FILMWINTER '96:
Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival Screening
Organized by Mindi Faber
Interior Ethnographies: Videos On The Self
curated by Mindy Faber, Video Data Bank, Chicago

Edward Rankus
Edward Rankus is an independent video artist whoose work references the symbolic system of science-fiction films, behavioral psychology experiments, and hypnosis. Concerned with the hazy borderline between inner and outer worlds, his work recalls a surrealist aesthetic. As a student of Dan Sandin and Phil Morton, Rankus is part of the second generation of Chicago video artists whose approach to video differed from their more procees-oriented teachers. Rankus`work is masterfully edited and deeply ironic; he is able to wrest drama from mundane subjects. The play of symbols is very important in Rankus`work, which is some ways approaches still life painting in the juxtaposition of essential elements to create a mood and a meaning.

Nerve Language (10:07, 1995) This tape, which forms a loose trilogy with Rankus`previous two works, Naked Doom and She Heard Voices, deepens further his visual investigation into the ambigiuous mingling of our inner and outer worlds. In strikingly composed images employing the techniques of tableaux vivants, assemblage and collage, Rankus fabricates a universe in which the human body does not possess a discrete boundary but is instead imagined into objects, and this encroachment causes the living subject to contemplate its own objectness. Rankus`vision is wryly commented upon by an effective and subtle musical track composed by bob Snyder.

Obsessive Becoming (56:00, 1995) This free-form and surreal autobiography is concerned with childhood and adult rituals and the longing for meaning and connection during the often wildly absurd events of early life. Obsessive Becoming returns to Reeves`early exploration of personal narrative forms, poetry, and his interest in creating a more apontaneous and direct fusion between language and video.Here words and images of the expectations and betrayals of coming of age break down the boundaries of either medium. Reeves draws upon a wealth of images created since the 1940s in his family`s enthusiasm for capturing time, featuring Polaroids and 16mm film. The essence of his work is insight, compassion, and healing. It suggests that we abandon memories that have created emotional barriers, and deal with the past without letting it limit our passage through life - in Reeves`words : "Stand long enough and put off all that guards your heart."

Joe Gibbson
Gibbson's dry humor comes across in obsessive monologues that scrape the bottom of a monomaniacal mind, spilling forth with fantasies of power, destruction, and death. In his tapes, the hand-held camera allows Gibbsons alter-ego to surface as he gives vent to tyrannical rants that comically invert social values.

Pretty Boy (2:45, 1994, pixelvision) Tension between a man and his handsome young rival, a Ken doll, erupts into violence.

Michael O'Reilly
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.

Glass Jaw (17:00, 1991) In this impressionistic Pixelversion 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.

Tom Kalin
Tom Kalin`s work focuses on the portrayal of gay sexuality both in the age of AIDS and historically, as in his highly acclaimed feature film Swoon. Informed by his work with two AIDS activists collectives, CT UP and Gran Fury, Kalin`s tapes are characterized by beautiful murky images drawn from a variety of film and video sources. Kalin is currently working on a feature based on the book Savage Grace, and a half-hour film adaptation of two stories by Jane Bowles. Kalin also served as a producer on the feature films Go Fish (by Rose Troch‚) an I Shot Andy Warhol (by Mary Harron).

Selection from Third Known Nest (13:20, 1991 - 1995) A loose association of short works primarily shot on Super 8 and edited on video, Third Known Nest crawls inside the skin of music video and makes a diary from a pocketful of literary touchstones and filming out in the world. Includes the following:

I hung back, held fire, danced and lied (5:00, 1994) A memorial for living insired by a quote from James Baldwin.

Information Gladly Given but Safety Requires Avoiding Unnecessary Conversation (1:05, 1994) A short that adopts the form of advertising but eloquently advocates for personal freedoms.

Shu Lea Cheang
Cheang tackles conceptions of racial assimilation in American culture, examining the political underbelly of everyday situations that affect the relationship between individuals and society. Cheang often uses video in formally innovative installations; her projects include the Airwaves Project, which focuses on the one-way flow of global information and industrial waste, and Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, and installation presenting the work of women artists dealing with interracial sexual politics. Cheang ( under the name Maniac) has recently been collaborating with Ela Troyano (E.T.), a filmmaker and performer, and Jane Castle (Baby), also a filmmaker with work on numerous features to her credit. One of the most recent joint projects is the critically acclaimed Frech Kill.

Fingers and Kisses (Shu Lea Cheang with Superdyke, Inc., Japan, 5:00, 1995) Cheang has taken her camera to the streets for a conspicouos glimpse into lesbian public sexuality. If Asian women and lesbians share a certain amount of invisibitity in the culture, Fingers and Kisses offers not only a bold representation of both but a challenge to the questions, "what do lesbians do?" Tokyo`s own out and loud music by Chu punctuates the narrative as what begins in the streets continues under the sheets. Song by Chu.

Sadie Benning
Sadie 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. In1995, she completed a short music video for the Boston band, Come. German Song is a notable departure from her previous pixelvisionwork stilistically. Where the pixel pieces are most often shot in extreme close-ups and often within the privacy of her own bedroom, German Song is shot in Super-8 film and is comprised mostly of outdoor scenes and long-shots that emphasize the isolation of her individual in a landscape of abandonment and dilapidation. Yet, similar themes re-emerge about the fears and isolation of youth and the yearning for departure.

