Kerry Baldry is an enormously generous spirit – her curatorial efforts around the various
One Minutes compilations have given a good many moving image artists reason
to be grateful.
She is also herself a maker of fine work with an intensity both of focus and of feeling.
In this piece everything falls together.
She touches the familiar with wonder and terror.
Category Archives: film
Happy New Year/Everything Changes
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Gilgamesh, Part #1 (2012, 214MB, 5:03 min)
Beyond Spectacle (2012, 214MB, 5:03 min)
About DVblog –
Doron started DVblog in summer 2005 and Michael started posting about a month after.
A number of people have contributed hugely along the way – notably Mica Scalin, Brittany
Shoot and Brian Gibson.
We’ve been vandalised a couple of times (hence postings now dating back only to late 2006,
although the vast majority of what was ever posted is back up now) but we’ve also had some really
delightful feedback from people who’ve felt what we’ve done is worthwhile.
Early on we decided that anything we posted would actually live on our server and this means we have assembled an extraordinary and unique archive of the birth and infancy of art video specifically created for or focussed upon the network.
One day we will donate this to an institution that will preserve it and continue to make it available for both joy and study.
When we started Quicktime was the only serious way for anyone to post moving image work to the net. Although it remains the backbone of virtually all digital moving image activity, as a mode of delivery it has now been almost completely superseded by streaming video. This has two implications – one being that the casual viewer has become less patient and is much more likely to go to YouTube or similar, where there’s no significant wait and where quality has improved immeasurably. The other is that fewer and fewer artists are posting their work in QuickTime format – so our old methodology of accepting submitted work but also scouring the net for interesting stuff is at least 50% outmoded.
Finally we want to say – it has been hard work and for no material reward. Indeed, not only have we never made a dime out of DVblog, it has cost us both cash and a great deal of time to sustain. Not that we are complaining – we hope we provided a service to people and certainly we learned a great deal and derived a great deal of pleasure from everything we posted. We made some good and lasting friendships too.
For the reasons listed above we are going to stop posting regularly from today. We finish with pieces from two artists who, in very different ways, have given us a great deal of pleasure – Annie Abrahams and Edward Picot.
Annie, with a record of a networked performance in November of 2012 and Edward with a splendidly mad take on the tale of Gilgamesh, featuring characters from his Dr Hairy series.
We’re not proposing to shut up shop entirely – we will continue post such work in QuickTime format which is submitted to us and which we like. We still think there is something special about the amount of control over quality posting an actual QT file gives and we’re very interested in continuing to write short, but we hope thoughtful and helpful, texts about these. Please, therefore, don’t be shy abuot sending us stuff!
We’d like to thank all who have contributed work over the past seven and a half years and, of course, those who have taken an interest both in the work and what we’ve had to say about it.
Finally we wish readers and contributors alike a happy, productive and thoughtful 2013.
Michael Szpakowski & Doron Golan, 1st Jan 2013.
Burroughs & Van Sant
Thanksgiving Prayer (1986, 7.6MB, 2:21 min.)
An astonishing rendition by William Burroughs of his
‘Thanksgiving Prayer’ in a short video directed by
Gus Van Sant.
Pieces of OiZ
Christoph Brunner – schwarzenbergplatz (2005, 9.8MB, 0:46)
Christoph Brunner – schwarzenbergplatz 2 (2005, 13.5MB, 1:03)
Orte in Zeiten is a filmmaking process conceived
by Christoph Brunner that continuously re-exposes film
to make surreal loops of space and time.
These two clips were taken during the development
of OiZ, which roughly translates to “places in time”.
Burroughs, Balch & Gysin – The Cut-Ups
The Cut-Ups (clip) (1966, 15.4MB, 1:20 min.)
William Burroughs & co-conspirators made this in 1966.
1966! – could’ve been the day after tomorrow.
Cremaster 1 Trailer
Cremaster 1, Trailer (1995, 34MB, 3:23 min.)
Trailer for Cremaster1 of Matthew Barney‘s Cremaster cycle –
a self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five films that
explore processes of creation.
Andy Warhol Eats A Hamburger
Jørgen Leth – 66 Scenes from America (1981, 9.9MB, 4:16)
Pretty self-explanatory: Andy eats a burger.
Scene from controversial Danish filmmaker
Jørgen Leth’s 1981 composite film, 66 Scenes from America.
Imitations of Life – Mike Hoolboom
Imitations of Life (excerpt) (2003, 35MB, 4 min.)
Imitations of Life is a ten-part video that strains childhood through a history
of reproduction, culling pictures from the Lumières to
the present day in order to find the future in our past.
by experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom.
One Minutes – Volume #6
Emily Richardson -‘Over the Horizon’ (extract) (2012, 75MB, 1:10min)
We’ll start this season with an suggestion for something you
can physically attend and absolutely should, too, if you’re
anywhere near London this Thursday evening (Sept 27th).
As part of the London Underground Film Sessions
The Horse Hospital are premiering Volume 6 of Kerry Baldry‘s
exemplary ‘One Minutes’ compilations of …er… one-minute-in-length
artist moving image work.
