Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, such as works by Fred Halsted, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place.
Shot in black and white Super 8, this lyrical short follows a wandering, disengaged youth through grey afternoons. German Song features the hard-edged music of Come, an alternative band from Boston.
"Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there—you just don’t have to bother reading it!"
—New York Video Festival (2002)
A vain, self centered mother competes with her daughter in the world of carnivorous men and sleazy movies.
The Fancy is a speculative, experimental work that explores the life of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), evoked by the published catalogues of and about her photographs. Structural in form, the video radically reorganizes information from the catalogues in order to pose questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property.
This very funny video plays with the identification of the camera as phallus, as an instrument of power and domination intruding upon reality; never an innocent bystander, it is always the organizing locus of events. Over sequences in which the camera/viewer approaches entrances to houses, shops, and other buildings, the soundtrack carries the moans of a man and woman reaching orgasm. The pitch and urgency of their moaning increases as the camera nears and finally penetrates its target.
"Conspiracy Of Lies speaks of the alienation of minorities, of consumer culture, urban isolation and the fine balance between mental order and chaos. The video begins with a voice (my own) recounting the story of the discovery of a series of diary entries and lists written by an anonymous author. When I found the texts, I assumed the author to be a white, gay man, like myself. Through the use of twelve narrators of different race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation, I attempted to destabilize my own subjectivity and challenge my pre-existing assumptions regarding difference.
Video artist meets a handsome and enigmatic Marlboro Man; video artist gets a sexually transmitted disease. In a wry and pointed work that’s part Ibsen and part Danielle Steele, Vanalyne Green reworks the sex-education film to take a critical look at cherished stereotypes about romance, the American West, and cowboys. Expanding on a body of work that investigates the idea that public spaces are gendered, Green revisits the myth of the rugged outdoors, and the West will never be the same.
You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.
Tom Kalin is a screenwriter, film director, producer, and educator. As a key figure in New Queer Cinema, his work focuses on the portrayal of gay sexuality both in the age of AIDS and historically. Informed by his work with two AIDS activist collectives, ACT UP and Gran Fury, Kalin’s video work is characterized by appropriated images, original portraits, and performances.
Jennifer, an intelligent but insecure 14-year-old student at a boarding school, seduces her married dormitory counselor, a photographer who has offered to teach her about his art and winds up shooting her in the nude. She is naive, and he manipulates her into an affair that eventually is discovered. Years later, as the photographer is being investigated by the FBI, the adult woman remembers her first love as a case of herself watching the artist who watched her.
Juxtaposing feminist readings of medical tracts, narratives of patient treatment and archival footage, I Need Your Full Cooperation reveals the evolution of women’s relationship to modern medicine. The video dramatizes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “rest cure”, adapting her 1892 story "The Yellow Wallpaper", and includes critical commentary by activist/writer Barbara Ehrenreich and historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg.
Two potential saints struggle against the Moon’s pull on their libidos. In this battle, the midnight "sinners" confess secrets that reveal a truth that justifies their bodies and unites their souls.
This title comprises Moon-Tide (2015) and Soul Catcher (2017) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
Wittnerchrome, Exacto Knife, 1.5mm Letter Punches, Hammer, Leather Puncher
This is a feminist critique of the Oedipal complex. The filmmaker recounts an abortion she had in 2009. The aborted child survives and becomes her lover. Her subject is filmed in a private act, complicating what could be an act of the solitary.
In a vile and ingenious way, Acconci pleads with the camera/spectator to join with him, to come to him, promising to be honest and begging, "I need it, you need it, c'mon... look how easy it is." Acconci addresses the viewer as a sexual partner, acting as if no distance existed between them. The monitor becomes an agent of intimate address, presenting a disingenuous intimacy that is one-sided and pure fantasy, much like the popular love songs in the background with which Acconci croons, "I'll be your baby, I'll be your baby tonight, yeah, yeah."
Frances, a young Gay Indian (2 Spirit), played by Lacey Hill, is struggling with the aftermath of a gay basing. Through her friendship with her ex Jean, she gathers the strength to go out in public again. This video is a salute to the 70s and to Gay Indian movements which became 2Spirit/Indigiqueer communities.
Song performed by Lacy Hill.
“A soldier’s trip to Syria is complicated when he accidentally impregnates a friend. Meanwhile, a horse breeder from Ohio is driven away from home by her own desire to become pregnant. In Hard as Opal the lines between truth and fiction, fact and fantasy, are reined in and treated not as fixed, divisive markers but as malleable threads of narrative potential. Buckhiester and Leventhal perform alongside other non-actors who are filmed in their own varying domestic and professional environments.
Shot in the style of a silent film from the 1920s, Frida & Anita is a political fantasy, intersecting the lives of two queer radicals — Frida Kahlo and Anita Berber — who happen to meet one fateful Berlin night in 1924 at the infamous La Garcon Cabaret.
Masked men prowling in the bushes and not touching anything but satin, dandelions and flesh.
Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.
-- Mike Kuchar
A sweeping saga of an evil matriarch and her march to infamy as she invades the hearts and souls of those organs and entities that reside in the male physique. A lustful excursion to the far corners of the globe as this vixen of vice weaves an occult web of sticky substances guaranteed to gummy up the gals and grease down the guys.
When she was 16, Benning stopped going to high school for three weeks and stayed inside with her camera, her TV set, and a pile of dirty laundry. This tape mirrors her psyche during this time. With the image breaking up between edits, the rough quality of this early tape captures Benning’s sense of isolation and sadness, her retreat from the world. As such, Living Inside is the confession of a chronic outsider.
This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1.
This video diary visits two sites that exhibited my visual works this past year, culminating at the VOLTA ART SHOW in N.Y.C., where I sold some paintings and a photograph.
The underling theme of the diary deals with some bloating, scarring and beefcake exposure while on the road to an acting gig where I'm scheduled to play a BI-SEXUAL, paraplegic in heat.
There are some in depth scenes of me working out the romance/sex routines with a young and attractive, male co-star. The all-girl crew appears to be getting off on the whole thing and I don't blame them!
Two boys are drawn together like metal to a magnet and conduct a somewhat confusing — but utterly charming "pow-wow" where dreams and ideas get tossed around like baseballs and artistic aspiration explores like pop-corn on a sunny porch.
This title comprises Adam's Apple (2014) and Dreamsville (2014) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
