John Menick Blog | Archive for September, 2006

In Greencine.

Last year, Creative Time invited me to be part of a series of discussions on the topic of politics in contemporary art. The series, organized by Doug Ashford, included a lot of great people, and now the edited transcripts of those talks are about to be published. Four related projects by artists are also due to open soon.

Artist, writer, musician, and multitasker Geoffrey Garrison recently posted his short HD film to Google video:

The Cut is a short video based on the history of the John Huston film Freud the Secret Passion (1961) about the life of Sigmund Freud. It is a non-linear impression of the history and not a documentary or exact reenactment. The film presents several fragments in which Huston argues with the main actor Montgomery Clift during the filming of Freud; Clift discusses his insomnia problems with Marilyn Monroe during the filming of the Misfits; Huston is interrogated by the FBI during the investigation of Hollywood communists; and Huston discusses the censorship of the film over Freud with a Catholic priest and with a producer. The Cut was written and directed by Geoffrey Garrison with support from the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Give it a look.

A Princeton study of Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machines. Scroll down for the video.

In the fall of 2002, Emily Jacir asked me to help her organize a video festival in Palestine. As I remember, Emily had sent out an email to a group of artist friends requesting they send videos to show in a class she was teaching at Birzeit University that winter. Evidently, she meant the request to be private, but that wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere in the email, and many of the people began forwarding it on. The emails spread quickly, and weeks later she was inundated with videos.

I watched and helped select many of the videos with Emily, at first just because I was around, and then as a co-organizer. A video festival grew out of those initial subissions. Actually, Emily did most of the hard work in Palestine, and I mostly managed the New York end. The response to the project was quite good, and despite the fact that there was almost no press on the fest outside of Palestine, I get occasional emails about the project. There have been several film and video festivals since, but none focusing on videos art or experimental cinema.

The old domain for the festival’s Web site expired (impossible to renew since it was gobbled up by some porn company) and the only records of the festival left were the local PHP files I had backed up in an ancient computer in my apartment. At Emily’s request I dug them out and will keep them archived here until we find a better place for them.