Dead Frankenstein

Writes Kobayashi, "In 1972 I started a series of participatory performances where the first person performs an ambiguous action in front of a recording camera; the next person watches the recorded footage and imitates the action in front of a recording camera; the third person repeats the same procedure using the second person's video recording, and so on. Within the repetition of recording and action, the original gesture is transformed by the participants' misunderstanding, interpretation, and memory."

A collaborative performance, Image of Seeing--Seeing investigates the meaning of television watching. This work was created for television broadcast on the Nippon Broadcasting Corporation's program "Hyōgo no jikan" (Hyōgo Time).

A member of the collective Video Hiroba, Morihiro Wada also used video in his solo projects. In The Recognition Construction, each subject entering the frame is identified by a narrator, while the video camera slowly rotates. As the rotation speeds up the identification becomes more difficult, and the objects ultimately become "indecipherable."

Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and Hakudo Kobayashi presented the video performance Eat at Video Hiroba's first exhibition, Video Communication DO IT YOURSELF KIT. Two performers sit at a table. One records the other eating; then they switch roles. The live video feed of the performance was displayed on a monitor in the exhibition space.

Gérard Courant applies the Lettrist editing techniques of Isidore Isou to footage of late 70's pop culture. Courant posits that his cinema offers an aggressive détournement to the French mainstream, reifying a Duchampian view of film: "I believe in impossible movies and works without meaning... I believe in the anti-movie. I believe in the non-movie. I believe in Urgent... My first full length movie that is so anti-everything that I sometimes wonder if it really does exist!"

This is the first in a series of films using documentary, industrial and educational film footage from the Prelinger Archive and The Internet Archive. The film explores the theme of technology, showing how the future can be edited and manipulated through advances in computer science. As the narrative in the film says "The art of computer graphics is only in its infancy yet it is already stimulating creative thought in far out areas where research is likely to get complex and unwieldy".

In 1907, the Gaumont Films company in France made a slapstick comedy (silent, of course) with a title that would translate from the French as 'A gentleman who ate some bull'. Eugene Deslow got hold of that film and added an introduction plus a soundtrack, the latter consisting of commentary narrated by the single-named actor Bétove.

Writes Imai, "As a photographer during the 1970s, my interest in capturing time led me to explore the video medium. After utilizing video in two or three works, I saw a similarity between videotape and an ancient scroll, in that they both capture a story of our time. I started using physical videotape as a metaphorical representation of time, rolling out the magnetic tape from right to left, representing a narrative from beginning to end."

Trance dances and out of body projection. In front of the camera, Parvaneh Navaï becomes a mediator who enters in contact with and immerses into the energies of Nature, while her own energy radiates and echos in the forest ("selva"). The camera amplifies and expands her presence, transforming the forest into an imaginary space. The camera becomes a painter's brush.

In "Falling. Desert. Syn" there is the body of repetition—not of tautology but of smooth resurrection; a body dying and being resurrected in a dance without suffering. A body of the desert, which is not deserted, but instead possessed by a force of attraction towards the sky, a force as strong as the one towards the earth. A body for the stars, the same one which plunges into the underworlds.

Black Hole Radio is an installation that consists of taped confessions of callers of the New York City Phone Confession Line and video images. The Phone Confession Line is based on anonymous callers ringing to confess on things they had done or thought like adultery, theft, murder or regrets. Thereafter anybody could call and listen to the confessions. Although making a confession was free, listening to a confession costs money. After Cohen got his hands on the confessions, he used them as an audio heartbeat to accompany video-images of every day life in New York City he had taken over the years. This installation is a portrait of the city with its dark secrets, hushed voices and nocturnal images. In this way Cohen tries to bring across an experience to the viewer that relies on absence, waiting and the effort to hear something in the dark.

An experimental short film from Toshio Matsumoto featuring Mona Lisa.

The second half of Gustav Deutsch's experimental Film ist. series, constructing new narratives and moods out of existing footage, mostly from early silent era films.

The story means to develop through an uncovering of layers - strata. As writer Krumbachova stated: "With nature as a prison, an impassable barrier ... where every action is physically and psychically limited by the environment ... people are reduced to fragments of basic instinct and intelligence." Promoted as a psychological thriller, Strata provides little tension nor any real climax. The characters are ideas - not believably real.

Self shots are the optical Biographie of an unorthodox film producer. Director, cameraman and actor in a person, he directs the camera against itself. It plays with her, throws her into air, races over the meadows, films its movements, his face and his hands and demonstrates thereby its adventurous relationship to a 16 mm camera. Not an action thus, but filming becomes the action. The Godard' Bonmot of filming as ' truth 24 times in the second ' made Mommartz in his films conscious like hardly another. (Wilfried Reichart Kölner Stadtanz 4.1.68)

Szirtes's masterful experimental work is a dazzling composition of several years of filming within an industrial macro/microcosm, an abstract model of revolution and the beauty of daybreak.

Outrage kiss-in at Bow Street police station in London, with a demonstration against homophobic government bills clause 25/28.

An experimental short film from Mi-sen Wu.

Camera, Monitor, Frame is the first installment of Takahiko Iimura's "Video Semiotics Triptych" (the other two works are Observer/Observed, made in 1975, and Observer/Observed/Observer, made in 1976). The work analyzes the fundamental components of video: the camera, the monitor, and the frame, focusing on the role of each within a system of video as analogous to the functions of vision and speech.

Using video technology as an extension of his body, Yamamoto interacts with a pre-recorded image of his hand displayed on a monitor.