VIDEO REVIEWS : No Living-Room TV Fare at 11th AFI Festival

It’s a mark of the identity problem with the American Film Institute’s annual national video festival (the 11th edition runs today through Sunday at various locations on AFI’s Hollywood campus) that the uninitiated will presume that it’s an exhibition of videos a la MTV. And it doesn’t help explaining that the festival celebrates “television art,” an oxymoron if there ever was one.

What the viewer sees at the festival is generally artful video that can only be seen on TV monitors. More than anything else, it is about the realms of television virtually unseen on the networks or cable.

Indeed, “The Elusive Sign” series (selected by film and video artists affiliated with the Arts Council of Great Britain and divided into four parts, covering video from 1977 to 1987) only points out for an American audience the lame programming sensibilities of PBS. David Larcher’s wide-ranging, dynamically fragmented “E ETC,” for instance, was partly funded by and aired on England’s Channel 4. The work of one of the leading British radical film and videomakers, “E ETC” jumps back and forth between the two media with a rare power and abandon.

While “The Elusive Sign” reveals a group of artists more concerned with aesthetics (as in Steve Hawley’s baroque “Trout Descending a Staircase” and Sera Furneaux’s hypnotically contained “Lessness--Parts I, II and III”) than many of their American counterparts, it also contains such spare works as Jayne Parker’s “Almost Out,” in which Parker and her mother talk with each other, naked in a video studio. At 105 minutes, “Almost Out” demands commitment, but its view of a mother-daughter exchange generates a remarkably intense intimacy that somehow avoids the voyeuristic.

Here is a female energy, imposed on what is generally considered a “cold,” mechanistic form: In a fairly undistinguished festival, the women really stand out. Yet another “Elusive Sign” work, “Changing Parts,” by Palestinian Mona Hatoum, explodes the austere structuralism of so much British filmmaking of the ‘70s with an awesome climax of images full of blood, noise and the terror of exile.

There are no political metaphors in Debra Chasnoff’s “Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment,” part of the festival’s “New Works” section. Instead, the video’s tally of claims regarding GE’s history of nuclear dumping, worker safety violations and disregard for public health amount to a partisan, investigative assault. Its juxtaposition of GE’s feel-good ads and radiated victims is only slightly less ironic than the media references in the video it is billed with--Luis Valdovino’s cheeky critique of U.S. immigration policy, “Work in Progress.”

Chasnoff and Valdovino display the videomaker’s understandable need to examine electronic media. The two most pointed and developed examples here are Sut Jhally’s “Dreamworlds” and Marlon Riggs’ “Color Adjustment,” his follow-up to the controversial “Tongues Untied” (which will screen, with Beth B’s “Belladonna,” in the festival’s look at the Whitney Museum’s 1991 biennial video exhibition).

MTV threatened, and later dropped, an effort to prevent “Dreamworlds” from being seen--and no wonder. Their claim may have been copyright infringement, but, clearly, their fear was that Jhally’s message would get out. This University of Massachusetts at Amherst communications professor and media critic has assembled from 165 MTV videos a scathing examination of pop video’s use and abuse of women. The “dreamworld” is one designed for young teen-age boys, visualizing their fantasies of perfect, nubile, nymphomaniacal women as sex objects, eternally primed for anything the male popsters desire (Rod Stewart and David Lee Roth are big here).

Even when women say “no” in these videos, they mean “yes,” and Jhally audaciously connects this to the logic of rape. He intercuts the relentless gang-rape scene from “The Accused” with similar, though stylized actions in various videos--a fascinating and jarring depiction of how two fictional representations of the same act produce opposite responses.

If “Dreamworlds” is about fantasy overdose, Riggs’ “Adjustment” is about fantasies unfulfilled.

Tracking the history of commercial TV and its depiction of black characters--from the loud stereotypes of Amos and Andy, to the social realism of the great, forgotten series “East Side West Side,” Riggs tells a saga of disappointments (the short-lived “Frank’s Place”), white guilt (Hal Kanter producing “Julia,” with Diahann Carroll) and discomforting assimilation (Nat King Cole). Even such breakthroughs as “Roots” and Bill Cosby’s emergence as a TV powerhouse come under question: For Riggs, both “Roots’ ” fairy-tale notions and “Cosby’s” middle-class family life are ultimately warm and fuzzy prime-time goodies in another color. And the picture isn’t likely to change in such a sponsor-driven business.

Riggs’ exemplary work is scheduled in the festival’s huge, 16-part “New Works” section, which is always a wildly uneven grab-bag. While Part 13, for example, is stuffed with video fragments of empty pretension, Part 8 actually manages to be ingenious and funny: Donald Ord’s interviews with embittered restaurant workers, “Cafe Nocomeback,” is hilariously cynical, while Bob Paris’ brilliantly edited “Behold I Come Quickly” turns Jimmy Swaggart into a sexual monster.

Perhaps no other entry exhibits the best and worst tendencies in current video art than David Blair’s “Wax . . . or the discovery of television among the bees.” Too radical for the American tube (and funded largely by German television), “Wax” blends wigged-out science-fiction musings with a barely-disguised love affair with ‘50s-era technology--not to mention ‘90s-era video tricks. But “Wax’s” ludicrous narrative--in which our hero discovers a planet inside the Earth ruled by bees--brings all the tricks, well, down to Earth.

Other festivals-within-the-festival include the winners of the seventh annual Vision of U.S. video contest, the Robert M. Bennett award winners for best achievement in local TV production, works from the 1991 L.A.-based Freewaves festival, and “Private Hungary,” a four-part series of compiled (by Peter Forgacs) home movies filmed by Hungarian citizens, mostly during the tense Communist years. Alas, the tension rarely comes through.

* The AFI National Video Festival is at the AFI campus, 2021 N. Western Ave., Hollywood, today through Sunday. Admission is free to all events. Information: (213) 856-7707.