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November
21, Thursday, 8PM, 2002
PIXELVISION
Balagan
collaborates with Gerry Fialka, the founder
of the Pixel This Festival to put together
a program of the best of PixelVision. After the
show, the discussion will follow and you will
be able to talk with Gerry and a few of the participating
PixelVision artists, as well as learn about the
history of the Fisher Price PixelVision and it's
adoption by artist. Among the filmmakers featured
are: Sean Eno, Michael O'Reilley, Michael Almereyda,
Sadie Benning, Elisabeth Subrin and Joe Gibbons.
What
is PIXELVISION?
The PXL-2000 (aka PIXELVISION) is a light weigth
portable video camera that was manufactured by
Fisher Price in the late eighties for around $100.
It was marketed as a toy for kids, so they could
play at making their own home movies. The camera
records both audio and a strange grainy black
and white video image on standard audio cassette
tapes. The PXL-2000 just didn't seem to catch
on with the youngsters so Fisher Price quickly
took it off the market, but it was later embraced
by filmmakers and video artists for its unique
look and low price. Today, the cameras are nearly
impossible to find, bringing PIXELVISION to it's
current cult like status.
The
Stepfather and the Suitor 8min, 2002
PREMIERE!!
Director: Joe Gibbons
When
Barbie's estranged stepfather Joe tries to quash
her romance with young beau Ken, the fur flies.
~ Joe Gibbons
Joe
Gibbons
works in film and video, making features and
shorts. His work has been shown at numerous
museums including the Museum of Modern Art
and the Whitney Museum, and included twice
in the Whitney Biennial, and is regularly
included in the NY Video Festival and the
Rotterdam Film Festival. His last feature
The Genius, starring Karen Finley and himself,
had a month-long run in NYC at Anthology Film
Archives and was included in such festivals
as New Directors/New Films, AFI and Rotterdam.
He lives in Boston and teaches at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
The
Rocking Horse Winner 1997, 23min
Director: Michael Almereyda
Michael
Almereyda (The Eternal, Nadja, Twister)
adapted this D.H. Lawrence short story about
a child who has the power to predict racing
horse winners while atop his own rocking horse.
Filmed entirely in "Pixelvision":
video cameras sold by Fisher-Price (originally
as toys) which record low-resolution black &
white images onto standard audio cassette tapes.
~ Anthony Reed, All Movie Guide
For
the enlightened who already know who Michael
Almereyda is, what can I say about this guy
that hasn't already been written? At the risk
of sounding like a press release, I am going
to rave about his work. Not because Substation
paid me heaps of money to do so (they're a
non-profit organization), but simply because
Mr Almereyda is good. A brief backgrounder
on Mr Almereyda - he got on a fast track to
fame (on the indie circuit, that is) after
writing, directing and producing a highly
acclaimed film, Another Girl, Another Planet.
Since then, he's moved from strength to strength
and after paying his dues with his films'
tours of the numerous indie circuits, he has
a Hollywood feature to his name. The recently
released Hamlet, which stars Ethan Hawke,
is Michael Almereyda's proof of having reached
the pinnacle of the movie-kingdom. –
Anonymous Reviewer
Glass
Jaw 17min,
1991
Director:Mike O'Reilly
In
this impressionistic Pixelvision piece, O`Reilly
provides a gripping portrait of lived physical
trauma while detailing the severe mental and
physical confusion caused by two incidents.
In April 1991 he broke his jaw in a biking
accident. Then in July he was assaulted and
had to undergo brain surgery as a result.
The tape is breath-taking, as O`Reilly narrates
the painful story of his recovery, his problems
with Public Aid, and his daily adjustment
to pain. Glass Jaw is a powerful contemporary
comment on the nature of death and dying,
and touches on the politics and gaps of the
American health care system. O`Reilly produced
most of the sound effects and music in his
highly-acclaimed video Glass Jaw on the Casio
SK-1 keyboard, and shot all the images with
a Fisher-Price PXL 2000 showing that the ultra-low-tech
can be a viable alternative for independents.
Philadelphia-based Michael O'Reilly
is a video- and filmmaker, musician, performer,
and writer. O`Reilly uses low-cost consumer-equipment
in creating visions of life, death, and in-between.
