Youth/Childhood

Videotaped on August 13th 1972, this tape features a number of scenes shot for Lanesville TV, including the Videofreex at the Catskill Game Farm shooting footage of the animals. There are some oddball images… a woman on an exercise machine, and someone in a gorilla suit brushing their teeth. A man named Steve Toomie from Tannersville, NY talks about Mountaintop Youth Group’s performances. There is the horse riding competition in Hunter. A little girl asks, “Are you the Lanesville Television guy?” and then shows her horse ribbon to the camera.

We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S.

A young girl buys a weird toy from a charity shop. She forms such an intense relationship with it that it develops special ways of communicating and a strange connection to her that seems to defy the laws of physics. As the situation escalates, it seems that repression is the only way forward. First conceived of as a kind of fairy tale that goes wrong, this is a piece about learning the “rules” of grown-up reality and an extrapolation of the consequences of “over-identifying” with toys. A digital video with digital video effects, live-action, and model/object animation.

A 12-year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother (both played by July) speak to the public about going for the gold.

“As the film progresses through subtle editing-in-reverse, July reveals the world around the televised facade. ... [T]he 23-year-old performer convincingly plays both Dawn Schnavel and her mom, or rather, vanishes into them. What’s noticeable isn’t so much the ease with which July transforms herself into a pre-teen girl and an older woman but the similarities and differences between the daughter and the mother July becomes.”

Four Ikpeng children reply to a video-letter from the children of Sierra Maestra in Cuba, introducing their village, families, toys, celebrations, and ways of life with grace and lightheartedness. Curious to know about children from other cultures, they ask to continue the correspondence.

Direction and camera by Karané, Kumaré, and Natuyu Yuwipo Txicão; edited by Mari Corrê.

Told through the voices of three elderly South Carolinian's who reside in the homes in which they were born, Steven Go Get Me A Switch is an oral history mapping dichotomies of gender, familial mythologies, sexuality, and belief. A heavy use of symbolism comingles with suggestions of narrative proof. The desire to be good and the impossibility of such desire becomes a sharp inaudible pitch, like a dog whistles call to violence.

Back in the days of hippy bliss, Ulrike and her husband used to believe that the world would be revolutionized by their activities, consisting mainly of smoking pot and having sex. Thanks to a large family fortune, none of them has ever had to work for a living. But the ‘three generation millions’ – one generation makes it, the second maintains it and the third generation blows it – are slowly disappearing. So now the burden of maintaining the tower falls on the children, of whom Sirius (the Latin form of Osiris) actually seems to enjoy making money.

Part science movie, part storybook, Bug Girl is an ecological fable. A young girl has lost her cat. While searching for it she accidentally swallows a bee--her journey suddenly transforms into a visual tumble through nature, biology, and consciousness.

This title is only available on Soft Science.

talkin' 'bout droppin' out examines the multiple reasons why 40% of students in New York, Boston, and Chicago drop out of high school each year. Students wrote, directed, shot and edited segments of the video with Miller’s technical and creative guidance. Jail, work, vocational school, problems with teachers, motherhood, easy money, drug or alcohol addiction, and boredom are just some of the reasons given for dropping out. Leverock Hazell (a Madison High School Graduate) composed original music for the piece, incorporating fifteen hours of the students’ taped conversations.

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) is a hyper-war waged on over 20 million children in the United States. Despite overwhelming evidence of its educational ineffectiveness, D.A.R.E. has gained a religious following among educators and parents, and is the only federally-funded drug education program. D.A.R.E.'s imagistic and psychological assault is based on the presence of uniformed gun-toting police officers in the classroom.

With wit and humor, seven-year-old Kendra portrays ten female stereotypes, including an ingratiating Southern belle, a motorcycle-riding tough chick, and a simpering housewife. Under the rubric of playing dress-up, the video illustrates the pervasive, prescribed personalities available to women, and the early age at which girls recognize these choices. But, as outtakes reveal, spirited Kendra’s is infinitely more complex than the cardboard cut-outs she depicts.

Set in a post-industrial ‘Neverland’ of worn down row houses, looming factories, and desolate seashores, a rabble of deprived gender and age ambiguous youths explore their own vulnerabilities and put pressure on what it means to grow up. Misadventures that include impromptu races, nighttime spooning, cheating at card games, attempts at hypnotism, pocket knife haircuts, and sexual fantasies all function as means for the characters to attempt knowing one another.

Zaatari’s contribution to Lebanon’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 2013. This video offers a portrait of a public school and a tribute to those refusing illegal military orders.

We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S.

The innocence of creating a mirror, only to repeatedly crush it underfoot.

This title is also available on Ximena Cuevas: Dormimundo Vol. 1 (Sleepworld Vol. 1), Ximena Cuevas: El Mundo del Silencio (The Silent World), and Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas.

A domestic portrait rendered at miniature scale, Dust Studies brushes along the edge of what can be seen. Staying close to the ground to collect what gathers there, the film looks deeply for everyday things and finds them drifting in the pleasant, meandering headwaters of a young child's language.

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.

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice.

Joe Gibbons plays Dr. Joe Baldwin, the self-styled child education expert. He prepares Zoe, from birth, for acceptance into a coveted “gifted-only” kindergarten program. He brings to each lesson an assortment of modified educational books, games and toys. These sessions, along with monologues analyzing her development, are recorded in hopes of proving that “genii [his term] are not born, but made.” What becomes evident is one man’s misguided quest to manipulate pitted against one child’s exuberant resistance to being controlled.

Director’s statement:

"The content of the rogue computer animation Boy/Analysis is perfectly illustrated by the integral title, namely, a drastic abbreviation of Melanie Klein's 1961 key study on child psychology. The initial 93 sessions the psychoanalyst booked with a ten-year-old boy, are reduced down to 16 by Reinke, and thoroughly illuminated. Tumbling around, appearing and disappearing against a black background, are text fragments. A score from Benjamin Britten orchestrates this semantic ballet in which the most arbitrary associations can be made.

Invoking Eve’s temptation and fall from grace with recurring images of the garden, the serpent, and the apple, Condit provides a look at the trouble beneath the surface in a modern-day suburban paradise. As a housewife struggling to come to terms with the conflicting demands placed on her as a wife, mother, career-woman, and daughter, Anne finds she is divided against herself; her identity is a territory occupied by everyone’s needs but her own.

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) is a hyper-war waged on over 20 million children in the United States. Despite overwhelming evidence of its educational ineffectiveness, D.A.R.E. has gained a religious following among educators and parents, and is the only federally-funded drug education program. D.A.R.E.'s imagistic and psychological assault is based on the presence of uniformed gun-toting police officers in the classroom.

A meditation on birth, silence and American cinema, sealed with a kiss.

In 1995 when TJ Cuthand was 16 they felt like the only lesbian at their Saskatoon high school. This turned out to be untrue, but the lack of visibility in their high school coupled with the lack of representation of Queer teenagers in the 90's made their video, a comedic short about teenage lesbian loneliness and trying to bribe classmates to come out with the promise of candy.