Video Art

This is quite a rare stuff from Eija-Liisa Ahtila, a Finnish videoartist and photographer.
The film tells five different stories about women who have developed psychoses.
It consists of five episodes each telling the story of one woman. In the first a woman prefers to stay underneath her bed because of the imaginary killers hunting around her. In the second a teenage girl becomes the assistant of UFOs controlling sounds heard on earth. In the third episode a woman crawls over a bridge because things have become unstable due to the emergence of past events. The fourth part depicts how anger takes the form of a wind in a woman’s apartment. In the last episode a woman starts to hear the sounds of other places, and shuts out all images by covering the windows of her house so as to be able to be in the space where the sounds are.
The script links the episodes together by using various spaces and surroundings, and through the treatment of images.Read More »

Prolific underground filmmaker Fotopoulos’ enigmatic setting of the Coleridge poem, using both 16mm and digital film to create a shifting, layered visual accompaniment. From the linked review:

“Those unfamiliar with the source material needn’t be intimidated. Reacting to another artist’s work, Fotopoulos creates something intrinsically his own. Christabel might be interpreted as the account of a young woman’s dream-thoughts as she nears adulthood, and the four sections of the film (structured to accompany each fragment of Coleridge’s poem) guide her to different levels of introspection. Each layer is charged with specificity, forging connections on multiple levels: corporeal, familial, religious, daemonic, and sexual. The young woman, Christabel, struggles through the blending worlds of waking life and soul-possessed visions….Christabel exists in vibrant, painterly counterpoint to the purposefully bleak, stark minimalism of Fotopoulos’ narratives, Back Against the Wall and Migrating Forms.”Read More »

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This remarkable compilation follows an exchange of video letters that took place between Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in the months immediately preceding Terayama’s death. It can be thought of as a home video produced by two preeminent poets and inter-laid with highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior and occasionally flamboyant visuals.Read More »

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This video is an ensemble piece that contains a collection of experimental performance art pieces by various performers. The entire video takes place in The Kitchen, an enormous artist’s loft in the midst of New York City. All the performance pieces are what could be considered Avant-garde in nature, though that term has fallen out of use today in order to make way for the more pedestrian and commonplace whitewash term of alternative; however, when this video was created, the style and feel of each of these pieces was more intentionally risk-filled and groundbreaking than what we see today as is the nature with the ideals of the avant-garde–I don’t think the term alternative had been coined and/or abused as yet, people were still saying New Wave or Punk or using terms even more inaccurate and less flattering. Don’t get me wrong, these differing pieces are new and experimental concepts in art but all are carefully rehearsed and well scripted, there is some, but very little improvisation on the whole. Read More »

Photo to Film. Horrors of the childhood.Read More »

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Statement by Hamlet Hovsepian regarding the films:
“”What have been presented are totally unrelated events (material) at the outset. The relation between them portrays neither pleasant nor unpleasant feelings. To find interest in a place outside man’s attention.”Read More »

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“Rotation around a rock” / during socialism / the passage of days and decades came to resemble one another, that was our life. Monotonous life chases after us and we are chasing after it.” (Hamlet Hovsepian)Read More »

Staggeringly simple films: a man itching his back, a man thinking, a man yawning, but like the works of Samuel Beckett, these minute gestures stand in as grand statements of the human condition, akin to the films of Bas Jan Ader and Marcel Broodthaers.Read More »

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A decade after quitting Hollywood, legendary director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, In a Lonely Place) accepted a teaching contract at Harpur College in Binghamton, NY. There, with the intensive collaboration of his students, he began work on a project unlike anything he had done before, the making of which would consume his creative energies for the remainder of his life. Entitled We Can’t Go Home Again, that film is Ray’s enormously ambitious, profoundly personal, wildly experimental magnum opus – a collection of notes on Vietnam-era America, the generation gap and the filmmaking process itself, conceived in a dizzying kaleidoscope of split screens, superimpositions and other radical image manipulations that anticipate later trends in video art and digital effects.Read More »