Expedition/Travel

Netherlands, January 29th 2006/January 29th 2007

Hamas have just won the Palestinian elections and a chocolate bar in a Rotterdam hotel room eventually reminds the filmmaker that there are more important things going on in the world outside. Exactly one year later he returns to the same city and checks in at a very different hotel. Pyramids/Skunk is a double episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

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

Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.

Scenes from a vacation. Music comes on loud and clear and washes over a series of visual impressions of the land and the sky and the faulty plumbing that submerges porcelain bottoms in a sea of unmentionable froth.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

Since his early days in Ant Farm, Lord’s evocation of the automobile has been the car as avatar, as the spirit of America—that consummate combination of superior organized corporate technology and the pioneering triumph of the willful individual driver. Motorist is a 69-minute road picture in which the camera rides shotgun with TV actor Richard Marcus as he plays a drifting driver.

In the midst of the 2011 revolution in Cairo, a few beduins listen to their car's radio near Jericho, a place which looks like the end of the world. Within moments this desolated landscape transfers into a busy tourist attraction as a bus full of Polish Pilgrims enter the landscape.

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.

A collection of unidentified individuals is stuck together on a boat. Are they going home? Where is their home and why are they so silent? This short work takes a look at a displaced and uprooted community.

BAGHDAD IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER is an ambient video essay of life in Baghdad before the invasion and occupation. Men dance, women draw and sufis sing as they await the coming of another war. In seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish).

Notes, gifts, promises, paintings, trash, and other ephemera from the city which is now hardly a city. What if Walter Benjamin didn’t kill himself, learned html, bought a camera, and thought himself useful enough to work in an impending war zone?

Hub proposes that the idea of home is today perhaps better expressed as a sense of being between places. Within the dalectical interplay between global processes and local environments, Hub suggests that displacement and mobility itself might be thought of as a new way of belonging. Hub uses the transitory space of the airport—defined by its arrivals and departures—to introduce the notion of disappearance to articulate new ideas on belonging and identity.

A fragmented, experimental biography of the 19th-century poet and writer Isabelle Eberhardt, whose brief, unusual life ended abruptly in a flash flood in the desert.

Sahara Chronicle encompasses an undefined number of short videos documenting the present sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe. Taking a close look at the modalities and logistics of the migration system in the Sahara, the project examines the politics of mobility, visibility and containment which lie at the heart of current global geopolitics. The material is gathered during three field trips to major gates and nodes of the trans-Saharan network in Morocco, Mauritania and Niger where migratory intensity is bundled. No voice-over narrative strings these stories together.

This is a journey to El Paso, Texas, where the Super-8 filmmaker Willie Varella and I have a dialogue amid domestic routines, motel accommodations, and emotional baggage, indicative of life on the road. 

In Barbier’s meditative journey through India, she deconstructs the myth of the objective documentary by using textual commentary and off-camera remarks to address the problematic relationship of observer to observed. Framing the images through the artist’s subjective and distinctly female point of view, she explores images of women working, sweeping, cooking, and tending children in direct juxtaposition to men who sit, relax, and observe the spectacle.

Artist Rabih Mroué looks back at old audio recordings, which were made by him and his parents to be sent as audio letters to his brother while he studied abroad. The old recordings become the site of a political critique of the packaged values of communism, resistance and martyrdom.

This title is only available on Radical Closure.

One of the earlier video diaries where George vacations in Colorado, reflects on scenery and animal life and visits people. "

Frisco anxiously awaits the pyrotechnic birth of a New Year while the remnants of holiday greenery still burn bright in all the right places. One of those places gives shelter to an Abyssinian animal of lethargic nature, while all about her the rumblings of tummies in turmoil foreshadow the gluttony of her bipedal guardian.

A voyage through a California Christmas that begins in the turd-smeared streets of San Francisco and ends in a botanical wonder of ethnic endurance and faith. A journey that incorporates pelicans, palaces, and platters of plenty. A season of joy bloated with the ephemeral gasses of religious fermentation and the iconography of a movie-land Madonna.

Storms batter California as 1995 ushers in a world of computerized characters and unplugged souls in search of electrified juice. The images of a naked past haunt the denizens of today as a wet tomorrow threatens to sweep them into oblivion on a tide of technology. Already water-bogged and bloated, the occupants seek the sun and the worshippers who strip in defiance of Divine dehydration.

Colors swirl and shift amid pulsating blobs of light as a voice from the past takes us on an antiquated journey to the future and beyond. Revel in the mysteries of gizmo-channeled visuals and contactee gibberish as the geometric unknown gyrates before thine own eyes.

Alienation in academia beneath the chandeliered opulence of a political correctional facility that caters to clashing cultures with chicken fajitas and carefully worded alphabet soup. Features George at the Flaherty Seminar and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

Made in Germany, October 14th, 2004

While the Iraq war continues, a day's sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small.

Museum Piece is the second episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world's hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

Like a generation of viewers, I was profoundly affected by Deliverance.  But I have always been troubled by the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey. Hence, my version is played by women: myself, Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, and Meredith Root, all experimental filmmakers who work as academics. While faithful to our respective male characters, we also play ourselves.

A Japanese student is taken by his teacher to the land down under from Frisco (LA) and gets to meet the mighty that fuel our lust for entertainment and art with gregarious gusto. The viewer gets to share the wonders that confront this stranger in a strange land as the locals do what they do best: appear loco yet lubricated for vocational wisdom.

Moving towards an unknown destination, a group of anonymous passengers float through an unidentified landscape. Built from Cohen’s archive documenting his travels, the film can be seen as a curious parable. The film's subheading refers to the Old Testament, Daniel chapter 11, verse 40:  “And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.” 

There’s lots cooking in the city-by the-bay and the waters smell good too as the viewer sails off to Sausalito for home-made bread and gets an ocular whiff of oriental cuisine. The eyeball is treated to many tasty items as the Pacific itself churns like an overtaxed tummy in preparation for a blowout. There are Christmas lights and holiday fireworks and furry playmates being squeezed by the overstuffed. It’s all in good cheer and definitely good taste as the spinach pies flaunt their iron-packed punch to the gut and a bittersweet/hot & sour merriment stalks the salivating.