In June 1994 he was named a Fellow of the
Pew Fellowship in the discipline of media
arts. He is currently working on a computer-based
version of Orion Climbs that would arrange
the words, music and images from the original
tape in a "smart shuffle" fashion,
allowing the viewer to construct their own
version by re-configuring the elements of
the video. title.
Girl
Power 14 min 1992
Director:Sadie Benning
Set
to music by Bikini Kill (an all-girl
band from Washington), Girl Power is
a raucous vision of what it means to be a
radical girl in the 90s. Benning relates her
personal rebellion against school, family,
and female stereotypes as a story of personal
freedom, telling how she used to model like
Matt Dillon and skip school to have adventures
alone. Informed by the underground “riot
grrrl” movement, this tape transforms
the image politics of female youth, rejecting
traditional passivity and polite compliance
in favor of radical independence and a self-determined
sexual identity.-VDB
Sadie Benning is best known for her lush
and mesmerizing short pixelvision films, created
with the Fisher Price PXL 2000 toy camera.
Fascinating self studies of a young woman
developing her ideas about her place in the
universe, Benning’s shorts brought her
to international attention as an artist to
watch out for. Benning began creating truly
original videotapes when she was 15 years
old using a Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera.
Her pixel-vision works culminated in 1992
with the production of two works (It Wasn`t
Love and Girlpower), Sadie was age 19 that
year and had already had seen her work screened
at the Museum of Modern Art, the Sundance
Film Festival and the Whitney Biennial. Since
that time, Benning has taken an hiatus from
public appearances in order to devote her
time to painting, drawing and animation work.
In 1995, she completed a short music video
for the Boston band, Come.
Glink
8 min, 2000
Director: Sean Eno
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Shot
in the underground pedestrian pathways of the
World Trade Center, Glink reformats the
tracery of bodily enterprise during rush hour
in a busy metropolitan hub. Scored by Bola,
Glink becomes a powerful memorial to spectral
lives in transit -- after the fact.
In the six years since earning a Masters degree
in Architecture from Columbia University, Sean
Eno has been an animator and broadcast designer
in New York City. In addition to broadcast animation
work, Sean has pursued his own filmmaking activities
in recent years with the experimental music
video Glink for British electronic musician
Bola, which has been screened as part of the
travelling film festival "PXL This Eleven",
as well as festivals in Boston, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, New York, and Victoria British
Columbia. He also recently created original
video art as an installation at a Hudson River
environmental benefit event aboard the lightship
Frying Pan. Sean's poem "four ideas about
moving House" has just been published in
a new poetry journal Pool, (Los Angeles)
Swallow
28 min, 2000
Director: Elisabeth Subrin
Based
on accounts of girlhood anorexia, Swallow
unravels the masked and shifting symptoms that
define clinical depression. With a densely layered
soundtrack, humorous and painful scenes of potential
psychological breakdown reveal a critical loss
of meaning, and the failure to diagnose mental
illness. Weaving narrative, documentary, and
experimental strategies, Swallow intimately
traces the awkward steps from unacknowledged
depression to self-recognition.
Swallow
examines the possibility that depression and
anorexia are language disorders. The wrong
naming of things, and the subsequent loss
of meaning, is one of several devices skillfully
and humourously applied to call into question
modes of representation.—Kristine
Diekman, Language and Disorder
Elisabeth Subrin's award-winning trilogy
of experimental biographies have screened
widely in the US and abroad, including in
the Whitney Biennial, the Rotterdam Int1l
Film Festival, The New York Film Festival
and The Sundance Channel. Her work has received
awards from the Los Angeles Film Critic1s
Association, The New England Film Festival,
The Black Maria Film and Video Festival, The
USA Film Festival, the VIPER International
Film, Video and New Media Festival, and the
U.S. Super 8 Film Festival, and has been presented
in solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art,
The Vienna Int1l Film Festival, Pacific Film
Archives, The Film Center at The Art Institute
of Chicago, The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar
and The Center for Media, Culture and History
at New York University. A 2002-2003 Guggenheim
Fellow, Subrin is a visiting lecturer in the
Department of Visual and Environmental Studies
at Harvard University and lives in Brooklyn,
New York, where she is completing a feature-length
screenplay.
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