Video Art

  • Michaela Grill & Martin Siewert – Trans (2003)

    Martin Siewert2001-2010ExperimentalMichaela GrillUSAVideo Art

    Michaela Grill wrote:
    With trans, Martin Siewert and I used the 5 act structure of classical drama to create an atmosphere of in-between-ness and levitation. I found these old photographs of a harbor that totally embodied this emotion (also the sadness and melancholy of parting and saying goodbye). So I used them as my starting images and worked through the layers of the images, scratched away the unnecessary until I reached the essence.Read More »

  • Thomas Aigelsreiter – Key West (2002)

    2001-2010AustriaExperimentalThomas AigelsreiterVideo Art

    Vrääth Öhner wrote:
    Key West is located near the southern tip of Florida, not far from Key Largo. In contrast to Key Largo (John Huston, USA 1948), Key West has no need of gangsters to reveal this paradise on earth to be an illusion. Looking back from a distance of nearly 50 years, it is sufficient to reconnect those images which – each in itself – represented a longing view of this paradise: images of boat-like cars sailing down the highway, of bikini-clad girls on the beach, of surfers riding the waves. A moral lesson? Possibly.Read More »

  • Bill Morrison – Incident (2023)

    2021-2030Bill MorrisonDocumentaryUSAVideo Art

    INCIDENT reconstructs a 2018 police shooting in Chicago, reassembling the event and its immediate aftermath from a variety of sources, including surveillance, CCTV, dashboard, and body-worn cameras, as a synchronized split-screen montage.Read More »

  • Ralf Schmerberg – Poem – Ich setzte den Fuß in die Luft und sie trug aka Poem: I Set My Foot Upon the Air and It Carried Me (2003)

    2001-2010ExperimentalGermanyRalf SchmerbergVideo Art

    Poems have the power to uplift. They deal with a certain sense of magical enthusiasm and truth. Poem is a film that lets the viewer experience this power.
    A collection of nineteen poems from German-speaking authors, like Heiner Müller, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Schiller, Paul Celan and many others are performed and recited, taking us on a trip through life: its precious experiences and possibilities, expressions of love and friendship, the suffering of change, and the fear of aging, disease, loneliness and death.Read More »

  • Jean-Marie Straub – Gens du lac (2018)

    Jean-Marie Straub2011-2020FranceShort FilmVideo Art
    Gens du lac (2018)
    Gens du lac (2018)

    It is the discovery of a document recognising the services rendered by two fishermen from Lake Geneva during the Occupation that triggered the investigation undertaken by Swiss author Janine Massard in her novel Gens du lac, published in 2013. Jean-Marie Straub retraces the itinerary of the son, Paulus – just as he and Danièle Huillet had followed that of Jean Bricard just over ten years ago in the last film they made together. Gens du lac does not depart from the rule that sets each Straubfilm as an account of a historical situation in which men have resisted (Daney). Shot aboard a boat and hardly ever leaving the lake’s waters, the film depicts the life of this only son who has found brothers over the course of his fishing – be it his first steps in the trade, the help given to fugitives and deliveries of provisions to the Resistance, or his contribution to the emergence of a new Left in post-war Francophone Switzerland. Read More »

  • Ron Peck – What Can I Do with a Male Nude? (1985)

    Ron Peck1981-1990Short FilmUnited KingdomVideo Art
    What Can I Do with a Male Nude? (1985)
    What Can I Do with a Male Nude? (1985)

    Quote:
    The problems of showing the naked male body in all its glory are laid bare in this witty short. From the unabashed nudity on Grecian urns to the homoeroticism of 1950s muscle mags, this strange history is related by an unseen photographer as he snaps a naked male model, his kinky commentary full of sardonic observations on society’s hypocrisies.Read More »

  • Nicholas Ray – We Can’t Go Home Again (1973)

    Nicholas Ray1971-1980ExperimentalUSAVideo Art
    We Can't Go Home Again (1973)
    We Can’t Go Home Again (1973)

    Quote:
    A decade after quitting Hollywood, legendary director Nicholas Ray 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 »

  • Soda Jerk – Terror Nullius (2018)

    2011-2020AustraliaSoda JerkVideo Art
    Terror Nullius (2018)
    Terror Nullius (2018)

    Quote:
    Part political satire, part eco-horror, part road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a political revenge fable constructed entirely from samples pirated from the Australian cinema cannon. Binding together a documentary impulse with speculative muckraking, Soda Jerk’s revisionist history opens a queer narrative space where cinema fictions and historical facts permeate each other in new ways. The apocalyptic desert camps of Mad Max 2 become the site of refugee detention, flesh-eating sheep are recast as anti-colonial insurgents, and the women of Australian cinema go vigilante on Mel Gibson. Working within and against the official archive, Soda Jerk’s feature remix offers an incendiary un-writing of Australian national mythologies. Funded by the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission in 2016, TERROR NULLIUS was notoriously disowned by the organization just days prior to the film’s premiere in 2018. Offended by its politics, Ian Potter’s Board of Trustees described the work as “a very controversial piece of art” and “unAustralian.”Read More »

  • Charles Atlas – Hail the New Puritan (1987)

    1981-1990Charles AtlasQueer Cinema(s)United KingdomVideo Art
    Hail the New Puritan (1987)
    Hail the New Puritan (1987)

    Quote:
    Employing a documentary treatment with a fictional script, Atlas presents a time capsule of London in the spring of 1985. Michael Clark, hailed as the rock star of British contemporary dance, is cast as a successful young choreographer. The film charts a half-typical, half-imaginary day in Clark’s life, beginning with a dream sequence.

    Clark’s vigorous day includes an interview with a dance critic in a surreal skit featuring members of The Fall; a cemetery filming for an underground featurette; an erotic encounter in a mirrored bedroom; a nightclub scene; and dancing to exhaustion at home alone. The heart of the film centers on 12 principal dance sequences set in rehearsal, photo session, performance, and nightclub scenes.Read More »

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