Various projects by Vanderbeek include the construction of the "Movie Dome" in Stony Point, New York, an audio-visual laboratory for simultaneous projection of dance, magic theatre, sound, and film; computer graphics: the development of images and graphics designed by manmade dialogue; animation and new graphics, projection systems, multi-media: integrated information concerts, movie-murals experiments with motion/light/stills/film/magic theatre.
MANKINDA is an experimental combination of verse and hand-painted images creating graphic as well as verbal excitement. The letters themselves assume an almost ideographic significance. Vanderbeek described this film as a "visual tunnel, with a poem carved in light upon walls."
1959, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
"A 'drawn' film, with images that are constantly changing, drawings of landscapes that keep escaping, traces of faces, everything is almost what it is but never stays that way. The soundtrack punches out a wild monotone of dirty, nonsense limericks to the accompaniment of hand-drawn images related only in their complementary rhythm." - David Holmstrom
1960, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $20
Double exposure and other methods are used to include animated collage "live" newsreel footage, mixing the eye with live scenes and unlive scenes, to jibe at world so-called leaders.
1960, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $20
Man does not move in or reach for vanishing one-point perspective, he lives on a sphere spinning in orbit. This film is a metaphor of the change of perspective from the 19th century railroad man to 21st century spaceman. The nude dancer extends herself and moves through a bending landscape, sky, trees, earth seem to circumnavigate about her. The piece is danced by Elaine Summers.
1961, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
An experiment in videotape control, an electric collage that mixes the images by way of electronic mattes, superimpositions, and other electronic means of integrating as many as eight separate images onto one screen. A film commissioned by CBS for TV, it is the first such attempt to examine the almost unlimited graphic and visual possibilities of videotape intermix.
1962, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $25
Dedicated to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. A surrealistic fantasy based on the 15th century woodcuts of the dance of the dead.
A film experiment that deals with the photoreality and the surrealism of life. It is a collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing a harp in the middle of a battlefield?) with the inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks at death ... a parabolic parable.
Awards: Bell Telephone Prize; Third Experimental Film Competition, Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, 1964; Midwest Film Festival, 1964; Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1964.
1964, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
A hypnotic dance film of colors, dancers, forms, and music all sweeping through the TV tube eye, mixed together into a flow of female bodies and colors, a brilliant study of color printing from black and white. Collaboration on the project by Brown and Olvey.
1964, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
Dream matrix, history written in lightning image, memory and the TV syntax, images flowing and fused together to other images and electronic tapestry of images half seen, sought for, seeking man's dreams, movies as dreams, history as media.
"The artist will tell you it is as much a process he is interested in ... as a result. Art is a process - life is a process - are they the same process? So many of the artists became unhappy about this eternal, unyielding quality in their art, and they began to wish their work were more like shoes, more temporary, more human, more able to admit of the possibility of change. The fixed, finished work began to be supplemented by the idea of work as a process, constantly becoming something else, tentative, allowing more than one interpretation." - Dick Higgins
1963-1964, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
An animated and live action fantasy, the loop de loops of ten spoons, forks and tableware ... a parable in the shape of a soup spoon ... conceived as a children's film.
1965, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $20
Similies of a slippery TV tube gesticulate break and supply - a long view of multiple images (Mr. Johnson's war, is it Howard Johnson's or President Johnson's war?) - a long curving view, breakfast with aspirin, good grief - or Goodbye. (SUPER-IMPOSITION is a videotape experiment with multiple images, made with film artist-in-residency at Colgate University.)
Life and art ... interacting ... it is interesting to note that movies and psychoanalysis are approximately the same age ... there are now more TV sets in America than bathtubs. There are more radios in America than people. Although 75 percent of Japanese households have television sets, statistics show only 35 percent have running water and fewer than ten percent have flush sanitation. Some 40 percent of American children have one or more.
1965, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
COMPUTER ART SERIES is animated computer/graphic films. The series is called POEMFIELD. All of these films explore variations of poems, computer graphics, and in some cases combine live action images and animation collage; all are geometric and fast moving and in color. There are eight films in the computer animated art series. As samples of the art of the future all the films explore variations of abstract geometric forms and words. In effect these works could be compared to the illuminated manuscripts of an earlier age. Now typography and design are created at speeds of 100,000 decisions per second, set in motion a step away from "mental movies."
POEMFIELD No. 2 and 5 are all colorized by Brown and Olvey.
1966, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
1967, 16mm, color/si, 7m, $20
Assassination, falling down, animated drawings from the landscape of memory, mankind falling down, faces within faces, a haunting view of man drawn in brilliant animation graphics.
1967, 16mm, color/so, 12m, $35
A companion piece to Wheeeels No. 2, exploring more of the highways and by-ways of "American on Wheels" with the filmmaker's gentle surgery on the American pop-consciousness very much in evidence.
1968, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $20
Man dance - hand glance on-off video electromagnetic circumnavigation - man in space man's foot to the ground - a color collage of graphics by electronic mixing - (A videotape electronic collage. All the color has been added to black and white film by electronic means.)
1968, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
Computer-animated drawing that works at the speed of light. Developed as an experiment at MIT while at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, this film explores the rapid tracking of drawn line images compounded by the symmetry of multiple images; one result of the experiment is the phenomenon of color that comes from the black and white images, a blend of music and images that mystifies and delights the eye.
1972, 16mm, b&w/so, 7m, $20
A work in progress, the use of film to parody dreams and induce a dream state. A nonverbal work that examines the surrealistic landscape of dreams and dream events, compound images that overlap and disguise the real meaning of the image, actors as characters lost in the web of being there and not there. The theory behind DREAMING is to make a series of long film/video images that induce the viewer into a calm state of mind and allow the viewer to make free associations with the images he is watching ... similar to watching late night television, the viewer slips off to sleep and the viewer can question the edge of his own dreams with those on the screen .�
1980, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
Music by Max VanDerBeek.
A fantasy film of illusive geometry, changing and rebuilding itself by computer animation, unique visual magic done while artist-in-residence at NASA in Houston in conjunction with Richard Weinberg.
1980, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
A self-focused woman loses herself in the mysteries of herself. Is it a study of distorted reason, paranoia, or is she really insane? A film work derived from a Kafka short story, the actress Deniese Koch gives a stunning performance of a woman lost in the resemblance of herself; as a parable about life's dangers, it points to the risk of society taking away the body and spirit of our individuality.
Award: Baltimore Int'l Film Festival, 1981
Exhibition: NY Film Festival, 1981
1980, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30