Early Video Pioneer: An Interview with Skip Blumberg Author(s): Melanie La Rosa Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 64, No. 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2012), pp. 30-41 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jfilmvideo.64.1-2.0030 . Accessed: 08/05/2012 19:25 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Illinois Press and University Film & Video Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Film and Video. http://www.jstor.org Early Video Pioneer: An Interview with Skip Blumberg melanie la rosa skip blumberg is an influential figure Several hundred of Blumberg’s movies in the evolution of independent video docu- are online and in distribution for home view- mentary and experimental filmmaking. He ing and for academic and public screenings has produced hundreds of shorts, TV shows, through Electronic Arts Intermix, Video Data installations, exhibitions, and multimedia Bank, and In Motion Productions, Inc. His performances and continues as an active me- videos have appeared on broadcast and cable diamaker. Beginning in the late 1960s, during TV and in museums and festivals around the the inception of independent video, he collabo- world, with retrospectives in the Berlin Film rated with production groups including TVTV, Festival Videofest, Rotterdam Film Festival, Videofreex, Ant Farm, and Paper Tiger TV and and Dallas Video Festival. He has received with many other pioneering artists and inde- numerous awards and grants, including a pendent videomakers, such as Nam June Paik Guggenheim Fellowship and an Ohio State and Shirley Clarke. Blumberg is active in the in- University Journalism Award; has been named dependent video community, including having one of Esquire magazine’s Best of the Next served as a board member of the Association of Generation; and has been screened at the Independent Video and Filmmakers. Museum of Broadcasting’s TV Critics’ Favorite From his seminal experimental video JGLNG TV Shows of All Time event. He was also artist- (1976) to his classic video documentaries such in-residence at several public TV stations, at as the triple Emmy–winning Pick Up Your Feet: the Walker Art Center, and at the 1980 Lake The Double Dutch Show (1982), to his more Placid Winter Olympics. recent diaries such as Nam June Paik: Lessons Blumberg has produced for Sesame Street from the Video Master (2007) and experimental (more than 150 shorts), Great Performances nonfiction video On Dream Street . (2012), (700,000-plus online views), The 90’s, National Blumberg brings a distinctive, warm, personal Geographic Explorer, and MyHero.com, as well approach to filmmaking. He was one of the first as for nonprofits, including the Yale Center for one-person-crew camcorder reporters. Dyslexia and Creativity and the Twenty-First Century Foundation. Blumberg has been a US melanie la rosa is an award-winning filmmaker State Department cultural envoy in Senegal, and educator whose work is distributed by Kosovo, Herzegovina, Slovakia, and other Women Make Movies and has been screened and countries and a visiting filmmaker, artist-in- broadcast internationally and funded by several residence, and teacher at universities, schools, arts councils and foundations. She currently libraries, and media centers. Blumberg cur- teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, CUNY, and holds an rently is Special Professor in the MFA documen- MFA from Temple University and a BA from the tary program at Hofstra University School of University of Michigan. Communication. 30 journal of film and video 64.1–2 / spring/summer 2012 ©2012 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois melanie la rosa: Let’s communication where the Skip Blumberg’s movies and start with what’s happen- Videofreex videos are available history of video is sometimes ing with your early videos for viewing on the following ignored. I am alarmed that, as a now. Web sites: result, this history could be lost. skip blumberg: I just http://www.SkipBlumberg.com Video, as an art form and its returned from the WRO YouTube history, is often taught in art Biennale in Poland— http://www.youtube.com/ schools. But in classes on the “the leading forum for SkipBlumberg history of filmmaking, espe- new media art in Central MediaBurn.org cially documentary and experi- Europe”—where there http://www.mediaburn.org/Video- mental film studies, the history was a lot of exciting Makers.videomaker.0.html?&no_ of video is often simply left out. work and many inspir- cache=1&catalog=3 Film professors, many of whom ing media artists, a Videofreex Archive are filmmakers, teach the his- week of screenings, http://www.vdb.org/collection/ tory of film as they learned it Videofreex%20Archive installations, concerts, in their film studies courses, performances—and it Electronic Arts Intermix from the earliest filmmakers http://www.eai.org/artistTitles was gratifying to see the in the twentieth century, and .htm?id=303 audience’s interest in adding on current twenty-first- the early video screen- Video Data Bank: Skip Blumberg century digital films. The break- http://vdb.org/artists/skip-blumberg ing. I was there with throughs, accomplishments, Abina Manning, from MyHero.com and contributions of a sizable http://www.myhero.com/go/hero. Video Data Bank. We asp?hero=skip_blumberg_2007 community of videomakers, as screened newly restored well as video curators, program- SesameStreet.org—Happy Cheer videotapes from the http://www.sesamestreet mers, technicians, and academ- Videofreex Archive from .org/video_player/-/pgpv/ ics are, unfortunately, over- 1969 to 1971, which are videoplayer/0/5e0a65a6-f8e6–4c32 looked. Now that videomaking in vdb.org’s collection. –91be-356912d99ce0/happy_cheer has merged with filmmaking, in It was great to see the SesameStreet.org—Keith Haring, Exit order for its history to survive, contemporary audience http://www.sesamestreet video must be included in film connect with the work .org/video_player/-/pgpv/ history course syllabi, as well and with the activism of videoplayer/0/644ac196–155f-11dd as offered as studies courses in -a62f-919b98326687/keith_haring_exit that time period. Video- video documentary and experi- freex has had a couple mental videomaking. of other recent well-received screenings—in ml: Say more about the importance of video Brooklyn at Light Industry and in Washing- history. ton, D.C. at the DC Arts Center. sb: Video was a unique and separate medium I appreciate these screenings—and op- from around 1965, when artists, activists, portunity to talk to you about the early and mediamakers first began using video, to videotapes, and that era, and the history of just a few years ago, say 2005, when digital video— because it was a rare and exciting video became completely ubiquitous as phenomenon, a very special time. What’s the recording medium of choice for the vast especially important is that it was the begin- majority of filmmakers. It is a self-contained ning of the medium of video, when it was history delineated by the evolution of video brand new. technology from its analog invention to its And this is also a chance to speak to you digital near-replacement of film. The two and professors about a syndrome now that mediums of video and film—which have I’ve noticed in film schools and schools of very different, separate histories—have now journal of film and video 64.1–2 / spring/summer 2012 31 ©2012 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois merged. There’s no difference. Video and Sherman, who were on the leading edge of film are both available as part of one grand the liberal arts curriculum curve. But I never digital palette that artists and filmmakers took a production class—I just started by have. And what we used to call “videos” picking up a film camera. are now called “movies.” So it’s important When I found portable video, it was lib- to distinguish and preserve this forty-year erating. Filmmaking is like riding a taxi . period of self-contained history while it’s still when you press the trigger, you hear click, recent. click, click, click, like the fare meter of a taxi. ml: So in the early days the pioneer videomak- And you know for every click you have to pay ers saw the medium as unique? for developing and printing. But video is like sb: When we first picked up the video camera, a bus. You get on the bus, and you ride the we knew that it was quite different than film, whole way for the same price. So there was and we identified more with television. At more freedom to shoot a lot just because that time, TV cameras were only used in tele- of the economics. It wasn’t just the cheaper vision studios and on eighteen-wheel mobile cost, though; video also gave you a lot more TV trucks. The first portable video was in- time on the reel, which is major. troduced for schools and industrial use, but And there were lots of other reasons why pretty much a commercial failure due to reel- I liked video. It was new, and to be part of to-reel threading challenges.