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 Takahiko Iimura
For Filmic Meditation (2006) 16mm, color & B&w, sound, 42 min. rental price: 70.00 Sale: $90.00 Individual, *180 Institutional
Chrystel Egal  Chrystel Egal (2006) DVD, B&W and color, sound, 38 min and 40 min. rental price: 50.00
Compilation DVD
DVD 1: 38 Minutes
1-TRIBAL, Ron Athey, redemption through tatooing
2-KIRLI about a sculptor that makes the metal sounds.
3-PRINCESS WITH A PENIS, transvestites, these princesses with a penis that raise the question of sexual identity and inspire me some war cries
4-GHOSTS - a trip about the pleasure of being lonely and high
5-ROOM O - my studio and the origin of ideas. What drives me on can drive me mad
6-NO SHIT, THE WARRIOR SPIRIT, A Thai boxer and my involvement as an artist
7-NO SHIT, ON THGE EDGE, a travel through Patpong at night
8-NO SHIT, a road book about Thailand
9-KOVALAM BEACH, my first novel about a passion between a brother and sister
10- SLOAN, HER EXCESSES THAT WE CALL SCARS or the woman cop and the story of her scars
DVD 2: 40 minutes
11-NEW YORK IS MY EXCESS, my second novel of illuminations through New York.
12-EXTASY, a film illumination, a staccatyo of images, the psirit of extasy.
13-MY PERFORMANCE: TAKUSAN, THE ESSENCE OF LIFE, a physical approach , by the writing, of Cecil taylor's creation, the free jazz musician
14-ENOUGH OF CONFUCIUS, LOOKING FOR BASQUIAT, 30 flashes about the gap existing between the Korean temper and the confucianist society with its strict and complex laws
15-DESTINY, a skater evolving between the big city and the true nature.
16-BEING A CHILD, a haiku film about the perception of the child
17-PEACE is a synonym of lsd, a trip among lights with the woman and the figure of the circle as epicenters
18-EXISTENCE, alone together alone, frictions and sensuality.
19-HONG KONG 1948, the dignity of the poors
20-COMPTON, about the homeless in los angeles
These films are haiku-portraits. Every fiction-portrait shot in Super 8 or video, is the result of a relation of intimacy and the story of a body. It takes place in an installation where films, photos and texts respond to each other. I try to bring back the sensations of the first encounter. To recreate the universe of thoughts and intuitions it had revealed. By images and words, I affirm my choices and my places: New York, Los Angeles, Bangkok, Kovalam Beach, Vik, Geyser, Seoul... Places where I put myself in danger. No film is possible without knowing hte location of the risk.
Ken Jacobs THE GEORGETOWN LOOP 1997, 35mm, b&w/si, 11m, $50
Originally photographed in 1903, US Library of Congress collection. New arrangement in 1996 by Ken Jacobs, assisted by Florence Jacobs. 35mm optical rephotography by Sam Bush, Western Cine, Denver.
I've been raiding the Paper Print Collection of the Library Of Congress in Washington, DC, since the late 1960s with TOM, TOM, THE PIPER'S SON. It's a preserve of early cinema. Until 1912, in order to copyright film, one deposited with the library a positive from the negative printed on paper, unprojectable, but - unlike nitrate prints - capable of weathering the years without Crumbling into chemical volatility. And there the stacks rested, safely out of mind, hundreds and hundreds of silent rolls most less than 30 meters, many Edisons, American Mutoscope And Biograph, Gaumont, Lubin, Vitagraph ; cine-snatches of life as it was lived, vaudevillians, proto-dramas, and too many state parades. Until they were ripe for rediscovery and reevaluation, and rephotography back onto film. THE GEORGETOWN LOOP is my 11-minute riff on "The Scenic Wonder Of Colorado", a rail-line built in the 1870s through daunting mountain terrain to serve the silver mining industry. I've called it the first landscape film deserving of an X-rating, and that it is, yet its secret subtitle is - I must whisper - (Celestial Railway).
Sandra Davis CREPESCULE Pond & Chair (2001) 16mm, color, sound, 6.5min. rental price: 25.00
My brother was disabled by muscular dystrophy and used a wheelchair for most of his life. Despite the long, gradual degeneration of his physical condition, he lived with great spirit and heart, married, raised two children, volunteered for his church and was still working at his profession and building his fish pond on his land, when he died suddenly of complications of MD at age 52. He was my only brother and when I myself was disabled 10 years ago in an auto accident, his attitude of practical adaptions to physical impairments was one that made it easier for me. In an irony of life, a little Christmas message from him arrived two days after his sudden death. This event impelled me to respond with a film. The chair was his mobility in life, the pond he created was his dream.
This film is a little ellegy song to him, simultaneously celebrating his life and mourning his family’s personal loss.
Showed San Francisco International Film Festival 2002
Silvianna Goldsmith 'Lil Picard (1981) DVD/VHS, color, sound, 30 min. sale price: $60.00
Silvianna Goldsmith's Lil Picard is a filmed memoir of the witty and irreverent art world personality, artist and critic.
-Madcat Women's International Film Festival
For Life, Against The War...Again! (2006) Video (original miniDV), color, sound, 88 min. sale price: 200.00 (DVD)
Click Here for More Information
Richard Sandler The Gods of Times Square (1999) 112 min. rental price:
The plethora of religious zealots that (daily) would gather there to preach against the "sins" of secular life. The backdrop for their rants were the 60-foot supermodels and pop neon signs whose proselytizing pitch was wrapped in the primary colors of conformity. The work was shot from 1992-1998 as Times Square was "Disneyfied" for the new millenium. In his quest for gods in Times Square, Sandler speaks with mystics and with the reasoned and the unreasonable followers of the standard creeds. Spirituality is found, but only in the metaphysics of a timeless cast of gritty New Yorkers.
Richard Sandler Brave New York (2004) 55 min. rental price:
Celebrates the East Village in all its fabulous diversity. Shot from 1992-2004, it chronicles the gentrification of the "hood." The movie's main voices are those of the artists, street people and activists whose commentaries on the dominant culture give pause amidst the speedy approach of a "Brave New World."
Richard Sandler Sway (2006) 32 min. rental price:
a free-form documentary edited from 14 years of shooting video in the New York subways
Richard Sandler Everybody Is Hurting (2006) 52 min. rental price:
a documentary about the day of 9/11, and the soul searching and muscular debate that raged in union square park in the weeks following.
Richard Sandler a/k/a/ Martha's Vineyard (2006) 15 min. rental price:
a work in progress for a feature film doc about the lovely Massachusetts isle as seen from the perspectives of the Wampanoag Indian tribe, the island's indigenous people.
Vincent Grenier Compilation DVD (2006) Video (original miniDV), color, sound, 10 1/2 min. sale price: 150.00 (DVD)
Includes Tabula Rasa, Here, Colorstudy, Winter Collection, Material Incidents, Brendan's Cracker. (Contains updated versions of Material Incidents and Brendan's Cracker).
