Educational Media Reviews Online

Just about every segment of this collection of experimental films and videos – from Bridge magazine editor Michael Workman’s pretentious off-putting on-camera introduction (a harbinger, alas, of the material to follow!) to the eighteen individual works themselves – reeks of that self-deluding solipsistic seriousness that led Jean Cocteau to observe so many years ago that everything changes except the avant-garde. Workman’s opening words would lead you to believe you’re about to watch cutting edge films and videos that bridge (sic) the artificial gaps between the various arts and sciences, without which bridges, Workman warns, those disciplines are certain to stagnate. Instead we’re treated to a disparate hodgepodge of self-indulgent works, one less aesthetically appealing than the next, whose main virtue (if you’re looking for one) is their merciful brevity. (Still, with, say, a rough average of four minutes per film, that adds to more than an hour of tedious viewing, enough to test anyone’s patience.) Thus in one film, we’re given a woman who literally (but not really) spills her guts out – over and over again.

In another film, a 78 r.p.m turntable (a Calliphone, a pretty cheap make and model, presumably to keep the budget low) is booby trapped with firecrackers that explode as the record on it plays “The Star Spangled Banner.” A third film has a topless girl speaking in execrable French, telling us she doesn’t have an idea in her head that’s original. If you stay the course, there is some solace to be found in a film called The Forbidden Zone, about a young man with Down’s Syndrome fascinated by the world of Star Trek, and also in a very well produced and directed film by the well-known David Cronenberg that makes the solemn point that the camera – i.e., the preservation of the visual image in any form – signals … death! The last film on the program, “Rude Film,” asks the question what the social function of same might be, and can only come up with a couple of guys giving the camera the finger. At this point one can only entertain the thought that they ought to have been around from the start. Is, then, this DVD worthwhile? Perhaps only as a cautionary reminder of what to avoid when your mother and father buy you a video camera for your birthday.