Diary

Clouds abound in this short meditation on vaporous masses that flow across the borders of our windowpanes, leaving in their wake the wreckage of discarded diets and sugar coated emptiness. Into those holes that surround us with the sweetness of puffy dough we plunge into a landscape of desolation and rebirth, never again to deny the terror that piles up in the sky like a malignant mound of virgin pudding. A mass of revolving turbulence hell-bent on defying gravity in the name of vertical instability and electrical insanity. A supercell for the supersized who flee its windy wrath.

A Prayer For Nettie dramatizes the death of an elderly woman who was Cumming’s photographic model from 1982 to 1993, presenting an improvised series of prayers and memorials for Nettie Harris by people who knew her, and some who did not. In its ambiguous mix of tenderness and aggression, A Prayer For Nettie extends the traditions of the grotesque and the absurd. The fervent prayers of the actors are undermined by indifference, forgetfulness, and the presence of the camera. In the end, comedy turns the tables on piety and remembrance as Nettie looks up from the grave.

Setting her pixelvision camera on herself and her room, Benning searches for a sense of identity and respect as a woman and a lesbian. Acting alternately as confessor and accuser, the camera captures Benning’s anger and frustration at feeling trapped by social prejudices.

This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1.

A tour of acting gigs that come my way and the people behind the cameras that aim at my expanding torso. A bloated ham in action on the West Coast and the thespians that rub shoulders with his hind quarters. Shot in San Francisco and Hollywood, USA.

Return to the House of Pain documents my walking through the turf and sludge of the Big Apple and many worm holes... I chomp my way back west and gnaw on all that sinks stomachward and beyond in vertiginous aching.

A series of vignettes, anemic in color, as the absence of light threatens the vibrancy of those depicted: a Bostonian painter and her bloated model. A brunette guitarist and her assault weapon on the ear drums, and a lady from London in makeup and mourning. A canvas of black dahlias and white noise intent on smothering life, limb and vocal chords.

Once again a seaside serenade of sloshing oils and simmering scallops fills the crannies of Cape Cod with dingle-berries of dubious delight!  Join a crew of crustacean craving civilians as they shuck their shells of inhibitions to become the truly truculent trespassers of a salty sanctuary.  Visit the chefs of chivalry as they skewer the squeamish with talons of titillating tidbits, each one a calorie crunching course in obese obtrusiveness and opulent oddness.  Come one, come all, and sample a smorgasbord of simple pleasures in this vacation video of vicarious vacillations.

A video diary about Cuthand's efforts to undergo artificial insemination. Cuthand contemplates a desire to have children and its relation to preserving Indigenous culture.

The waters run deep as massive jaws chomp and bubbles burst in a world gone mad with technological delusion and prehistoric puppetry.

A trip to Boston to visit a local filmmaker in his studio is followed by a journey to the cinematic facilities of SUNY College in Purchase, NY, and then to the kitchen and living quarters of my mother in the Bronx. My mother is in her most candid mode as we relate and debate. My brother Mike suffers dental woes, too.

A friend visits from Canada and we relive the past as the future becomes more and more obscured by a cloud of burning vegetation wrapped in cigarette paper and exhaled by a pair of lungs unable to supply a brain with the necessary oxygen (mercifully) to remember the past.

Kipnis describes this tape as "an appropriation of the aesthetics of both late capitalism and early Soviet cinema—MTV meets Eisenstein—reconstructing Karl Marx for the video age.” She presents a postmodern lecture delivered by a chorus of drag queens on the unexpected corelations between Marx’s theories and the carbuncles that plagued the body of the rotund thinker for over thirty years. Marx’s erupting, diseased body is juxtaposed with the “body politic", and posited as a symbol of contemporary society proceeding the failed revolutions of the late 1960s.

Scenes from a vacation. Music comes on loud and clear and washes over a series of visual impressions of the land and the sky and the faulty plumbing that submerges porcelain bottoms in a sea of unmentionable froth.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

"I'm not finished. I don't know how long it's going to take. As far as I'm concerned I'm officially dead."

In his 50th year, Colin looks back on a life of drug and alcohol abuse. Four years into recovery, he is angry and articulate about addiction, treatment, and the romance of the street. In the chaos and claustrophobia of an ice storm, Colin waits to be reborn. His erratic angel is late.

George stays in San Francisco for this video about local filmmakers and their future projects.

"I'm not going to go to the Anne Frank House—I don't think I could take it—being a tourist is bad enough—though I'm not really a tourist—I'm here working—my camera's the one on vacation—taking holiday sounds and images—it's having a nice change of pace—for me it's still the same old thing—talking and talking.

In Reunion in Los Angeles, George Kuchar visits his friend, actress Virginia Giritlian. As the two drive around Beverly Hills, Kuchar is treated to the full Los Angeles experience, ranging from sitting next to the writers of Poltergeist at Il Fornaio to considerations of Al Pacino taking part in one of his films.

Flies buzz among the congestion of combustible contraptions as Western civilization gasps for air amid Oriental orifices that emit the stench of sugar and spice and everything nice.

On a back-to-nature trip to Boulder, Colorado, George goes to the mountains, but goes on the rocks emotionally.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

The colors of fall are muted by the fog of a lingering summer and the memory of that which is dark and naked among the dappled crimson.

A big splashy rendering of Hollywood in hot action. The babes, the boobs, the boo-boos and the inner triumphs all brought to the screen by the uncorked youth and uncouth old bats of the San Francisco Art Institute.

As I rummage through a stack of photos the memories of this and that plus who’s what and where rush in helter skelter. There’s a lot to swallow on screen and off (most of it from Oriental kitchens) but there are dashes of the even more exotic as the viewer glimpses renderings of the indigestible here and there (but mostly above and beyond!).

We Were Hardly More Than Children tells an epic tale of an illegal abortion, as lived by two women on a perilous journey through a world that has little concern for their survival.

Paintings by Diane Messinger.

Music by Renato Umali.

Lena and friend: Flora Coker and Cecelia Condit.

Dear features the interior world of two teenage Chinese girls in New York City, whose diary entries reveal their concerns related to growing up as immigrants amidst the ever-gentrifying landscape of Chinatown.

Performers: Anna Yu, Shu Xia Zhao
Cinematography: Steve Cossman
Voice: Joanna Lin, Shu Xia Zhao
Music: Ikue Mori
Production: Xiao Li Tan

The unstable earth becomes the epicenter of this videotape document which explores—in a fractured way—the relationships between the people, places, and furniture that sit atop the San Andreas Fault.