By Jennifer Litz
Editor
March 26, 2008

Lest young, avant-garde types in San Angelo complain there’s not enough culture or enough to do in this town, the San Angelo Museum of Arts is screening videos from the Dallas Video Festival’s last 20 years next Tuesday. The program will feature a selection of shorts from the best of 20 years’ compilation of the Dallas Video Festival, including comedy, animation, documentary, and experimental video.

Before you get all excited, unless you’re a film buff, you might not even realize what video really is. It’s different from film, the older, more traditional method of capturing moving images, which has a higher contrast ratio (256:1 vs. film’s 30:1). There’s a good—though biased—explanation of film vs. video here .

Festival founder Bart Weiss wouldn’t appreciate this simplistic explanation of the medium differences, which shortchanges video’s advantages. In fact, the Dallas Video Festival, now supported by the National Endowment For the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts, started in the mid-80s as a weekend of video programming titled "Video as a Creative Medium.” Weiss sought—and seeks—to show the beauty, advances, and advantages of using the video medium.

“Video to me is—first, anything shot with a video camera is a video,” Weiss says. “But also anything processed through a video, or animation, on a computer, which is video. Or shot with film, edited, produced in video and then shown through a video projector. It used to be that everything was done and shown on film. Now most work is done on video, and all editing is done on video. So I think things have moved in our direction.”

When Weiss began in the 80s, he says video was not the choice for many mainstream filmmakers. Rather, it was the domain of pornographers and few art house productions. (And probably students, because of video’s cost advantage.) He remembers conducting a workshop on desktop video before it was imaginable. He had imagined that people would one day make videos on their own computers.

Now that the Dallas Video Festival is 20, Weiss is taking some of the most memorable video shorts from the years on the road. Each year’s festival showcases landmark, cutting-edge videos from around the world. David Lynch (“Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive”) is among the famous filmmakers whose work has been featured at the festival.

Weiss says he travels around Central and South Texas with his program to find and connect filmmakers in the area. “Filmmakers in the regions [Weiss visits] will send us things,” he says. “And it’s good for me to meet the audiences, and know what’s going on in different areas.

“I’ll be in the Valley and El Paso soon. And by traveling, I can say, ‘oh, you’re working on this? There’s a guy in El Paso working on that, y’all should get together.’ ”

Weiss also likes to visit places like San Angelo to “get the word out” about his particular type of festival and its devotion to video.

The San Angelo Museum of Art has screened Dallas Video Festival pieces for the last couple of years. The April 1 program will start at 7 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.

The program includes eight selections from the Dallas Video Festival’s 20-year history. It includes “Joe Bob’s God Stuff,” a satirical review of religious TV and televangelists, hosted by the infamous Joe Bob Briggs of “B-movie” review fame. “God Stuff” was a weekly segment on the Daily Show in the late ‘90s.

“Still Life with Animated Dogs” is an animated piece with a peculiar staccato flow but fluidly drawn characters. Czech animator Paul Fierlinger created the film for PBS in the late ‘90s. It reveals Fierlinger’s transition from Stalinist Russia to the United States, and how his canine companions reflect his character and strife. It won the Peabody Award in 2002.