Animal Charm - Golden Digest

Price: 22,00 €

Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos.

By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs 'nature' and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.

DVD Extras:

Live Video Mix at Aurora Picture Show
"Sunshine Kitty" – Animal Charm’s Previously Unreleased First Video
Video Scrapbook of Animal Charm at home and on the road
Upcoming Releases from Other Cinema DVD

Movies on this DVD:

Several Videos

Press Ratings

»Animal Charm use sight and sound to generate a particular type of laughter: the uncanny kind that overtakes you like a seizure.« (Johnny Ray Huston, San Francisco Bay Guardian)
»Jim Fetterley and Rich Bott are the L.A.-based Animal Charm, known for sublime video mashups performed live using low-end video mixers, switchers and samplers. With chunks of discarded video footage collected from yard sales, thrift stores and dumpsters as their source material, the pair cheerfully mix and mismatch everything from veterinary-training videos to nature shows and faded ’70s industrials. September marks the debut of their first DVD release, with a series of screenings throughout the city, beginning at UnUrban Coffeehouse in Santa Monica. Titled Golden Digest, the long-awaited collection features the cult favorite Sunshine Kitty, a collision of kittens, children in danger and nose swabbing, with the image snippets intercut so that viewers alternately cringe, sneeze and marvel at the brilliance of the demented mix. The more delicate Lightfoot Fever brings together leaping baby deers and a band, shot in silhouette, performing “Fever.” On their own, each of the sequences would be vaguely interesting evidence of American vapidity. Together, they become visually more complex, and the sound and music clips, cut and repeated in short bursts, form an entirely new syncopation. From their start in the mid-’90s, Animal Charm have demonstrated the power of DIY media-making and helped champion the culture-jamming ethos by refusing to quietly absorb the media around us in favor of making it into something new. Digital tools have now made this kind of manipulation de rigueur for most American teens. But Animal Charm were doing it back in the day, in analog, and their videos remain unrivaled in their sly wit and transformative power.« (Holly Willis, LA Weekly)

For more information, please visit this products webpage.

Animal Charm - Golden Digest was added to our catalog on Tuesday 24 July, 2007.