Hollywood

Paul Schrader’s Bag is an inventory of fame. Playing the anonymous Every Man in a brush with celebrity, Simon presents a Hollywood peerage as our cultural patrimony.

This title is also available on Jason Simon: Three Videos.

In a celebrity-obsessed culture, filmmakers often exploit the downfall of a star to amplify the emotional undertones of the fictional films in which they perform. POSTFACE takes a look back at the filmography of Montgomery Clift whose private life and career spiral downward after a 1956 car crash that left his face scarred and partially paralyzed.

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.

Psykho III The Musical is an intriguing play on the tension between “authentic” and “pop” camp. This celebration of artifice was originally written, directed, and produced by Mark Oates as a stage musical parody following the release of Psycho II in 1983, and was performed at the East Village’s most notorious nightspot — The Pyramid Club. In 1985, after a wildly successful run, Oates reached out to longtime friend and Downtown video artist Tom Rubnitz to produce a video adaptation of the stage musical.

Psykho III The Musical is an intriguing play on the tension between “authentic” and “pop” camp. This celebration of artifice was originally written, directed, and produced by Mark Oates as a stage musical parody following the release of Psycho II in 1983, and was performed at the East Village’s most notorious nightspot — The Pyramid Club. In 1985, after a wildly successful run, Oates reached out to longtime friend and Downtown video artist Tom Rubnitz to produce a video adaptation of the stage musical.

California has been multicultural for at least 100 years, home to Indians, Spaniards, and Anglos. An 1884 romance novel, in fact, paired a half-European/half-Indian woman with the son of a Luiseño Indian chief. This experimental video essay examines the conventional wisdom on mixing of the races and includes popular movie images from Elvis Presley’s film Flaming Star, The Last of the Mohicans, and West Side Story.

RECKONING 3 is the first in a series of investigations into:

1. Terror and wonder in big-budget virtual worlds

2. The mutability, fragility and loneliness of technologically mediated social identities and friendships

3. The queerness and malevolence of archetypal masculinity

4. The diminishing distance between "real" and "artificial" humanity

5. The poetics of blockbuster aesthetics

RECKONING 4 is the second in a series of investigations into (among other things)

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.

An homage to Chicago's East 95th Street Bridge, Calumet Fisheries and to a couple of the city's infamous brothers.  The take-out shack, originally glimpsed in the background of a scene from The Blues Brothers, still operates.  It has become a real-world portal to a cinematic past.  Propped along the edge of the 95th street drawbridge, the building is framed by the towering infrastructures of the Chicago Skyway and Calumet Harbor.

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.

Stardust is the second part of the trilogy where Nicolas Provost investigates the boundaries of fiction and reality by filming everyday life with a hidden high resolution camera and turning the cinematic images into a fiction film by using cinematographic and narrative codes from the Hollywood film language. The first part of the trilogy was the award winning Plot Point (2007) that was shot entirely with a hidden camera and turned everyday life around Times Square, New York into a thriller film.

With Strain Andromeda The, video artist Anne McGuire has created an awesome and spellbinding film that throws everything from story structure to character motivation into question. Put simply, McGuire has taken Robert Wise's entire 1971 virus from outer space classic The Andromeda Strain and re-edited it shot-by-shot precisely in reverse, so that the last shot appears first and the first last, though nothing is actually running backwards.

Stutter the Searchers is an undulating re-edit of John Ford's "frontier saga" The Searchers (1956). Ford's violent narrative is restructured through the use of condensation, repetition, and the oscillating de-location of the image's place within the frame. This work pursues a spiraling, percussive search where flashing images endanger assumptions about home and wilderness.

This title is also available on Reconstruction Trilogy: Les LeVeque.

The Nothing That Is stems from the environment of our streets, both the “virtual” and “other reality” which inhabits them.

Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escourts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.

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.

A chaotic assortment of artists tumbles forth in the first half of this video diary, and the pieces of flotsam and jetsam coalesce into the junk statuary of Jerry Barrish, sculptor. Then the piece drifts down to Baltimore where my brother, Mike, and I are invited to the premire of Divine Trash, a documentary on John Waters that is being screened in an old and historic theater prowled by the media and folks in evening attire (evening-out attire).

Walt Disney's re-imagineering of Martin Scorsese's classic film Taxi Driver follows Mickey Mouse-obsessed Travis Bickle as he looks for love in a rapidly transforming New York City. A 'fair use' parody by Bryan Boyce.

"A brilliant video essay."

-- Roger Ebert

white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is a stroboscopic work made from fifteen films starring Charlton Heston. Each film has been algorithmically condensed down to thirty seconds in length. These fifteen condensed movies have been frame-by-frame chronologically organized and metrically inter-cut with two Heston film frames followed by two white frames.

Ming Wong creates videos that explore performance and issues of race and gender. Born in Singapore of Chinese heritage, and now based in Berlin, his work examines cross-cultural experiences by appropriating scenes of iconic world cinema. Wong casts himself anachronistically as the star, critically exposing the otherness of the relationship of media and world history.