Kathy Acker
"Blood and Guts in High School" features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s book of the same title. The book received noteriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes’ interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by US news events from the time period in which the book was written. These events saturate the character's daily experience, informing her adolescent, nihilistic worldview and her desire for rebellion. As the viewer looks back at pivotal historical events (Jonestown Massacre, Moral Majority, Three Mile Island etc.) connections are drawn in relation to our current political situation.
Documentary tracing the extreme life of outlaw writer, performance artist and punk icon, Kathy Acker. Through animation, archival footage, interviews and dramatic reenactments, director Barbara Caspar explores Acker's colorful history, from her well-heeled upbringing to her role as the scribe of society's fringe.
Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair's liminal, laminal tribute to underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead, featuring image manipulation by Dave Mckean & reminiscences from various countercultural characters. A fitting epitaph for an English margin walker.
Film becomes a metaphor for lost history and its “negative“ impact on successive generations who look for stability in an electronic world that lacks sufficient mediation. Video retrieves lost memories for the child who, through her camera, seeks to find her father.
Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire - a Mexican soap opera star - and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God's existence.
Documentary about Kathy Acker where she talks about her writing and her life in New York.
Serious discussions of art, philosophy & idealism are put together with explicit scenes of masturbation and sex, by writer Alan Sondheim and punk icon Kathy Acker.
