Although Gainsbourg and Birkin had appeared in a string of films since their magnetic collision in Pierre Grimblat’s Slogan, Melody was a bit of diversion from their collaborations since it’s a series of interwoven videos inspired by the Gainsbourgalbum. For '71 it’s a novel concept to bring visual life to an LP, but even more surprising are the short film’s amazing visuals that director Averty crafted using a wealth of video filters, overlays, camera movements and chroma key effects. Averty applies these in tandem with the increasing tone of Gainsbourg’s songs, which more or less chronicle an older man's affair with a young girl. Each song is comprised of steady, sometimes brooding poetic delivery, with refrains timed to the phrase repeats of each song, while Alan Parker’s buzzing guitar accompanies and wiggles around Gainsbourg’s resonant voice. The bass is fat and groovy, the drums easy but steady, and the periodic use of strings or rich vibrato makes this short a sultry little gem.
Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.
A meditation on isolation through paint textures, video collage and sound
The goddess Diana and her two attendants traverse the rugged terrain of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains in pursuit of the elusive wolf. An Engraver (Matthew Barney) furtively documents their actions in copper engravings and provokes a series of confrontations. The characters communicate through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.
A dream where obsession for German as a second language mixes up with an obsession for neatness and cleanliness as a distinctive feature of the national culture in question seen from the perspective of a foreigner. The dream is not a nightmare only because the set it is dreamt into is the seashore of the mare nostrum, where the dreaming subject is perfectly at home. A homeland which she, in turn, in her more secret thus naïf dreams would dream of being cleaner and tidier as in the reality, especially in front of such beauty of nature. As is right and proper.
In a city inhabited by drawn beings, an indigenous boy witnesses a holographic appearance. It is the arrival of an entity of unknown materiality. With a mysterious presence and exotic allegories, it starts to enchant the residents, awakening their most insane senses.
Shows a couple (Adam and Eve) and various objects, simultaneously, in time, space and movement.
Anémona and Pisces live a capicua experience: they are at the same time the woman who looks, the woman who is looked at, and the very act of looking. Between fractal scenes and images multiplied in reference to Man Ray, Anémona assumes the will to, through the state of trance, always be a foreigner within herself, while Pisces goes in search of an alien vision, to assume herself as the self and otherness to understand the world.
After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.
Cóndor
Performance video about a holiday romance at St Ives, Cornwall.
"of reciprocal isolation and foreignness"
Experimental video art set to the track "Place I Know/Kid Like You" by Arthur Russell.
A dejected homemade robot wanders through a bright and sunny landscape, only to encounter some bad luck.
The Karikpo masquerade - a traditional dance of the Ogoni tribe - is transposed onto the remnants of a faded oil industry programme in the Niger delta.
H(o)me(o)pa®t(h)y is a home entertainment healing system based on Homoeopathic medicine which one can at least to a certain extent autonomously manage as first aid tool, if you are skilled enough. As an allusion to David Cronenberg's Videodrome where the president of a trashy TV channel, Max Renn is desperate for new programming to attract viewers by establishing a new TV show dedicated to torture and punishment, H(o)me(o)pa®t(h)y instead is based on joy and healing. But will there be an overdose of globules? Insert 1 globules and start your solo home party! Cure yourself on so many occasions and relive a full relief. Your own H(o)me(o)pa®t(h)y kit is now available. Don't worry, be homoeopathic!
TEMPORALLY tells the story of an Italian thunderstorm through the eyes of a Japanese painter. The lightning itself fusions with its environment and creates a hypnotic point of view. The sound in the video was recorded on the occasion of the exceptionally high water alert in Venice, Italy. The alarm is composed of two parts. The first was the sirene in use under bombardments during WW2, whereas the second is designed by the University of Venice and should be heard during all the sleep phases, yet not causing any panic. The images themselves were shot during multiple thunderstorms in the mountains between Lake Lugano and Lake Como. So, an interplay of salt and sweet water. Furthermore, the title TEMPORALLY is a combination of the Italian word for storm "temporale", and the word for atmospheric weather "tempo" which in English means rhythm and rally, thus a race of lightning, in the end, following in a recovery.
A memorial mourns as time passes
White Homeland Commando takes the familiar terrain of network action drama and tilts the playing field. Reminiscent of today's popular reality-based cop shows, White Homeland Commando offers a straightforward story: four members of a special police unit investigate and infiltrate a New York-based white supremacist organization. But that is where the commonplace ends. The teleplay is shot and edited in a highly textured visual style, the colors are subdued yet somehow garish, and the sound is deliberately just out of sync with the speaker's lips. Occasional static combines with jumps in the plot — the editing is reminiscent of a television viewer flipping channels.
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).