CO, CO, CO
Tuesday, October 14, 2025, The Union Cinema
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Conventionally hierarchical production practices offer a limited but culturally-outsized sense of how we can make films together. This program glimpses generously at other approaches to collaborative filmmaking, pondering how the processes of production inform final forms. These ranging relational modes tease at the poetics, politics and possibilities group work magnetize and manifest.
To wit: a video band, a classroom as a studio, a group portrait in costume, a collective for play and replay. Spanning 60 years, this program constellates a mixed-metaphor iceberg tip at the ways we can work together to make films, to make meaning, to make new ways of making.
Hooliganship - junk spirals (2008)
Hooliganship was a "tropycal_super_maryo_grunge_rock_duo" “HI-NRG electrooney maze mmelodies:tranncending both clefs, omg, dance trayne, peaceful emoticons, yr lttl pny, Galapagos koopa beats,classical rock block, troubadour rave wave, sylvan northwestern performance duo, trick-or-treat trance” and “Peter Burr and Christopher Doulgeris”.
Sofia Theodore-Pierce and Grace Mitchell - Pet World (2022)
A parking lot by the airport where people sit in their cars, eat takeout, and watch the planes land. A parking lot outside a mega pet store. A parking lot with a mailbox and a laundromat. A parking lot on the beach. Inspired by Amy Hempel’s short story collection, Reasons to Live, and the work of poet Bernadette Mayer. An ensemble cast riffs on what we might discover about intimacy in parking lots.
George Kuchar - Terror by Twilight (1988), 5:54, color, sound, hi-8 video to DCP**
George is in Tampa, Florida to do a one-day video workshop, so they make a fast-moving trailer for a non-existent UFO abduction movie.
Alexandre Alexeïeff & Claire Parker - The Nose (1963)
A pinscreen animation adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s brilliant satirical
short story of the same name. Mid-19th century Russia is rendered beautiful and absurd and sensuous in this wordless world that needles the needless.
Videofreex - Mes and Youse aka Faces (1971)
A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are
morphed together, forming an image of one person. The exercise is repeated by Nancy Cain and Skip Blumberg as the music speeds up.
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos - Pitayas (2019)
Pitayas are the sacred Mesoamerican fruits that grow on Mexican nopales, an ancient plant. This is the colorful body, the vibrant blood and the radiant skin of the open life.
Wynne Greenwood, K8 Hardy - New Report : Artist Unknown (2006)
The second installment of the collaborative project New Report, an ongoing series of performances and videos, Artist Unknown features K8 Hardy (founder of the queer feminist art collective LTTR) and Wynne Greenwood (of Tracy and the Plastics) playing Henry Irigaray and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill, and anchor and roving correspondent for WKRH, a feminist TV news station whose tagline is "pregnant with information." Based on documentation of a live, digital communication in real time between Greenwood at Foxy Production Gallery and Hardy on the street in New York. A third artist is missing in this "breaking news" report on bad painting, the situation of women in the contemporary art world and the problem of communication without a community.
Videofreex - Fred Hampton: Chant and Demonstration (1970)
Rare footage of a September 1970 rally honoring the late Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. One of the speakers leads the audience in a call and response
