodiest conflicts of World War One—, which is considered as a defining moment in the establishment of the Turkish nation state as well as the beginning of national consciousness in Australia and New Zealand. With heightened emotions, they move around the historical battlefields, graves and war monuments with the help of guided tours tailored for each community.
Small biographies and musing generalizations--men’s relations to each other and their lives. There is hope and loneliness, companionship and isolation and the simplest of filmic elements to contrast the complexity of human emotions. The delicacy of the formalist writing moves the listener from intimacy to universalism and back again, swaying gently to and fro like the rocking of a ship. The minimalism of the photographic presentation allows the viewer to recognize the humanity in each individual document of a body.
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.
Tell Me About Your Mother investigates matrilineal lineage, domesticity and creativity. Intimate and conversational, seven female artist friends and colleagues of mine—mostly boomers—recount their mother’s creative influence upon them. Additionally, each woman discusses the unique way(s) she distinguished herself from her mother.
"Real time digital buffer recording, light bulb, panning camera motor and turntable. Light Bulb, the title says it almost all. Real time recording events. Two cameras, light bulb, camera panning motor, electric lazy susan, spinning white paper rectangle for the clip. Using the first digital video frame buffer I built together with David Jones, video buffer number one with variable clock. Several minutes of Rube Goldberg like digital electronics and optical props and motors. No computer, just entergetic digital slivers, shimmering and shattering."
– Peer Bode
A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a re-cataloguer, a gay man, a watcher, an impersonator. He passes his time collecting images that he puts before us – his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we share his cloak of invisibility, both a benefit and a curse.
Futures for Failures is a double narrative of failure: architectural and social. Archival footage from a demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe building in St. Louis manifests as the materialization of modernity’s failure. Meanwhile, an intimate voiceover recounts a moment of laughter erupting during a stranger’s funeral, staging anachronous conversation between the disappeared and the disappearing.
You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born is a visually stunning work that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage and loss, but in which she finds humor, love, and joy. With a score that follows the span of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the early 70s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from moments of harrowing loss to those of poignancy and dark humor.
The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century.
"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."
— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018
In(sul)ar marks the dichotomy between reality and fiction, by creating meta-images of an imagined island, where time and space are confused with each other. In(sul)ar reflects the relation between space, memory and history, as well as the mapping of the body and its relation with architecture, and identity. A women walks through spaces of ruin and old erased memories in spaces located in Azores, an Island in the Atlantic which is at the crossroads in between Europe and Africa.
"Look at a landscape and imagine a different one there. Touch the body and let it slip from memory. Imagine a desert when what you see is winter. The filmmaker evokes a territory where fragile shifts—the links between things, emotions, and places—materialize and dematerialize."
—Nicole Gingras
This title is also available on Nelson Henricks Videoworks: Volume 1.
Through collage, Alazeef shows the dreams and the fears of a typical Iraqi soldier, a week before the 1991 Desert Storm, compared to the huge war machine. Through poetic narration, Alazeef humanizes the "enemy" and separates the people and soldiers on both sides from political agendas. The control of the mise-en-scene gives the film a radiant surreal feeling.
Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer is a two-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the two channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
“When I moved to Hudson Valley, NY state in 1984 after being tied to Tehching Hsieh in his ART/Life: One Year Performance, I began meeting remarkable elders over 80, and sometimes 90, years old. They became my mentors, guides, friends, helpers and spiritual directors. I took hours and hours of my footage to video artist Tobe Carey and he and I collaged it together collaboratively to make this document of these helpers along the way.”
--Linda Montano
A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to the power structures they are inherently part of. Each woman extends her reach to a subject she is outside of. Vever grew out of the abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti.
A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke Loa, or god.
Emerging from one reel of Super 8 film and a brief prompt given to a group of friends, Keep in Touch gestures a sense of being together-in-difference that brushes against the fleeting, unstable solidarity. Fragmented with moments of silence, uneasy gossip, and coded bodily communication, the work consider the complexity of contact, touch and becoming a subject.
The Diaspora Suite
Filmed on location in Salvador, Brazil (the last city in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery) and Harlem, NY ( an international stronghold of the African Diaspora), Many Thousands Gone draws parallels between a summer afternoon on the streets of the two cities. A silent version of the film was given to jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to use an interpretive score. The final film is the combination of the images and McPhee’s real time “sight reading” of the score.
This is the audiovisual translation of the Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History.
