Franko B I'm Not Your Babe UK, 1996, 10mins, video

Irm & Ed Sommer Nitsch Germany, 1969, 14 mins, 16mm

Michael Curran All My Little Ducks UK/Netherlands, 1995, 7 mins, video

Film and video have always been used as records and documents of live performance, and many of the works in the list are precisely that. Others, however, have been made specifically for the camera and combine performance with other elements.

See also:
BODY
MUSIC & SOUND

FRANKO B
I'M NOT YOUR BABE
UK, 1996, 10mins, video
Documentation of Franko B's seminal performance at the ICA in May 1996. I'm Not Your Babe is a provocative and stark portrait of the existential self, in which Franko B uses his own drawn blood as a symbol of carnal reality and suggests the natural destitution of the body as a fundamental of existence. Standing before us as a mute body-object, achromatic and cadaverous, his performance is an act of cleansing, stripping the flesh of identity.

FRANKO B
I MISS YOU!
UK, 1999, 13 mins, video
I Miss You! is about being exposed and naked with nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. It is a project that takes an unshirking look at the body as a canvas and as anmediated and unrefined site of representation for the sacred, the beautiful, the untouchable, the unspeakable, the ignorant and for the pain, the love, the hate, the loss, the power and the fears of the human condition.

ROBERT BECK
NINE YEARS LATER
USA, 1996, 23mins, video
Robert Beck recontextualises videotaped performances he created in the late 1980's to music by The Smiths. By turns gruesome and ironic, these three home-made 'music videos', including Panic, Big Mouth Strikes Again and Girlfriend In A Coma, are brought to their ultimate and canny conclusion only with Beck's long delayed return to them. Revisiting his highly self-concious and idiosyncratic performances Beck betrays the apparent ease and economy of the original clips by deftly editing them against the awkwardness and obsessiveness of their numerous out-takes. Wittingly, with intertitles and voice-over, Beck calibrates his performances retrospectively with the video technology that recorded them, and inadvertently traverses a decade of video history...from the mainstream-media inspired work of the 1980's to the more reflexive performance-based practices of the 1990's.

DAVID BLANDY
SECRETS AND LIES
UK, 2002, 3 mins, video
Through the appropriation of the soundtrack to Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, I try to question the possibility of genuine emotion: what is the difference between a performance artist and an actor, when is art autobiography and when is it an act of self-mythologisation?

IAN BREAKWELL & KEVIN COYNE
THE INSTITUTION
UK, 1977-79, sound, colour, 50 mins, 16mm.
Director: Ian Breakwell, soundtrack & dialogue: Kevin Coyne, Screenplay: Ian Breakwell and Kevin Coyne, Cast: The man in the room : Kevin Coyne, People in the neighbourhood: Phil Gray, Alison Jones, Felicity Sparrow, Paul Vester, William Wilding.
The Institution is intended to develop further the questioning of 'normal' viewing habits, those easy responses to 'harrowing documentaries' and 'social -conscious dramas' which are served up on the nation's small screens between the cornflakes and the motor car adverts. It is the prerogative of the sloppy, sentimental liberal to assume that someone who lives alone in a room must automatically be lonely and miserable. It is not as simple as that. Is what we imagine to be behind the living room windows (i.e. the surface appearance) necessarily the reality? We shall see. - I. B.

One only has to walk into a public bar in London to find the man I'm talking about. I can think of several places that are totally haunted by them. The bar is the extension of their room. The lonely evolve another world: a better world? Frequent contact with people can produce the need for a true alternative. I would like to suggest that 'the occupant' is close to something new. When all is said and done he's happy. There are many possibilities. Is there really someone else in the house? Is it a house or a flat? Will a disaster occur? The camera will find out. - K.C.

IAN BREAKWELL & MIKE LEGGETT
ONE
UK, 1971/2003, sound, B&W, 15 mins, video
Performance. Original 16mm film made in 1971 with Mike Leggett and digitally reconstructed in 2003.
An event at Angela Flowers Gallery in which a group of labourers shovelled earth over the course of an '8-hour day'. On the 2nd floor of the gallery, each man continously shovelled earth onto the adjacent man's mound of earth, while at the same time the Apollo astronauts were digging up rock samples on the surface of the moon.

While every TV shop window showed live footage of the activities on the moon, Angela Flowers Gallery was transmitting these activities via CCTV to their street-level window. Gradually through the course of the day, as the all-white gallery space was reduced to a sea of mud, the pictures transmitted from each event became almost indistinguishable from each other...Two tourists: "Das ist die Moon[sic]." "Nien[sic], das ist Kunst."

WOJCIECH BRUSZEWSKI
YYAA
Poland, 1973, sound, B&W, 5 mins, 16mm
The author of the film / seen on the screen / screams: yyyy... Four sources of light constituting lighting are switched by lottery, by an electronic device, within the bounds of chance from 0 to 8 seconds.

