Cinematheque Celebrates Art of Music Video

And here you thought music video was just glamour boys with poufy hair preening behind blemish-obscuring smoke--money for nothing, as it were.

But this relatively recent genre represents something else entirely to the American Cinematheque, which, in conjunction with the Long Beach Museum of Art, has scheduled this weekend a mini-festival whose brave assertion--as stated in its printed program--is nothing less than that “music video is the art form of the ‘80s.”

To prove it, more than 100 titles grouped into seven programs will run at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., beginning at 6 tonight with the premiere of a documentary on Soviet rock and continuing all day Sunday. The focus is largely on how the form has unexpectedly brought true experimental film making to the masses.

“Robert Longo’s Megadeth video, ‘Peace Sells (But Who’s Buying?),’ has almost 1,000 edits in it,” said an admiring Michael Nash, media arts curator of the Long Beach museum, who put together the exhibition for his museum in August and has had it on the road ever since.

“It was unimaginable before the inception of MTV that you could make programming that would appear on a commercial venue that would move that fast. . . .,” he added. “But people are learning to be able to move faster and faster and are willing to fill in the blanks a lot more.”

Nash’s presentation encompasses both the ambitious origins and--he hopes--expansive future of music video. “Audio Auteurs” (showing tonight at 7) showcases such early work as Devo’s 1977 “In the Beginning Was the End,” an 11-minute video that has the crude power of a snuff film crossed with a bizarre industrial education trailer.

Nash’s hope for the future can be seen in “Vanguard Re-Visions” (Sunday, 8:45 p.m.), featuring experimental forays into video art, and “Unseen Music” (Sunday, 6:15 p.m.), which showcases videos from independent record labels.

Also of interest: “Ad Art” (tonight, 9:30), which includes amusingly self-reflexive clips by the Replacements, Tom Waits and Les Rita Mitsouko; “Extended Plays” (Sunday, 4:30 p.m.), “video albums” by The The and R.E.M., and “Digital Harmony” (Sunday, 2:30 p.m.), a work for computer by composer John Whitney Sr.

Receiving its U.S. premiere tonight at 6 (its first of six showings) is Ken Thurlbeck’s “USSR&R;: Rock on a Red Horse,” a fitfully intriguing documentary about the underground Soviet rock scene.

General admission prices are $5; $3 for Cinematheque members. Information: (213) 461-9737.