"Apart from being about the most fun I ever had in a movie theater, Joe Gibbons' films are my most sound argument for the currency of real experience. Blatantly made up as they go along, they permit an immediacy of expression to exist that actually reminds me I'm alive and that anything can happen." - Hal Hartley
"Without the accessibility of the Pixelvision camera, we might have a dangerous individual roaming the streets; instead, we have an artist leaving his various psychic scars as objects - to be considered by curators instead of the police." - Chris Chang, Film Comment
"Joe Gibbons is the bon-vivant rebel of the avant-garde, cinematically 'researching' life on the fringe. His super-8 films are chronicles of daily life, humorous acts of transgression in which Gibbons skirts both social and art world conventions .... He successfully achieves his goal of erasing the boundaries between domestic reality and movie entertainment." - David Schwartz, American Museum of the Moving Image
"For Joe Gibbons, his Super-8 camera is essential for his 'research' - the gathering and recording of observations of himself and others, with and without consent. In his hands, the camera is not a neutral device - he is too aware of the relationship between camera and subject, and concurrently between the completed film and audience; rather it is a means of actively exploring the unknown, the forbidden. It seems to trigger both confessionals and confidences, and play with our desire to see and know; it is both analyst and analysand. Crossing and blurring the borders between fact and fiction, public and private moments, responsible and impulsive actions, Joe Gibbons' research continues." - Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive
Transferred from Super 8.
"One of the ten best films of the year. A silent exercise in applied voyeurism, SPYING is a hilariously perverse Man with a Movie Camera, in which the filmmaker secretly observes his neighbors (and their pets) sunbathing, gardening, or gazing out of their windows." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
1978, VHS, color/si, 35m, $25 Home; $100 Other
Transferred from Super 8.
"Gibbons is a superb performer with the recessive manner that cameras 'love.' He sustains his film through the subtlety of his acting with its constant potential for violent eruption as well as through the power and incisiveness of his basic filmmaking conceit." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
"Gibbons' most powerful work ... the most startling aspect is that he is clearly not talking to the audience - the sequences are mainly midnight tête-à-têtes which the spectator is put in the remarkable and self-conscious position of over-hearing." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
1979, VHS, color/so, 20m, $25 Home; $100 Other
Transferred from Super 8.
"Seldom has depression been played to such comic effect .... The camera sits on a tripod considering Gibbons as he hunches over his kitchen table, slugging vodka, chain smoking, and toying aimlessly with a half-eaten potato. Morose and giggling by turns, the filmmaker launches into a broken account of present unhappiness, which is broken by extended cut-aways to dying plants, freeway traffic, and TV soap operas." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
1979, VHS, color/so, 15m, $25 Home; $100 Other
Transferred from Super 8.
A documentary shot in SF circa 1979 about a trio of middle-class kids experimenting with heroin and cocaine. They start out innocently enough but they soon get in over their heads.
"Brilliant." - Gavin Smith, Editor, Film Comment
1980, VHS, color/so, 20m, $25 Home; $100 Other
Transferred from Super 8.
An auto-documentary about a disenfranchised Everyman and his struggle to re-integrate himself into society. He fails and turns to crime.
"Gibbons' ongoing saga of his struggle to act normal (find a job, do the dishes, move to SF) is the funniest and most alienated of nouveau psychodramas." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
1985, VHS, color/so, 95m, $25 Home; $100 Other
Transferred from Super 8.
An earlier version of FUGITIVE IN PARIS. A beleaguered scofflaw flees to Paris to become someone else. He meets a model named Coco (Corinne Mallet), and they drink champagne and make love. While he robs banks, she models, until she decides to rob banks too. Eventually they go to Normandy to chill out, but something peculiar happens. No longer sustained by the criminal act, he becomes unmoored and loses his personality altogether, merging with Coco's. Then, with the police on the trail, they are forced to split up. He ends up in a seedy hotel room in Mexico, dying of selflessness. Coco ends up in London with two personalities, but no happier.
1986, VHS, color/so, 35m, $25 Home; $100 Other
Transferred from Super 8.
A university professor learns from his golfing partner/hematologist (Tony Oursler) that he has a fatal blood disease. He resolves to live out his remaining weeks doing everything he ever dreamed out. He goes to Paris to rob banks and take up with a bohemian Parisienne named Coco. The only problem is that he can't bring himself to break the law, although Coco is a natural at it. When she discovers he's been faking the robberies their relationship sours. He's got to muster up the fortitude to do the job. Meanwhile his doctor friend has been looking for him - it seems there's been a terrible mix-up.
