Videofreex

In the theater of the D.C. Arts Center on Wednesday night, I watched an older crowd fill into the black box, greeting each other as a dear friend. Rare for a district arts event, I realized that I was conspicuously young. These were folks who experienced Woodstock, who protested the DNC in '68, who were jailed on May Day in '71. Who partied on Prince Street back when artists could afford to live there. All were gathered on this unusually warm January evening to relive a few of their glory days through the medium of video, courtesy of Videofreex, a collective of activist videomakers whose prolific work captured an era while forging an alternative approach to moving-image work.

Skip Blumberg, a core member of Videofreex, stood before the crowd of 50, shouting over the videos that played from a small DVD player and projector at the back of the room. “You can skip this one, B!” he shouted to DCAC's director. “Turn the sound down for this one and we'll just let it run.” Hardly a formal event, Wednesday's gathering mimicked the Videofreex' early viewing parties, which they held every Friday night in their Manhattan loft for a stretch in the late '60s. They quickly developed an underground following; counter-culture crowds turned out in droves to watch these early VJs screen a handful of quirky, exuberant tapes. “But sometimes, it was only us,” Skip noted.

The 'Freex pioneered independent video – an altogether separate world from independent film in those early days. In the late '60s-early '70s, your television would only have received three channels: NBC, ABC, and CBS. When the Sony Portapak was introduced to the consumer public in 1967, the means of production were democractized. “Suddenly, we could talk back to TV,” Skip put it. Early experimental video artists often came to the Portapak from the world of performance art rather than filmmaking. With long takes and a focus on process, the Videofreex work resembles cable access television more than Stan Brakhage or Kenneth Anger. After moving out of Manhattan, the collective relocated to Lanesville, NY, where they produced the first pirate television station and became a fixture in the homes of several hundred residents of the Catskills.

They did not produce elegant, poetic cinema. The 'Freex were doggedly political. Their footage of pigs billy-clubbing longhairs, their informal interviews with Fred Hampton and Abbie Hoffman, and their coverage of mainstream broadcasters at the RNC broke barriers that were not yet even articulated. Their exuberance can only be compared to the video collective Ant Farm, with whom they were known to collaborate.

The 'Freex sought to forge an alternative journalism that prefigured and continues to influence the likes of Democracy Now, Indy Media, Michael Moore, and even the Daily Show. Little Kid antics designed to befuddle Big Brother as he tries to seduce Lady Liberty. While their historical role should not be undermined – and that is Blumberg's goal here, to restore the 'Freex archive and spread the word about the history of activist video – I am skeptical as to how transformative or radicalizing the 'Freex work could have been, sub-underground as it was. They developed street credit within the radical circuits, but one wonders if they were only preaching to the choir.

Blumberg lamented the digital age now that everyone has become a videographer, now that one must sort through so much static to find content, now that we are all so constantly distracted and so fundamentally unfocused as to watch videos longer than even a few seconds. Nevertheless, I wonder if tight-knit alternative communities have lost their utility as a utopian model. The world today connects through media that bring Tunisian hunger riots and Haitian earthquakes to our doorstep. We can opt for static instead, but nevertheless those packets of information can traverse the world in an instant. Knowledge travels faster than light.

“Democratized but deluded” is how Skip described the current state of video. More people have access to the means of production, which become cheaper by the day, but the lower cost results in more and more bullshit being produced, essentially. Frankly, this smacks of elitism. Some liberally-educated white kids from the East Coast can take some unedited, out-of-focus videos of their friends and call themselves activists, but Joe Shmoe can't take an iPhone video of a protest today and consider himself political? If anything, the lowering in price accentuates the democratization that happened with the PortaPak's introduction. Not a simple case of elitism, but I wonder how Blumberg would see himself from the youth perspective of today.

The Videofreex archive can chiefly serve the present as an index of audacity and a how-to for independent media. Their efforts to set the record straight on the distinct development of video as its own media form can not be ignored, for doing so would be to dismiss an entire artistic discipline as a technological development rather than as its own format, with its own rules, associations, and bag of tricks from which to play.