George Barber

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

This revolves around Tim West, an advertising executive who is developing a Channel 4 programme on cooking for terrorists. Disillusioned by the hyper-reality of the media world, he joins Robert de Niro evening classes, but also falls under the pastoral influence of Johnny Morris. From the opening images of night-time, car-ridden streets accompanied by languorous sax on the soundtrack, through to the sub-Chandleresque voice-over narration, Taxi Driver II strikes you with its clever knowingness. But it's more than just a clever nod in the direction of contemporary film noir, just as it's more than an incestuous joke at the expense of the London based media world: it's a telling comment on the contemporary media culture of postmodernism.

An unmanned drone deviates from its destined flight path, as it wanders through time and space its camera surveys its surroundings and the robot narrates its findings.

The inside story of the long-running Hovis TV advertisement as Barber’s voice-over highlights the psychological emptiness of the narratives delivered daily by consumer culture.

A beautiful woman screams at something unseen off camera. Paul Newman appears eating salad and soon the famous sequence of Paul Newman closing a car door cut with a helicopter takes place. Absence of Satan is probably one of George Barber's best Scratch works and is a deft reworking of cinematic narrative and cliché. George Barber is one of the pioneers of Scratch Video which emerged in the UK during the mid-1980s. Scratch video makes use of found images from films and television, cutting seemingly incongruous imagery together to make a new meaning; it has been compared to the record-scratching techniques of hip-hop music, hence the name. (lux.org.uk)

Short film.

What’s it like being a Renaissance man when your host is a jerk-of-all-trades? What’s it like being obsessed with memory when you host lives in the perpetual present? George Barber’s The Venetian Ghost has as its hero a former ruler of Venice who, as a result of a semantic boo-boo, finds himself catapulted from the High Culture of Venice, Italia, to the High camp of Venice, LA. Barber plays up these oppositions in his usual offbeat style; having the figure of the ghost keyed in cartoon – like with Charlie and family – good-time Californians to a fault.

"Walking Off Court concerns a story I saw in the Times about a tennis coach called James Goodman who had a nervous breakdown around about the time that a motorway was built right outside his house. He spent a lot of time aimlessly walking in circles around new roads and road works. I contacted him and even ended up playing tennis with him. The video is loosely the story around his experience and his changing relationship to his normal circumstances." - George Barber

A humorous rooftop monologue: George Barber explains how he sees the year developing, while waiting for the ever unreliable Dave.

Thirsty? The longing created by advertising is satirised in this remix of Schweppes advertising.

Short film.

On the left side of this video diptych sequences of a typical Hollywood movie of the genre "airplane catastrophy" are showing, while on the right side a man liying in a bath tub talks about how he gradually came to terms with the actual trauma of such a catastrophy and his fear of water. Not only by the contrast of documentary interview and fictional processing of the same topic, but by the redundancies of sound and images between both "panels", telling itself and being told has come to the point.

A remixing of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints.

Takes the scratch genre to a postmodern extreme by processing and colouring Andy Warhol's Marilyn prints. Warhol's famous print undergoes intense changes of tone, as a whole spectrum of colours slowly slide across the screen to the lush, over-the-top muzak on the soundtrack.

Promo video for the Arts Council

A film about the discrepancy between the random and the intended. Chance meetings, chance adventures, holiday anecdotes and the slowed down inevitability of an eagle catching a fish.

Short film.

Scratch Free State has great energy and straddles an interesting line between a popular culture and fine art sensibility. This piece was made at the same time as Tilt. It is probably the best example of what an artist can do re-cutting and processing David Attenborough's Life On Earth programmes.

George Barber deconstructs two feature films, The Blue Lagoon and The Deep, pillaging ‘moments’ which when re-edited constitute a new totality.

Film by George Barber.