Program Archive: the 1998 New York Video Festival

The New York Video Festival is presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in association with Lincoln Center Festival 98

The term video covers a wide range of work. This year we've gone wider. In addition to beautifully realized slates of tapes that cover a multitude of obsessions, live performances -- with video, music, and interactive media -- have been added to the mix. Hence, video is more than something to watch on television. Speaking of television, the theater may be just the place to finally see program segments banned from your TV set. Meanwhile videomakers are continuing to make documentaries that enlighten, and experimental tapes that are over the top and around the bend. Join us for a week of exhilaration. You will be entertained, sometimes outraged, many times amused, always engaged.

The Video Festival is curated by Marian Masone, Gavin Smith, and Graham Leggat. Thanks to Craig Baldwin, Laura Bruce, Ben Cook, Patrick Friel, Ruby Lerner, Abina Manning, Daniel Schott, Elisabeth Subrin, Stephen Vitiello, and Bart Weiss.

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 98
For the third year, the Film Society is proud to present the video festival as a part of the Lincoln Center Festival. For more Lincoln Center Festival 98 information, call (212) 875-5928 or visit www.LincolnCenter.org/festival.

schedule of programs

NEXT STOP: BEYOND THE X-FILES
The Way of the Weed
(An-Marie Lambrechts, Peter Missotten, and Anne Quirynen, Belgium, 1997, 83 min.)
"The Way of the Weed is to be found between anti-gravitation and freezing. It is a search in the desert for new life forms in an old experiment. Roussel's machines have become kaleidoscopic show-boxes. Thomas--researcher--unravels the many life forms and their outlandish movement patterns. Until the floating takes over."--the directors
A scientist-for-hire parachutes into an unnamed desert in an unspecified future to study, of all things, weeds. Before long he is lured by a complex and mysterious set of clues to an underground bunker, where he begins piecing together a provocative set of experiments. Discovering a stream of arcane scientific data, he begins his own experiments, using a gloriously lit immersion tank that sits in the middle of a cathedral-like underground room like a sublime crucible. This trippy and utterly contemporary piece is brilliantly shot and edited, and its heady mix of bio-botanical hybridization and spooky desert/postindustrial settings place it firmly in the vanguard of new work.
Friday, July 17 at 4pm
Sunday, July 19 at 6pm

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE CONVERTED
From a raucous assembly of banned-from television TV Nation clips to a thoughtful examination of community, a consideration of right and wrongs.
TV Nation Censored Segments
(USA, 1997, 14 min.)
Segments from TV Nation, Michael Moore's satirical political reportage/prank series, that were never aired due to network censorship: the L.A. Riot recreated by Civil War reenactors; what became of the Savings and Loans execs found guilty of fraud; a public spirited Kansas minister's militant anti-gay dynasty.
O Night Without Objects
(Jeanne Finley and John H. Muse, USA, 1998, 61 min.)
"O Night Without Objects consists of three stylistically diverse segments. Each segment can stand alone or can be viewed within the context of the trilogy."--the directors
This smartly constructed triptych deftly problematizes ready notions of family, religious community, and redemption. It begins strangely and beautifully with the idea of childhood as a paradise always already lost to anxiety. There follows an extended middle passage, where in deceptively straightforward documentary fashion an odd tale of apparent redemption unfolds: a vitriolic Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon in Lincoln, Nebraska, is rendered meek as a lamb and converted to Judaism by the love and care of a local cantor and his family. In the disturbing final chapter, the covenant of the family, and of the religious community as adoptive family, is again abandoned.
Friday, July 17 at 6pm
Saturday, July 18 at 3:45pm

SADIE BENNING: NEAR-LIFE EXPERIENCE
with Sadie Benning in person
Flat is Beautiful
(Sadie Benning, USA, 1998, 50 min.)
The New York premiere of a major new work by Sadie Benning.
The program begins with the 1994 German Song (6 min.), a super 8 music video for the Boston indie band Come, and the 1995 experimental animation Judy Spots (12 min.), two videos whose stylistic departures from the PXL tapes she is known for feed directly into the combinatory aesthetic of the new work with stunning results.
Set in the mid-80s, Flat is Beautiful is a delicate, intimate narrative study of Taylor, memorably played by Sammy Steel, an androgynous, emotionally-isolated 11-year-old girl living with her single mother and a surrogate-sibling gay roomate in a poor working class Milwaukee neighbourhood. Tenderly depicting the world from a misfit child's eye view through accumulative observation of small details and transient moments, Benning evokes listless circumstances and solitary pastimes, pop culture dreamlife and suspension of time in the calm before the storm - the fleeting interval between childhood and adolescence. Benning's central conceit - her cast wear face masks - suggests a live-action cartoon aesthetic that at once distances and draws the viewer in. Imbued with a unique ambience of fragile, lyrical entropy and charged, sleepy eroticism, Benning's tape has the quiet, irresistable force of a masterpiece.
Friday, July 17 at 8:15pm and 10:15pm
Saturday, July 18 at 2pm