Vincent Grenier This, and this (2006) Video (original miniDV), color, sound, 10 1/2 min. sale price: 100.00 (Betacam SP) 50.00 (DVD)
“This, and This”, is digital immediacy splendor where images of nature cannot be merely innocent. Ideas about the natural and the mechanical are being toyed with, in varying degrees of wetness, scale, compressed states and expectations.
Vincent Grenier North Southernly (2005) Video (original miniDV), color, sound, 6 min. sale price: 100.00 (Betacam SP) 50.00 (DVD)
“ For an example of an artist exploring the aesthetic possibilities of video to their fullest, one need look no further than Vincent Grenier and his recent work. He's not just "working in video. Vincent Grenier is a true video artist, and North Southernly is a subtle, complex study in textures and gradations of layered video imagery.” Michael Sicinski, Online Journal “The Academic Hack”
Vincent Grenier Tabula Rasa (1993-2004) Video (original 16mm edited in miniDV), color, sound, 7 1/2 min. sale price: 100.00 (Betacam SP) 50.00 (DVD)
Filmed in a South Bronx high-school, Tabula Rasa attempts through sound image juxtapositions, digital manipulation and layering to deal at once with the propensity to mislead and eloquence of the recorded image. The ambiguous qualities of appearances, so assiduously cultivated by institutions, the motivations found in the clues that tells the history of objects, colors, textures, architecture and ultimately, psychological states of mind are but some of the players in this poetic and cultural happening.
Vincent Grenier Brendan's Cracker (1999) Video (orig MiniDV and Hi8), color, sound, 8-1/2 min. Sale Price: $75 (betacam SP) $50 (DVD)
with Betty Ostrov, Susan Weisser and Brendan Murphy.
Shot in mini DV and Hi 8 and edited on a digital desktop workstation. A collage of distant worlds, lost and not yet learned, memories and functions as playful instincts. An Alzheimer afflicted woman's distant reactions in intercut with the mischievous antic of a four year old looking into, scratching and feeding the screen.
Vincent Grenier Material Incidents (2001) Video (orig MiniDV), color, mono sound, 6 min. sale price: $75 (betacam SP) $50 (DVD)
MATERIAL INCIDENTS brings a layered look at the secrets of light's ritual and its loose associations with matter, temperature and the senses. Our eyes, our brain's primary sensors, ultimate arbiters of our sense of reality, well being and even of security, are closely implicated in this shadowy drama where notions of solidity, joust with fluidity and the ephemeral.
Screenings: Rotterdam International Film Festival, The House of Instants program curated by Mark McElhatten, January 2002; San Francisco Cinematheque, March 28, 2002; New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center, July 19 & 24, 2002.
Vincent Grenier Here (2002) Video (original miniDV), color, sound, 7 min. sale price: 100.00 (Betacam SP) 50.00 (DVD)
A boy’s phantasmagoric world of heroes is captured in layers of light and hues. This video, humorously and poetically juggles ideas about make believe and representation of the everyday.
Vincent Grenier Shut Up Barbie (1974) 16mm, color, sound, 14 min. rental price: 30.00 sale price (DVD):$50
SHUT UP BARBIE has rarely been shown and is a "rediscovered" film, so to speak. The film is the filmmaker's (Vincent Grenier) reaction to the obsession a seven year old girl has with her Barbie Dolls. The film builds on the Barbie Dolls' referential content and limits. While innocuous at first, the humor eventually becomes rather unsettling and tragic. Ann Knutson plays the role of the mother Barbie Doll.
Vincent Grenier Surface Tension #2 (1995) 16mm, color, sound, 4.5 min. rental price: 30.00
(new re-edited print)
This film was partly shot in Kinemacolor. A process which was used in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black & white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, red and green filters.
Award: Director's Choice, 1995 Black Maria Film & Video Festival. Curated screenings: Conspiracies Film Festival, Symposium on Independent Film & Video at the University of Colorado, Boulder, June 1996.
Vincent Grenier While Revolved (1976) 16mm, color, silent, 11 min. rental price: 25.00
(new re-mastered 16mm print)
Project at 18 fps.
This film is concerned with the projected, not just light or the emulsion or the illusion or the projector or the camera, but all of them. The surface of the film, the grain, is remembered when a similar but illusionistic surface appears (just as magnified), crossing the frame. Other times the grain is left to itself. There are the idiosyncratic focusing qualities of shadows acting as diaphragms inside the image. The elusive background confounds itself with the foreground. The notions of appearances and disappearances transform themselves in notions of time.
Made with a grant from the Canada Council.
Bruce Baillie All My Life (1966) 16mm trasferred to DVD, color, sound, 3 min. Sale price: 200.00
A newly produced, signed, limited edition NTSC DVD release of Baillie's film.
Caspar, CA in the days of kites and roses! A single, continuous shot, documented last roll of 16mm Ansco Color film. Titled from the song, inspired by the light, the blue sky and red roses along an ancient Celtic fence. -- B.B.
Stephane Marti In Contextus (1976) VHS, color, sound, 23 min. rental price: 50.00
Super 8 color reversal film transferred to VHS NTSC
Stephane Marti "> La Cite Des Neuf Portes (1977) VHS, color, sound, 70 min. rental price: 75.00
Super 8 color reversal film transferred to VHS NTSC
Stephane Marti "> Video Compilation: Ladyman; Allegoria; Climax (2006) VHS, color, sound, 32 min. rental price: 50.00
Compilation of three Super 8 color reversal films transferred to VHS NTSC
LADYMAN (1976) color, sound, 8 min.
ALLEGORIA (1979) color, sound, 14 min.
CLIMAX (1983) color, sound, 12 min.
Stephane Marti "> Mira Corpora (2004) VHS, color, sound, 45 min. rental price: 75.00
Super 8 and 16mm film original transferred to VHS NTSC
Karel Doing Antipodes (2006) DVD, color, sound, 19.5 min. rental price: 20.00
Portrait of a globe-trotter in four corners of the world: Shanghai, Marrakech, Rotterdam, Kabelvåg.
In this place there was no time. Only progress. He missed time. Not that time had been particularly friendly to him, the only effect it had was death. Death was everywhere. He felt bleak, miserable, unremarkable, he was looking for life..
He was an outsider, but he loved it. The world was a show of miracles, he wouldn’t like to miss. He didn’t make it to the stage, he was watching, with pleasure, without really being part of it.
He was an antipode. Here was his home. It was a place like everywhere else, did it matter where he lived? His body was just a vessel, no shore being in reach, but safe, comfortable.
A friend for life A home, regardless where-ever it was.
That night he dreamed he was in a burning building, he knew that it was going to explode soon.
He laid down on a bed, and imagined that he was a fish, swimming in an ice-cold sea. The building exploded. He felt happy.
Karel Doing El (2005) DVD, b&w, sound, 5 min. rental price: 20.00
A dreamy document about finding a fragile treasure amongst a hasty crowd, the drinking of water, some wandering between stones, and the vulnerabilty of human life.
