automatism and (-)(+) feedback is a 3:29-minute video made from shot footage of a 10-year-old child playing Zombie Smash on a handheld device. The video footage and sound have been repeatedly rescanned and resampled using a television and a number of old analog video cameras.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
A troubling relationship arose between the character played by Winona Ryder in the film Girl, Interrupted, the genuine depression experienced by the actress, and the shoplifting of which she was accused. Consisting entirely of clips from existing films, this video essay, which ultimately turns out to be profoundly personal, explores the possible links between depression and kleptomania.
This video proposes an ironic metaphor to grasp the follies of U.S. government action and inaction in Central America. The process of learning U.S. policy is similar to the process of a young child acquiring the principles of language. These dual senses of literacy operate on several levels, situating a child’s consciousness within the contradictions of history comments on the illusory innocence of childhood, and the unexamined, but real, guilt of the U.S. government, its supporters and clients.
Indians In Brazil is an educational series for Brazilian public schools that invites students to experience cultural diversity. Four teenagers are invited to discover a new world and participate in Indian daily life in two different communities. They show their emotions, curiosity and fears, and are surprised by their new friends. Part Two of the series, When God Visits the Village, sees the teenagers invited to visit the Kaiowá people in South Mato Grosso. Expecting something similar to the Krahô village they had earlier visited, they are at first shocked.
La Mesa explores the intersections of memory, identity and queer desire. It recreates fragmented and romanticized stories of a childhood in rural Mexico as told by the artist’s father. These disjointed vignettes are interwoven with queered reenactments of scenes from popular culture. The artist casts himself in the old Mexican films and American Westerns he grew up watching with his family in California. He appears as the romantic lead opposite the male actors, including Pedro Infante, Mexican national hero and the filmmaker’s childhood crush.
A documentary about the initiation ritual for young Xavante Indians, created during a training workshop for the Video in the Villages project. Invited by Divino from the Sangradouro village, one Suyú and four Xavantes Indians film together for the first time. While filming the ritual, various members of the village explain the significance of the complex ceremony’s elements.
Directed and photographed by Bartolomeu Patira, Caimi Waiassé, Divino Tserewahú, Jorge Protodi, Whinti Suyá; edited by Tutu Nunes.
In Xavante with English subtitles.
"It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were, but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves."
Budlong Memorial Middle School is heating up. Queer Teen Romance is a charmingly perverse homage to the after-school special that tackles bullying in a hormone-fueled flurry of forbidden sexual fantasy. When Bryce, the school bully, picks on outcast Kevin, a group of tough (and brightly accessorized) girls decide to teach Bryce a lesson. But maybe Kevin doesn’t want the pain to stop?
A fast-talking and fabulous teen recounts his experiences as an out and loud Toronto queer. With catty wit, he recalls his confrontations with straight students at school and his gay prom at a Toronto gay youth community center, told with a flair for drama and punctuated with enactments of his Wonder Woman fantasies. Fung keeps the format simple, giving voice to his subject.
A personal essay about connection and disconnection, in and through different realities.
Nest of Tens is comprised of four alternating stories which reveal mundane yet personal methods of control. These systems are derived from intuitive sources. Children and a retarded adult operate control panels made out of paper, lists, monsters, and their own bodies.
A two-part study of the self-sustaining lifestyle of a communal farm in Vermont.
Addressing the camera, Segalove confesses to plagarizing her 5th grade report, The Story of Coal.
Why do teenagers get drunk?
"Like Gaijin, these five videos were made very quickly. My goal was to make all five of them in the span of a workweek, one video a night. If I remember correctly, I succeeded with all but one of them (it took me a few nights to get The Biggest Night in Music just right). These videos were commissioned for and premiered in the April-May 2004 Dialogue with Pop exhibition at NYC’s The Tank."
"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.
The Turkish national anthem, regularly sung in schools on Mondays and Fridays, is recorded with Super-8 and video to capture the fragile links that tie young citizens to nationhood.
This title is only available on Radical Closure.
Videotaped on August 13th 1972, this tape features a number of scenes shot for Lanesville TV, including the Videofreex at the Catskill Game Farm shooting footage of the animals. There are some oddball images… a woman on an exercise machine, and someone in a gorilla suit brushing their teeth. A man named Steve Toomie from Tannersville, NY talks about Mountaintop Youth Group’s performances. There is the horse riding competition in Hunter. A little girl asks, “Are you the Lanesville Television guy?” and then shows her horse ribbon to the camera.
We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S.
A young girl buys a weird toy from a charity shop. She forms such an intense relationship with it that it develops special ways of communicating and a strange connection to her that seems to defy the laws of physics. As the situation escalates, it seems that repression is the only way forward. First conceived of as a kind of fairy tale that goes wrong, this is a piece about learning the “rules” of grown-up reality and an extrapolation of the consequences of “over-identifying” with toys. A digital video with digital video effects, live-action, and model/object animation.
Rosie Cutler, a middle school lunch lady, and TJ Fortune, a outcast student, have an unusual relationship. Mystically-minded and gender ambiguous, TJ recoils into an abandoned warehouse where he builds a massive sculptural shrine from discarded objects and trash. Through a dream Rosie makes intimate contact with a trans-worldly being who she hopes will bridge the gap between real and imagined to reveal truths about our world.
Told through the voices of three elderly South Carolinian's who reside in the homes in which they were born, Steven Go Get Me A Switch is an oral history mapping dichotomies of gender, familial mythologies, sexuality, and belief. A heavy use of symbolism comingles with suggestions of narrative proof. The desire to be good and the impossibility of such desire becomes a sharp inaudible pitch, like a dog whistles call to violence.
Back in the days of hippy bliss, Ulrike and her husband used to believe that the world would be revolutionized by their activities, consisting mainly of smoking pot and having sex. Thanks to a large family fortune, none of them has ever had to work for a living. But the ‘three generation millions’ – one generation makes it, the second maintains it and the third generation blows it – are slowly disappearing. So now the burden of maintaining the tower falls on the children, of whom Sirius (the Latin form of Osiris) actually seems to enjoy making money.
A 12-year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother (both played by July) speak to the public about going for the gold.
“As the film progresses through subtle editing-in-reverse, July reveals the world around the televised facade. ... [T]he 23-year-old performer convincingly plays both Dawn Schnavel and her mom, or rather, vanishes into them. What’s noticeable isn’t so much the ease with which July transforms herself into a pre-teen girl and an older woman but the similarities and differences between the daughter and the mother July becomes.”
Four Ikpeng children reply to a video-letter from the children of Sierra Maestra in Cuba, introducing their village, families, toys, celebrations, and ways of life with grace and lightheartedness. Curious to know about children from other cultures, they ask to continue the correspondence.
Direction and camera by Karané, Kumaré, and Natuyu Yuwipo Txicão; edited by Mari Corrê.
Part science movie, part storybook, Bug Girl is an ecological fable. A young girl has lost her cat. While searching for it she accidentally swallows a bee--her journey suddenly transforms into a visual tumble through nature, biology, and consciousness.
This title is only available on Soft Science.