In any moment of the film only one of the four lamps casts light on the author.

Each of the four directions of lighting has its equivalent in a different modulation of the author's voice.

The modulation changes synchronically with the change of lighting.

The film technique provides the author with a five-minute long exhalation.

A repeated change of the shot from a close-up to a semi close-up and vice versa is motiveless. - W.B.

ULYSSES CARRION
GOSSIP, SCANDAL AND GOOD MANNERS
Netherlands, 1981, 46 mins, video
Carrion uses gossip, being a form of language, as an artform. The project consisted of launching some gossip with the help of a group of friends, keeping track, as accurately as possible, of the evolution of the gossip through the city of Amsterdam. As the final phase in this project, Carrion gives a lecture on the whole process in the Amsterdam University.

POLA CHAPELLE
A MATTER OF BAOBAB -WITH ONE GROWTH
USA, 1966-70, sound, colour & B&W, 2 mins, 16mm
International Cast of Actors, Jonas Mekas, from Lithuania, poet and film-maker, Louis Brigante, from Madagascar, poet and publisher, Storm De Hirsch, from Holland, poetess, seer and film-maker, Pola Chapelle, from Tierra del Fuego, singer and motel operator, Adolfas Mekas, from Lapland, basket weaver and film director, Contessa Angela Maria Andreacci di Castiglione, from Italy, opera singer. Music by 'The Last Judgement' and 'The Beatles'. - P.C.

MICHAEL CURRAN
AMAMI SE VUOI
UK/Netherlands, 1994, 5 mins, video
Curran enacts a sexual fantasy in this touching, yet slightly unsettling piece. The artist lies naked on a table, while a male friend/lover proceeds to repeatedly spit in his open mouth. An atmosphere of almost bachic abandon is helped by the lyrical soundtrack.

MICHAEL CURRAN
ALL MY LITTLE DUCKS
UK/Netherlands, 1995, 7 mins, video
In the heart of the Dutch countryside, the artists seems intent on drowning himself in a tub of water, regardless of the people who loudly heckle him from off-screen. Given the extreme physical challenges he puts himself through, Curran seems to be making a point about the artist's relationship with the outside world: choosing to engage with himself rather than society.

CIARA FINNEGAN
SWITCH
UK, 1997 , 9 mins, video
An exercise performed with a hat.

ON/a co-ordination of simple movements of hands, eyes and
mouth/OFF
ON/combinations of the actions performed/OFF
OVER - implied performance of variations on combinations executed.
ON/OFF/OVER - ON/OFF/OVER - ON/OFF/OVER - ON
Performed to camera, SWITCH runs without edits.

MAGGIE JAILLER
A NOSEGAY
UK, 1986, sound, colour, 15 mins, 16mm
Cast:
Francois Testory as The Hermaphrodite
Richard Heslop as The Angel
Celestino Coronado as The Voice

Crew:
Martin Jones
Mehdi Norowzian
Tim Hands
Jane Aspeling

Based on the writings of Genet and Lautremont this is the story of the love of an angel for a hermaphrodite.

KURT KREN
REEL ONE
Austria, 1957-62, sound, B&W & colour, 22 mins, 16mm

1/57: VERSUCH MIT SYNTHETISCHEM TON (sound)
2/60: 48 KOPFE AUS DEM SZONDI-TEST (silent)
3/60: BAUME IM HERBST (sound)
4/61: MAUERN-POSITIV-NEGATIV UND WEG (silent)
5/62: FENSTERGUCKER, ABFALL, ETC. (silent)
ETC. (silent)

"With thirty-one 16mm works to date, Kren's historical role in Europe is comparable to that of Brakhage in America, as is the way in which each historically represent some aspect of the transition from the existential to the structural within their work. Though Kren's work chiefly initiates and contributes to this formal/structural axis...it is very complex at the imagist/associative level." - Malcolm Le Grice, 'Kurt Kren,' Studio International, Nov/Dec 1975.

All of his film titles are methodically pre-fixed by the number of the work in complete chronology, followed by the year of realisation.

JULIE KUZMINSKA
ARCHAOS I
UK, 1989, 11 mins, video
A highly original document of the anarchic and challenging circus Archaos, in two parts.

ANDREW BARR McKAY
WHAT PEOPLE DO
UK, 1981, sound, B&W, 22 mins, 16mm
In content, the film is a commentary upon the human tendency to deliberately create cycles of behaviour, and of alienating consequences of habit.

Rather than illustrating the theme through documentary social example, the film uses "gestural symbolism" and choreographed figures in movement. These are linked with a rhythmic and occasionally repetitive voice commentary, and images creating an expression of the "essence of habit" and its effect upon a sensitised individual character who traces a path through the habituation of others. The habituation is created by compositions of neutral figures trapped within cyclic actions to which the central character, a woman, has a series of accumulative reactions which range through curiosity, detachment, cynicism, mimicry, infatuation, anger, disbelief, and finally dementia.

