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Venice Underwater

Chip Lord

2013 00:24:10 Italy, United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9Video
Tags:
Documentary, Environment, Travel

Description

This observational documentary presents Venice as a city inundated with tourists as well as periodic bouts of high water. The tourists take pictures, and endure the flooded areas of Piazza San Marcos. On the canals, tourists ride in gondolas while workers collect the garbage, and others deliver building materials. In the fog we approach the Rialto Bridge and then move on towards Saluti. Here a ritual procession is in progress, an event held every year since 1643 when the plague ended. People light candles to remember ancestors in the church of Santa Maria del Saluti while children hold helium balloons of colorful characters.

And here, no tourists are present.

—Chip Lord

 

Chip Lord has worked with video since 1971, first as a partner in the alternative media collective Ant Farm, and since 1978 as an independent artist/producer. With Ant Farm, he produced and co-directed the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame. His early work draws on documentary conventions, but during the '80s he moved toward experimental narrative with Easy Living, Ballplayer, and his first feature-length tape, Motorist. His more recent works return to non-fiction with the video essay The Aroma of Enchantment (1992), and Awakening from the 20th Century (1999). He produces video installations as well as single-channel tapes, and he is a Professor in the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.