Transparency dictates I reveal I have a piece in it, but any claims
for mine aside, I can confidently predict a wonderfully varied, well
curated, roller coaster of work.
This piece is an extract from a longer work by Emily Richardson
(and, of course, splendid though it is, showing a single piece
immediately traduces one of the principal attractions of the project
which is the heady variety and contrast of it all. Here and here
is some stuff from previous volumes)
Hope to see you there!
Stan VanDerBeek – 2 Poem Films
Astral Man an Illuminated Poem (1959, 22MB, 2:27 min.)
poem field No2 (1966, 60MB, 5:42 min.)
A true innovator. Creator of countless films displaying complete artistic control.
What vision Stan VanDerBeek, what vision.
Vera Brunner-Sung
Vera Brunner-Sung – untitled (2006, 2.5MB, 1:10)
Vera Brunner-Sung – Longshore (2004, 9.9MB, 4:34)
Two short films from Vera Brunner-Sung, made respectively
on 16mm and super 8, both exploring boundaries of privacy
and community, the understanding of memory and place.
Impactist – Nebraska
Impactist – Nebraska – in single frames (2004, 16.9MB, 3:29)
The simplicity of this piece resonates with me.
A 2004 piece from the enormously talented Impactist duo,
Kelly Meador & Daniel Elwing.
Wheeler Winston Dixon – Serial Metaphysics
Serial Metaphysics #1 (1984-86, clip, 6.4MB, 1:08 min)
Serial Metaphysics #2 (1984-86, clip, 5.9MB, 1:08 min)
Wheeler Winston Dixon is now a professor of film studies
at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Before he did that he made
a lot of (on the evidence of these clips & others) really great short movies.
In particular these two clips from Serial Metaphysics, apparently almost
entirely constructed from TV ads, whet the appetite for a viewing
of the whole twenty minutes.
Dixon conjures fever dream magic from commercial banality.
Check in particular the end sequence of clip one:
David Lynch eat your heart out.
Man With a Movie Camera – Perry Bard
Man With a Movie Camera (Trailer) (1929-2007, 6MB, 2:17 min.)
“Man With a Movie Camera is a participatory video shot by people around the world
who are invited to record video according to the original script of Vertov’s Man With
A Movie Camera and submit it to a website which will archive, sequence and deliver
it. When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage,
in Vertov’s terms the ‘decoding of life as it is’.
Project by Perry Bard.
Hal Hartley – Henry Fool
Henry Fool -trailer (1997, 5.2MB, 2:05 min.)
Henry Fool -clip (1997, 3.3MB, 57 secs)
In a rationally ordered universe Hal Hartley would be feted
as one of the most thoughtful, bold & innovative filmakers
of the last 20 years.
We showed the trailer for Fay Grim, his sequel to 1997’s Henry Fool
here awhile back.
Here’s ’s the trailer from Henry Fool & also a short clip.
While we wait for the next one ( this month, if you’re lucky
enough to be in New York) there’re a couple of good
Hartley things available from the indispensable
microcinema international.
Comme un Chat Noir au Fond d’un Sac
comme un chat noir au fond d’un sac (2006, 18.4MB, 4:47 min)
A beautiful excerpt from Stephane Elmadjian’s feature film found
on composer Daniel Wohl’s website.
Starting off a bit intense it winds itself down and into some breathtaking stuff.
Glimpse of the Garden
Marie Menken – Glimpse of the Garden (1957, 36.2MB, 5:04)
Marie Menken, avant-garde filmmaker of the 1940s, 50s,
and 60s – in addition to being the inspiration for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a Warhol
superstar – made inspirational work from a time we seem
to overlook too much today. The garden here belongs
to one of her husband’s former male lovers, and while
Menken was often criticized for being quaint in her displays,
her style is an obviously feminine one that hides much
deeper meaning in ordinary but stunning visuals.
Recreation, Re-Creation, or, We Like OLD Stuff – Bitsy Knox
Recreation, Re-Creation (2006, 9.6 MB, 4:27 min.)
“This video juxtaposes original 16 mm footage acquired from my Grandfather
with interview footage taken of my Mother and Grandparents. All but the
past-tenses of their speaking are left intact, while the film footage has been
aggressively manipulated.
The project seeks to question the language of constructing one’s identity through
negotiation with familial history, where the past has been constructed and reconstructed
in order to corroborate certain facades of culture which are wished to be left intact.”
Bitsy Knox from 312.
Sigur Ròs : Heima Trailer
heima trailer (2007, 46.7 MB, 3:53 min.)
An exquisite trailer for the promising first film from Iceland’s Sigur Ròs.
Watch, and then tell me you did not add Iceland to your top 5 places
to see before you die.
1905 at 2 a.m. in the subway
2 a.m. in the subway (1905, 8 MB, 56 sec.)
A subway platform, a policeman and a conductor, a well-dressed man
with a cigar and two women dressed in long skirts and jackets.
One of the women causes a sensation by raising her skirt and
revealing her stocking. Artificial legs are displayed out the subway car window.
