Approaching Narrative – "There are Problems to be Solved"

1.The Red Tapes
Vito Acconci | 140 min | 1976
The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic aspirations of the previous decade. Acconci maps a "topography of the self," constructing scenes that suggest both the intimate video space of close-up and the panoramic landscape of film space.

2. Out of Body Travel
Richard Foreman | excerpt 23 min | 1976
A "young woman who finds herself surrounded by the relics of Western culture" is the subject of Richard Foreman's formal tableaux. The narration centers on a young woman's struggle to find a relation between her body and her self as mediated by language. The text is a poetry of formal relations that carries personal and historical implications, including the desires of the woman paradoxically voiced by a male narrator. Richard Foreman, founder and director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York, produced this first videotape project with students from the American Dance Festival and cinematographer Babette Mangolte.

3.The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd
Artur Ginsberg | excerpt 33 min | 1972
From 1970 to 1972, Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America recorded the private life of a not-so-average American couple-Carel Row and Ferd Eggan. She is a porn actress and filmmaker; he is a bisexual junkie. The video verite camera captures the desires and frustrations of their evolving relationship and their responses to the ongoing videotaping exercise. The tape, a study in "the effect of living too close to an electronic medium," reveals attitudes and discussions that also render it a fascinating social document of the west coast counterculture.

moderated by: David Kulhánek