Continuing the theme of the last season's Victory Day show, the films in this program ruminate upon the human condition in our current world filled with crime, wars and trauma. Among the filmmakers featured: Robert Todd, Jim Seibert, Stan Vanderbeek, Peter Rose, Jem Cohen, Bryan Boyce, Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen.

World Premiere!
Trauma Victim (Self Portrait of a Civilized Human) 16mm, 17 min, 2002
Director: Robert Todd Director In Person

Robert Todd has been working in and teaching film production since 1989, producing over twenty short pieces in various formats. Since 1985 he has been working as a painter, musician, and editor/sound designer on experimental, narrative and documentary films and videos. Robert's films have been screened at the festivals around the world and received a number of awards including Ann Arbor Film Festival Old Peculiar Award, New England Film Festival Director's Choice Award, Utah Film Festival Best Documentary Award and others. He holds a Masters Degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Oh 16mm, color/sound, 12 min, 1967
Director: Stan VanDerbeek

Assassination, falling down, animated drawings from the landscape of memory, mankind falling down, faces within faces, a haunting view of man drawn in brilliant animation graphics.

A pioneer in the development of experimental film and live-action animation techniques, Stan VanDerBeek achieved widespread recognition in the American avant-garde cinema. An advocate of the application of a utopian fusion of art and technology, he began making films in 1955. In the 1960s, he produced theatrical, multimedia pieces and computer animation, often working in collaboration with Bell Telephone Laboratories. In the 1970s, he constructed a "Movie Drome" in Stony Point, New York, which was an audiovisual laboratory for the projection of film, dance, magic theater, sound and other visual effects. His multimedia experiments included movie murals, projection systems, planetarium events and the exploration of early computer graphics and image-processing systems.

VanDerBeek was born in 1927 and died in 1984. He studied at Cooper Union and Black Mountain College, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Cooper Union in 1972. Among his numerous awards are grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and an American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award. He was artist-in-residence at WGBH and the University of South Florida, and professor of art at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. His work was the subject of retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Babel Video, 17 min, 1987
Director: Peter Rose

BABEL uses processed voices, generic babble, kinetic texts and misleading film and video images to link the linguistic implications of a third nostril to the Tower of Babel and the Strategic Defense Initiative. It is the first part of a film/video/performance work entitled VOX which will investigate the human voice as authority, instrument, apparition and enigma. BABEL has been presented at the Polyphonix Festival in Paris, at the New Music America Festival in Philadelphia, at the National Video Festival in LA and at the WeltMusikTage in West Germany.

"The most compelling piece in the (National Video) festival ... a work of efficacious political art which is also sensuously luscious and rich in ironic humor." - Christine Tamblyn, Afterimage

At times, video artist Peter Rose's work is funny. Like stand-up comedy performed by a linguistic theorist. He mimics the emphatic signals of someone urgently trying to make himself understood while only succeeding in making matters more confused. At other times, Rose is mystical; utilizing the hypnotic nature of video to its fullest and taking from television what it takes from us -- the capacity to be spellbinding and lost in watching. He accomplishes these seemingly conflicting miracles by piecing together images from spinning cameras, filming signs and writing the text on the film itself so that it races past your eyes too fast to read and becomes a filter through which a deeper layer of meaning is perceived...and obscured.

Mr. Rose's work has been presented in numerous film festivals world-wide, including the Philadelphia Film Festival, the European Media Festival, the American Film Festival, the Fourth Experimental Film Festival in Tokyo, and the Edinburgh Film Festival, and has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, and the Instituto Chileno-Nortamericano in Chile. He has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and two Media Production Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is in significant collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Image Forum in Tokyo, the Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Sackner Collection, and the Australian National Film Library. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics from City College of New York and studied film at San Francisco State College. Mr. Rose is a Professor of Film at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. -Pew Foundation http://www.pewarts.org/97/Rose/index.html

Little Flags Super 8 on Video, 6.5min, 2000
Director: Jem Cohen

Filmed on the streets of lower Manhattan during a patriotic victory parade. Everyone loves a parade—except for the dead.

