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Show ip il n Park( it t- f iurda, January 13, 1983 Page B5 Video pieces provoke controversy, beauty i I V 41 I i ' i' pi!lplliillpiit The menacing central character stalks the deathly silent interiors of "Deafman Glance" a video finalist at the Park City festival. t.:,.:;.:,.;;. ;.....--,::::::;:: .;.rr::::.: has attempted to distill dream images that are meaningful to him, yet will also engage the interest of the viewer. (See separate story.) FilmVideo Festival Guide The following are the selections for the festival in the area of video documentary: documen-tary: WINNERS How Much is Enough? Decision Making in the Nuclear Age. Andrew Stern's video shows that nuclear-weapons policy has consistently been arbitrary and capricious. (A former military adviser recalls that the Pentagon in the early 1960s ordered a thousand new missiles because it jps i nice round number.) Stern illustrates the debate with video-game graphics and a logical, calm approach, while the weapons experts ping-pong the issues around. American and European spokesmen, for instance, accuse each other of being the first ones to ask for Pershing missiles in Europe. Art and the Prison Crisis. Eric Thiermann and Mark Schwartz look at art programs pro-grams in California prisons a cost-effective alternative to letting unrehabilitated cons back into society. Says Ruth Rushen, director of the Department of Corrections, "If we weigh the money that we spend having inmates work in pottery or photography photo-graphy or music, against what it costs us to fix the broken windows or the toilets they tear out, from the inside the art programs pay off in morale." In Our Own Backyard: The First Love Canal. "If there's hell on earth, I found it." So said one resident near the Love Canal industrial dump, as its toxic wastes began to seep into the basements of nearby homes. Lynn Corcoran's tape does not set up heroes and villains. While it appreciates the anguish of the residents, it comprehends the frustration frustra-tion of the local government officials who cannot by themselves handle the job of moving the citizens out of danger. DOCUMENTARY FINALISTS Jeannette Rankin: The Woman Who Voted No. The story of a woman who stood at two vital crossroads of 20th-century history and cried "Halt!" Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, Con-gress, was the only member to vote against American entry to both world wars. Friends and family recall her life in a tape by Ronald Bayly and Nancy Landgren. Monterey's Boat People. Racial intolerance weaves its way through the history of the fishing industry in Monterey. Mon-terey. Chinese fishermen worked the fishing beds through the 1800s, til their shacks were burned down. The Japanese who followed were interned during World War II. Now it is the turn of the Vietnamese refugee fisherman working in Monterey? Mon-terey? The tape looks at the resentful Americans, who are angry at the government aid going to Vietnamese, and are convinced the immigrants immi-grants are sponging off U.S. resources. ("I say send 'em home," says a resident.) The video-makers, are Spencer I&kaiakS 6 and 'Vincent' DiGirolamo. Survival in America. Five stories from around the country show poor and working-class people trying to survive in today's society. Philadelphia Squatters concerns con-cerns mothers battling City Hall and callous landlords land-lords to find a place to live. Goldminers in South Dakota fight their employers to hold on to their land and receive decent working conditions. In A Father's Dream, a Baltimore father cures his son's birth defect and tries to help other sick children. The Illinois Penny Auction shows farmers banding together to save a friend from foreclosure. fore-closure. The Battle of Hobo-ken Hobo-ken focuses on another landlord-tenant dispute. Conceived Con-ceived by Jon Alpert, Steve Goodman and Karen Ran-ucci. Ran-ucci. The following are winners in the video art category: Hatsu Yume First dream. Bill Viola's quest is to take commonplace reality and reveal the exquisite experience behind it. In this tape, he applies that sensibility sensi-bility to the culture and land of Japan. He meditates on bamboo forests, raindrops on a windshield, lanterns floating on a stream that represent the spirits of dead ancestors. Viola calls the tape "an awareness that what we call culture is defined by the landscape-by landscape-by the chemistry between human beings and a given landscape." ART WINNERS cope with the fact of his exile, to try to re-invent society around him. This drama by Teodoro Maus mixes surrealism and humanism. Spiral PTL. Though the abstract images in the tape are produced through electronic elec-tronic means, they gradually take on a life that looks almost biological. The images were produced (by Tom De Fanti, Dan Sandin, and Mimi Shevitz) by interacting inter-acting in real time with a computer system. HONORABLE MENTIONS IN ART Leaving the 20th Century Trilogy. Max Almy looks forward with optimism to the technology of the future, "like a good technoid artist," he says. But he says we cling to economic, social and political ideas that may prevent us from reaching the 21st Century. Almy explores the problem with a trio of satirical ideas. And appropriately ap-propriately he uses a grab-bag grab-bag of future-effects like voice processing, synthesized synthe-sized music, digital video effects, and Dubner animation. Spine Time. A spine-like rod probes amid parched earth, bone and steam. Verbal meditations on time reverberate and echo. A man confronts his mirrored image, then smashes it. Local artist John Sturgeon Split. The tape looks at a 16-year-old runaway named Susy James who lives in her boyfriend's car. Artist Ar-dele Ar-dele Lister is twice as old as Susy, but feels a kinship with her. "She reminded me of myself at her age, full' of teenage angst, a sense of isolation and boredom, adventurous ad-venturous bordering on dangerous, dan-gerous, and feeling no possibility pos-sibility of communication with family or society." The tape is so absorbed with Susy