Movies: Dara Birnbaum

In 1999, Internet entrepreneur Josh Harris recruits dozens of young men and women who agree to live in underground apartments for weeks at a time while their every movement is broadcast online. Soon, Harris and his girlfriend embark on their own subt...

The video opens with a barrage of explosive imagery along with an audio track of a siren taken from the 1970s TV show Wonder Woman. The following scenes are fast paced repeated shots from Wonder Woman, with several scenes following of actress Lynda C...

This is an interesting little documentary about the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which was apparently one of the global hotbeds of experimental/avant garde art- particularly video art- back in the 70's & 80's. MacGillvary interviews a n...

Local TV News Analysis is the document of a collaborative project of Graham and Birnbaum, in which they investigate local television news, both in form and content. Three simultaneous realities of the news are revealed within one composite frame: the...

1987, 30 sec, color, sound Produced for an Artbreak segment on MTV Network, this dynamic "thirty-second spot" presents an abbreviated history of animation according to the representation of women, from the cell imagery of Max Fleischer's Out of the ...

“In this early performance-based work, Birnbaum investigates the notion of video as a mirror to create a psychological self-portrait. Devising a simple but ingenious formal exercise, she layers real and reflected images to articulate metaphorically t...

Commissioned by VideoGram International, Ltd., for a videodisc of music by Jimi Hendrix, Fire! uses the stylized visuals and pacing of a music video to critique the representational economies of sexuality and consumerism. Translating the psychedelic ...

In an early work, video artist Dara Birnbaum records a cross section of fellow passengers aboard the Staten Island Ferry while en route to the Statue of Liberty. Asking subjects to use her video camera to capture their own views of the iconic monumen...

Appropriating material from the introduction to the nightly television show, PM Magazine and a commercial for Wang Computers, Birnbaum uses enlarged still-frames from each of the sources to compound a new image of the indelible American Dream. To the...

Commissioned by Remy Martin for a public exhibition in Grand Central Station in New York, Remy/Grand Central is an advertisement with a deconstructive twist. In a syncopated collage of appropriated footage (including a TV commercial for Sergio Valent...

Constructed of footage recorded from the television game show Hollywood Squares. The bulk of the piece is made up from recorded introductory gestures of female celebrities participating in Hollywood Squares, which are synced to then-contemporary Disc...

"Dara Birnbaum's Pop-Pop Video... [has] been hailed as [a] classic of the new wave. [The tape] juxtaposes fragments from a soap opera with sequences of ice skating races. The graceful movements of the skaters punctuate repeated excerpts from a dreadf...

1. Damnation of Faust: Evocation - Using "found" imagery shot in a SoHo playground, the first part of the Damnation of Faust trilogy explores the possible relations between childhood play and a woman looking on from outside. Without dialogue, the ge...

Friedman documents a model during a fashion shoot, the exaggerated, staccato rhythms of her camera punctuated by machine-gun like bursts of fireworks and the chiming of bells. The model veers wildly between states of calm and hair-wringing distress i...