Karel Doing Jinx (2005) DVD, color, sound, 19.5 min. rental price: 30.00
Jinx is a bad spirit or a hopeless situation. In this short dancefilm the jinx is stronger then two breathtaking women, dancing their last dance.
A telephone and a car are the only attributes, a lonely road between sea, sand and wind is the location. The world seems to be empty, the landschape is artificial, the elements rage. A short, rough film in vivid colours.
Jinx is a collaboration of Karel Doing and the Rotterdam based dance-group Lieber Gorilla.
Karel Doing Trottadam (2006) DVD, b&w, sound, 8.75 min. rental price: 45.00
Two women have a rendez-vous in Rotterdam, the city they chose for their wedding. Their personal approach towards the traditional ritual, undermines the established sterotypes. They evocate the atmosphere of the twenties, and simultaniously parody the topics of the hour. They enchant with their comical and lovely performance.
Paul Gabel For Safekeeping (Scissions, Sutures and Naming) (2006) dvd, color, 44 min. rental price: 75.00
For Safekeeping (Scissions, Sutures and Naming) is an experimental documentary that chronicles the procedures behind an image archive to offer a perspective on how origin, history and authority are formed, ordered and sustained.
Anne Hanavan I Love Jesus (2003) DVD, color, sound, 3 min. sale price: 50.00
"i love jesus" is an auto-erotic self portrait of the artist. High tone and natural light with clever editing set to a clasic punk sound track makes this piece the quintessential post modern porn.
Anna Fahr Khaneh Ma: These places we call home (2006) DVD, color, sound, 90 min. rental price: 50.00, sales price: 75.00
Khaneh Ma: These Places We Call Home examines questions of cultural identity by presenting three generations of Iranians divided on three continents, and reunited on one journey. The film begins with the director's return to Iran, her country of cultural origin, where she becomes reacquainted with family she has not seen in over ten years, and rediscovers a culture that has remained a quiet yet ever-present part of her life in Canada. As the journey unfolds, we uncover rarely seen aspects of Iranian culture, as experienced by the director, while witnessing firsthand the process of leaving an old culture behind and the journey into a new one.
Brian Coffey Like Being Pursued By A Boulder (2005) 16mm, B&W, sound, 6 min. rental price: 30.00
LIKE BEING PURSUED BY A BOULDER is a willfully subjective document of the protests surrounding the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. The film juxtaposes images of anonymous dissent with the iconography of the state, and questions what is hidden and visible within the public sphere.
LIKE BEING PURSUED BY A BOULDER acts as a counter to prevailing representations of large-scale protests through its refusal to play the numbers game (success or failure determined solely by suspect headcounts), and its avoidance of images that foster a binary identification/rejection relationship with the viewer (Do these people look like/unlike me?). Instead the film focuses on the collective energy generated on the street and the force marshaled to restrict and contain this energy. The film recognizes the steady disappearance of the public commons and the marginalization of dissent in hopes that new objectives and strategies can be realized to counter this trend.
Brian Coffey Onishi Portrait (2005) 16mm, B&W, silent, 6 min. rental price: 30.00
A portrait of filmmaker ONISHI Kenji at his Tokyo apartment in 2003. A series of cinematic exchanges between filmmaker and subject set in a space infiltrated by cinematic detritus.
Scot-Free Strange Love (1996) 16mm, color, sound, 5 min. Rental Price: Starring: Nick Zedd, Cynthia Demoss, Darryl Goldsmith and scot-free
Cinema of Transgression founder Nick Zedd stars in this sick little film as one half of a jaded Lower East Side couple that's become bored of straight sex. Wanting to spice things up a bit they imitate some rough sex action they see on TV with gory consequences.
Official Selection: 7th Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival
Official Selection: 2nd Annual Boston Underground Film Festival
Phil Costa Cummins Fire (?) 16mm, color, silent, 2.5 min. rental price: 20.00
An attempt to capture beauty too volatile, too fleeting and too dangerous; a thing with a life of its own.
Phil Costa Cummins Handmade (?) 16mm, color, silent, 3.5 min. rental price: 20.00
A shared discovery. In HANDMADE the camera is directed into the sun as the hand is expanded and contracted in front of the lens in a kind of living shutter. The resulting images fuse flesh and light into a dance of brilliant bursts of light and color, expressing a longing for flight and celebrating the passion of a living summer day.
Awards: 24th Ann Arbor Festival and Tour; Humboldt Film Festival, 1986
SF Art Institute Film Festival, 1987; Athens Int'l Film Festival, 1987.
Phil Costa Cummins Moondance (?) 16mm, color, silent, 3.5 min. rental price: 20.00
There are small creatures within all of us. We lurk alone in the mossy cool of the day, peering out to the warm light through the hidden foliage to the lush, dark mystery of daydream. At nightfall we emerge and stir about with the spinning of the moon. This scintillation and eclipse, the invocation of night and nature, is for me the rediscovery of magic.
Award: Humboldt Film Festival, 1987
Exhibition: No-Nothing Cinema, SF, 1986
Phil Costa Cummins Requiem (?) 16mm, b&w, silent, 2 min. rental price: 20.00 *
The resurrection of myth in a simple play of light and shadow. The images of epochs are evoked within these short passages.
*Note: REQUIEM is included free of charge with rental of the three other films, FIRE, HANDMADE and MOONDANCE.
Phil Costa Cummins Today's Big News (1984) 16mm, color, sound, 3.5 min. rental price: 20.00
TODAY'S BIG NEWS synthesizes the thousands of bits of meaningless information contained within the hourly onslaught of media bombardment. Chemically solarized film is combined with depolarized video images - achieved by literally attacking the internal components of a videotape recorder - to produce garish colors and electronic negative images. The disharmony is further emphasized by a fragmented soundtrack composed of bits of TV commercials and programs - a metaphor for the inherent deception in the broadcast medium.
Award: Humboldt Film Festival, 1985
Phil Costa Cummins Vigo & Broadway (1985) 16mm, color, sound, 5 min. rental price: 20.00
An articulation of the conflict between man and nature, told in the style of the cinepoem. The camera takes on the point of view of an egret, a great sea bird, its sense of vision fragmented, slow in coming. It takes time to assemble the parts of vision into meaningful forms. Taking rest for a moment on this sad world of men, it returns to sky.
Phil Costa Cummins Angels (1988) 16mm, color, silent, 2 min. rental price: 20.00
Fears, laments, and remembrances told in romantic images on the classic Kodachrome eight millimeter. A film shot as though its images have somehow mythically emerged from the nineteenth century.
Phil Costa Cummins Four Films by Phil Costa Cummins (1985 - 1989) VHS, color, silent & sound, 26 min. Purchase price: 20.00
Four film compilation:
VIGO & BROADWAY (1985, VHS, color/so, 5m): See film description above.
