Video Art

  • Tacita Dean – Event for a Stage (2015)

    2011-2020PerformanceTacita DeanUnited KingdomVideo Art

    ‘Event for a Stage’ is a 16mm film I made in 2015 with the actor Stephen Dillane. I normally project the work as film inside galleries and museums, and occasionally cinemas. I have always been steadfast about showing my films in the medium with which they were made and were always intended to be shown. I have therefore never allowed them to be streamed online or ever projected digitally. Film is a very different way of making and seeing a work, and over the years, I have campaigned to keep photochemical mediums available to artists and filmmakers, and I have found that I have done this best this by continuing to make and show my works in and on film.Read More »

  • Jean-Luc Godard – Scénario du film ‘Passion’ (1982)

    1981-1990DocumentaryFranceJean-Luc GodardVideo Art

    In scenario du film Passion, Godard constructs a lyrical study of the cinematic and creative process by deconstructing the story of His 1982 film Passion. “I did not want to write the script,” he states, “I wanted to see it.” Positioning himself in a video editing suite in front of a white film screen that evokes for him the “famous blank page of Mallarme” Godard uses video as a sketchbook with Which to reconceive the film. The result is a philosophical, often humorous rumination on the desire and labor that inform the conceptual and image making process of the cinema. directly quoting from and Further elaborating on the process and content of the earlier film – Which is itself about labor and creativity – Godard’s scenario is both rigorously theoretical and intensely personal.Read More »

  • Hito Steyerl – Factory of the Sun (2015)

    Hito Steyerl2011-2020DocumentaryGermanyVideo Art

    In this immersive work, which debuted at the 2015 German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Steyerl probes the pleasures and perils of image circulation in a moment defined by the unprecedented global flow of data. Ricocheting between genres—news reportage, documentary film, video games, and internet dance videos—Factory of the Sun uses the motifs of light and acceleration to explore what possibilities are still available for collective resistance when surveillance has become a mundane part of an increasingly virtual world. Factory of the Sun tells the surreal story of workers whose forced moves in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine.Read More »

  • Jean-Marie Straub – In omaggio all’arte italiana! (2015)

    2011-2020ItalyJean-Marie StraubShort FilmVideo Art

    Quote:
    Presented at the 2015 Venice Biennale, this short film by Jean-Marie Straub is a fragment of the last reel of his film History Lessons, based on Bertolt Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar and dedicated to the memory and materiality of cinema.Read More »

  • Yoko Ono & John Lennon – Rape (1969)

    1961-1970ExperimentalJapanJapanese Female DirectorsJohn LennonVideo ArtYoko Ono

    One of the most radical and influential works of experimental television produced by the famous couple of the late 60s, Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

    In November 1968 work began on one of one of John & Yoko’s most ambitious film ventures, a 75-minute mini-feature called Rape. It starred Eva Majlata, a 21 year old Hungarian actress who couldn’t speak English. She cannot escape the prying attentions of the camera which follows her around the streets of London, through a park, allowing her no privacy and almost causing her to walk into the path of a truck. She attempts to escape in a taxi, but is still followed. She is eventually cornered in an apartment from which she apparently cannot escape and her tearful pleas to the camera remain ignored. Rape was shot when John and Yoko were both at Great Charlotte Street Hospital following Yoko’s miscarriage. The cameraman was Nick Knowland, who worked on most of John and Yoko’s productions.Read More »

  • Nicky Hamlyn – Nicky Hamlyn- Selected Works (1974-2012)

    ExperimentalNicky HamlynUnited KingdomVideo Art

    Quote:
    Nicky Hamlyn is one of the UK’s key artist filmmakers of the past 30 years, working in 16mm film and video, he has produced a large body of both single screen work and installations in both media. His current practice has two distinct concerns, based on the medium he is using. In much of the film work he has been concerned with developing structures that are derived as closely as possible from the form of the subject matter. In recent years the subjects have been predominantly architectural, but also topographical. He often works frame by frame, in the manner of an animator, and this approach acknowledges the importance of the individual frame as a building block for bigger structures. The aim in establishing a reciprocal relationship between the film frame, the framing edges and the subject’s formal properties, is to eliminate subjective decisions about framing and allow given parameters to have a determining effect. Much of the video work, by contrast, explores the spontaneous interactions between complex events, such as the swirling movements of layers of net curtain, and the video technology used to record process the data it receives. This DVD makes available for the first time his major film and video works from the past 38 years and is accompanied by new essays by Simon Payne and Federico Windhausen.Read More »

  • Manon de Boer – Think About Wood, Think About Metal (2011)

    2011-2020BelgiumExperimentalManon de BoerVideo Art

    In a series of films in which we discover the portrait of a woman, Manon de Boer prolongs her experiments during the meeting with Robyn Schulkowsky. In Italy and then Germany, the rotation of the lens leads us in a false loop where the visible is metamorphosed by the audible. The meetings of the musician make up the journey of an instrumentalist confronted with some contemporary composers whose evocation disturbs our appreciation of the pieces performed. The sound portrait animates the vision of performance spaces.
    —Gilles GrandRead More »

  • William E. Jones – The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998)

    1991-2000Queer Cinema(s)USAVideo ArtWilliam E. Jones

    Quote:
    Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay adult videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.Read More »

  • Daniel Eisenberg – Something More Than Night (2003)

    2001-2010Daniel EisenbergDocumentaryUSAVideo Art

    Quote:
    Daniel Eisenberg’s quiet, voyeuristic portrait of Chicago shrouded in darkness draws us back to the beginning of cinema: to the Lumieres and Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet” to long takes by a fixed-camera with a fixed-lens to images that unfold in durational time. Confronting one-hundred years worth of cinematic conditioning, accomplished through montage and editing that has accelerated the way we experience time, Eisenberg meticulously edited his footage to avoid the chronological thrust of a narrative while evoking the rhythms of a city at night, long a fascination of filmmakers. Eschewing the conventions of fiction and non-fiction, SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT embodies the heightened sensual experience of place, time and memory.Read More »

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