Jem Cohen is a New York-based film- and videomaker. Often shooting in hundreds of locations with little or no additional crew, Cohen collects street footage, portraits, and sounds. The projects built from these archives defy easy categorization, thriving on the collision between documentary, narrative, and experimental approaches. Some of the projects are personal/political city portraits made on travels around the globe. Many center around daily life and ephemeral moments: things seen out of the corner of the eye and pulled into the center.

Cohen has made two feature-length documentaries: Instrument (with and about Fugazi) and Benjamin Smoke (co-directed by Peter Sillen). He has worked with musicians including Sparklehorse, Blonde Redhead, R.E.M., Elliott Smith, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Miracle Legion, Jonathan Richman, Patti Smith, Vic Chesnutt, Stephen Vitiello, and Gil Shaham with the Orpheus Orchestra. Cohen’s work has been broadcast by PBS, the BBC, Planete, and the Sundance Channel. Awards include first prizes at Locarno International Film Festival, Bonn Videonale, Festival Dei Popoli, Doubletake Documentary Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Film + Arc, Graz, and the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award 2000. Cohen is a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellow.

State of the Union Video, 2 min, 2001
Director: Bryan Boyce

Baby Bush meets Tubby-land. Completed in August 2001, this project was initially just a simple comic skewering of George W. Bush and his defense policies—but after September 11th, it took on a whole new meaning. State of the Union now has a surreal documentary quality that is genuinely disturbing. "Bryan Boyce's hilarious Bush-meets-Telletubbies spoof, State of the Union garnered some of the most enthusiastic and raucous audiences of this, or any, festival."—Paul Power, on 42nd Thessaloniki Film Festival program

"George W. Bush is remained as Teletubbies' giant baby-in-the-sky for Bryan Boyce's uproarious short State Of The Union; Daddy's boy makes the same gurgling sounds, though his eyes launch smart bombs at the small, defenseless bunnies who hop around the countryside (one hauntingly devoid of Teletubbies)."—Village Voice
San Francisco native Bryan Boyce is a film and video artist whose work has been shown at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam International Film Festival, NY Expo of Short Film and Video, NY Underground, Chicago Underground, Cinematexas, RESFest and the Pacific Film Archive.

41 Shots Video, 14 min, 2000
Director: Sherry Millner & Ernest Larsen

19 out of the 41 shots fired in 10 seconds by 4 members of the NYPD Street Crimes Unit hit the defenseless body of one Amidou Diallo as he stood in the vestibule of the building where he lived in the Bronx. This video essay seizes on the grotesquely bald, factual precision of this numerical data, proceeding remorselessly on up from number 1 to 41, rubber-banding ten seconds into fourteen minutes, and then snapping it tight, in an intense, formal contemplation of how police violence is produced and then addressed by other forces on the city streets. We see the streets, at night, occupied by a crazy army of vibrant, constantly shifting colors and images, the frantic movement of anxiety and influence, insult and injury. Superimposed upon the unstable text of the city streets is the electronic pulsing of bits of computer text, the horizontal instability of the virtual information stream—while a graphic of the scene of the police crime is retraced obsessively, decomposing into fragmented close-ups.

The images we see of each number from 1 to 41 turn out to be street addresses and vestibules within Manhattan that have not received the violent attentions of the almost entirely white Street Crimes Unit. Behind these 41 locked vestibules live citizens who probably consider themselves safe from the depredations of unknown elements. 41 Shots intimates how at risk they (we) all may ultimately be—not from the unknown, but precisely from the appointed guardians of public safety. The vestibule, transitional zone between inside and outside, becomes an architectural metaphor for universal vulnerability to the sanctioned forces of order on the point of becoming "a great disorder."

