Music

Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escourts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.

A structure of Lawrence Weiner. Based upon the LP Niets Aan Verloren (1976) and the performance tape Niets Aan Verloren (1984).

Players: Alice Zimmerman, Sophie Calle, Peter Gordon, Kim Gordon, and Kirsten Vibeke Thueson; Still photography: Alice Zimmerman; Photography: Moved Pictures; Computer editing: K. Hassett; Voices: Coosje Van Bruggen and Lawrence Weiner

This title is also available on Lawrence Weiner: There are Things that Move Outside of Motion.

Utilizing a four-way split screen, Divided Alto documents Landry’s improvised flute performance—focusing on the harmonics of the instrument as he plays double and triple chords. The camera centers on the elements that make the music—the mouth and fingers of the musician—as the music moves from counterpoint to synchronization, establishing rhythms that ebb and resurface.  The tape is double-tracked in stereo, video, and audio.

A Sly and the Family Stone tarmac arrival as a point of departure.

This title is only available on Can You Move Like This: Black Fire.

Starting with an activity as basic as four hands clapping, Landry composes an arresting visual documentation of the fundamentals of music through a play of visual and sonic rhythms. Landry considers these movements “imaginary hand exercises for beginning drummers.”  As disembodied hands swim through shallow space, a strobe light freezes them in the process of clapping, creating a mesmerizing play of eye-ear coordination.

This title was part of the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection. 

In 1985, Hassan Zbib and Olga Nakkas separately started to develop film scenarios based on simple narratives, and would shoot them on Super 8, which was still possible to develop in Beirut at the time. Their work featured the city as a stage where lonely characters drifted: a taxi driver in his car, a man walking around, talking to a Rambo poster.

This music video for the band Julie Ruin, fronted by Kathleen Hanna, formerly of Bikini Kill, critiques the cynical music marketeers of corporate America. Criticism particularly targets campaigns aimed at women, which Benning and Hanna refer to here as the "Girls Rule (kind of) Strategy."

In this video diptych, Snyder uses image and music to depict opposing forces in semi-abstract terms. Exploring processes of fracture and permutation, Hard and Flexible Music contrasts two groups of images, gridded architectural structures and fluid natural imagery, on opposite sides of the screen. The experimental music soundtrack carries two synthesized tracks with differing musical qualities.

This title is also available on Bob Snyder: Sound and Video 1975-1990.

Kuyenda N’kubvina looks at how thought and culture propagate in the slender nation of Malawi. Weaving our way through video halls, book stores, dance floors and radio stations, in cities and small villages, we meet Malawians who traffic in ideas, reflecting the rhythms of Malawian contemporary life. The video was instigated by the filmmaker’s relative ignorance about the people and culture of southeast Africa, and accompanies her as she seeks out individuals and infrastructures that channel and articulate Malawian identity.

Martin Sorrondeguy, former vocalist for Los Crudos, produced this powerful and uplifting documentary about the U.S. Latino punk scene and the DIY movement. The video features live performances by bands, including Huasinpungo, Los Crudos, Subsistencia, Sbitch, and many more.

Patti Smith asked if I would do a short film to accompany the release of her version of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. As neither of us are fans of the music video format or industry, we approached the project as a short film, with no lip sync, that would simply try to get at the heart of her version of the song. I shot in Super 8 film and pulled a few things from my archive. The film is a domestic portrait of Patti and her son, Jackson. William Blake was invited in the form of a plaster cast of his death mask.

An experimental video for electro-feminist-performance-artists Le Tigre, the early eighties MTV aesthetic unpacks a thoroughly current obsession: the hidden erotics of office supplies.

This title is also available on Elisabeth Subrin Videoworks.

A series of unnatural deaths and departures (almost all, of men) disrupts the lives of nine families sharing an apartment building in Jerusalem.