MAKING CONTACT
Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Diary 1995
(Dominique Cabrera, France, 1996, 83 min.)
"I had made a film about something which was missing, and it seems to me it is a film about the happiness of a woman who is ordinary but is also a film maker, five years before the year 2000."--Dominique Cabrera
Documentarian Cabrera, whose first feature film, The Other Shore, was a highlight of this year's New Directors/New Films, takes the video diary to a new level. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, and separated from husband and son, Cabrera filmed every day of 1995, "trying to make contact with something other than my fear." She knits together the details of daily life with her emotions, itemizing activities: fixing the toilet, mending a windowpane, crying a lot. Each minute detail is captured on tape with extreme care: a drop of water evaporating on a hot plate; a piece of bread dipped in olive oil. She argues with her family, tries to connect with her son, and has an affair with a political colleague from the past. As she grapples with the problems she started the year with, and the new ones that occur, the art of making one's way through life becomes crystal clear.
Saturday, July 18 at 12 noon
Sunday, July 19 at 8:15pm

PERSISTENCE OF VISION
The delights of disciplined formal exploration are surveyed in this wide-ranging omnibus program, which puts the key elements of the grammar of moving imagery through their paces.
The Recording Messenger
(Mark Bain, USA, 1997, 2 min.)
A suspended moment explodes into movement:
"What happens when opposites meet: dynamic trajectories combining with objects of immobility. In this case a 1930's air show depicting flight into buildings, the ensuing crash and the inherent danger of such an absurd spectacle. The Recording Messenger describes this dynamic agency infecting the static image and the architectural construct represented."--Mark Bain
Rev
(Seoungho Cho, USA, 1997, 11 min)
The dreamy torque of a city in motion.
Flight
(Les LeVeque, USA, 1998, 7 min.)
Evanescent motion of a lunar phantasm:
"In this piece the unstable stuttering image tells a story of the astronaut's attempt to escape his body. The astronaut separates, stumbles and disappears into white light"--Les LeVeque
Fish
(Michael Intriere, USA, 1998, 5 min.)
Pattern in motion by chance or by design?
Rue Francis
(François Vogel, Belgium, 1997, 4 min.)
A cubist room with a view.
Space Probing
(Mark Bain, USA, 1998, 12 min.)
Infinitely regressing panoramas in three dimensions:
"Enhanced through formal analysis, Space Probing is a three dimensional exploration of the mechanized feeder areas and subterranean environments beneath the campus of MIT. By re-presenting this complicated site of pipes, ducts and machinery through digital filtering, a projection of synthetic tectonics is derived generating a form of 'impossible space,' or a place which is only experientially habitable"--Mark Bain.
Stuffing
(Animal Charm, USA, 1998, 4 min.)
Cross-eyed with cross-cutting.
Off and On
(Michael Gitlin, USA, 1998, 7 min.)
Time's layers undone:
"Coming off or back, putting on or in, through a painted screen, an ambient dressing room; there a scumbled surface of uncertain scale; a figure at inconstant speed; a typology of chairs; a game for the eye in a frame for the hand."--Michael Gitlin.
Transfinite Loops
(Van McElwee, USA, 1997, 20 min.)
Funfair lights as fugue.
Saturday, July 18 at 5:45pm Monday, July 20 at 4pm