Fleeting carnivalesque scenes of highly policed street demonstrations and Halloween parades intimate both the possibility of resistance and a vision of the urban landscape as a necropolis. Ghostly images of windows reflect the sinister theorization underlying the nationwide ratcheting-up of police activity known as the "broken windows" theory of criminology, which posits zero tolerance toward the most minor of offenses. This inherently racist, scorched earth approach to the clean-up of crime has had dire consequences for our communities, among them a violent erasure of the vibrant possibilities for street life. The police murder of Amidou Diallo is thus not only a crime: it could be a blueprint for the future. 41 Shots implicates all of us as we stand uneasily in the vestibule leading toward—or away from—that future.

Sherry Millner has been producing films, videotapes, and photomontages since the mid-1970s. Her tapes are remarkable for their mixture of humor, analysis, and personal insight. Embracing a wide range of issues in her work, from the mundane to the political, Millner portrays an acute sense of the sublime and the ridiculous—a necessary virtue when tackling U.S. foreign policy. For example, The Desert Bush, produced in collaboration with her husband, videomaker and writer Ernest Larsen, makes mincemeat out of George Bush’s Gulf War rhetoric, casting the entire US press corps into the role of skilled manipulators, and refusing to see them as the bastions of truth they would have us believe.

In addition to his work in video, Ernest Larsen is a fiction writer and media critic. His criticism has been published in The Nation, Art in America, The Village Voice, Art Journal, The Independent, Exposure, Transition, and Jump Cut; and his essays have appeared in a number of anthologies. The Usual Suspects will be published by the British Film Institute in the Fall of 2001 in its Modern Film Classics series. A short story, Invasion as a State of Mind, appears in the current Fishdrum. His novel, Not a Through Street, was nominated for an Edgar. Also a scriptwriter and contributing producer for several PBS series and for National Geographic Television, he has received grants and awards from the Jerome Foundation, Paul Robeson Foundation, MacDowell Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, Gunk Foundation, and the Blumenthal Foundation. His collaborative video projects with Sherry Millner have been exhibited and have won awards at major festivals throughout the world (London, Sydney, Berlin, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Dallas, Los Angeles, etc.) including two Whitney Biennials.

Songs of Deeds (casualties) 16mm, b&w/sound, 5 min, 1997
Director: Jim Seibert

This is the first part completed in a projected series documenting human affairs .... Toward the end of the 11th century the Franks were seeking a new Christian identity and an enemy. Poets and minstrels started to compose the chansons de geste, the songs of deeds. Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade in 1095. ... Muslims (Saracens) and Jews were slaughtered with holy zeal. Nine centuries later the consequences to that call to arms resonates from the Mideast, to the boardrooms of the global, corporate warriors, to the heinous crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Your host for this segment is Porky, the Trickster. To be continued ...

[Jim Seibert] was born in Ohio in 1951 and was raised throughout the Midwest. In my childhood the unknown was a threat and "Art" was not something you created and looked at ... he was our next-door neighbor. In reaction to those early years (see THE CHILL ASCENDS) I 1) joined the counter-culture and went to Woodstock 2) moved to California and 3) stayed drunk for about a decade. Like most in my (every) generation I denied the profound effect my familial and cultural history had on my personal relationships and interaction with the world in general. (It made it kind of difficult to love everyone.) Two essential tools of my later filmmaking - anger and sadness - were not available to me at that time. I began to recover those tools in my early thirties. A few years later I ended up studying film at the San Francisco Art Institute. There I worked closely with Gunvor Nelson and George Kuchar.

My films usually germinate from some cultural, historic or personal nightmare. I hold to no rigid formal concerns from piece to piece. To an extent my films make themselves. I shoot subjects that interest me with little thought to purpose or utility. It is only when I begin manipulating film on the editing table that a work begins to reveal itself. Sound is a critical element in my work. (I came to experimental filmmaking through my interest in 20th century classical music's avant-garde.) I feel connected with an audience when I receive a visceral response to my films. "Jim's films are intense, dark and emotional and visually understated. Things are not spelled out but are perceived under the surface through fragmentation and close-up. He tackles difficult subjects with sensibilities and awareness." - Gunvor Nelson, April 1993