Watching Video Art - experimental cinema

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

Really rather enjoying watching a lot of video art type stuff lately after going to a screening of Takashi Ito & Toshio Matsumoto short movies

Problem is actually seeing a lot of this work. often only appearing at special screenings and exhibitions unless someone has been sneaky enough to STEAL and UPLOAD it somewhere

like, i can watch all of Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon's work on youtube which is very nice, but am I literally ever going to see any Ana Mendieta except for photos?

Anyone god any good resources beyond ubuweb?

edit: just gonna share the very fun things i saw at said screening

[Sebastian Cobb]

Archive.org might be a good bet for some of it. I think they used to have some longish bits of Lanesville TV/Videofreex and also Tee Pee Videospace troupe:
https://archive.org/search?query=%28videofreex%29+AND+mediatype%3A%28movies%29

Also https://videofreex.com

Unfortunately can't find it online but there's a great doc Jim Moir (Vic Reeves) did about the subject for BBC Four https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bpjw
If you have some good links already please share!

[dontpaintyourteeth]

completely unhelpfully registering my interest in this thread because I've always wanted to see more of Ana Mendieta's work

[Herbert Ashe]

Really rather enjoying watching a lot of video art type stuff lately after going to a screening of Takashi Ito & Toshio Matsumoto short movies

Fuck sake was this in the UK? Where? Watched a load of Ito a few months back and would have been there for this like a shot.


I've found https://www.solidaritycinema.com/ good for some obscure stuff in good quality, I guess much of it stuff grabbed off KG for the benefit of the masses. It's a bit of a pain interface as it's all done via google drive, but it's basically open access. They've got 2 Ana Mendieta files:

Ana Mendieta: Selected Film Works (34min)
Ana Mendieta: Selected Performance Works (1973-1981) (52 min)

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

Archive.org might be a good bet for some of it. I think they used to have some longish bits of Lanesville TV/Videofreex and also Tee Pee Videospace troupe:
https://archive.org/search?query=%28videofreex%29+AND+mediatype%3A%28movies%29

Also https://videofreex.com

Unfortunately can't find it online but there's a great doc Jim Moir (Vic Reeves) did about the subject for BBC Four https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bpjw
If you have some good links already please share!

archive is good! just a lot of estate holders etc seem pretty on it with the takedowns etc

Fuck sake was this in the UK? Where? Watched a load of Ito a few months back and would have been there for this like a shot.


I've found https://www.solidaritycinema.com/ good for some obscure stuff in good quality, I guess much of it stuff grabbed off KG for the benefit of the masses. It's a bit of a pain interface as it's all done via google drive, but it's basically open access. They've got 2 Ana Mendieta files:

Ana Mendieta: Selected Film Works (34min)
Ana Mendieta: Selected Performance Works (1973-1981) (52 min)

yeah this was in brighton!

oooooh this is a great looking resource. keen to try the plex link when i'm off of work

[Herbert Ashe]

Ah fuck, so it was part of the Tetsuo screening. Serves me right for not reading stuff properly.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

Ah fuck, so it was part of the Tetsuo screening. Serves me right for not reading stuff properly.

it was bangin. never managed to see tetsuo until now. sexiest movie i ever saw

[sevendaughters]

will contrib later but UBU WEB was indispensable for me getting into experimental work

https://www.ubu.com/

[Famous Mortimer]

I bloody love Toshio Matsumoto's stuff. "Shift" is fantastic.

I also bloody love Ito's. "Drill" might be my favourite of the lot.

[sovietrussia]

I tend to love this kind of thing in the gallery setting (oh, get her). I found myself sitting in a museum in Milan earlier this year transfixed by an installation about a bunch of guys in a hyperbaric chamber. I'm not sure I could lock into this kind of thing at home, even if I pop on my crumpled linen suit.

[Herbert Ashe]

Think I admire Ito more now than if I'd seen his stuff in more analogue times, I realise it's not as simple as digital=easy, but something about the bloody-mindedness needed to make something like Spacy. (I guess Jodie Mack is an example of someone current whose work still has a tangible sense of labour about it, IIRC her stop-motion stuff is 16mm.

As I'm here, my big find in the last few months is trapline (Ellie Epp, 1976). Blurb: < Ellie Epp's 12-shot study of a soon-to-be-demolished public bath in London, which "maps another way out of structural film toward a cinema of delicate implication". > . Exactly what I want out of exp-film exploring buildings and human structures; not rushed, just enough human presence for us to consider the utilitarian aspects of the space, enough other shots that confound the sense of the familiar, all with great sound (don't know if it was sync or not). Seen a few things here and there that don't do much more than plonk a camera outside a building, move it a bit, then cut to the next shot, was getting a bit pissed off and disappointed by this sort of thing and this was a great antidote.

Also a few of Hollis Frampton's Hapax Legomena series. V annoyed me, something a bit lame about how, to quote Frampton, "The soundtrack annexes, as mantram, the Wade-Giles syllabary of the Chinese language.", besides that Wade-Giles is a romanisation scheme for writing Chinese so it's a weird thing to say. I, II, III were all good or great though, II especially which pre-empts Marguerite Duras's The Lorry and is one of those very rare films that feels like a viable attempt to make literature on film (as opposed to just filming a story).

[Mr_Simnock]

If you like video art - experimental cinema you might like 'The Colour of Pomegranates' by Sergei Parajanov. It tries to visually show the life of Armenian singer Sayat Nova and is also filled with Armenian cultural meaning\iconography.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

If you like video art - experimental cinema you might like 'The Colour of Pomegranates' by Sergei Parajanov. It tries to visually show the life of Armenian singer Sayat Nova and is also filled with Armenian cultural meaning\iconography.

oh yeah i saw an awwwful live-soundtrack version years ago. been meaning to see in the proper way

my attention span is pretty bobbins at the moment, so short experimental stuff has been particularly appealing to me. i can watch it at work when i should be working but work can be boring because it's work

[chutnut]

Can't really help with finding anything but I've been meaning to watch more stuff like this so looking forward to checking out the stuff above. I've seen some Brakhage and Peter Tscherkassky and really enjoyed them

[Herbert Ashe]

Oh, I forgot to mention another handy download source for this sort of stuff, ulozto dot net, used it for years with no problems. In particular someone has loads of experimental stuff they've uploaded in reasonable quality with 'shortmovie' in the title. Only downside is 300k/s download speed if you're desperate for instant gratification

[Midas]

Frumpy solution is to search for interesting films distributed by LUX and either purchase or thieve, depending on the price/availability