An erotic/mystical misadventure in which the allure of the religious path is strewn with earthly temptations. Struggling with a bogus Zen koan involving flowers in keyholes and jumping through windows, the protagonist will end up entering, by the conclusion, the realm of subatomic particles, thereby achieving transcendence-of-a-sort. On the soundtrack, operatic quotations comment ironically (and sometimes sincerely) on the visual proceedings.

On the Way to the Moon, We Discovered the Earth is a short film that remixes archival material from a prominent mainstream newspaper printed during the New York City Blackout in July 1977. The 1977 New York City Blackout is cited as the official birth of hip-hop, wherein looters took equipment that allowed them to formalize and professionalize hip-hop. Titled after a quote by an astronomer looking back at the Earth during the Apollo space mission, this kaleidoscopic film hints at a cultural moment of rupture and reinvention that transcends resilience.

Plowman's Lunch is called a documentary because its intent was to explore actual occurrences—be these the building of the work, or what befalls the players. It still uses an open form, but the characters are more developed; they have "names," and some of the scenes were truly dangerous for them to produce. As in the other films (with the exception of Done To) there is a nucleus of three characters—two women (Boris and Jamiee), and one man (Steentje, a tranvestite/hermaphrodite). The music, composed expressly for the piece, is harmonious with its developments.

These five short videos introduce Judy, a paper maché puppet who ruminates on her position in society. Like Judy, of the famous Punch and Judy puppet duo, Benning’s Judy seems to experience the world from the outside, letting things happen to her rather than making things happen around her.

This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 3.

Mr. Thomas is in the back garden, performing his new moves in the glorious sunlight, making things happen. Somewhere between ritual, a white suburban war dance and 1970's "keep fit" exercise to lovely music, Mr. Thomas tries to coordinate with the Black Blob, that persistently undermines the nature of his representational space...

And the song goes:

We've only just begun to live

White lace and promises

A kiss for luck and we're on our way...

Drink Deep is a lyrical vision of friendship, hidden secrets, and desires. Cohen uses several types of film image to add texture to the layered composition. Beautiful shades of grey, silver, black and blue echo the water, reminiscent of early photography and silverprints. Cohen says, "The piece was constructed primarily from footage I’d shot of skinnydippers at swimming holes in Georgia and rural Pennsylvania. It’s about water and memory and stories just submerged. It is also, in part, a response to thinking about censorship.

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

Joan Logue cuts down considerably Andy Warhol’s projection of fifteen minutes of fame, with this compilation of 30-Second Spots. Produced to be broadcast as individual, mini-documentaries on the included artists and their work, Logue’s short interpretive video pieces feature a prime time selection of over twenty New York performance artists, composers, dancers and writers, including Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, David Behrman, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Douglas Ewart, Simone Forti, Jon Gibson, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray, Joan Jonas, Bill T.

This compilation features 11 of Jem Cohen's collaborations with musicians. Made on 16mm, Super 8 and Video, the works include the music of R.E.M., Gil Shaham and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Void, Elliot Smith, Jonathan Richman, Miracle Legion and Olivier Messiaen.

Nightswimming

John Cage’s compositions and performances have had a profound influence on generations of musicians and artists. In this tape, he initiates For the Third Time as author Richard Kostelanetz interviews him. “I’ve left the punctuation out, but I’ve distributed it by chance operations on the page, like an explosion,” Cage says. “You can replace the punctuation where you wish.”

An alternative earth music video. An epic last stand. A portrait of two utilitarian workers engaging in a collaboration with Karen, manifesting improvisational geographic friendships...

This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.

Through distorted audio and visual representations of interviews with music journalists, this video critiques the mass media’s treatment of the rap group Public Enemy, and accusations that their lyrics are anti-Semitic. This experimental documentary includes scenes from Public Enemy performances and music videos, as well as archival footage of the Black Power movement and Malcolm X. Know Your Enemy details the war being waged by black artists on the battleground of representation, a struggle against forms of expression which are already co-opted.