In Woodstock Festival 1969: First Aid, the Videofreex interview visitors and volunteers in and around the first aid tent about the level of health and hygiene at Woodstock. Topics range from the use of chlorine in the drinking water to protect against dysentery to the poisonous acid potentially circulating throughout the crowd. The Videofreex also interview a man with a pet lamb who discusses the relationship between vegetarianism and revolution.
Recognizing the extreme inadequacy of information on AIDS prevention, cosmetologist DiAna DiAna, with her partner Dr. Bambi Sumpter, took on the task of educating the black community (which makes up the majority of local AIDS cases) in Columbia, South Carolina. This video documents the growth of the South Carolina AIDS Education Network, which originated and operates in DiAna’s Hair Ego, DiAna’s beauty salon.
Body Prep helps fortify and support the body during any level of activity—low, medium, or high intensity. It compares various alternatives to weightlifting with natural and artificial light sources. Exercise is explored through the change of seasons.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 3, Computer Smarts.
amaurosis is an experimental documentary about Dat Nguyen, a blind guitarist living in Little Saigon, Orange County, California. Dat Nguyen was a "triple outcast": blind, Amerasian, and an impoverished orphan. His American father left Viet Nam in 1973, and his mother died in 1975. Living on the streets of Saigon, he sold lottery tickets for food money. At the age of 12, Dat met a classical music teacher who was also blind and who taught him to read Braille as well as supported him.
In My Dinner With Weegee Donigan Cumming weaves together two life stories. The central figure, a man in his seventies named Marty, remembers his experiences in New York as a young Catholic labour organizer and peace activist, his friendships with David Dellinger, the Berrigan brothers, Bayard Rustin, Weegee, and James Agee. This mixture of first-hand knowledge and gossip brightens Marty’s dark passage—he is old, sick, depressed, and alcoholic.
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.
In The Body Parlor, both man and sheep as combined sacrificial bodies become subjects of biological investigation. As symbols of ritual sacrifice, they are bodies that give of themselves. In discovering new forms of health-care (regenerative medicine) and tissue engineering (such as stem cell research), the body becomes sacrificial material for the greater purpose of a social good. The performers employ the material objects, either as products of or as extensions of the body as a way of exploring giving from one's self in sacrifice.
Against images of an inventor-chemist juggling brightly colored molecules, psychedelic arms passing out pesticides, and nightmarish landscapes that include trapped live subjects, Oursler presents Hopewell, Virginia—a turn-of-the-century boomtown gone bust, and host to a Kepone pesticide manufacturing plant since 1966. Although Kepone’s extreme toxicity was well established by 1964, production grew and employees continued to be exposed to the carcinogen—eventually poisoning the surrounding area and the James River for years to come.
Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke proceed to beat each other while text from psychiatrists and ex-patients discuss the violence in some forms of psychiatric care. Four actions repeat as the struggle for autonomy rages.
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.
The first of the series includes:
What Does Away Mean? by Jem Cohen advertises the need to recycle through reconsideration of landfills and garbage disposal.
Pro-Choice is Pro-Life by Jane Pratt makes its point with the simple logic that every child should be cared for and wanted.
Historic Preservation by Jim McKay counsels for the preservation of historic buildings endangered by urban decay.
Martha Rosler tackles mainstream media's representation of the case of surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead.
Twilight deepens, Night descends and moods sink into madness. But the mind refuses to exist in dark places, and struggles to resurface so that the soul can breathe-in spiritual enlightenment.
Are gender outlaws considered the new biological terrorists seeking weapons of mass bodily destruction? OPERATION INVERT compares the different regulations mediating botox-related plastic surgery and gender reassignment "sex change." Historical medical assessments of the invert (homosexual and transsexual) "condition" reveal seemingly outdated absurdities about outsider deviance. Nonetheless, current institutional loopholes governing gender re-assignment surgery suggest a fresh resurgence of loony pathology and diagnosis.
In this tape, the Videofreex record their visit with Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, then recognized widely for his popular medical advice column, Dear Dr. Hip Pocrates, which doled out information about sex and drugs. At the time of this session in November 1969, Schoenfeld had recently published a book based on his advice column, and was also serving as a member of the editorial board of Modern Medicine.
In The Body Parlor, both man and sheep as combined sacrificial bodies become subjects of biological investigation. As symbols of ritual sacrifice, they are bodies that give of themselves. In discovering new forms of health-care (regenerative medicine) and tissue engineering (such as stem cell research), the body becomes sacrificial material for the greater purpose of a social good. The performers employ the material objects, either as products of or as extensions of the body as a way of exploring giving from one's self in sacrifice.
An ailing, elderly man listens to a private performance in his room. The singing is a halting mix cross-cultural-Inuktitut and Country & Western. Transgressive and mesmerizing, Karaoke distorts the landscapes of sound and body.
In Inukitut.
This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 1.
In The Lost Art of the Future, Cuthand talks about artists he has known who have passed while living with HIV/AIDS, and the art he wishes he had been able to see them make if their lifetimes had been longer.
An experimental documentary video project about individuals who have been transformed from so called “ordinary” citizens into activists, Witness To The Future seeks connections that unite people of all cultures, communities, races, and economic classes as they struggle for environmental and social change.
This video collects public service announcements created by a number of independent producers, including Jem Cohen and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. Powerful and provocative, these PSAs address issues such as organic farming, abortion rights, street harassment, and the environment. Included are:
They Have Dreams by Natalie Merchant and Abigail Simon which focuses on the plight of homeless children.
A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear-projected, grainy, looped images of Masai tribesmen and women, recycled from an educational film, become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation.
Filmed from the artist’s window during lockdown, Citadel combines short fragments from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speeches relating to coronavirus with views of the London skyline recorded in a variety of weather conditions. Recognising the government’s decision to place business interests before public health, it relocates the centre of power from Parliament to the financial district of the City of London.
Shot during an NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) seminar in Berlin, a group fluxuates between guided meditation and discussion on consciousness and self-acceptance. Neuro-linguistic programming is a set of techniques and beliefs that are used primarily towards personal development. NLP is based on the idea that mind, body, and language create an individual's perception of the world, and an individuals behaviors can be changed by "perceiving and feeling yourself". Rapport focuses on the staging of the self that takes place during this kind of group therapy.
The Making and Unmaking of the Earth turns to geology as both a metaphor for and a psychic container of women's emotional states and embodied experiences of physical pain. Combining archival footage of earth processes with interviews describing mysterious physical experiences and emotional attachments, this film explores how everything we bury deep inside eventually speaks through the geology of the body.
That Which Is Possible is a portrait of a community of painters, sculptors, musicians and writers making work at the Living Museum, an art-space on the grounds of a large state-run psychiatric facility in Queens, New York. Shot over the course of two years and structured across the arc of a day, the film observes with an intimate lens and unspools like a musical, both bracing and tender. That Which Is Possible explores the liberatory and reparative functions that creative action has for a group of artists drawn together by shared struggle.
