Early Video Pioneer: An Interview with Skip Blumberg

Abstract

SKIP BLUMBERG IS AN INFLUENTIAL FIGURE in evolution of independent video documentary and experimental filmmaking. He has produced hundreds of shorts, TV shows, installations, exhibitions, and multimedia performances and continues as an active mediamaker. Beginning in late 1960s, during inception of independent video, he collaborated with production groups including TVTV, Videofreex, Ant Farm, and Paper Tiger TV and with many other pioneering artists and independent videomakers, such as Nam June Paik and Shirley Clarke. Blumberg is active in independent video community, including having served as a board member of Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. From his seminal experimental video JGLNG (1976) to his classic video documentaries such as triple Emmy-winning Pick Up Your Feet: The Double Dutch Show (1982), to his more recent diaries such as Nam June Paik: Lessons from Video Master (2007) and experimental nonfiction video On Dream Street . . . (2012), Blumberg brings a distinctive, warm, personal approach to filmmaking. He was one of first one-person-crew camcorder reporters. Several hundred of Blumberg's movies are online and in distribution for home viewing and for academic and public screenings through Electronic Arts Intermix, Video Data Bank, and In Motion Productions, Inc. His videos have appeared on broadcast and cable TV and in museums and festivals around world, with retrospectives in Berlin Film Festival Videofest, Rotterdam Film Festival, and Dallas Video Festival. He has received numerous awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Ohio State University Journalism Award; has been named one of Esquire magazine's Best of Next Generation; and has been screened at Museum of Broadcasting's TV Critics' Favorite TV Shows of All Time event. He was also artistin- residence at several public TV stations, at Walker Art Center, and at 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics. Blumberg has produced for Sesame Street (more than 150 shorts), Great Performances (700,000-plus online views), The 90's, National Geographic Explorer, and MyHero.com, as well as for nonprofits, including Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity and Twenty-First Century Foundation. Blumberg has been a US State Department cultural envoy in Senegal, Kosovo, Herzegovina, Slovakia, and other countries and a visiting filmmaker, artist-inresidence, and teacher at universities, schools, libraries, and media centers. Blumberg currently is Special Professor in MFA documentary program at Hofstra University School of Communication. melanie l a rosa: Let's start with what's happening with your early videos now. skip blumberg: I just returned from WRO Biennale in Poland- the leading forum for new media art in Central Europe-where there was a lot of exciting work and many inspiring media artists, a week of screenings, installations, concerts, performances-and it was gratifying to see audience's interest in early video screening. I was there with Abina Manning, from Video Data Bank. We screened newly restored videotapes from Videofreex Archive from 1969 to 1971, which are in vdb.org's collection. It was great to see contemporary audience connect with work and with activism of that time period. Videofreex has had a couple of other recent well-received screenings-in Brooklyn at Light Industry and in Washington, D.C. at DC Arts Center. I appreciate these screenings-and opportunity to talk to you about early videotapes, and that era, and history of video-because it was a rare and exciting phenomenon, a very special time. What's especially important is that it was beginning of medium of video, when it was brand new. And this is also a chance to speak to you and professors about a syndrome now that I've noticed in film schools and schools of communication where history of video is sometimes ignored. …