Film or Videomaking

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.

Dan Sandin designed the Image Processor that, partly because of his decision to give away the building plans, has effected an energetic and aesthetic investigation of the technological structures of electronic media. He sees the Image Processor as both an event and an environment for artists to explore and experience. During the interview, Sandin spontaneously synthesizes his own image.

Interview by John Manning. Shot by Christine DeLignieres.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1980.

Parry Teasdale, David Cort and Chuck Kennedy visit The Kitchen in New York looking for Shirley Clarke, and bump into Steina and Woody Vasulka who are overseeing a show in progress.  A few doors down they find Shirley in her studio, dressed in white and full of energy. 

John Smith, throughout his 40-year career, has approached the moving image from film, video and installations, generating a tremendous body of work that’s as diverse in its topics as it is in its methods. Weaving between early structuralist film and more personal, diaristic, documentary approaches to the places in which he lived, most notably London, his output is both broad and varied.

Bob Snyder is a Chicago-based composer, video artist, and author who has been experimenting with sound and video synthesis since the 1960s. As a musician, his interest has always been in the relationship between music and visual imagery. In Snyder’s work, music is the central generative source of meaning, although he also creates a dialogue between the sound and images of nature and architecture.

Interview by Rafael Franca. 

1. The idea that a film about a city, a quiet, architectural film no less, can tell us anything that we don’t already know about urban life at this point in our new century is perhaps a bit arrogant. But the city is an organism that changes constantly; our knowledge of it is provisional at best. So a film that examines the urban environment under the cloak of darkness must presume to reveal a reality that we don’t know, and tries to dispel projections and fears that are for the most part located in the imagination... in a memory of film, television, or the novel.

A Japanese Kabuki-influenced performance piece, shot in the woods in Winter. A masked woman emerges from a snowy forest and approaches a stone dwelling, where another woman is waiting.  The pair enact a tea ceremony in silence. 

In the next scene the tea tray appears in the road, and then disappears after a car passes.  Image processing magic.

Please note, production year is approximate.

Using color video Freed captures three mirrors in various positions on a grassy lawn. As the title suggests, Freed employs reflections in the work to signify video’s intrinsic quality of spatial manipulation. In the mirrors, we catch ephemeral glimpses of Freed’s family and friends, surrounding nature and various structures such as nearby seating or an old wooden fence.

Spell Reel is an archive of film and audio material from Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. On the verge of complete ruin, the footage testifies to the birth of Guinean cinema as part of the decolonising vision of Amílcar Cabral, the liberation leader who was assassinated in 1973.

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.

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.

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.

Strained Andromeda Strain is a frame by frame re-edit of Robert Wise's 131-minute sci-fi biological thriller into a 7-minute anxious oscillation.

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.

suicide is 70 packed minutes of a fictional filmmaker's crazed ruminations on travel, family history, death and sex as she traverses a world of malls, airports and train stations, chronicling her fiercely hopeful search for a reason to continue living.

Kidlat Tahimik is a Filipino filmmaker, writer and actor who takes his name from the Tagalog translation of “silent lightning.” Known as the “Father of Philippine Independent Cinema,” his contemplative films are associated with the Third Cinema movement for their examination of neocolonialism and the Hollywood business-model of filmmaking.

An episode from a Lebanese TV series entitled Image + Sound.  Each episode in this groundbreaking program was based on paralleling TV news images alongside staged events. This episode was shot at the St. Georges church in Beirut before its renovation.

Parry Teasdale is one of the founding members of the video art collective Videofreex, which was active in the 1960s and 70s. In this extensive two-part interview Teasdale explores the collective’s motivations and endeavors, which embodied the social and political concerns of the period.

Divino explains how he got introduced to video. “Filming is my profession; that’s what I was born to do... not for the work with the axe. I wasn’t born to plant. I already said this to my wife.” Today, Divino dominates the language of video and its filming and editing techniques. He also talks about working in partnership with his community.

Directed by Divino Tserewahu; edited by Tutu Nunes.

In Portuguese with English subtitles.

In 1959, Jean Rouch directed the film La Pyramide Humaine. Situated between fiction and documentary, Rouch’s work presents his attempts to initiate a debate between two groups of students from the Ivory Coast, a white group and a Black group. A precursor to cinéma vérité, this often forgotten film served as the starting point of The Four Chambered Heart.

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

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.

Three Songs of Lenin is an 11-minute piece made from three one-second samples taken from the second song We Loved Him of Vertov's film Three Songs About Lenin. Building on Vertov's second song's structural use of moving and still images to articulate a dynamic of Lenin's passing from life to death, this video employs an algorithmic structure where every other frame is the first frame of the one-second sample. The 29.97 frame rate allows us to almost see moving and still images at the same time as an imagining of Lenin haunting the present.

This tape was produced by Artists TV Network, documenting a symposium that included composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, writer Richard Kostelanetz, and video artist Nam June Paik with art critic Dore Ashton serving as moderator. This freewheeling symposium taped before a live audience ranges from individual reminiscences to discussion of then-current art community concerns about music, literature, theater, art, dance, video, and technology.

Subverting dramaturgical conventions in his Plot Point trilogy, Provost masterfully presents the man in the street as a film protagonist. After New York (Plot Point) and Las Vegas (Stardust) he takes his hidden camera to the hyperkinetic streets of Tokyo and reveals the mystery of reality. A serial killer, a rapist, a terrorist, a cult, the Yakuza, all have in common that their paths cross and merge into a powerful climax that can not be resolved.