All Films

Futility is a two part story, introduced by a series mishaps from archival films about tools. The body of the film illustrates the title; in the tale of a woman's attempt to schedule an abortion, and a moribund love letter. The images resist illustration or narrative, constituting a kind of peripheral vision.

A professional decorator shares his secrets for a perfectly trimmed Christmas tree.

I have several English style windows and this and a tree in winter have caused me to think about Fox-Talbot’s window—his first image, perhaps. Carried out, as usual, with the technique—but perhaps it would be better to say the discipline—of the flicker, which is, “the undulation, trembling, quivering, flashing, sparkling weakly” of the dictionary, in short everything of the cinèsi fosforescentica. Drawn from a thin monograph (it’s worth saying from typographic ink where there had been silver salts) I tried to shake my window using his where there had been a tree in winter. Cross-dissolving between real and not-real, between fixed and animated images of his lively works, seemed to me to reconstruct what would have perhaps happened to Fox-Talbot, filming my window in winter.

East/West is a video with two channels of sound, based on the artist’s citizenship interview. It shows a mouth split in half, with one half speaking English and one half speaking Chinese. Occasionally, the two halves come together to create a whole. The half-mouths reflect the artist’s struggle and conflict in reconciling two cultures.

A short collage revealing invisible phenomena.

Marks another stage of work which I called “distributed narrative”. In this a strand of thought, an idea or a story, and related or unrelated material that adds or conflicts is constantly re-presented over the course of the work, to create in the totality of the viewing a synthesis that is somewhat open, mediated but not fixed. The story of Nohi Abassi is a rainforest myth and is told within the hard architecture of the computer processing centre, and the hard and yet fluid architecture of videographic operations that enclose and abstract the image, and confront the implicit slipperiness of the ideology and the relationship of mankind and nature shown within the myth. The story is read by a non-actor, undermining easy acceptance and transparent listening, and yet giving a different type of authenticity to the tale. The tale is read many times from different points, repeating, double tracking. Every aspect of the recording is present.

For a long time the KMT government has held a monopoly over Taiwan’s TV channels, using the lack of channel bandwidth as an excuse for its stranglehold. During the build-up to the elections at the end of 1989, Green Team set up a satellite transmission channel on its own, poking a hole in the KMT’s argument.

A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the 1989 horror film, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. Includes cast and crew interviews, produced as part of Drew Cummings' "Making Of" series.

1989 computer animation produced by IBM.

Walking a thematic tightrope, Norbert Meissner here puts media technology to the test. The universal event of pentecost is the moment of the highest realization: technologically, the moment of all possibilities, i.e. white noise and snow. The text spoken by a TV announcer tries to create a hierarchy, but it is constantly disturbed, subverted, and displaced by electronic image distortions and fade-ins and fade-outs of multilingual versions of the text and of signal terms in various alphabets. A work to be read with differentiation on truth, sublimity, and the media.

Short film by Jon Behrens

"Not a documentary but the the ruins of an attempted documentary." - Grashina Gabelmann

Featuring the Carpenters song ‘Close To You’, this is an ode to love and fantasy. Filmed in a gay bar, the roving camera hesitates on a woman’s face, on some lilies, on small groups of people drinking and enjoying themselves and on the proverbial kiss between two women. As if on cue, ten lesbians gather in line at the bar and nonchalantly perform a synchronised dance. A sublime fantasy, with pleasure as protest.

Western and African cultures collide in Haiti resulting in religious conflict between Christianity and Voodoo. Despite centuries of vigilant opposition from the Christian Church, Voodoo has flourished in Haiti and continues to be one of the strongest elements underlying Haitian culture. This film dispels Hollywood stereotypes and presents Voodoo as a belief system that has been passed down from African ancestor to slave to present day Haitian. Traveling from the intensely overcrowded streets of Port-au-Prince to the serenity of the Haitian countryside, the viewer comes to see how the Haitian has accepted both the Christian and Voodoo mythology for use in daily life. The highly integrated Haitian culture is truthfully revealed.

From the pages of Videohound's Cult Flicks and Trash Pics

A droll Brazilian short on the theme of an incriminating earring.

Mexican feature film

VHS special produced to promote the new range of "Ice Age" figures, released as "Ice Age Adventure" (but with the on-screen title "Dino-Riders in the Ice Age")

16 years have elapsed since Too Long A Winter and a combination of failing health and a series of devastatingly bitter winters culminates in Hannah being heart-wrenchingly driven off her beloved farm.

I don't know what to say because the film was practically made itself. Definitely a gesture of admiration in the Netherlands and Dutch things. Certainly it is the 30 kilometer dyke which stretches in Friesland, to the north, "De Afsluitdijk". And certainly, I am sure, it is about grids and primary colors, and about Rebecca (the Beautiful one) that I know only slightly, and of this feeling of being (squarely) at the bottom of a landscape sculpted, refined and wild - a landscape (mooi ... mooi ... mooi ...) that made me silent, even peaceful ...

The title alone sums up the concerns of this work, which extends the problem of self-representation to two supports; video and film. The monitor can be perceived in its specular dimension and / or in its capacity to open up a new field (not “outside” but “in” or “on the spot”).