As documented in The Winner’s Circle and la Migra (the emigrant), the move north brings many changes to family life, specifically mothers going to work and children learning English in school. Hock explores the fact that women often adapt more easily than the men to American life, learning English more rapidly. This becomes a source of conflict between the men and women as they compete for better-paying jobs.
"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.
Holt's terrain is her Aunt Ethel's home in New Bedford, Massachusetts, presented in still images and excerpts from letters to the artist from her aunt. Holt pays particular attention to her aunt's poignant story of aging, altering the images by "underscanning" them—a technical process that compresses the edges of the video image—building an intrinsic limitation into the tape: the compression of time and personal history represented by the images and narrative. This process echoes Holt's reading, slightly distorting and compressing the information in the letters as she presents them.
Loss Prevention combines documentary and fiction to tell the story of Irene, arrested at the age of 79 for stealing a bottle of aspirin from a Miami Wal-Mart and sentenced to ten weeks of Senior Citizen Shoplifting Prevention School. Narrated through the voice of her daughter, this film explores the alienation of aging and the evolving relationship between a daughter and an elderly mother.
Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (also including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion and Come Coyote.) The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work.
Sable Elyse Smith's How We Tell Stories to Children is a single channel video that combines found footage, music clips, and audio of the artist reading with video clips of her father recording himself from prison. Focal points and significant moments seem to always occur just offscreen, or quickly flash away.
Eiko & Koma's second son Shin Otake created this video for the occasion of the 2004 American Dance Festival Scripps Award ceremony. Shin edited and narrated the video to convey Eiko & Koma's history and the concepts behind their works.
A poetic meditation on distance, Come Closer is a short and peripatetic film, casting an affective web between the locations of Lisbon, San Francisco and Brazil. Focusing on Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, musician Derrick Green –– the filmmaker’s brother and lead singer of Brazilian band Sepultura –– and her own work produced in Lisbon since 1992, Come Closer can be thought as a meditation on friendship and saudade.
The repeatedly distorted, primate behaviour of an (ani)female carrying her baby, reflecting the pain and suffering provoked by the mother/child relationship.
A daughter leads her mother on a rope while they take a walk, looking for a place where the mother can bid her final farewell. Before she leaves, they have a picnic, she sings a song, and they chat about the family. An absurd domestic drama played out against the background of a summer’s day by the seaside.
Invoking a biblical story of life coming from dry bones, Condit constructs an experimental narrative about an older woman’s confrontation with her own mortality after the death of her mother. The bone represents the promise of youth and hope—a promise jealously coveted by the young, but needed more by those grown old. Inverting cultural values, Condit represents feminine youth as a mannequin, and seeks humanity in the form of the older woman, who is reborn by overcoming her fear of death.
The “a-ha experience” is the moment when a child first recognizes its own image in a mirror; it is critical to the development of intelligence and identity. It is also the moment when the “self” is surrendered to the control of an external influence. The child accepts the power of the mother to confer or withhold love; it is the mother’s power to fulfill desire that shapes a child’s sense of identity. Similarly, a camera controls love by directing or not directing its attention to the desiring subject.
"Inside a Lithuanian synagogue, young Domas Darguzs regales the filmmaker with a whispered, wide-eyed account of mythical events, while the film cross-cuts to images of farm-life. Kid brother of an Israeli soldier, Domas's stories are part fantasy, part hopeful ruminations of a courageous, young mind interrupted only by an impatient adult."
— KJ Mohr
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.
In Oh, Rapunzel, when Rapunzel flees the tower, Condit's mother leaves her home for an independent living facility and a freedom that she has never known. A collaboration between Cecelia Condit and Dick Blau. Music by Stephen Vogel. Re-edited in 2008.
This title is also available on Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1.
"On my mother’s side there are two lands I come from, separated by the Atlantic ocean, all those fathoms deep. The lands of my grandma and grandpa. I had been through the lands of my grandfather, that is where I still live. The now tamed prairies, missing their bison herds and fenced out into neat geometrical patterns. My grandma comes from a similarly colonized land, Scotland. Ruled by the British Commonwealth and forbidden to speak their language. . . I had never been to Scotland. And I wanted to see my Grandma’s traditional territory.
A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted) is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual, and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire, and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.
A HalfLifers journey to a lush interior landscape where some domestic chores and an unexpected encounter provoke a crisis at Mission Control, paving the way for a seasonal reflection upon the meaning of "home."
This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.
Segalove takes her mom as subject in these short pieces, recording her stories, her advice, and her daily routine. What results is a portrait of a contemporary mother-daughter relationship, touchingly devoid of drama and full of whimsical humor. For example, in one piece, Ilene’s mother laments over a pair of shoes her daughter has chosen to hang on the wall instead of wearing, saying,”With you, everything is art.” In another segment the camera focuses on a pair of unoccupied, overstuffed chairs.
Because of the War things were changing. Very few toys or games were left and music was almost over. Tap water was tasting female and television only came in nasty spasms…
A surreal and sometimes comic meditation on how war affects the hopes and dreams of ordinary people.
Memory Palace is a short video grounded in the personal history of the artist. A discovery of a photo album activates memories of physical spaces, which in turn open doors to reminiscences of past family life. Inspired by the classical method of loci, the film presents a woman — singer/songwriter Alice Smith — at work in Los Angeles.
U & I dOt cOm is an experimental narrative/documentary hybrid about Zoey, a teenage girl who negotiates her identity in cyberspace. Dreaming about the perfect true love, she secretly navigates 3-D worlds to find romance. A web contest sweeps her into a dreamscape of desire and deception as hidden mechanisms of e-commerce, online data-mining, and real-time consumer profiling monitor her every move. When Zoey finally rebels, her sense of self, her home, and her relationship with her mother are forever transformed in the new cyber-cultural domain.
Locke’s Way is the photographic path to knowledge, full of twists and turns, treacherously steep. What has happened down here? A family’s photographs tell us everything and nothing about the subterranean past. "One of the central questions of philosophy has always been: what can be known? Locke’s Way provides a vivid illustration of this perennial philosophical dilemma. In this short video, Donigan Cumming is preoccupied with the story of his older brother, who seems to have been brain-damaged and spent much of his life in institutions.
This arresting early work conveys a tension that emanates from what Tanaka posits as life's basic dualities: male/female, past/present, known/unknown. By focusing issues of identity, doubt, wonder, and awareness through the body, and the bodies of her ancestors, Tanaka succeeds in creating a work with both personal and political power. Tanaka creates a unique voice that speaks of her experience of maturing into womanhood, repeating the refrain, "I my mother." An experimental video, this work contains one of the first examples of flicker editing.
