Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist David O. Selznick, runs the state film studio as a way of promoting his own and his father's cult of personality. The film's title, Great Man and Cinema, comes from a propaganda booklet filled with stories of how the Dear Leader has written, edited, produced and given acting advice in films for the last 40 years. This film succinctly synthesizes the Dear Leader's directing philosophy with his feelings toward the imperialist beast at his heels.
"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."
Film festivals are in progress as this video takes the viewer from the autumn rich colors of a Washington State movie event to the Virginia countryside of flaming, October foliage. In between bouts of waterlogged imagery we hear the peeps and exhortations of those in front of and behind the screens that plaster this geography with tribal dreams. Water sloshes and spurts freely in the chilly air, unfrozen by stage fright, while wineglasses clink to the coming winter. Featuring festival goers Nicholas Cage and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.
stammering forward backward GIANT is a re-edit of George Stevens' 1956 film Giant - an epic story of Texas, oil and racism. Condensed to 17 minutes and beginning in the middle, stammering forward backward GIANT implements improvisational percussive frame by frame editing structures to simultaneously unwind the film to the conclusion of beginning and end.
This East Coast travelogue documents my journey from New York City to Boston as several screenings plunge me into a maelstrom of social excess and tummy filling delights. You too can digest this banquet of artists, poets and movie-makers as this foray into fleeting fame runs its course on a highway of film oriented locales. See the Harvard Film Archive in all its spaciousness and visit the citadel of cinema, Anthology Film Archives, before winding up in a Greenwich Village bar full of verbal beauty. A trip for young and old who like to sit in one spot and watch someone els
This early Videofreex production exemplifies the type of imaginative approach that the collective adopted when exploring the medium of video, and how, in many ways, this balance of play and experimentation defined and unified the group's work from the very start.
Billion Dollar Bimbo: A Musical is a story of a young Hollywood actress’s psychological roller coaster ride through loss and redemption. One day on set the actress witnesses her mother collapse in the middle of shooting. Thinking her dead, the woman quickly spins out of control, immediately descending into drug use and promiscuity. The daughter’s depression-induced mania is assuaged when the mother recovers, but only briefly. When the mother quickly dies, the forlorn daughter plummets again into hopelessness and seeks solace in religion.
By subjecting fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon to a mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.
A re-working of Humphrey Jenning's 1943 seminal docu-drama The Silent Village wherein coal miners from the Welsh village of Cwmgiedd re-enact the Nazi invasion and annihilation of the resisting Czech villagers of Lidice. Principal focus in this re-mix is upon the way sound is used as a mode of social control.
Jessica Bardsley is an artist-scholar working across film, writing, and studio art. Her interdisciplinary research takes an ecological approach to film and media within the global context of contemporary art. In addition to her work as a scholar, she is also an ecofeminist filmmaker.
Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before. --Neil Karassik
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.
Laurel Klick and I were members of the feminist art program at CalArts and became close lifelong friends. Laurel is behind the camera as I recount my one-sided flirtation with a guy who worked at CalArts in the equipment “cage” - the cage where I checked out the video Portapak - the Portapak we utilized to record my anecdote. My story about an everyday interaction would become a trademark of my work. “Laurel and Susan” was not edited or presented publicly until 2022.
A single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley* process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition. The circular camera path moves inside and back out of a Foley stage in Burbank, California. While portraying sound artists at work, typically invisible support mechanisms of filmmaking are exposed, as are, by extension and quotation, governmental violations of individual privacy.
Martha Rosler (b.1943) received her BA from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1974. Rosler has produced seminal works in the fields of photography, performance, video, installation, criticism, and theory. Committed to an art that engages a public beyond the confines of the art world, Rosler investigates how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate everyday life. Rosler's work has entered the canon of contemporary art through a process of steady, stealthy infiltration. Lacking commercial gallery representation until 1993, her endeavors as a prolific essayist, lecturer, and political agitator enabled her agenda to trickle down through critical channels.
Shot in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, this essay uses transportation, video, and photography to examine images circulating in a historically charged, and presently war-torn and divided, Middle East. From images of camels in the desert to images of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the video looks at states of mind in relation to actual geographies. The video pays tribute to an unformatted and open-ended documentary approach, and examines modes of access to information such as travel, television and the Internet, while carefully displaying the resulting iconography.
Operation Atropos is a documentary about interrogation and POW resistance training. Director Coco Fusco worked with retired U.S. Army interrogators who subjected her group of women students to immersive simulations of POW experiences in order to show them what hostile interrogations can be like and how members of the U.S. military are taught to resist them. The group of interrogators is called Team Delta, and they regularly offer intensive courses that they call "Authentic Military Experiences" to civilians.
A portrait of Luce Vigo, film critic, educator, and the daughter of pivotal French filmmaker Jean Vigo. Commissioned by the Spanish documentary festival, Punto de Vista, the film incorporates Luce's memories of her extraordinary life, reflections on her father, and images of Northern Spain.
A rising moon and lowering standards in secular shenanigans highlight this documentary on the making of a sci-fi epic for mini-adults. The stakes are high and the porkchops well done as cast and crew blast off to kiddie dimensions only dreamed of by reformed perverts who revert back to more primitive states of fetishistic attire to usher in the new millenium.
Paternal Rites is a first-person essay film that examines the secret underbelly of a contemporary Jewish American family as they grapple with the aftereffects of physical and sexual abuse on their present-day lives. It is also a groundbreaking film about the nature of trauma and memory itself: the ways in which trauma encrypts in uncanny ways; the function of speech and narrative in the process of decryption; and the role of film and filmmaking in the practice of healing.
This turgid potboiler was made with my class at the San Francisco Art Institute. It steam-rolls a series of overheated episodes to a colorful climax of redemption and moral rectitude. The rest of it wallows in a swamp of spiritual rot and loose codes of clothing and domestic decency.
A myth illustrated on the stones of a waterfall, the reconstruction of a great communal hut, the attempt to recover objects kept for years in a museum in Manaus. In IAUARETÊ, Waterfall of the Jaguars the Tariano Indians, of the North-western Amazon, after decades of missionary catechism, decide to make a cultural record for future generations.
Direction: Vincent Carelli
Photography: Vincent Carelli and Altair Paixão
Editing: Joana Collier
Production: IPHAN / Vídeo nas Aldeias
This crime drama made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute is a mixed bag of colorful misadventures featuring a wayward member of the clergy and a corrupting, femme fatale with bangs. The couple open a casino of ill repute with money acquired during their murderous rampage upon the population of a small community of churchgoers. The action is fast and cheap because of the $400 budget, and the cast attractive because youth itself is always beautiful.
Storyteller recomposes aerial shots from the Las Vegas casino skyline to create a slick, artificial world, reminiscent of science fiction. At first glance, the viewer might think of jewelry-like space ships floating slowly through the universe. When the camera zooms in on buildings and architecture, the detailed glitter and kitsch of the city hypnotically reveals something of pure beauty and madness.
The daily life of the Hunikui village of Sâo Joaquim, on the river Jordâo in the state of Acre. Augustinho, village shaman and patriarch, and his wife and father-in-law, remember the fetters of the rubber plantations and celebrate a new era. Now, with their land demarcated, they can once again teach their traditions to their children and grandchildren.
Direction: Zezinho Yube
Photography: Zezinho Yube, Zé Mateus Itsairu, Vanessa Ayani, Fernando Siã, Josias Mana, Tadeu Siã
Editing: Mari Corrêa, Pedro Portella and Vincent Carelli
