Home » Posts tagged 'Global Village Video Resource Center' (Page 2)

  • Giving Birth: Four Portraits

    Giving Birth: Four Portraits

    An examination of American birthing traditions focusing on four couples and four different types of childbirth: a standard hospital delivery with high technology and anesthesia, a Leboyer “birth without violence,” a Caesarean section, and a midwife-assisted natural childbirth using the Lamaze method. The first collaboration of husband and wife documentary team Julie Gustafson and John Reilly, GIVING BIRTH illustrates the joys and pains of childbirth in intimate, video vérité portraits. Through interviews with Frederick Leboyer, Elizabeth Bing and Margaret Mead, GIVING BIRTH contextualizes emerging ideas and techniques for birthing. As Mead says, “There are cases when childbirth is surgery, but there is no reason we should take a life process and treat it always like a disease.” One of the first video documentaries produced by WNET’s pioneering TV Laboratory, GIVING BIRTH aired nationally on public television in 1976 to critical acclaim. The Scripps Howard News Service said, “Splendid… absolutely candid…The medical, physical and spiritual points of view explored.” According to John Cashman of Newsday, “Men should see it…Women should see it…Explicit and absolutely real.” Originally shot in ¾” Color and B & W video. Winner of “Best Video Documentary” awards at the Athens Video Festival (1977) and the Chicago International Film Festival (1977).

  • The Politics of Intimacy

    The Politics of Intimacy

    In this foundational feminist video, ten women address the camera and seemingly each other in a wide-ranging exploration of such previously taboo subjects as women’s sexuality, power, and fears about intimacy. First-time videomaker, Julie Gustafson, forgoes shame and focuses on the women’s questions about orgasm, masturbation and male “ownership” of sexuality, as well as their joy in exploring their bodies and desire for satisfying sexual lives. The only expert in the tape is Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey, author of “Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality,” who provides scientific descriptions of women’s orgasms and context for the historical suppression of female sexuality. According to the curators of the 1992 Whitney Museum’s series “From Object to Subject,” “by selecting women who vary in age, color, sexual experience and orientation and by using extreme close ups and a pace resembling real time, Gustafson creates an ideal consciousness raising group (c-r).” Indeed, “Politics of Intimacy” is a valuable document of the synergy between the growing women’s movement and the new video technology and aesthetics of its time. Originally shot in 1/2″ B & W video.

  • Lifestyles: An Experiment in Feedback

    Lifestyles: An Experiment in Feedback

    Two students from a Global Village workshop explore their lives and family’s beliefs about gender roles by using video feedback. One is a New Jersey housewife who hopes to convince her flamboyant and macho husband that she can be more than a wife and mothers; the other is a NYC single mother and writer already forging an independent path. Poignant and often funny, the resulting ‘experiment’ evolves into a striking feminist documentary using the power of new video technology.

  • The Irish Tapes

    The Irish Tapes

    THE IRISH TAPES was one of the first major video documentaries produced with 1/2-inch portable equipment. From 1971 to 1973, John Reilly and Stefan Moore shot over one hundred hours of footage in Northern Ireland, profiling one of the most volatile and violent moments in the decades-long conflict from the vantage point of those who lived through and remembered it. Includes rare interviews with members of the Provisional IRA, individuals suffering from unrelenting violence in Belfast and Irish-American perspectives on “The Troubles.” Originally shown as a three-channel, twelve-monitor installation at Global Village. Edited and kinescoped for broadcast by WNET in 1975. Originally shot in 1/2″ B & W video. Permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, 2013, Brooklyn Academy of Music 2014.

    In 2014, curators at the Brooklyn Academy of Music described THE IRISH TAPES as “a striking example o the creative and political potential of the then-new video technology… offering an immediacy, intimacy, and unabashed subjectivity that was then unheard of in broadcast television journalism.”

 
 
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