GIRLFRIEND: THE LIVE PERFORMANCE
Written, performed, and video by Deke Weaver.
"I'm driving. At night.
I'm accelerating. Up an onramp. Onto a freeway.
There are yellow streetlights.
There's someone in the passenger seat. A woman.
There are headlights. Coming towards me and then turning away.
The woman puts her hand on the back of my neck. As soon as she touches me I get this swirling absolutely certain feeling that I've done this before."
--Deke Weaver.
Award-winning video artist and performer Deke Weaver's magical stage and video performance is a hybrid of gut-wrenching, riveting, corporeal solo theater vignettes and innovative lo-fi video spectacle. You may have seen the GIRLFRIEND tapes at NYVF in '96, but until you've seen Deke Weaver in performance, you ain't seen nothing yet. Careening through ten different characters, twitching with confusion, humor, and lust, GIRLFRIEND goes from chivalrous cockroaches to a peeping tom to a cyber-love affair, and examines the sex/spirit connection in modern relationships and ancient ritual. Simultaneously disturbing and entertainingly bracing in its attempt to communicate both the dark and the light, GIRLFRIEND takes Weaver's obsessions with sex, violence, and spirit to the performance edge.
Saturday, July 18 at 9pm
Tickets: $10

FRONTIER MEDITATIONS
Spiritual Voices: The Diaries of War.
(Aleksandr Sokurov, Russia, 1995, 5 ½ hours)
"I can hardly conceive of Russia without war. Russian men without heavy soldier's coats, or army shirts and or boots are also difficult to imagine....There isn't a single family which doesn't wait for someone to return from the war. It has always been like this....nowadays it is Tadshikistan, Chechnya...."--Aleksandr Sokurov.
Aleksandr Sokurov, whose moving works Oriental Elegy and Mother and Son graced last year's NYVF and New York Film Festival respectively, spent three months tracking a Russian army unit stationed at the Afghan border. This is by no means a traditional documentary: this experimental, five-part narration begins with an almost hour-long shot of a snow-covered, melancholy landscape. Melancholy turns to silent anticipation, and finally battle with an invisible enemy. But Sokurov's interest is not in the complex political issues of nationalism or war. Instead he reconstructs the lives of men who happen to be bearing arms. About his time there he has said, "war is ugly. There is nothing aesthetic about it." Yet the visual language of Spiritual Voices compels us to contemplate the ravages of battle on the body, the intellect, and the psyche. A monumental work.
Sunday, July 19 at 12 noon
Tickets: $10

GIMME SHELTER
Where we live and who we are.
Middletown
(Nic Nicosia, USA, 1997, 15 min.)
A neverending drive through the tree-lined streets of a suburban neighborhood, reveals the idyllic -- or infernal -- aspect of "the good life."
Blight
( John Smith, UK, 1996, 14 min.)
The razing of homes to make way for a highway echoes with memories of their uprooted inhabitants.
The Final Insult
(Charles Burnett, USA/Germany, 1997, 54 min)
Box Brown lives in his car. A series of common middle-class tragedies -- tax audits, rent increases -- have put him a half-step from the street. Only his car stands between him and total homelessness. While he works as a temporary consultant to a bank (and advises them to save money by downsizing), he lives among his homeless contemporaries and in his peaceful way tries to stir revolution in their souls. In this moving experimental docu-fiction Charles Burnett takes a bitter and ironic look at LA as it cracks underneath the weight of poverty and racism. Scripted moments go hand in hand with comments by those who live unseen in plain sight, on the city streets. Los Angeles may appear a frightening city of the future, but for Burnett it is, more prosaically, "home": he takes a bitter look, not devoid of irony, at this megalopolis cracking at its seams due to poverty and ghettoisation.
Monday, July 20 at 6pm
Tuesday, July 21 at 4pm

THE SPIKE AND HYPE SHOW
Armond White's music video presentation surveys the two most influential young directors, Hype Williams and Spike Jonze. Their contrasting styles--as respectively the kings of hiphop and alternative music videos--continually set new standards for formal invention and generic subversion. White explores how these young turks' work for artists from L.L.Cool J and Sonic Youth to the Beastie Boys and Busta Rhymes and others recontextualize the postmodern visual storehouse. Each piece combines fetishism with rebellion. Through Hype and Spike, the black and white extremists of American pop, White will reveal diversity's common ground -- in genius.
Videos to be screened and discussed include:
It's Oh So Quiet (Bjork)
Silly (Taral Hicks)
Mo Money Mo Problems (Puff Daddy)
Sabotage (Beastie Boys)
Doin' It (L.L. Cool J)
Sky's the Limit (Notorious B.I.G.)
Gettin' Jiggy Wit It (Will Smith)
Man on Fire (California)
It's All About the Benjamins (Puff Daddy)
Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See (Busta Rhymes)
100% (Sonic Youth)
Where Want Me to Put It (Solo)
Buddy Holly (Weezer) Monday, July 20 at 8:30pm