VOYAGER (1987, VHS, color/so, 3m): Shot in my mother's living room a short time after my father's death. The film combines images of objects in the room with family photographs, old films and soft light refractions in green and gold. The images suggest the contemplative nature of thought-memory; a kind of universal state of consciousness in which all memories are melded into one.
ANGELS (1988, color/si, 2m): See film description above.
SMOKY'S JOURNAL (1989, color/si, 16m) A silent diary film shot while living in a rural area from the summer of 1988 through the spring of 1989. States of mind are expressed in the film through visual relationships to animals and nature and through the play of light on Kodachrome 40.
Changes in mood are denoted by the structural changes in editing, from languid and pastoral to anxious and frenetic, and by the seasonal changes in nature.
Jennifer MacMillan The Garden Dissolves Into Air (2006) MiniDV, color, sound, 6 min. rental price: 25.00
Shot on super 8, transfered to 16mm to mini-DV
A cinematic exploration throught the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, using a super-8 camera and the simple power of observation; a document of flowers, butterflies, dragonflies, and goldfish has been captured and analyzed through the optical printer and Final Cut Pro. A true film/video hybrid of science & imagination, this digitally manipulated 16mm film in some small way approaches the marsh flowers of Odilon Redon, where the marvels of nature become part of the dream world! - JM
Nancy Graves Izy Boukir (1971) 16mm or video, color, sound, 16 min. rental price: 50.00
film rental: 50.00, video rental: 50.00, video sale: 400.00
ISY BOUKIR contains footage filmed in the Sahara during eighteen days. I wanted to extend sequences in GOULIMINE, 1970 and to a greater degree permit the animal motions to determine structure. An arriflex was often positioned five to ten feet from the animals. In New York, partite animal forms were seperated into two segments: as walking and as graduated motion. Through the edited sequential duration, camel morphology vies with the viewer's inherent anthropomorphism... This film is the most successful in that the impression of these animals as primordial beings existing in barren yet awesomely beautiful surroundings far outweighs a consciousness of complicated editing and sound relationships.--N.G.
"ISY BOUKIR is not exactly a study of camels--though unavoidably it is full of the material for such a study--but rather a study of the way in a flock of camels, individual camels, and parts of a camels, occupy the space available to the camera frame. This may sound preteniously abstract, but Ms. Graves's film is precise and wonderfully particular, and as appreciativee of its camels as of the controlled rhythms of their surges across the screen, the slight shifting of their legs, the curves of their extended necks. It is altogethter beautiful, rich, assured, tactful and intensive filmmaking."--Roger Greenspun, New York Times
David Finkelstein Radiant Emanators (2003) DVD, color, sound, 19 min. rental price: 30.00
A holy scripture appears floating in outer space. It is covered with text, copiously illustrated, and refers to a wide range of fanciful incidents, including Walt Whitman's trip down the Long Island Expressway, the trials of a pregnant teenager, and ballerinas who stuff their toe shoes with newspaper, among many other things. An illuminated manuscript, based on a fully improvised performance, Radiant Emanators mediates on the effect of uneven sources of light on written texts, and on the way our uneven readings of our own cultural texts determine our views on genocide, sexual freedom, and our general consciousness.
David Finkelstein Earth And Moon In Love (2004) DVD, color, sound, 21 min. rental price: 30.00
At the climax of Percy Shelley's lyrical drama, "Prometheus Unbound," Mankind is delivered once and for all from tyranny, and the Universe celebrates his new-found freedom and self-mastery. As part of this celebration the Earth and the Moon fall rapturously in love. This musical setting for acclaimed countertenors RANDALL WONG and JOHN COLLIS places the amorous planets among floating panels of scenery which illustrate almost every line of the text, creating a visual/musical feast which is at once silly, mystical and delirious.
David Finkelstein
Lovely Academic Slaughter Houses (2005) DVD, color, sound, 27 min. rental price: 30.00
Inside the card catalogue of the University library, Greek boys and pin-up girls gambol on the Acropolis. Meanwhile, out in the real world, parfait desserts and unruly children are floating by in uncontrollable clouds of bubbles. Based on a fully improvised text, this video meditates on how the boxlike conceptual thinking of academia attempts to grapple with sexuality, gender, culture, and the unclassifiably bubblelike flow of reality. Multiple layers of meticulously crafted imagery help the viewer to make sense of the complex text and music.
David Finkelstein Display Devices (2005) DVD, color, sound, 25 min. rental price: 30.00
Based on a completely improvised performance, "Display Devices" juxtaposes meticulously animated digital images with floating, spinning grids of color, to create a pixelated universe, in which tiny rectangles of pure color are combined into images which display coded messages of gender, philosophy, and urgently personal visions. Male peacocks display their feathers, warriors don their war bonnets, Carmen Miranda decks herself out in a fruity hat, and cocoa wafers dissolve themselves into cups of cocoa, while a lush musical score and constantly shifting visual perspectives lift the viewer into a dizzying flight through perceptual space.
Donna Cameron Live Reel I - War Paths Thru Turquoise & Silver 2005 16mm, color, silent, 15 min. rental price: 75.00
5 Silent Films in Cinematic Paper Emulsion
Five films on one reel, each separated by 3 seconds of turquoise leader
Films may be rented separately by advance arrangement with The Film-Makers' Coop.
1. BROKN BRIDGE 3 min, 2005
2. LIEDER 3.5 min, 1996, 35mm showm on 16mm
3. WORLD TRADE ALPHABET 2.5 min, 2000, 35mmm shown on 16mm
4. PETERBOROUGH FOREST 2.5 min, 2001, 35mm shown on 16mm
5. JAZZ STUDY 2.5 min, 2001, 35mm shown on 16mm
All films employ a cinematic paper emulsion technique developed by Cameron since 1974 and are handmade, original works. The reel in its entirety premiered at the Film-makers' Coop benefit show, September 2005, with music accompaniment by Mark Stewart and David Cossin of Bang on A Can.
WORLD TRADE ALPHABET "Materials: Oil, Charcoal, Ink on Paper Emulsion, on 35mm film ...Theme: A Visual Meditation on the evolution of the alphabet which we use, it's origins in ancient Phoenicia, and the fact that it was invented as a shorthand from 360+ character cuneiform to better the efficiency of communication in ancient international world trade.
Process: Film begins with primitive carving into handmade paper emulsion of ancient cuneiform glyphs, evolves into painting and drawing of glyphs, them floating type, using digital print-out of helvetica type and concludes with multi-material words: World Trade Alphabet." -- Canyon Cinema catalog
Clayton Patterson Tompkins Square Park Police Riot (1988) video, color, sound, 3 hrs. 33 min. DVD purchase price: 200.00
This tape provided the evidence that the police had in fact rioted. Clayton Patterson was arrested, was allowed back on the street after a 10 day hunger strike, and won the right in the trial, as an artist, to keep the original tape. Clayton has had more video tapes used in court against rogue police officers than anyone in American history.
A basic document in the recent history of urban civil strife in the U.S. "This was a military action on the streets of NYC and you can see that" Sharon Broussard, NY Daily News.
