They called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, but because of their ecstatic dancing, the world called them Shakers. Ken Burns creates a moving portrait of this particularly American movement, and in the process, offers us a new and unusually moving way to...
With a title referring to Japanese folklore, wherein things done on the first day of a new year are significant, the film - an ardent dream entirely shot in Japan - stands as a spiritual allegory equating light and dark with life and death.
In one of his first experiments in video, Emshwiller creates an electronic landscape of both abstract and figurative elements, where colorized dancers are chroma-keyed into a mutable, computer-animated environment. Working with the "Scan-i-mate," an early analog video synthesizer, Emshwiller...
Through eloquent portrayals of four different life experiences — birth, aging, marriage and the death of a parent — Home addresses how the dissolution of the nuclear family and the increasing control of daily life by institutions have affected the individual. The subjects of this verité...
Set to Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War, Bill Etra's original performance on 9 B&W monitors was shot in real-time on 16mm color film by Woody Vasulka. The 16mm film added some unexpected and welcome color effects that lend themselves to the composition and the choice was made to leave them in.
Emshwiller writes that the visually complex and densely textured Skin Matrix is a "video tapestry... a layering of different manifestations of energy: electronic (light, video, computer), inorganic (dunes, rocks, mud), organic (wood, plants), human (skin, hair), individual (faces, eyes),...
The New Wave is the seminal compendium of independent video work in the early 1970s. Written and narrated by Brian O'Doherty, this overview of the emerging video field includes examples of guerrilla television and "street" documentaries, early explorations with image-processing and synthesis, and...
