Video 50 + Deafman Glance

Video 50 (1978)
Dir. Robert Wilson
With Lucinda Childs, Philippe Chemin, Laura Condominas, Robert Wilson
52min; Digital

An extraordinary video sketchbook, Video 50 is a composition of one hundred abbreviated “episodes” produced for television by Wilson, a perhaps prescient exploration of ultra-short form film. This series of 30-second vignettes unfolds in uninterrupted succession, snowballing into an enigmatic film essay that invokes a range of visual styles, from deadpan theatricality to tense surrealism. Rife with singular images—a man teetering above a waterfall, a floating chair, a winking eye, a parrot against the New York skyline—Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry.

Deafman Glance (1981)
Dir. Robert Wilson
With Sheryl Sutton, Jerry Jackson. Rafael Carmona
27min; Digital

This adaptation of Wilson's five-hour "silent opera" of the same title tells a vividly stylized story of murder, eschewing the spoken word in favor of light and movement as narrative tools. The ritualistic action, which moves from a spartan kitchen through the silent halls, stairways, and rooms of a lonely house, is both dreamlike and sinister. A somber, menacing woman washes white dishes and a gleaming carving knife, pours milk into a glass, and then slowly attacks first one young boy and then another. Not a word of dialogue is uttered. Suggesting the disparate worlds of both ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary tabloid headlines, Deafman Glance harbors paradox: the events are terrifying but not violent; characters are both real and symbols of reality; pacing reduces action to abstraction; and morality and mortality are ambiguous.