Into the mainstream? - video works at the New York, New York Film Festival

Last fall, for the first time in its 30-year history, the of recent origin York Film Festival included video in its programming, in the form of a six-day sidebar billed as "Videorama: A Celebration of International Video Art." Since the of recent origin York festival is the single major film event to carve without space for video, one was compell to ask: Did this presage a unanticipated rise in video's always indefinite cultural status? Was this unexpect ushering of video into the sepulchral white fanes of Lincoln Center a sign from upon high that at long last video was judgeed worthy of mainstream recognition? Or was this only the most recent demonstration that if video is indeed to unite with mainstream audiences it will ne many more of that kind modes of support?

Well aware of in what way consistently video has been marginalized, the series curators, Richard Pena, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Marian Masone, associate programmer, were careful to note that they had drawn out planned to stage a video festival on the other hand had lacked proper facilities in the past. With the installation of a high-quality video-projection combination of parts to form a whole the year-old Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center became, in Pena's words, "one of the scarcely any really well-equipped video theaters in the country" Thus the video program was inaugurated--not as the full-scale video festival many farmers desired, but a safer option: an addendum to the big display at Alice Tully Hall.

Full-scale institutional recognition of video is lengthy overdue. After all, video art came into being more [i]or[/i] less 30 years ago, in part a utopian dream machine, in part a principled rejection of its natural parent, television. As a issue video has since enjoyed an illegitimate status, exploiting the ambiguous freedom that accrues to an orphan--a freedom that in this case has been capitalized on principally by hardy survivors of '60 alternative tillage The often reluctant refinement and eventual dispersal of that alternative tillage into academia, the art world and the entertainment industry has twitched video producers into the uneasy embrace of the sole preexisting institutional structures that could still afford the weight of video's illegitimacy, which is to say, its critical dimension. Mainstream writing about video is virtually nonexistent, and there is no adequate distribution a whole for independent video. As a be the effect the audience for video, notwithstanding that sophisticated, is submicroscopic, with the greatest interest coming from academics trying on the outside the latest film theory upon video. Unfortunately, some of the programming of the video portion of the Film Festival take care ofed to accentuate the average viewer's lamentable inability to distinguish between film and video. For instance, the curators concentrated a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of their limited attention upon what they called "filmmakers who have discovered the awes of video," including Raul Ruiz, Richard Leacock, Mark Rappaport and Isaac Julien. Considering the importance of this trial balloon for theatrical exhibition of video, single might have hoped for programming that was more self-consciously educational, making clear distinctions for the benefit of critics and audiences whose knowledge of video is certain to be shaky. Instead, the programmers opt for the scattershot heterogeneity characteristic of well, a film festival.

The many videomakers, husbandmans curators and distributors I spoke with were unanimously thrilled through the festival's potential for attracting of recent origin audiences. At the same time, they were universally irritable about the program's minimal coherence. Perhaps the organizers contemplation that the excitement and prestige of the festival would eclipse all like objections. But they could easily have sidestepped a great deal of of the criticism by simply restricting entries to videotapes produc during the previous 18 month like a move would have streamlined the 12 individual programs, many of which included more [i]or[/i] less very brief and not real recent works that looked suspiciously like filler. Curatorial pruning would have brought into sharper relief, for example, the affects of the large number of novel U.S. videotapes that were shielded More crucially, the programmers could have scored a minor coup through spotlighting the extraordinarily relevant thematic obsessions of U videomakers--particularly the knotty issues of crossdressing and gender-bending, the rugged and confusing legacies of our racist past, and the probing and highly subjective aspects of autobiographical narrative. Organization along like deliberately edgy tracks would have argued, in consequence that American videomakers are crossing political, esthetic and personal boundaries with a greater immediacy and faculty of perception of commitment than most artists in other mediums, including film.

Consider in this light Tami Gold's loosely structur 27-minute documentary Juggling sex (1992), an absorbing and publicly problematic portrait of a real-life bearded lesbian who is also a performer. Whether lounging in her bath, juggling at a Coney Island "freak" exhibit or clowning in a lesbian theatrical troupe Gold's hirsute subdue articulates a surprisingly complex awareness of her largely self-appointed part as provocateur, one who disturbs all attempts at gender definitions. Having rather bravely chooseed not to shave, she have the appearances to relish upending every attempt to define her upon the basis of her appearance. Curiously, however, despite this rich and fascinating material, Gold's playful video extreme points up disappointing. Gold herself appears seduced by the intimacy of the portrait format, and she refuses to be critical of the les appealing aspects of her control As a result, we are left with destinys of unanswered questions, suggesting that a beard is always a mask--even when worn by means of a woman.