"The most unique thing about this film is Gibbons' presence, or his conception of the protagonist, which can be described as Belmondo/Raskolnikov. In a way, this is not an actor's film - maybe not even a filmmaker's film - it's a stars film .... Perfect in what it sets out for itself to do." - Jonas Mekas, Motion Picture
1987, VHS, color/so, 65m, $25 Home; $100 Other
With Tony Oursler.
"Ur-slackers Gibbons and Oursler play two psychotics who are forced by budgetary cutbacks to leave the hospital for, as it were, the free world. Keeping a video diary is their outpatient therapy. Perverse and prescient." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
1989, VHS, color/so, 50m, $25 Home; $100 Other
Pixelvision.
"A hilarious way-out-there tour-de- force. The camera captures in extreme close-up a man walking through a cemetery on the first day of autumn, talking rapid fire to his dog Woody about life, death, and procreation. 'Do you understand beauty at all?' the increasingly angst-ridden man shouts at his happy-go-lucky pet." - M. Blowen, Boston Globe
1990, VHS, b&w/so, 10m, $25 Home; $200 Other
Woody and Joe try to stop Spring from happening. "Gibbons' outstanding encounters with a mutt named Woody are sweet and soulful, the most winning animal rendezvous since Wegman met Man Ray." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
1990, VHS, b&w/so, 10m, $25 Home; $200 Other
With Tony Oursler.
Part Two of ONOUROWN. Joe and Tony resolve to quit taking their extensive medication regimen, not foreseeing the unpleasant side effects of withdrawal. Features Saul Levine as a social worker who makes the mistake of drinking Joe's last Coca-Cola, and Tony Conrad as their video psychiatrist paying a house call.
1992, VHS, color/so, 30m, $25 Home; $100 Other
Desmond Denton (Joe Gibbons) has just perfected a technique for transferring personality attributes from one brain to another, a process that comes in handy when his love interest, art-terrorist Kitty Church (Karen Finley), fails to respond to his overtures. Also featuring Tony Conrad, Tony Oursler and Adolfas Mekas.
"A ramshackle art-world farce whose charm lies in not taking itself too seriously. Finley is volatile, scary and funny; she nearly walks away with the film." - The New York Times
"A mad scientist spoof gone Boho .... Gibbons' alternately languorous and manic performances steals the show." - The Village Voice
"Farcical, deliriously Downtown satire of the Soho mindset .... Anchored by engaging performances from Gibbons and Finley." - NY Press
"Editor's Choice!" - NY Post
Awards and Exhibition: Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995; New Directors/New Films, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1993.
1993, 16mm, color/so, 86m, $250
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $250 Other
Pixelvision.
Son of Sam returns, this time in the form of Woody, a seemingly benign pooch who orders Joe to kill, and kill again. Joe implores Woody to come to his senses, have some compassion, but the dog will hear none of it.
1994, VHS, b&w/so, 5m, $25 Home; $200 Other
Pixelvision.
"I practically levitated when PRETTY BOY came on the screen .... [The video] is a Punch and Joe show in which Gibbons holds a doll in front of his face, thrusts it right in front of the lens, and then, in a deadpan riff on projection, accuses it of being a 'narcissistic son of a bitch.' Whereupon the doll punches him out (who's in control here?) and he retaliates by beating the doll's bare bottom with a hairbrush. PRETTY BOY proves that the concept is inseparable from the performance. Only this Keaton of the avant-garde could get away with such knowing puerility." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
Exhibition: NY Film Festival, 1994
1994, VHS, b&w/so, 3m, $20 Home; $100 Other
Pixelvision.
BARBIE'S AUDITION is a hilarious bit of throwaway sleaze: Gibbons tries to get the meat-puppet substitute to spend some time on the casting couch." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
Award: First Prize, Viper Festival
Exhibition: NY Video Fest, 1995
1995, VHS, b&w/so, 9m, $25 Home; $200 Other
Pixelvision.
In an attempt to re-integrate Barbie's personality, fragmented from the trauma of parental sexual transgression and compounded by an abusive relationship with her boyfriend Ken, a therapist opens a Pandora's Box of psychopathy.
1998, VHS, b&w/so, 8.5m, $25 Home; $200 Other