STOP MAKING SENSE
In the realm of the senseless: a program of tapes that confound meaning and abandon themselves to the irrational, the absurd, the infantile, the ludicrous and the impossibly cryptic.
Bored Project Movie
(Eric Henry, USA, 1995, 4 min.)
How to while away all that spare time you have too much of.
Slow Gin Soul Stallion
(Animal Charm, USA, 1996, 3 min.)
Comprised of Jim Fetterly and Rich Bott, Animal Charm's tapes are mind-bendingly inventive experiments in uncanny, surreal montage that defy logical analysis.
Control Corridor
(HalfLifers, USA, 1997, 11 min.)
An unknown mission, meaningless procedures and bad color: the HalfLifers (Torsten Burns and Anthony DiScenza) ride again. In a fictional conduit space, language and function are re-contextualized as two navigators struggle to re-assess the nature of their mission while engaged in an eternal cycle of maintenance and communications routines.
Wood Technology in the Design of Structures
(Eric Henry, USA, 1997, 9 min.)
A scientific report on the pros and cons of power-assisted wood eating, this computer-animated short plays out the consequences of "alienated" desire.
Working Together
(Animal Charm, USA, 1996, 2 min.)
Say cheese.
The Horror
(Emily Breer and Joe Gibbons, USA, 1998, 2 min.)
Joe's life story's been stolen by Hollywood!
Workers (Anthony DiScenza, USA, 1997, 7 min.) A solo project by one half of the HalfLifers, depicting blue-collar career opportunities in the era of rescanned video.
Jake and Dinos Chapman's Studio Visit
(Jake and Dinos Chapman, UK, 1997, 10 min.)
The very silly misadventures of two puppets exploring the studio of the Young British Artists notorious for their outrageous anatomical mutant sculptures.
Ashley
(Animal Charm, USA, 1997, 9 min.)
A tour de force of incongurous juxtapositions, startling dislocations and ingenious visual rhymes assembled from the banal detritus of late night TV.
Actions in Action
(HalfLifers, USA, 1998, 11 min.)
Food for thought - or therapy? Part One of the HalfLifers' Action series. "Actions in Action plunges into a world of frantic heroes trapped in a continual crisis of dissolution and reification"--The Halflifers.
Throw Up Spectacle
(Stuart Morgan, UK, 1995, 3 min.)
A fitting end for the disgusted.
Tuesday, July 21 at 6pm
Wednesday, July 22 at 9:45pm

SECRET HISTORIES
Excavating the repressed impulses of culture's historical unconscious.
Dissing D.A.R.E.: Education as Spectacle
(Les LeVeque and Diane Nerwen, USA, 1997, 7 min.)
LeVeque and Norwen mobilize a manic, vertiginous image bombardment to critique the military-entertainment complex's promotion of paranoia and social panic exemplified by the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program.
Sub Accident
(Seth Price, USA, 1997, 20 min.)
Probing into a photograph doctored for McCarthy era propaganda purposes, Price's cryptic, unnerving video is "an act of conjuring" that scrutinizes images, from home movies to NASA footage, in search of traces of history's baleful omniscience. Reducing images to their constituent pixels and grain, this tape suggests that as surely as we picture history for meaning or conspiratorial pattern, history is scanning us for signs of dissidence.
dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
(Johan Grimonprez, Belgium, 1997, 68 min.)
"Exceptional for its juice, its jazzy, compelling fusion of social and esthetic issues, and its stomach-churning power."--New York Times
An eyepopping, playfully mordant compendium of airplane hijackings and counter-terrorism set to texts from Don DeLillo's Mao II and White Noise and a remarkable music and sample collage by David Shea. This alternately heartbreaking and sardonic tour through, in Grimonprez's words, "the media politics of contemporary catastrophe culture," functions as an allegorical travesty chronicling the flashpoints of ideological and historical conflict and geopolitical and cultural shift in the modern era.
Tuesday, July 21 at 8:30pm -- with live music by composer David Shea
Wednesday, July 22 at 4pm

