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.
Humor
Behind the skyscraping walls of a neon lit asylum, the frustrated inhabitants therein erupt and engage in a psychological waltz that couple fact with fantasy in ways that open windows of the madhouse to the sanity of daylight.
This title comprises Grip of the Gorgon (2001), Midnight Mass (2006) and Celestial Murmurs (2006) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
The five-and-dime store pulsates with the stench of she-who-shops. Follow this ragdoll apparition as she haunts the futuristic landscape of our buried past and rejoice in the resurrection of the cellar celebrity.
A massive video drama made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute that chronicles a man and wife parting ways amid the clatter of dice in a gambling resort on a painted desert of painted women and panting men. A large cast of digitized divas and international inepts march across this corlorful canvas of romanticized rubbish and low-budget lushness.
The Rudnick family run amok with unleashed talent in San Francisco and display a wide girth of creative curvature for all to admire over a hot cup of java. The fluidity of artistic endeavors spills over the borders of the Pacific Rim to highlight not only aquatic animals, but also desert-bound creatures etched in the thirst-quenching magnificence of kitchenware crystal.
One of the earlier video diaries where George vacations in Colorado, reflects on scenery and animal life and visits people. "
Strap on your seat belts and get comfortable for a 7,000 mile drive. This documentary invites you to travel along with the Center for Land Use Interpretation as they find suggested photo spots across North America. Journey from coast to coast, stopping long enough to take snap shots of unusual or exemplary land use sites across North America. You will even get to take a picture of Kodak's own waste water treatment plant in Rochester, New York.
In this spoof program produced for Lanesville TV, the premise is that a “Sheik” has come to buy all the land in Lanesville. Videofreex member Carol Vontobel reports that the sheik (Bart Friedman), escorted by his real estate agent (Parry Teasdale) is approaching people in the community and asking to buy their homes. An unknown Lanesville local chauffeurs them around, and the Videofreex interview Mr. Benjamin, Mr. And Mrs. Kelly, Mr. Lloyd, Mr. and Mrs. Ginsburg, and others from the Tavern.
In Reel 1, newly re-mastered in 2005, a series of vignettes and jokes to camera take place, some starring Wegman’s droll and obliging canine partner Man Ray. Both the human body and props are employed to amusing effect: lamps talk, a microphone is dragged around, stomachs sing. At one point, Wegman dribbles milk on to the floor, to be lapped up by a thirsty dog.
Contents:
Microphone, 0:47
Pocketbook Man, 1:19
Anet and Abtu, 0:47
The Ring, 1:11
Randy’s Sick, 0:16
Milk/Floor, 1:02
One minute, two mysteries: The shelf-life of genius and why we try to make pictures when, as Robert Lowell put it, "No voice outsings the serpent's flawed, euphoric hiss.
This title is also available on Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 3.
A mother sews; a son yearns for meat; a friend relives the past via glamour shots of a forgotten slab of cheesecake that ferments off-camera. A slice of life with the bowl of cherries missing. A brief visit to a corner of the world that locks itself away with crunchy carbohydrates and six-inch protein protuberances.
This science fiction adventure centers on the interaction between a crew of Earthmen and their seduction by the love-hungry Amazons of the red planet, Mars. The tale is brought to life with all the opulence that an $800 budget can produce and the young cast of non-actors live up to their fullest foibles as the plot thickens with a mix of romance and wartime action intertwined with a musical number or two. The ambitions were high and the necklines low in this effects-laden tribute to pulp fiction fantasy and intergalactic intercourse.
This rapid-montage music video for John Sex’s song “Hustle with My Muscle” portrays the singer as a ladies’ man with ample endowment to share. “Can you handle all the man below my belt?” he provocatively asks.
This title is only available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.
Brave new shopping worlds are being created. What have mall owners, architects, surveillance technicians, and supermarket workers done to turn human subjects into pure streams of consumers, into the perfect inhabitants of shopping mall paradise?
Bill Murray and Christopher Guest lead a behind-the-scenes tour of the 1976 showdown between the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers. This irreverent view of football and America's number one sports event examines the "Woodstock of corporate America" from the viewpoint of the players, the wives, the fans and the media. The big business of sports, the high stakes, the pressures, the cost in health and happiness are all covered in this kaleidoscopic view of another American ritual.
"I just can't resist trying to empathize with animals and plants. I think that in the process of attempting to learn what it's like to be an animal or plant, I learn more about what it means to be human."
--Sam Easterson
As with his predecessor Ernie Kovaks, everything is fair game for ridicule in Dibble’s gentle and eccentric humor. Skillfully manipulating the video image in these brief sketches, Dibble gives us his view on subjects ranging from the practical application of Newton’s law, to the prospect of video dating. Born Yesterday includes:
1. Newton’s Law, 00:45
2. Mr. Dibble, 01:16
3. Three Things, 01:49
4. Video Dating, 05:38
5. Cantankerous Television, 3:44
“It’s spring, it’s spring, and I feel I’m giving birth myself, to something monstrous, something ugly.” Gibbons enters the woods to begin his destructive campaign against spring, snapping the buds off trees while babbling maniacally. Sabotaging Spring is an impressionistic peek at Gibbons’s paranoid fancy; he explains the facts of life, evolution, and whistling to his dog Woody.
This title is also available on Joe Gibbons Videoworks: Volume 1.
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.
In this faux-recreation of a home-shopping network, Al Gore and George W. Bush offer you a 'super-premium' collectible lamp commemorating the 2000 presidential election.
"The gerbil has long been associated with New World capitalism because of its incessant energy. The Golden Age of Hollywood takes on the history and evolution of this delightful household pet."
— International Film Festival Rotterdam (2003)
— "Jim Finn's Wüstenspringmaus, a well-sprung, rear-screened account of a gerbil's life in the '70s."
— Guy Maddin, Film Comment, January (2004)
This title is also available on Jim Finn Videoworks: Volume 1.
A tour of literary scraps that litter the highway of lost souls in search of publications to be publicized. The crush of printed pulp as it smears its way through the various media that feed off its symbols and excesses. The lust of writers made pure by the whiteness of the sheets they imprint with the shadow markings of their Smith-Corona contraption as it keeps pounding late into the night.
“Christopher Wilcha’s fascinating feature-length video reminds us how seldom we’re allowed to see certain businesses operating from the inside. Wilcha, a 22-year-old college graduate and alternative-rock enthusiast, was hired by the Columbia Record and Tape Club—apparently as a fluke—to help launch a whole new niche-marketing division, which brought him face-to-face with the contradictory meanings of the term ‘alternative’ once it’s been embraced by the mass market.
An alternative earth music video. An epic last stand. A portrait of two utilitarian workers engaging in a collaboration with Karen, manifesting improvisational geographic friendships...
This title is also available on HalfLifers: The Complete History.
A nostalgic glazier shows off his knowledge and expounds his theories. Taking glassmaking processes and history as its central theme, Slow Glass explores ideas about memory, perception and change.