that Lister says the music comes from the girl's "rhythms" and the lyrics from her expressions. Tongues. An experimental theater piece written by Sam Shepard, performed by Joseph Chaikin, and viewed ' as a "video spectator" by Shirley Clarke. The piece'" recreates a character's last rites through snatches of monologue, meditation, ranting, and moods morbid, giddy, or obsessed. Windfalls 198.1. Matthew Geller uses fragmented editing edit-ing and images to start five "storylines" rolling, which slide, collide, tempt comparison com-parison or defy common sense. The participants include in-clude a jazz musician who recalls violating the etiquette eti-quette at a jam session; a man named Tad who remembers re-members buying a hot TV, and a computer expert who describes coding systems. ART FINALISTS Deafman Glance. A stylized styl-ized story of murder that uses dreamlike, sinister images in the silent hallways and stairs of a house. In a spartan kitchen, a somber-looking somber-looking woman washes dishes and a dazzling carving carv-ing knife then stalks through the house to confront a pair of young boys. The dialogue in Robert Wilson's tape is rendered as time and space, light and movement. Generic Video Art. So you thought the only generic products were blank-faced peaches and flour in the grocery aisle? Artists Laurie McDonald and Tom Sims use the grocery concept to set up satirical presentations of five kinds of video conceptual, concep-tual, experimental, punk, pet-art, and state-of-the-art. Green Line. This video dance taped by Eva Maier is inspired by the 18th-century music of Quinteto Boccher-ini. Boccher-ini. The video attempts to put across what George Balan-chine Balan-chine called "seeing the music and hearing the dancing." danc-ing." It Starts at Home. Mark Fischer's tape is the latest adventure of his dorky, passive character Mark, who can barely get his underwear on, let alone summon the energy to leave his apartment. Suddenly, Mark finds the cable system on his TV set is transmitting him to the world and making him a star. A bizarre character named Bob, who wants to be Mark's agent, has been variously described by viewers as a toupee, a weasel, and a talking leg. Co-produced with Michael Smith, the tape goes in for strange reflective views, like Mark watching himself, watching TV. Letters. Artist Happy Luchsinger goes spelunking for the inner self of the person. In his search he uses love letters, X-rays, bone scans and psychoanalytic computer printouts. Making a Paid Political Announce merit. Artist Howard Fried supposes that he is an electoral candidate attempting to influence and ingratiate himself with only five randomly-selected people peo-ple and their interests. If the target group is laughably small, will this affect what the political animal says and does? Montana. Artist Jane Veeder loves to capture subjects with her video camera, whether it be a mountain hawk, buffalo, or the Sears Tower. At home, she uses computer graphics to amplify those sights to other views and processes. Parted Company. The tape, by James Wagner, is a video poem about turning 30 and being separated. But it also addresses our increasing increas-ing individual desolation, our difficulty in knowing ourselves, our-selves, and the idea that documentary and fiction are opposite entities. The Reagan Commercials. Glen Scantlebury was commissioned com-missioned in 1980 to build a set for a Reagan commercial. commer-cial. He was paid, but the set was never used. To "pay Reagan back" he made this tape. It shows 10 commercials commer-cials depicting Reagan's run for the White House, combining combin-ing original footage, off-the-air recording, and out-takes from Reagan movies. Slowly Sounding. A videotape video-tape can even be made from the concept of dropping various objects ( wood, giass, metal) to the ground! In post-production, artist W.A. Brown applied mathematical mathemati-cal editing schemes to his dropped items. Target: Siggraph '81. Computer graphics and image processing are imposed im-posed over raw footage of animal life and badland vistas. In mood, the tape ranges from chatty to an eerie "stranger in a strange land" feeling. Ey Jane Veeder and Phil Morton. TeleTapes. Peter DiAgos-tino DiAgos-tino grabs from TV news, movies, and other slices of boob-tube environment to critique the medium. While he compiles a dictionary of TV effects wipes, dissolves, fades he also shows the seductive, manipulative effects ef-fects TV can have on us. Unity Through Strength. Pier Marton deals with the deadly hypnosis of TV. His belief that television mounts a near-nuclear assault on the senses. "Gafit GountxLj fiLiLt is South Vii E.ii. .S.ii L.iki Cih. I 'l.ih isi 4s- Philippe' - at the Copperbottom Inn -1637 Shortline Road, Park City Featuring European specialities in the tradition of fine dining. Open for Dinner 6 -10 p.m. 7 days a week Featuring: fresh fish, fresh pastries, special entrees Ftp;prnrftinns arcpfttpd at A49-2421 g r i I f j Meta Mayan II. Edin Velez's tape was the product of her two-month trip to Guatemala in 1980. While Velez is sensitive to landscapes, land-scapes, textures, and people, she also casts an eye toward the social upheaval in the country. The Man on the Empire State. A Latin American leaves his country pledging to stop the injustice there, but his rhetoric only bores and saddens his comrades. He takes a room on the top of the Empire State Building, where he plays games to ffiirthday tii January 16 January 13 Steve Chin Glenn Artist Tim Vaughan January 17 Brock Rosenblatt Dan DeVries Beau Brinkerhof f Scot Verrone Virginia Clancy Dolly Corbo Erik Low January 18 January 14 Kathy Shoulders Sally Rosenblatt Michael McComb Alma Pedersen Penelope Reed Bob Lanser Susan Stanfield January 19 GarySneed Susan Boren Mike Lehner January 15 Andy Field Don Johnson Jim Thomson BUMNhS CARDS BKtX.HURFS fOKMS FLYtRS LETTERHEADS POSURS ADVI R1IMNC, ABHS OCCb MAKERS PMTS TYPESETTING DESIGN FERs BR'K p DIM' R I N T I N G SING ! I I ' r !! A! ) ADVI k i ' i, II VI KS Ik I" ." 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