Music Videos from the Film-Makers' Cooperative

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​Program:

1. Soul City, M. Henry Jones – 2 minutes (Song: "Soul City," performed by the Fleshtones)
2. Big Brown Eyes, Emily Hubley – 2 minutes (Song: "Big Brown Eyes," written by Peter Holsapple, performed by the db's)
3. The Monkey and the Engineer, Jacob Burckhardt – 5 minutes (Song: "The Monkey and the Engineer," written by Jesse Fuller, performed by Bill Rice and Marc Ribot)
4. Spiders in Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical, Martha Colburn – 3 minutes (Featuring original music by Red Balloon)
5. Square Times, Rudolph Burckhardt – 6.5 minutes (Featuring "Where Did Our Love Go?," "Standing at the Crossroads of Love," and "Long Gone Lover," performed by the Supremes)
6. Lost Shoe Blues, Andrea Callard – 4 minutes (Song: "Lost Shoe Blues," written and performed by Andrea Callard)
7. Mockingbird (Music Video for Chestnut), M Woods – 6 minutes (Song: "Mockingbird," written and performed by Chestnut)
8. Hold On, I'm Coming, Jacob Burckhardt – 4 minutes (Song: "Hold On, I'm Coming," written and performed by Mr. Mahogany Plywood, with "Hold On, I'm Coming" by Sam and Dave sampled)
9. Diferencia ("Plastiquer" album), Melisa Aller and Macarena Cordiviola  – 4 minutes (Song: "Diferencia," written and performed by Melisa Aller)
10. American Flag Bikini, Michael Love Michael – 4 minutes (Song: "American Flag Bikini," written and performed by Michael Love Michael)
11. NARC (Music Video for Glass Teeth), M Woods – 6 minutes (Song: "NARC," written and performed by Glass Teeth)
12. Real Life, Music, Television: A Trilogy, Laura Parnes – 15 minutes (Featuring music and sound design by John Halvorsen, Steve Antonsen, and Bass Mind Studio)

​Total Run Time: 62 minutes.

Notes by Matt McKinzie:

The origin of the music video is hard to pin down. The act of embellishing popular music with visual media can be traced back to the turn of the last century, when sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern collaborated with electrician George Thomas to promote their tune “The Little Lost Child” via live performances that used a magic lantern to project still images on a screen. Arguably the most pivotal (and thematically-relevant) example of the format as we know it nowadays was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which fittingly kicked off MTV’s inaugural broadcast on August 1, 1981. It could also be argued that mid-‘60s shows such as Top of the Pops — which broadcasted “filmed inserts” set to the songs of major pop acts like the Beatles and the Who — were proto-music videos. In his memoir, Tony Bennett claimed to have starred in the first music video when footage of him walking along the Serpentine in Hyde Park was widely disseminated as a supplement to his 1953 recording of “Stranger in Paradise.” Rickie Lee Jones similarly claims she was the first “video star” when a triptych of short films accompanying three singles from her debut album were broadcasted nationwide in 1979 and turned her into an overnight sensation, two years before MTV came to purvey and dominate the format.

Yet, one might discover the true origins of the modern music video in the avant-garde, where the work of experimental artists like Kenneth Anger and Bruce Conner (dubbed the “Father of the Music Video”) combined popular music with typically fascinating, sometimes controversial imagery, thereby engendering new meanings and impressions that forever fused and alchemized the sounds and images they presented in tandem. Who can forget Anger’s candy-coated Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), a fuchsia-tinted queer dreamscape that reframed the heterosexual lyrics of Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” as performed in saccharine fashion by the Paris Sisters? Or Conner’s Breakaway (1966), which featured equal parts frenetic and hypnotic footage of Toni Basal performing the song of the same name, and whose influence would manifest decades later in the delightfully frenzied music video for Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi?”

The music videos in this program follow in the experimental tradition of artists like Conner and Anger by exploring and expanding the boundaries of the medium — be it through hand-drawn animation, hand-tinting, collage, and flicker effects on analog film, or pixelation and distortion on digital and video formats. Likewise, many of the artists in this program engage with the synthesis of sound and image in their work as both an emotional and epistemological crossroads, thereby cultivating music videos that range from the playful to the personal to the political. From work highlighting original tunes by FMC artists to pieces that reuse, reappropriate, or interrogate the music of others, this lineup (which includes folk, rock, punk, blues, R&B, hip-hop, spoken word, and everything in between) presents a fascinating mosaic of the human experience as expressed through image and song.

Many of the pieces screened tonight — from colorful collagist works like M. Henry Jones’ Soul City and Martha Colburn’s Spiders in Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical, to the forlorn landscapes of Andrea Callard’s Lost Shoe Blues, to Rudolph Burckhardt’s candy-coated Times Square sizzle reel set to the Supremes’ greatest hits and son Jacob’s whimsical tale of a monkey and a train engineer that seems readymade for a PBS children’s show — originated on analog film formats. More recent work — like the video for Michael Love Michael’s astounding protest song confronting white supremacist violence and institutionalized racism in America at the dawn of Trump’s presidency, to M Woods’ glitchy and fervent visual counterpart to Glass Teeth’s “NARC” — originated on digital formats. Additionally, videos like Melisa Aller and Macarena Cordiviola’s Diferencia combine live 16mm projection with digital filmmaking, while Laura Parnes’ eerie and indelible triptych Real Life, Music, Television: A Trilogy explores cases of true crime among adolescents and, in the process, questions (and shatters) all notions of what a “music video” can be.

Sources:

1. Clay Cole. Sh-Boom!: The Explosion of Rock ‘n’ Roll (1953–1968). Morgan James Publishing, 2009, p. 238.
2. Rickie Lee Jones. Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. Grove Press, 2021, p. 285.
3. “Music Video 1900 Style.” PBS, 2004.