ROBERT MORRIS
SLOW MOTION
USA, 1969, silent, B&W, 18 mins, 16mm
Made for Art by Telephone - an exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. Morris simply dictated instructions for the making of the film. Despite this conceptual origin, it is also an essentially cinematic 'performance', exploiting slow motion, tight framing and an implicit analogy between the transparent glass door against which the figure pushes, and the screen or image surface. The repetitions and variations, the use of gesture, weight and force, give the performance a dance-like gravity.

GRACE NDIRITU
THE NIGHTINGALE
UK, 2004, 7 mins, video
This piece deals with issues of racial stereotyping since Sept 11. In this the protagonist is transformed in various guises by using a simple piece of cloth.

JAYNE PARKER
RX RECIPE
UK, 1980, sound, colour, 12 mins, 16mm
A woman cares for an eel. She washes it, feeds it and wraps it. She administers the correct prescription for its comfort and then she cares for herself.

SIMON POWER
PRECINCT PERFORMANCE
UK, 1977, 7 mins, video
Simon Power's videos are documentations of his performances.

JANE PROPHET
TO BE BORN THROUGH OUR OWN HANDS
UK, 1987, 7 mins, video
A performance-based tape in which the artist reuses elements of Tai-Chi and yoga exercises to enact, very simply and precisely, being reborn through her own hands.

JOZEPH ROBAKOWSKI
MOJEVIDEO MAZOCHISZMY
Poland, 1988, 10 mins, video
Active in the Polish avant-garde since the 1960's, Robakowski was among the first artists to experiment with television and video in Poland. His work is characterised by a succinct experimental style which fuses performance, conceptual discourse and wry wit.

Joseph Robakowski has worked in Poland over the last three decades in film, video and performance - tracing a progression from initial structural concerns to a more subjective approach. Much of his concerns involve performance, the body, self image and the apparatus - in MOJEVIDEO MAZOCHISZMY he explores his facial orifices with diverse kitchen utensils with surprising results.

DANA SALISBURY
LIFE CYCLE
USA, 1983, 10 mins, video
Life Cycle is a recording of a performance based on the life cycle of the Sockeye Salmom.

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN
IN QUEST OF MEAT JOY
USA, 1968-69, sound, colour, 17 mins, 16mm & video
'Theatre of physical contact: pinching, licking, kicking, painting and sculpting each others bodies, spontaneously freed to laugh, scream. Cry, instruct, advise, discuss within the actual performance process...I work with untrained people and various waste materials and materials of technology to realise images which range from the banal to the fantastic - images which dislocate, compound and engage our senses, expanding them into the unknown and unpredictable relationships.' - C.S.

Footage from the first theatre of physical contact between a core of performers and an expanding physical relationship to the environment and audience.

FRANCOISE SERGY & DAVID FINCH
THE FISH AND THE BICYCLE
UK, 1984, 23 mins, video
The performance artist / dancer Francoise Sergy dances with her bicycle and acts out roles which relate to a well-known graffito 'a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle'.

IRM & ED SOMMER
NITSCH
Germany, 1969, sound, B&W, 14 mins, 16mm
'Sommer's film is a documentation of the banned Vienna happening artists happening (in Munich, early morning before the police could raid the place in time.) It is supposedly a cathartic event. It involves the 'killing' of a dead cow, and ritualistic and real sex, when a spread-eagle naked woman has the animal innards and blood, bucketsful, dumped on her between her legs. She is also fucked by a man with a dildo.' - Anon.

Warning: This film contains scenes that some people may find offensive.

STELARC
STOMACH SCULPTURE
Australia, 1993, 10 mins, video
In Stomach Sculpture, Stelarc inserts a crab-like robotic object into his own stomach, and then records the event through an endoscopic camera fed into his oesophagus.

MIKE STUBBS
THE SWEATLODGE
UK, 1991, 7 mins, video
Shot as documentation of a performance by Man Act titled Sweatlodge, Stubbs' tape, originally shot on super-8, is an expressive account of male behaviour dramatically choreographed in swirling, fluid camerawork.

ARTHUR WICKS
SAND MEMORIES 2
Australia, 1977-78, 50 mins, two-screen video
1st actual performance at Pratt Graphic Center, 1977, NY, videoed performance at Wagga Wagga, final performance as fringe work for Sydney Biennale 1979. Interior performance based on the experiences & images of #2 'Sand Memories at Durras at Broome St.' Tapes 1 & 2 should be played simultan- eously performance: Arthur Wicks; camera: John Tomkins; Pratt Graphic Center (1st stage), 1977 & at with 'Video Australia' at Venice Biennale as a two video installation with 'Sand Memories at Durras at Broome St.', 1980