Lili Chin Finnish Psyche (Excerpt 1) The Red Spectre (2006) DVD, color, sound, 8 1/3 min. rental price: 35.00
A documentation of a live performance by musicians from Finland at Anthology Film Archives.
Lili Chin Portrait of Shanghai (2006) DVD, color, sound, 5 min. rental price: 35.00
A city symphony of Shanghai in the 21st century
Lili Chin Untitled Space Series (2006) DVD, color/b&w, sound, 15 min. rental price: 50.00
Compilation of 4 Titles:
Sunday Song
Space Song
Flight
Portrait Of Shanghai
Leslie Thornton Another Wordly (1999) video, b&w, sound, 22 min. rental price: 200.00
Pairing dated East German techno music with early twentieth-century film reels of cabaret lines and vaudevillean dance productions, this tape forces the viewer to question categories of "old" and "new," "good" and "bad."
Leslie Thornton Let Me Count The Ways - Minus 10, 9, 8, 7 (2004) video, color, sound, 20 min. rental price: 200.00
Tape also includes END IN NEW WORLD (2004) 2 min.
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS ... inaugurates a new serial work by Leslie Thornton. As in her recently completed Peggy and Fred series, Thornton explores the social effects of new technologies and media, but here she pushes even further into autobiographical territory to suggest the ways in which we are all implicated in these changes. Juxtaposing aerial military footage; scientific data on genetic mutation; audio testimony about the bombing of Hiroshima, and a home movie of her father, a World War II Air Force pilot, as he is dispatched to that city, Thornton creates a dense and compelling meditation on violence.
Leslie Thornton Peggy And Fred In Hell Beginning, Middle and End (2004) video, b&w/color, sound, 86 min. purchase price: 1000.00
Made 1984 - 2004.
Jennifer Reeves Shadows Choose Their Horrors (2005) Video, b&w and color, sound, 31 min. rental price: 70.00 sale price: 70.00
Available on DVD or VHS
SHADOWS CHOOSE THEIR HORRORS is the dark and melodic diary of a necromancer living on the edge between the mortal world and the realm of lost souls. Sinister forces surround Madame G (Winsome Brown) as she tries to bond with her favorite undead. Using magic and ritual to give them new life and pleasures, Madame G is shocked by a devastating outcome. This camp and experimental reworking of early silent horror was inspired by both the un-staged Aaron Copland ballet GROHG (1922-25), and the film which stirred the young Copland to write the ballet: NOSFERATU.
SHADOWS... was originally made for a performance of GROHG by the American Ballet Symphony Orchestra at Bard Music Festival.
Ken Jacobs Make Light On Film (with Pulfrich filters) (1995) DVD, sound, 23 min. rental price: ?
To be viewed with use of a single dark (Pulfrich) filter.
Ken Jacobs New York Street Trollies (1990/1999) DVD, sound, 10 1/2 min. rental price: ?
An illustrated lecture.
**Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy.
Ken Jacobs Star Spangled To Death (2004) DVD, b&w and color, sound, 440 min. rental price: ?
Made 1956-60/ 2003-04.
Ken Jacobs Mountaineer Spinning (2004) DVD, b&w and color, sound, 26 min. rental price: ?
Music: Rick Reed. Audio to be played comfortably loud (gets quiet toward end) and as 5.1 "virtual surround."
**Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy.
Ken Jacobs Insistent Clamor (2005) DVD, sound, 22 min. rental price: ?
Brief sound at end, keep volume high.
**Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy.
Ken Jacobs Let There Be Whistleblowers (2005) DVD, sound, 18 min. rental price: ?
Music: Steve Reich, DRUMMING, Part 1. Stereo (2 channel) best heard as 5.1 "virtual surround."
**Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy.
Ken Jacobs Nervous Magic Lantern: SPIRAL NEBULA (2005) DVD, b&w and color, sound, 45 min. rental price: ?
Music: Rick Reed. Audio to be played comfortably loud and (though it's 2-track stereo) as 5.1 "virtual surround."
**Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy.
Ken Jacobs Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly (2005) DVD, sound, 90 min. rental price: ?
**Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy.
Ken Jacobs Krypton Is Doomed (2005) DVD, b&w and color, sound, 34 min. rental price: ?
Sound: first Superman radio broadcast (1940)
Ken Jacobs Chronometer (2006) DVD, sound, 22 min. rental price: ?
First performed 1990.
First Nervous Magic Lantern piece .. single light source, no film-drive) Music: CHRONOMETER by Harrison Birtwistle, stereo-2 track greatly enhanced by playing as 5.1 "virtual surround." Keep level comfortably loud.
**Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy.
Ken Jacobs Pushcarts Of Eternity Street (2006) DVD, b&w, sound, 10 min. rental price: 25.00
Marie Losier Flying Saucey! (2006) 16mm on DVD, color, sound, 8 min. rental price: ?
A giant pot is descending from the sky. Twenty winsome damsels are landing on Planet Earth, coming out of the pot filled with 280 pounds of spaghetti. A battle for sauce and survival.
Marie Losier The Ontological Cowboy (2005) DVD, b&w and color, sound, 10 min. rental price: ?
With Richard Foreman, Juliana Francis, Tom Ryder Smith and Jay Smith.
"The theater is about sex." At least according to Richard Foreman, the father of the Ontological Hysterical Theater. The Ontological Cowboy documents Foreman's invocation of the "manifest destiny" of the avant-garde theater, King Cowboy Rufus strolling down off San Juan Hill with a sigh, waving his handkerchief. Foreman plays himself, and the cast pantomimes his preoccupation. If "the cast and crew suffer alike," it's all for a good cause: the violent rebirth of the American theater, with Foreman as its midwife. --M.L.
Grahame Weinbren Selected Works (1976 - 2004) (2004) DVD (NTSC) rental price: 35.00 sale price: 50.00
The DVD includes documentations of five interactive cinema works:
The Erl King (1983-85/2004) Sonata (1991/93) March (1997) Frame (1999) Tunnel (2000).
- Letters, 18 one minute films, each generating a letter of the alphabet.
- Five essays on film, interactivity, new media, and their philosophical implications (accessible only on a computer).
- 30 mins (at least) of ‘bonus’ material.
James Fotopoulos ZERO (1997) 16mm, color, sound, 142 min. rental price: 200.00
James Fotopoulos’ deeply disturbing experimental film paints a grim portrait of the psychological collapse of a young man drifting further and further into total isolation. In his solitude, primal fantasies of sex and violence transform into frightening visions and insanity, while a cyst growing on his arm suggests a physical manifestation of his mental breakdown. A shocking debut feature.