Hilarious. From – The Open Video Project.
MGM 1975
Jack Goldstein – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975, 16.2MB, 2:10)
An endlessly cyclical Hollywood, summed up in two minutes,
over thirty years ago. Still relevant and all too real.
Jerome Hill
Film Portrait (1972, 31MB, 11:45 min.)
La Cartomancienne (1932, 13MB, 12 min.)
This is a memoir and the last film made by artist and filmmaker Jerome Hill.
I also found ‘La Cartomancienne’, one of his earliest film experiments.
By Mica
Semiotics of a Kitchen
Martha Rosler – Semiotics of a Kitchen (1975, 18.3MB, 6:29)
An A-Z look at the tools of a kitchen, of domesticity,
of the self in the midst of frustrated ennui.
Historically significant feminist performance art that reminds us,
“When the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.”
Rosler is one of my favorites.
Santiago Sierra – NO, Global Tour
NO, Global Tour trailer (2010, 21 MB, 3:11 min)
Team Gallery, Lisson Gallery , Galería Helga de Alvear & Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani,
in association with Artprojx Cinema, present the UK premiere of NO, Global Tour,
2010 by Santiago Sierra.
The 120 minute film consists of the manufacture and transportation of two monumental sculptures
in the form of the word “NO”, travelling through different territories on a flatbed truck.
The NO, GLOBAL TOUR has resulted in a feature film that documents the passage of this
large NO through various world cities.
A monumental sculpture – unchanged both in its form and immediate meaning – that gradually
assumes a complex semantic load during a journey full of eventualities, accidents, and unexpected events.
Abbie Hoffman and gefilte fish
Abbie Making Gefilte Fish (1973, 156.4MB, 21:04)
Footage of Abbie Hoffman making gefilte fish with Laura Cavestani
(who made the video) in his kitchen, 1973.
Like Abbie, I think art is in the everyday, and it sure is a fun
(and rather informative) twenty minutes if you’ve got it to spare.
Art for Abbie was education, constant revolution, evolution, and living for free.
Art and freedom were one in the same, inextricable from each other.
We miss you man.
A Broad Way
A Broad Way, Trailer (2007, 60.89 MB, 5:17 min)
Saul Goode worked with 400 filmmakers to
document every corner of New York’s most
famous street, Broadway.
By Mica
Hanns Eisler – ‘Composing for the Films’
‘White Flood’ – clip 1 (1940-2, 1.1 MB, 30 sec.)
‘A Child Went Forth’ – clip (1940-2, 1.4 MB, 30 sec.)
‘White Flood’ – clip 2 (1940-2, 661 KB, 29 sec.)
Easily the most interesting of all Brecht’s composer collaborators
& in flat contradiction to the current myth spread by those
who dislike his politics, by far the better composer than the rather
dull Weill, Hanns Eisler’s keen intellect turned to questions of film in his
exile in the USA in the early forties.
Under the auspices of the New School & funded by the Rockefeller foundation
Eisler conducted an intensive investigation of the relationship between
film & music , often involving him writing new music to already existing footage.
You can see some of this footage here – but what you really need to do is to listen.
There is no-one who could not learn something from the amazing way Eisler
deploys music here.
After the project, Eisler went on to write, with Theodore Adorno,
himself no slouch intellectually (& also a practicing composer),
one of the key books on music & the movies –‘Composing for the Films’
These clips come from the website for a new edition of the book
released with a companion DVD documenting much of the Rockefeller experimentation.
Indispensable.
‘Erection’ by John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Erection (1971, 180MB, 18:06 min.)
A nineteen-minute film by John and Yoko, which was made in London during
1970 and 1971. When John had heard that the London International Hotel was
to be built in Kensington, he sought permission to film its entire construction.
Once he’d obtained it he contacted the photographer Iain MacMillan and asked
him to take a series of photographs of the construction. MacMillan had a stills
camera and filmed the erection of the hotel from a fixed position for a period
of eighteen months.
The stills were presented in sequence in the film, which ended with a shot of the
completed hotel where all the lights were then turned off, leaving a black screen.
On the soundtrack Yoko sang two songs, ‘Airmale’ and ‘You’, using tapes of recordings
of Joe Jones Tone Deaf Music Co., which was, in fact, a number of toy percussion
instruments that played themselves, a squeaky style of sound devised by a former
associate of Yoke’s Fluxus days, Joe Jones. The hotel was situated at 147 Cromwell
Road and later became the London Swallow Hotel.
British Beach Hut Miscellany
British Beach Hut Miscellany(2006, 5.2MB, 1:36 min)
Made by Giles Perkins. Shot on Super 8 & digitally edited.
English pastoral loveliness with a conceptual/formalist twist,
which resolves to… English pastoral loveliness.
Lovely!
Lumière – La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière à Lyon
La sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (1895, 2MB, 46 sec.)
The year is 1895. The “Hangar” was the first set in the history of Cinematography and
can be seen here in “La Sortie de l’usine Lumière”, Lumière’s first film.
from the fantastic site – Institut Lumière.