INNOCENCE AND IGNORANCE ABROAD
Strangers in strange lands: the tourist as exploitive fool, unfortunate innocent, and sophisticated inquirer.
Lulu's World Wide Tour: Chernobyl
(Agatha Kenar, Sweden, 1997, 27 min.)
With the redoubtable charm of MTV veejays, a Eurotrash trio trip-hop to Chernobyl, where they snack on a few social issues, exploit the bare-cupboard hospitality of their unfortunate subjects, and obsess, natch, over their attraction for each other.
The Tourist
(Maria Venuto. USA, 1997, 29 min.)
A young German woman arrives at JFK. Victim of a routine gypsy cab scam within minutes of getting off the plane, she retreats to the terminal, her port-of-call and tenuous psychological fortress, where she lingers, stripped of language and meaningful human contact. Through the use of desolated landscape, spare dialogue, and voice over, in the form of fictional excerpts from letters home, Venuto atmospherically renders the inner life of her protagonist.
Cuba: Going Back
(Tony Mendoza. USA., 1998, 25 min.)
University professor Tony Mendoza returns to the country he left as an adolescent armed with a video camera and a keen awareness of class differences, realpolitik, and, above all, his own awkward position as native-son-turned-sociologist. This lucid, powerful, and layered work presents with considerable economy an extraordinary portrait of contemporary Cuba and, by suggestion, Mendoza's affection for and displacement from his homeland and its people.
Wednesday, July 22 at 6pm
Thursday, July 23 at 4pm

FAULTLINES IN THE PSYCHE
Eight excursions into hinterlands of the mind that recover cryptic private meanings, strange fetishes and imagined or actual traumas and pathologies.
Cirkus
(Herman Weeb, Canada, 1997, 5 min.)
Funfair amusement rides form the object of a delirious, perhaps sinister erotic fixation rendered in artfully defaced, distorted, and truncated images.
Head Case
(Clio Barnard, UK, 1997, 15 min.)
A light-hearted post-modern gross-out in which a woman's morbid fixation on a severed head precipitates a series of reflections on horror.
#54567 (Skin the Surface)
(Anna Van Someren, USA, 1997, 7 min.)
"This tape is particularly concerned with the dynamics between physical and mental health, and the vague boundaries between the two"--Anna VanSomeren
This layered, hypnotic tape interweaves motifs of medical crisis, microscopic study, and undersea exploration to contrive a hermetic interior state of acute self-examination.
Multiple Barbie
(Joe Gibbons, USA, 1998, 9 min.)
The latest in PXL-fiend Joe Gibbons' ongoing Barbie series: a therapist attempts to reintegrate Barbie's split personality ("and opens a Pandora's Box of psychopathy--J. Gibbons").
invoice
(Christian Matts, USA, 1997, 9 min.)
An intense, hallucinatory evocation of psychic spoil and pervasive, nameless dread with a dense sound collage that suggests a mind haunted by voices. "An implied plot involves a father and child who are interchanged. The plot acts as a catalyst to verbalize an emotion."--Christian Matts
The Telling
(Anne McGuire, USA, 1998, 3 min.)
NYVF regular Anne McGuire makes a personal confession.
Thorazine Rebel
(Daniella Dooling and Les LeVeque, USA, 1998, 7 min.)
Like watching fingernails scraping down a blackboard, this bugged-out bad trip gives new meaning to itchy and scratchy.
"Fluttering between pleasure and pain, this collaborative tape re-presents the physical body as a site of hallucinatory projection, a psychic space where the delusional mind inscribes a false perception onto the skin"--the directors.
Moral Rearmament
(Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Belgium, 1996, 11 min.)
"A sex and technology project" that animates nude pinups from the 60s and 70s against a soundtrack of faded radio signals to create an overwhelming sense of nostalgic fetishism and tainted reverie steeped in post-historical malaise.
Wednesday, July 22 at 8pm
Thursday, July 23 at 6pm

INTERFANTASTIC JOURNEYS: CD-ROM SPECTACULAR
What draws filmmakers and videomakers to the CD-ROM? Artists and producers will discuss the many enticements of this platform during a lively evening that includes a presentation by Tony Oursler, Constance DeJong, and Stephen Vitiello, the creators of Fantastic Prayers, a new CD-ROM produced by the DIA Center. Christine van Assche, Chief Curator of New Media at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris will present, among other works, Immemory, an interactive piece by Chris Marker, creator of many seminal works in the experimental film lexicon. Via Fantastic Prayers' "uncorrupted garden of delight," and Marker's investigation of memory, go on guided tours of some of the most exquisite new work being done in interactive media today.
Thursday, July 23 at 8:30