“Grisly, abrasive and one of the few truly underground features we’ve seen in a good while, ZERO plays like a Brakhage/Morrisey directorial collaboration on a screenplay by Pasolini. A profoundly disturbing study in abjection and squalor, ZERO offers its own version of redemption. It’s not to be missed” –- Robert Beck Memorial Cinema
James Fotopoulos Growth (1999) 16mm, b/w & color, 6 min. rental price: 25.00
James Fotopoulos A Room (1999) 16mm, b/w & color, sound, 18 min. rental price: 40.00
James Fotopoulos Two Cats (1999) 16mm, color, silent, 46 sec. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos Migrating Forms (1999) 16mm, b/w and color, sound, 80 min. rental price: 200.00
"Migrating Forms is as complete a vision as any film has the right to be, and generates more intrigue and mystery than most ever do.” – Walker Art Center
“A kind of stripped-down Eraserhead, shot in low-contrast black and white in the style of cheap '40s porn loops, the film is set inside a single room that looks like the basic set you'd find in an acting class—a table with a chair at either end and a bed. The room is occupied by a stolid-looking guy and his cat and is visited repeatedly by a pudgy woman who strips off her clothes, gets on the bed, and has sex with the man. Sometimes the sex scenes are so softly focused and underexposed you can't tell what's going on. At other times, you see more than you would want. The woman has a large hideous growth on her back (rather like the phallic growth in Marilyn Chambers's armpit in Cronenberg's RABID). Soon the man discovers a similar growth on his shoulder. Midway through the film, an exterminator knocks at the door. After that, dead insects and rodents put in an appearance. Inevitably, the corpse of the cat turns up as well. MIGRATING FORMS has a formal purity and obsessive power that's all too rare these days.” – Amy Taubin, Village Voice
James Fotopoulos Breathe (2000) 16mm, b/w, silent, 34 sec. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos Drowning (2000) 16mm, color, sound, 3 min. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos Escape (2000) 16mm, color, sound, 3 min. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos The Sun (2000) 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos The Vanished (2000) 16mm, b/w, silent, 5 min. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos Back Against the Wall (2000) 16mm, b/w, sound, 94 min. rental price: 200.00
"BACK AGAINST THE WALL is the strongest Fotopoulos I've seen. Initially predicated on the filmmaker's trademark repetitive routines, it concerns a grim slab of middle-aged beef jerky (Martin Shannon) holed up in a characterless apartment furnished mainly with cardboard boxes. Lying in bed, sourly awaiting the return of his young girlfriend (Debbie Mulcahy) from work, Shannon seems like a john in his own place.
Fotopoulos likes his low-rent Hopper compositions harshly lit and underscored by a persistent drone. Back Against the Wall's anonymous atmosphere, pointless conversations, and recurring set-ups hold the promise of sex (or at least violence). But the movie is all about unreleased tension. Shannon's other activities include playing chess and listening to the complaints of his no-neck friend (Ernie E. Frantz). When Mulcahy, who apparently works in a strip club, models a series of little nighties for Shannon, he scarcely looks up from his book to acknowledge her. While the viewer patiently waits to discover if the movie is Shannon's long crack-up or just a prolonged slow-burn, Fotopoulos fastidiously maps a little corner of hell—brutal depression is mocked by the wind-up clown sitting on Shannon's night table.
Once Mulcahy leaves Shannon for a marginally livelier, more appropriate sleazemeister, the film's tone shifts first to the blandly inane and then the cumulatively insane. Mulcahy's new boyfriend is a would-be pornographer in hock to the mob—he gets beat up but won't tell her why. This fatal association leads to an extravagantly long scene on what could be the set of a porn film (half a dozen women making up, snorting coke, and sitting around in costume). The eventual payoff is far more grotesque. Mulcahy meets her depressing fate—or is it a happy ending?—in a No Exit motel room with Frantz." -- J. Hoberman, Village Voice
James Fotopoulos The Circle 1 (2001) 16mm, b/w, silent, 7 min. rental price: 25.00
James Fotopoulos Insect (2001) 16mm, b/w, sound, 11 min. rental price: 30.00
James Fotopoulos Consumed (2001) 16mm, color and b/w, sound, 21 min. rental price: 50.00
A five part series - Films can be rented individually: Part 1 (5min, b/w, price: 20.00); Part 2 (3min, color, price: 20.00); Part 3 (1min, color, price: 20.00); Part 4 (7min, color, price: 25.00); Part 5 (5min, b/w, price: 20.00)
James Fotopoulos The Circle 2 (2001) 16mm, color, sound, 8 min. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos Christabel (2001) digital video and 16mm, color, sound, 74 min. rental price: ??.00
"Pindar's fine remark respecting the different effects of Music, on different characters, holds equally true of Genius - as many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder either recognizes it as a projected form of his own Being, that moves before him with a Glory round its head, or recoils from it as a Spectre." -- S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825)
"The idea was that the soul of Coleridge should not be enslaved to the poem of Coleridge, even though that is what he worked on. The vision is far greater than that. With this technology, in a sort of anthropological way, you can fracture the poem, and by fracturing it you can begin taking the themes and extracting them...So I began by taking my emotional intuitions, tying that in to all the factual aspects of the poem, and then began this sort of surgery...Using these new technologies, I can go in and extract the essence of this and put it up again. And it was again difficult because the more you get into Coleridge the more complex it becomes. One way most adaptations fail is they focus on one aspect of something. But it's impossible to focus on one aspect of anything. You have to head in, and take on all the aspects. If you fail, you fail. Coleridge is a man of genius, so it just became more and more complex. I began unraveling more and more, and getting deeper and deeper, to the point where I could almost die working on it." -- J.F.
James Fotopoulos Flight (2002) 16mm, b/w, sound, 3 min. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos The Scythe (2002) 16mm, b/w, sound, 2 min. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos Families (2002) 16mm, b/w, sound, 97 min. rental price: 200.00
“Families bears the stylistic traits of his earlier feature-length films but expands the number of characters and locations. Opening with a portentous shot of nearly motionless sheep, the black-and-white film develops in disaffected dialogue scenes interspersed with shots of dreary Midwestern exteriors. The main strain of the narrative focuses on a young man and woman and their prolonged, halting conversations, many of which revolve around death. Yet none of the violence recounted in these exchanges takes place on screen, where life is characterized by the absence of physical contact, robotic soliloquy, and a general sense of forlorn ennui. Recurring throughout the film are repeated shots of the sheep from the opening, dogs or fish in an aquarium, paradigmatically linking annals to the characters and their awkward interactions. Fotopoulos suggests that the titular familial ties refer to larger structures of kinship, and constructs a bleak parallel in the common markers of human and animal existence.” --Henriette Huldisch, Whitney Museum of American Art
James Fotopoulos The Hemispheres (2003) 16mm, color, sound, 5 min. rental price: 20.00
James Fotopoulos Hidden Objects (2003) 16mm, b/w, silent, 39 min. rental price: 80.00, individual films: 20.00
A series with 12 films, all of them around 3-4 minutes. Films can also be rented individually.
