Ed Emshwiller

Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970 is a 1972 documentary directed by Emile de Antonio. It covers American art movements from abstract expressionism to pop art through conversations with artists in their studios. Artists appearing in the film include Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, Hans Hofmann, Jules Olitski, Philip Pavia, Larry Poons, Robert Motherwell, and Kenneth Noland.

In this wildly entertaining vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Bob Dylan is surrounded by teen fans, gets into heated philosophical jousts with journalists, and kicks back with fellow musicians Joan Baez, Donovan, and Alan Price.

Experimental computer animation from pioneering artist Ed Emshwiller.

Emshwiller made this film on a Ford Foundation grant, and in his original proposal to the Ford Foundation, he outlined the film as "something that deals with subjective reality, the emotional sense of what one's perception of the total environment is -- sexual, physical, social, time, space, life, death."

Emshwiller terms Family Focus a "family self-portrait, a stylized autobiography," which takes the form of an intimate collage of home movies, black-and-white videotape and photographs that have been colorized, synthesized or otherwise visually transformed in an electronic mediation by the artist. The viewer is witness to the spontaneous activities and conversations of the family's quotidian home life, which is accompanied by Carol Emshwiller's ironic, often poetic commentary. In one sequence of home movies, the children are seen "growing" over a span of twenty years. Using the video camera as a kind of psychological mirror, Emshwiller integrates video's intimacy, reflexivity and realism with its "unreal" technological manipulations to form what the artist describes as a "documentary/video art transformation of self-revealing images."

Shot during the 1968/69 school year at University of California Berkeley, Report was created as part of Norman Jacobson’s experimental political science course “Toward an Expression of the Idea of Freedom.” The film, which features cinematography by avant-garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, merges fiction and documentary as it portrays the widening generation gap within the university, and in society at large. At the center of the film is an uncertain teacher and the students who challenge him.

In one of his first experiments in video, Emshwiller creates an electronic landscape of both abstract and figurative elements, where colorized dancers are chroma-keyed into a mutable, computer-animated environment. Working with the "Scan-i-mate," an early analog video synthesizer, Emshwiller choreographs an architectural, illusory video space, in which frames proliferate within frames, disembodied heads and hands move within a collage of animated forms, and the dancers and their environment are subjected to constant transformations through image processing. With its witty interplay of the "real" and the "unreal" in an electronically rendered videospace, and the skillful manipulation and articulation of a sculptural illusion of three-dimensionality, Scape-mates introduced a new vocabulary of video image-making.

Ed Emshwiller’s tender portrait of his wife, avant-garde science fiction writer Carol Emshwiller.

Made for Roger Reynolds's Voicescapes performance, containing elements from Emshwiller's previous film "Sunstone."

Emile de Antonio's film decimates Richard Nixon and exposes him as a paranoid, power mad lunatic... de Antonio compiles (via video and film) what amounts to the "best of" one of the worst political figures of the 20th century. Nixon was a shameless self-promoter while trying desperately to convince everyone that he wasn't. Through Alger Hiss and the "Checkers" speech to the character assassination of Helen Gahagan Douglas (among others), there are few stones left unturned.

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

During the 1970s I shot, helped to make, or commissioned about ten document films, mainly about film-makers. This film is one of them. It was made with Dan Ochiva, who acted as cameraman on about half of the footage. I shot the rest, and then edited the film. It is a record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O'Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon, James Cox. This footage will eventually become part of my film PEOPLE, PLACES, THE 1970S. –R. H.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Oysters Are in Season feautures the improvised humor of Swede Sorenson, Dean Preece and Molly Parkin as they play out sharply satiric situations. Utter foolishness abounds in short skits that range from an employment interview with an applicant whose previous experience has left him physically uncontrollable, and an unsuspecting golfer who arrives for a first lesson, to scenes of mayhem with a hammock and a chinese lantern masquerading as an artificial kidney.

Emshwiller writes that Sur Faces is a "stylized collaborative videotape in which actors working with (the artist) explore sexual politics as expressed in styles of drama from Shakespeare to 19th-century social theater, early 20th-century Freudian work, and contemporary fictional autobiographical improvisation. A video collage juxtaposing different ways of using video to express psychological states and conflict." In a synthesis of densely processed, textural images with documentations of dramatic role-playing from sources as varied as Richard III, Strindberg, and the Open Theater, Emshwiller undertakes an inventive inquiry into the transformation and representation of male/female relationships, via video and theater.

Emshwiller introduces this work as a "tapestry of images and sounds suggestive of the hungers that human beings all share for food, love, sex, power, security and so forth." With collaborator Morton Subotnick, the noted electronic composer, and performer Joan La Barbara, Emshwiller weaves together sophisticated electronic and digital technology in conjunction with live performance and music, bringing his distinctive sensibility to a work of contemporary electronic theater.

Power saws and a heartbeat score this experimental light-and-color shot by Ed Emshwiller.

Jack and Leo vie for the affections of Vera – who appears a little differently to each man – over the course of a series of energetic sketches, flashbacks and homages.

A filmic interpretation of a modern dance ballet by Alvin Nikolais. Earth, fire, water and primordial mysteries in a cine-dance.

In New York four years after the bombing of Hiroshima, a bible-carrying drifter who witnesses the rape and murder of a black woman is framed and pursued by locals while left as the sole protector of the woman’s young son.