Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.
In From Fagtasia to Frisco, Brenda and Glennda report from Fagtasia, an event honoring the Summer Solstice in New York organized by the Radical Faeries. Through interviews with Faeries and footage of their walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, the group proposes to reclaim the city as a safe space for queer people, and discuss reorienting queer consciousness toward spirituality.
A collaboration with writer Luc Sante made in Tangier, Morocco, a city where neither of us had ever been. En route from the airport to the city center, we found ourselves amazed by the landscape outside of the car windows; a massive construction project under way in all directions. While not in itself unusual, we were by struck dumb by the epic scale and seemingly incomprehensible plan of the development and were drawn to return together to this puzzling zone.
-- Jem Cohen
A one-hour heliocopter flight over the suburban sprawl of Long Island to Fresh Kills, the New York City Landfill on Staten Island; accompanied by an operatic audio-mix of bad-mouth talk-radio mayhem and historic nostalgia.
E42 is a cinematic exploration of the area in Rome knows as the EUR, a modernist landscape that was originally designated by Mussolini as the the site of the World Fair of 1942 and as a celebration of the 20 year anniversary of Fascism. Originally designed as a monumental space for public performance and collective acts of solidarity to the Fascist regime, this landscape was in fact never inaugurated.
In November of 2004, I was invited to spend a couple of weeks in Cinque Terre (a string of towns along the Northern Mediterranean Italian coast). The area has been listed as a World Heritage Site, by UNESCO, because of its exquisite coastline and the hill towns which cluster on its rocks. Indeed, one is easily overwhelmed by the place, the extraordinary beauty of the light and color, the geometry of the towns and the incredible way humans have inhabited the landscape.
A nocturnal COVID-19 memoir.
Piano assemblage and image sequencing by Bob Snyder. Images by Sara Livingston.
While out shooting for a different project altogether, I encountered two sleeping men on a Manhattan street. A short time later, I was standing in front of Pennsylvania Train Station with the camera on a tripod, when one of the men suddenly reappeared. He stepped in front of my camera and began to speak, about his path in the U.S. military, from Panama to Afghanistan to Iraq, about his life. I decided to limit the piece to what I shot in that area in those few hours, with one key addition: the text from a classic children's rhyme.
–Jem Cohen
In this tape the Videofreex document an impromptu experimental art gathering in 1971, hosted by New York artist, Tosun Bayrak. Before entering the gathering, the Freex record their encounters with a police officer, passersby, and a member of Vegetarians for Ecological Action (an animals’ rights activist group) protesting the misuse of animals in performance art.
In this early Tom Rubnitz, Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken collaboration, "Frieda" performs her rap song with a bevy of dolls as back-up singers and dancers. Features rock-bottom production values and song lyrics by Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken.
The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.
Babeldom is a city so massive and growing at such a speed that soon, it is said, light itself will not escape its gravitational pull. How can two lovers communicate, one from inside the city and one outside? This is an elegy to urban life, against the backdrop of a city of the future, a portrait assembled from film shot in modern cities all around the world and collected from the most recent research in science, technology and architecture.
"It’s a complex architectural vision equal parts awesome and terrifying… This is a film – and city – to get lost in."
El Zócalo is an observational portrait of Mexico City’s central Plaza de la Constitutión during one day in August. Soldiers, Aztec dancers, clowns, food vendors, protestors, rain, dogs, tourists, kites, balloons, and dignitaries all meet in the public space of the Zócalo. This documentary presents daily life in one of the largest and most vibrant urban centers in the world, but it begins with a dream of history and ends with a dream of the space full of people for a Zapatista rally.
On September 11, 2021, Eiko Otake performed at 7am and 6pm at Belvedere Plaza in Battery Park City by the Hudson River, directly west of where the Twin Towers once stood. This video work is from the 6pm performance.
Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.
Do Not Circulate, an experimental short film, attempts a structuralist and materialist approach to unraveling the entrails of a collective media memory. Paced by an essay as a relentless voiceover, the film rips footage that challenges the materiality, ownership and legal boundaries of documentation.
Long for the City is a short portrait of Patti Smith in the city where she lives. Patti recites the very first poem-song she ever wrote, and then a later one, "Prayer", from the early 1970s. We take a walk in her changing neighborhood, and I ask her what she saw. Footage was shot in the moment, as well as drawn from the archive I've gathered over many years. Long for the City can be considered a non-musical companion piece to the music short, Spirit, which we collaborated on in 2007.
Your Money or Your Life is a video essay on street crime, and on the role played by an atmosphere of pervasive (white) urban fear in structuring and renewing racial antagonism and inequality. At the center of the video is a young, white, middle-class woman caught in an ideological trap in which her genuine fear, whetted and animated by the media, becomes synonymous with racial suspicion and hostility. Her counterpart is a black mugger, who tells a story of unemployment, powerlessness, ambition and cynicism, unmasking an ethos not dissimilar to the ethos of American capitalism.
Elle is an experimental dance film shot in a semi industrial landscape in Brooklyn reflecting on every day movements of falling and getting up.
Cinematography: Carolyn MaCartney
Choreography: Eleanor Hullihan and Katy Pyle Dancers, Eleanor Hullihan, Katy Pyle, Beth Gill, Emily Wexler Music, Zeena Parkins
Editor: Geoffrey Pugen
A Memory of Astoria, commissioned for Museum of the Moving Image, is an impressionistic portrait of the blocks surrounding the Museum in Astoria, New York. Artist Ezra Wube walked the neighborhood to observe the area’s confluence of cultures, focusing on everyday moments, sights, and sounds. He reconstituted these experiences into a poetic visual collage, inserting himself as a silhouetted observer exploring the memories of his walks.
Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a mircrocosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.
"... Basma Alsharif’s Home Movies Gaza, a film that captures the impossibly politicized domestic sphere of the Gaza Strip, under the constant hum and buzz of overhead drones."
Toxic pigments of lust stain an artist’s brush as he struggles against lurid colors on the canvas of his life, – a "life" in brick jungles wit sordid, dark alleys on neon-lit avenues where he got lost… Will he, can he, find a new, unsoiled canvas on which to paint a better life?
The scene: the industrial neighborhood of Gowanus, Brooklyn.
The players: wind, a flooded road, passersby, and birds...
The time: shortly before the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
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 fragmented view of a city provides this poetic examination of disclosing and withholding—what is and isn’t seen, and once it is seen, how is it read?