James Fotopoulos The Nest (2003) 16mm, color, sound, 78 min. rental price: 200.00
"Somewhere in the Midwest, a young couple's starter apartment discharges the anomie stored in its cool, white walls and sparse, angular furnishings. The eponymous nest and the true star of this suburban gothic, its light fixtures ooze bilious greens and overripe ambers onto surgically extracted blocks of cheap architecture that each emit their own pitches and grinds of white noise. A nonstop 3am panic attack of drywall-crawling despair, this is the field on which James Fotopoulos assembles his latest assault on the senses.
To pin down and enumerate what happens in The Nest is to do violence to it. Better to list effects, colors, and key phrases, cut up and drawn from a hat, than offer any kind of chronology. More textural than textual, it distills dramatic tensions to a 78-minute environment of pure narrative: out of time, unencumbered by plot or rounded characters and demanding to be taken as a story that happens chiefly to the audience rather than to the figures in its landscape." --Spencer Parsons, Cinematexas
James Fotopoulos Esophagus (2004) DVD, color, sound, 70 min. rental price: 25.00
“At 28, Chicagoan James Fotopoulos has made more than 100 films and videos, and they keep getting better, having moved from the uncomfortableness of human flesh to the more metaphysical hell of Esophagus. At its center is a typical Fotopoulos torment: six men, one sporting horns, seem imprisoned in a drab room, and a distorted female voice intones phrases such as ‘You’re born with teeth in your eyes.’ Elsewhere, scratches on the film outline and entrap women’s bodies. The opening section – showing gorgeous yet intrusive and terrible flickering light patterns accompanied by droning music – is repeated at the end, giving the work a fatalistic form that suggests the trap isn’t the walls of a room but the nature of the cosmos.” -- Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
James Fotopoulos The Ant Hill (2004) DVD, color, sound, 60 min. rental price: 25.00
"I was in the forest walking and thinking. And as I was coming upon the stream - all the sounds around me, the water running and the birds became very loud. It became very intense. I thought my head was going to explode. Then it all faded away and I was in complete silence. I smelled something burning and the sunlight was so bright in my eyes. I was surrounded by bright light. I looked up and saw the tops of the trees were on fire. Two large pillars of light stood before me. The pillars were made up of round balls of light. Red, blue, orange. And standing between them was a man. I couldn’t see his face. I was afraid. He told me that I was the chosen by him to do his work. That you all are my students. That I am here to help you. And when the world ends, we will be saved." — from THE ANT HILL
“A merciless narrative about the inner world of a nameless cult, The Ant Hill continues James Fotopoulos’ recent foray away from film and into the possibilities of video. The results prove more materially degraded than even his best-known feature, Migrating Forms. As with all of his work, each low-grade esthetic decision feels utterly, pointedly intentional. The actions of a tiny band of devotees, led by a single, lurchingly unpredictable patriarch, take on the sparse structure of a Biblical parable. Extended sequences of colorfield-like image-layering recall the electronic longueurs of early video art. Fotopoulos shoots his actors in a single bare set, with a grimy immediacy that feels almost self-reflexive: the viewer inevitably comes to question how the filmmaker was able to compel such total trust and obedience from his actors, given the extremity of the acts they have been asked to perform.” -- Ed Halter, New York Underground Film Festival
Henry Hills Nervous Ken (2004) DVD, color, sound, 20 min. sale price: 100.00
In NERVOUS KEN, experimental film legend and long-time Tribeca resident Ken Jacobs is “interviewed” by an urbane 12-year old from the Upper West Side, Emma Bernstein. Envisioning an exploration of the nature of listening (of apprehending or not, remembering or not, & creating meaning) and of the repetitions & variations of verbal expression and its accompanying often-emphatic physical gesturing as a basis for making visual music, Henry Hills employs the full range of temporal manipulation available within the digital realm, exploiting the unique corners which differentiate DV from 16mm, though including frequent references to themes & techniques from Jacobs’ own work within the arcanum of film. The “musical score” is derived through permutations of the sync track. This is the first released section from the ongoing series, EMMA’S DILEMMA, which follows its protagonist through numerous encounters with a range of artists in a search for identity spanning her entire teen years. --H.H.
Henry Hills King Richard (2005) DVD, color, sound, 20 min. sale price: 100.00
KING RICHARD is a portrait of New York avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman in his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. Focusing on the periphery of a recent production--the elaborate set design and lighting, the non-speaking supporting cast (the so-called "stage crew") with their frantic movement patterns, props and recurrent imagery, removed from their specific context; i.e., those elements that are "typical" of his recent work, rather than the principals & texts which distinguish one play from the next--Hills utilizes a range of disruptive shooting & editing techniques (as well as color & density alterations) which mimic disruptive theatrical tropes Foreman frequently draws upon to emphasize his non-narrative bias and humorously aggressive relation to his audience. This strand interweaves with a charming yet revealing interview on the set by pre-teen protagonist Emma Bernstein around which the piece is structured. Music is arranged using a selection of Foreman's sound loops. --H.H.
Nisi Jacobs word sand witch (2005) DVD, color, sound, 13 min. rental price: 50.00
EPACTA LUNAE, A DAY AND A HALF: Epacta is Latin for the number of days which must be calculated to synchronize the lunar and solar calendars. The solar year of 365 days and the lunar year of 354 generally require 11 days to line up. I have taken sounds of the moon’s instrument, ropes and metal walkways, played by the tides tugging on docked vessels in ports, simultaneously being played upon by the moon’s gravitational pull on our water bodies. The audio of EPACTA LUNAE, A DAY AND A HALF derives from numerous layered natural field recordings within a bed of synthesized chords. EPACTA LUNAE, A DAY A HALF is the first video-sound poem which comprise a much larger project in process entitled THE MOON’S GUITAR, COLLABORATION WITH THE TIDES. --N.J.
LITTLE BITS OF SKIN (WORDS): Struck by the ease of someone as articulate and expressive as my father losing their language facilities overnight with the advent of a stroke, I began filming the text of the city. The recorded audio is a montage of Peter Rose’s fabricated dialects when I recorded him reading a poem of mine mixed with synthetically altered wailing. Moments of mangled writing from various days after the stroke weave into the formal blocks of words in the environment playing between language as symbol, language as image, and language as pure experience. --N.J.
Robert Breer What Goes Up (2000) 16mm, color, sound, 4 min. rental price: 20.00
Paul Sharits Brancusi's Sculpture Ensemble At Tirgu Jiu (1977/84) 16mm, color, sound, 20-1/2 min. rental price: 60.00
This film is a "chronicle" of a visit I made in 1977 to Romania to experience three of Brancusi's most famous sculptures: "The Endless Column"; "The Gate of the Kiss"; "The Table of Silence"; (and the lesser known "Arcade of Pedestals," the modular system of stools which lead from the "Gate" to the "Table"). These works are in the small, rural town of Tirgu Jiu, not far from the village of Hobitza (where Brancusi was born and spent his childhood). These works are shown in photographs and discussed as totally autonomous "abstract" sculptures simply placed conveniently around the town; but, in fact, they are also parts of a larger and very specific environmental (and symbolic) motif. Their placement suggests a metaphysical continuum; they span the boundaries of the town and while aligned in a (virtual) straight line, all three cannot be seen from any single point of view, so there is a temporal unfolding as one moves through the town to experience the relationship.