German Song (5:49, 1995) Shot in black and white Super-8 film, Benning`s lyrical short muses on a disengaged youth and grey afternoons spent wandering. and features the hard-edged music of Come, an alternative band from Boston.

Meena Nanji
Of South Asian origin and born in Kenya, Meena Nanjyi moved to England when she was nine and Los Angeles when she was seventeen. Her work concerns the global diaspora of post-colonial peoples and the disruption and replacement of cultural values, traditions, and ideologies that results from these migrations.

Voices of the Morning (13:40, 1992) A multiple award winner, this experimental tape explores the psychoöogical ramifications of a woman growing up under orthodox Islamic law. Resisting traditional definitions of a woman`s role in society as first and foremost a dutiful daughter or wife, this tape depicts Nanji`s struggle as she tries to find a space amidst the web of necessities imposed upon her by restrictive familial and societal concentions.

Rachel Schreiber
Rachel Schreiber is a performance artist, photographer, writer and videomaker living and working in New York.

This is Not Erotica is a tape which problematizes the simple connotations usually assoicated with top/masculine/active vs. bottom/feminine/passive. Through a surprising juxtaposition of erotic fantasy and historical accounts of Jewish women in the Resistance during World War 2, This is Not Erotica questions the meaning of passivity and agency in the artist`s sexuality. Schreiber draws on women from her cultural past to explore the position that heritage holds in terms of her objects of desire.

Leslie Thornton
Leslie Thornton is a painter turned video- and filmmaker who teaches in the Modern Culture and Media Program at Brown University. Her lush complex works explore the mechanisms of desire and meaning while probing past the boundaries of language and narrative conventions. Difficult to categorize or describe, Thornton`s works are steeped in theoretical interest and filled with rich and intuitive imagery in experimental narratives crossing sience-fiction, ethnographic and documentary forms.

The Last Time I Saw Ron (12:00, 1994) During the winter of 1994 , actor Ron Vawter was in Brussels working on a theatre production about the mythical Greek warrior Philoketes. Philoketes was abandoned by Odysseus on the island of Lemnos after he had been bitten by a snake while on route to Troy. He was betrayed by Odysseus because his wound would not heal, provoking mournful cries and a stench that distressed the other soldiers, When Ron was diagnosed with AIDS, this story of anguish and isolation took on added poignancy, and he arranged to collaborate with Dutch director Jan Ritsema on a theatrical production inspired by the myth. An international group of artists came together to develope Philoketes Variations under the auspices of the Kaaitheater in Belgium. Ron passed away just as the production reached fruition. The Last Time I Saw Ron is made from footage shot for the play, and includes stunning material of Ron`s figure flying through the cosmic and destructive events. A pregnant woman drifts alongside him as his body merges with the time and space of the universe. The tape is a moving meditation on the power of art as a life-giving force, and on one man`s extraordinary belief in that power.

Maida Barbour / Linda Montano
Linda Montano: Seven Years of Living Art (13:13, 1994) A video collage of a seven-year performance piece by noted artist Linda Montano. it chronocles the issue and events that arose in Montano`s life as she devoted a year to each of the seven chakras. Initially devoted to themes of commitment and liberation, the work becomes a fascinating hybrid of art and life as Montano experiences the onset of menopause, her mother`s death, her choice to enter and leave a convent, the suffering of a stroke and thoughts of her own death - all within the structural confines of an intense work of art. Contributors include Ellen Furman, Gisela Gamper and Annie Sprinkle.

Various short works by the following producers will be interspersed throughout the program

Jem Cohen
Jem Cohen is a New York-based producer working in 16mm and 8mm film and video. His poetic, often ephemeral, work is marked by blurring of the distinctions between documentary, narrative and experimental genres. Cohen frequently shoots in hundreds of locations, without any additional crew, in the tradition of documentary street photographers such as Robert Frank. His projects include collaborations with poets, writers, and bands such as R.E.M., Fugazi and the Butthole Surfers, creating alternatives to generic and commodified "music video".

C-00 Film Corporation
The C-00 Film Corp. is a small film and video production and distribution company. While their production operations concentrate on making music videos with bands such as R.E.M., The Feelies, Latin Alliance, Pylon, and the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies among others, C-00 is also in production on their first feature film. Working with Direct Impact, their non-profit group, C-00 has created a series of low-cost, high effect public service announcements on a range of social and political issues, including race relations, sexism, safe sex, historical preservation, and the environment.

Teddy Dibble
Reminiscent of a simpler time (when crawly things were really scary), Dibble`s videotapes offer membership in a boy`s club of comedy hijinks. Based on visual and linguistic puns, his short works poke fun at everything from medical etiquette to prevalent truism to the nature of the medium. Dinnle lives and works in Kansa City.

Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer sees verbal ideas, in the form of signs, as integral components of daily life; as subject matter for contemporary art, they are as fundamentally relevant as the portraits and landscapes of past eras. The power of language to distort and manipulate is the basis of Holzer`s art, which is intellectual rather than visual. She is internationally renowned for her linguistic interventions in every inch of the social arena, from parking meters to t-shirt to billboards. Holzer`s Televised Texts adopt the form and language of commercial messages to disrupt communication, presenting kamikaze texts that are designed to stimulate thought, provide humor, and urge a critical attitude among an all-too-passive audience. Like all of holzer`s work, these television spots present deceptively simple sequences of text that mix provocative social commentary with resonant poetic reflection. Note: Televised Texts are designed to appear seperately in television or other curated programs anonymously and by surprise. Call for a complete list of texts and availabitity.