PLAYING AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

Perhaps you noticed the WWW episode that mentioned Supervision, the very obscure TVTV excursion into surrealistic television history. I'm a big fan of it myself—perhaps the biggest fan of it in the world! Once upon a time I managed to find installments of Supervision at the Museum of Television and Radio, where they were scattered willy-nilly amidst recordings of PBS Visions episodes from the 1970s.

This stuff is so obscure that it wasn't even included in an MTR salute to TVTV, but it looks like Anthology Film Archives will screen one Harold Ramis-directed installment in a fascinating program scheduled for Friday night at 8 pm. (There's a chance that it isn't technically part of Supervision, but I'm sure it's close enough.) Here's the description, from Anthology's website:

ALL CIRCUITS ON: THE BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY
What on earth did people do before there was TV? Tonight's sophomore installment of ALL CIRCUITS ON attempts to answer this burning question with a panoramic presentation of videos, performances and fun-filled facts. Engineer/Filmmaker/Philosopher Park Doing will be on hand to tell us the true story of early TV; how it was created, contested and co-opted. You may not know that in 1928 the first live drama broadcast, a three-camera production called THE QUEEN'S MESSENGER, was received on a General Electric Octagon set in Schenectady, New York. In 1931, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) broadcast experimental signals from the Empire State Building, featuring a familiar cartoon character, Felix the Cat. Prof. Doing, whose forthcoming book from the MIT Press is titled VELVET REVOLUTION AT THE SYNCHROTRON, will shine a light on the story behind and technology involved in these nascent broadcasts. He will even have some of it on hand for a show-and-tell demonstration. You haven't seen anything till you've witnessed a functioning Mechanical TV, or the films that Doing has made with this odd and wonderful device. This talk will be presented alongside a staged re-telling of TV's origins by TVTV and, well, one of the best uses of the medium thus far, THE GONG SHOW.

ALL CIRCUITS ON is a new Anthology series produced in close collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world's leading nonprofit resources for video and media art since 1971. Together we are revisiting our roots, combining forces and bringing our archives together to increase the potential for rarely-screened works from the early days of video exploration (which is to say pre-1979)....

Works to be screened include:

TVTV
BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY
1977, 18 minutes, video. Directed by Harold Ramis; written by Frank Cavestany, Hudson Marquez, Harold Ramis, Michael Shamberg, and Willie Walker.
A fictional, at times satirical portrayal of the rise of television and the death of radio, rooting the story in a greater American mythology. The historic figures of Philo Farnsworth, Edward Armstrong, and David Sarnoff are reduced to archetypes in a stand-off between the little man and Big Media. By now, we know who wins.

Tony Labat & Bruce Pollack
BRUCE AND TONY ON "THE GONG SHOW"
1978, 28 minutes, video.
Tony Labat and his frequent collaborator Bruce Pollack created an appropriately absurd performance for their appearance on the popular American variety/talent show. In a line-up that includes a man singing "God Bless America" through his nostrils and a woman who bends herself into a pretzel, Bruce and Tony manage to present a performance so absurd it defies ridicule. See it to believe it.

Also at Anthology this month: Unamerican Activities: The Films of Abraham Polonsky and several days of ephemeral oddities (September 20-23), including Why We're Fat, a program of nutrition documentaries curated by Skip Elsheimer (September 21 at 8 pm).

Here's Eat for Health, one of the films on the nutrition program.



Source (10:27)