"There should be other films like this about works of art." -- Lynda Benglis, Sculptor
J. M. Magrini Suffering the Legitimacy of Aesthetics (2004) VHS, color, sound, 17 min. rental price: 25.00
This film explores art as a legitimate species of autonomous knowledge. Beyond a playful subject for the science of aesthetics to interrogate, art is the superlative happening of truth in which knowledge is disclosed and historically appropriated by those who preserve the work.
“A daring film, and exactly what good experimental film should be. Beautifully haunting dream-like imagery and original, mood-altering music, with insightful words that resonate in your conscience.” ~ Short Buzz ~
Sheri Wills The Stream Flows I for solo violin (2005) DVD, color, sound, 6 min. rental price: 30.00 sale price: 50.00
This piece reflects on how memories can intrude into and define the present. The music, by Bright Sheng, is based on a traditional Chinese folk song. --S.W.
www.sheriwills.net
Nathalie Tafelmacher Magnat Welcome... Welcome (2005) DVD, b&w, sound, 4 min. Purchase price: 150.00
http://www.nathalietmagnat.com/
Nathalie Tafelmacher Magnat The Great Escape (2005) DVD, color, sound, 12 min. Purchase price: 200.00
Lana Lin & H. Lan Thao Lam Departure (2004) VHS, color, sound, 48 min. rental price: 85.00
Shot from the exploratory perspective of a moving car, cyclo, and trains, Departure is a video essay that looks at transportation to examine the impact of modernization and foreign intervention in three Asian cities: Taipei, Shanghai, and Hanoi.
Lynne Sachs Which Way is East (1994) DVD, color, sound, 33 min. rental price: 50.00
in collaboration with Dana Sachs
"A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot."
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs' travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that's put together with the warmth of a quilt. "Which Way Is East" starts as a road trip and flowers into a political discourse. It combines Vietnamese parables, history and memories of the people the sisters met, as well as their own childhood memories of the war on TV. (excerpted from article in The Independent by Susan Gerhard)
“The sound track is layered with the cacophony of bustling city streets, the chirps of cicadas and gentle rustles of trees in the countryside, and the visuals, devoid of travelogue clichés, are a collage of pictorial snippets taken from unusual vantage points.... What comes through is such a strong sense of the place you can almost smell it.” Ted Shen, The Chicago Reader
David Kalal Kalalabad Vol. 1 (2004) DVD, color, sound, rental price: 50.00
Presented at National Gallery of Canada, Helsinki's Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Anthology Film Archives.
NEVER BEEN TO MERLE, 5 min. - Born in Bombay in 1911 Estelle ‘Queenie’ O’Brien Thompson became Merle Oberon and became a star -- she believed she could be all sorts of people -- made to shine -- but as that other, more Shakespearean Oberon once said " The starry welkin cover thou anon/ With drooping fog as black as Acheron.” A musical tribute to the many shades of passing.
NAVY BLUE OF INDIA, 4 min. - A phone call gone astray between continents, chromatics, cinemas and soundtracks -- when the theme from 'Charade' is the theme from ‘Gumnaam,’ when you are only trying to call your aunt and getting all kinds of domestic drama in response, when as Mrs. Diane Vreeland said “Navy Blue is Pink of India.”
ANGLOPHOBIA, 9 min. - "No one knows for sure how many homosexuals there are in Great Britain, but the popular estimate is one in twenty persons. It's true the French call sodomy le Vice Anglais, but without reliable statistics we can always dismiss that as ANGLOPHOBIA" The French have their version of Anglophobia, the colonials theirs has his -- but with commentary provided by the hippies from 'Hari Ram Hari Krishna' and a train ride through Masterpiece Theater one has to wonder
if phobia isn't perhaps the souring side of love.
ECONOMIST DESCENDING A STAIRCASE, 6 min. - After: Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) by Marcel Duchamp (and Duchampiana by Shigeko Kubota). Specificity, biography, women with clothes and jobs and history all meet the Duchampian project on that oft-trod staircase.
PASOLINI SUPRABATHAM, 15 min. - The sub-proletariat meets the subaltern in a collision of semi-urban spaces, queer spectatorship, boys dancing together and neo-realism on video with vocals by Anna Magnani and M.S.Subbalakshmi.
HINDU PUSHUPS, 5 min. - You're rusty - the old whore is rusty ... and the only cure is a strict course of Hindu Pushups (as serenaded by Megan Mulally) till you look good enough to phone-camera in your own self portrait.
HINDUSTAN X, 7 min. - A tenth anniversary remix of the 1995 Video 'Hindustan' --the first queer South Asian Music Video -- more melodic thought on travel, foreignness and romance.
ELECTROCLASH WOJNAROWICZ, 5 min. - A retro-synth re-visitation of David Wojnarowicz, with particular attention to the Rimbaud in New York series and ‘"When I Put My HandsOn Your Body," -- fusing re-hash with mash-up, video with photography, 80s nostalgia with the actual stark poetic stakes of the decade.
EAST VILLAGE MAXI MANTRA, 3 min. - "Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, the hymn in English will now be performed at the beginning of the resumption of the music after the intermission" The sun also rises over downtown New York and Bombay -- to a very contemporary ‘keeping up with the Jones’ (Norah) Gayatri Mantra -- with dance by Parijat Desai.
Jud Yalkut Light Display: Color (2002) NTSC DVD, color, silent, 7 min. rental price: 50.00
LIGHT DISPLAY: COLOR is the culmination of several years of development of analogue and digital images derived from original 16mm footage shot of the first working reconstruction of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's pioneering kinetic sculpture LIGHT DISPLAY MACHINE, or LICHTEQUILST, first shown at the International Building Exhibition in Paris in 1939. Moholy had designed the sculpture, both to exist as itself, and to be the subject of a projected six-part film called LIGHT DISPLAY, BLACK, WHITE, GRAY, of which only the sixth section featuring the Light Display Machine was finished. In the early 1970's Moholy's wife Sibyl worked with several engineers on a working reconstruction of the machinem, which was exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. --J.Y.
Jud Yalkut Video Tanguy (1993-2003) NTSC DVD, color, sound, 8 min. rental price: 50.00
VIDEO TANGUY is a 'Cyber-Surrealist' digitally animated tribute to the great Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, loosely derived from the anthropomorphic figures which populate his atmospheric environments, actualized here within abstract landscapes analogous to his own working backgrounds. An electronic soundtrack reinforces the cyclic humorous flows of the piece which utilizes early forms of digital animation. --J.Y.
Premiered at Artists Television Access (ATA) in San Francisco in their curated "Involuntary Discharge" Animation Show (2003) and selected for their First Lower West Side Film Festival in New York City, and their "National Psyche(delia)" program (2005).
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