William E. Jones

What Have You Been Doing? is a response to the perpetual question asked during the COVID-19 lockdown. The source materials are extremely degraded found videos, plus on the soundtrack, an acting lesson from Tallulah Bankhead.

The evolution of an Ohio rust belt city is examined in this double-screen projection by Massillon-born, Los Angeles–based artist William E. Jones. The 1944 propaganda film Steel Town, which shows the booming wartime steel industry of Youngstown, Ohio, plays alongside contemporary footage of the city’s now-quiet empty streets and abandoned buildings, underscoring the bleak reality of this postindustrial city.

In William E. Jones’ Psychic Driving, a 1979 television broadcast, in which the wife of a Canadian M.P. details her horrific ordeal during CIA-backed mind-control experiments, disintegrates into a psychedelic miasma of scan lines and video interference.

A Great Way of Life is a mash-up of images of the imperialist war machine and sounds of the consumer economy, juxtaposing the Viet Nam War during the late 1960s with American television commercials of the same era. Advertisements dominate the spectator with appeals to buy products that have military as well as domestic uses: spray the life out of garden pests with insecticide, make your clothes whiter with bleach, and think of cowboys and Indians while you do it. On the other side of the world, another form of domination holds sway. A Great Way of Life is a horror film as relevant today as it was in 1970. [Overview courtesy of William E. Jones]

video/colour/sound

Model Workers presents a collection of paper money bearing images of workers. Intricately engraved details are arranged in chronological order; full views of the banknotes are in reverse chronological order, ending at the beginning: Mexico, 1914. The montage includes colonies and the independent countries they became, as well as former and present socialist states. Workers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe are represented.

Actual T. V. Picture (2013) juxtaposes footage of a jungle in Viet Nam being bombed by an American war plane with a late-60s television commercial showing recent advancements in the miniature transistors. This technology made possible improvements in consumer goods like television sets, but its origin was in military weaponry, as the advertisement shows.

An instructional film on when to shoot at a victim and when to wait. The film plays with instructions for real action, but also explores the short film's distinctive narration and structure, the rising tension resulting from unpredictability. Identifying the subtle sign indicating the need for action acts as a parallel for the act of finding reference points in cinematic storytelling.

Bay of Pigs makes use of a “captured” film from the CIA Film Library, Girón, a production of El Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos documenting the aerial bombardment of la Batalla de la Playa Girón, or as it is known in the United States, the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The soundtrack comes from a numbers station called “Atención” after the first word announcing the shortwave radio broadcast.

The Soviet Army Prepares for Action in Afghanistan is derived from four shots of a Soviet film called Heirs of Victory (1975) which commemorates the Allied triumph over fascism in World War II. The original film celebrates the military might of the USSR in images of explosions and armed men leaping through flames. These images are subjected to such thorough manipulation that they become patterns flickering like a multitude of abstract paintings, with digital smears standing in for squeegee marks and brush strokes. Slowly the shots become less abstract until they are completely recognizable, though still somehow rather surreal.

Inanimate includes 120 images of objects in a portrait format found in the Library of Congress. These portraits of inanimate objects are animated with zooms 120 frames in length.

Industry is composed of loops within loops, the repetitive motions of the factory, progressively simplified to fields of tones, until the images are as simple as possible without being monochromes. Human figures become gray geometric patterns. They perform tasks that seem antiquated in the digital age, yet the movie itself could not exist without digital technology.

The original footage of Spatial Disorientation is a flight test seen from the cockpit of a U. S. Air Force plane. The material has been edited into a loop that repeats in variations: magenta and green, with motion blurs applied to each individual frame, some blurs parallel to the horizon line in the shot, and others perpendicular to it. The result is a visually complex movie with stroboscopic sequences that are a challenge to the eye.

Berlin Flash Frames makes use of unedited film found in the National Archives of the United States. Labeled with the title “Berlin 1961,” the reel contains raw footage shot for a propaganda film produced by the U. S. Information Agency.

During the Great Depression, the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration documented American society in photographs. Thousands of the pictures made under the program’s auspices from 1935 to 1943 were rejected, or in Stryker’s term, killed. Roy Stryker and his assistants routinely killed 35mm negatives by punching holes in them, thereby rendering them unusable for publication. All killed negatives were preserved and filed away, but they remained unprinted, and until recently, unseen. When the Library of Congress began making high resolution digital scans of FSA negatives available on its website, it included many rejected images, and among them, a small number of killed negatives mutilated by a hole punch. In “Killed,” these suppressed images downloaded from the Library of Congress website have been reframed with the holes as the central feature, and edited in a quick montage showing glimpses of an unofficial view of Depression-era America.

Its images taken from a Technicolor propaganda film in lurid color, Discrepancy (A New All Around Leap Forward Situation Is Emerging) presents nuclear tests made by China in the 1960s. Though the source film was made a few years after the policies known as the Great Leap Forward were implemented, a reference to them occurs in a phrase from the film’s English language narration that has been adopted as this Discrepancy video’s subtitle. Two sequences of the original film, edited in ever-quicker alternations, culminate in an apocalyptic, stroboscopic mushroom cloud. Discrepancy is the generic title for a group of works that are distinguished with parenthetical subtitles. All versions of Discrepancy have the same soundtrack and are the same length (9 minutes, 30 seconds). Only the image tracks vary.

Tearoom consists of footage shot by the police in the course of a crackdown on public sex in the American Midwest. In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department photographed men in a restroom under the main square of the city. The cameramen hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. The film they shot was used in court as evidence against the defendants, all of whom were found guilty of sodomy, which at that time carried a mandatory minimum sentence of one year in the state penitentiary. The original surveillance footage shot by the police came into the possession of director William E. Jones while he was researching this case for a documentary project. The unedited scenes of ordinary men of various races and classes meeting to have sex were so powerful that the director decided to present the footage with a minimum of intervention.

An appropriated video work that also serves as a tribute to a great artist of the 1960s, Film Montages (for Peter Roehr) takes simple repetition as its first principle. It arranges fragments of gay porn films into a musical composition at once austere and delirious.

In a variation on what DJs call a “mash-up,” director William E. Jones combines segments of sound from classic foreign language films with segments of picture from gay porn films produced before 1985, making decisions based upon the length of the segments rather than their content. The somewhat arbitrary juxtaposition of diverse “found” materials often yields surprisingly appropriate results. v. o. suggests a new narrative space and pays tribute to a former era of gay life and cinephilia.

In More British Sounds images from The British Are Coming (1986) collide with dialogue from See You at Mao (1969) also known as British Sounds, produced by the Dziga Vertov Group under the direction of Jean-Luc Godard. “Workers have come to expect too much,” a narrator intones, as an English lad in a state of undress polishes the boots of a royal guard in full uniform. The soundtrack consists of a speech from British Sounds layered four times in the structure of a round. Gaps in the dialogue—filled by Godard’s heavy breathing in the original—allow certain key phrases to be heard in the chaos. The super-reactionary spouting venom must have seemed horrendous and absurd in the late 1960s, but his line was practically adopted as policy in early 21st Century America. The fetishistic sports underwear, skinhead tattoos, and bad boy snarls have been widely adopted as well.

All Male Mash Up makes use of the gay porn industry’s marginalia: establishing shots revealing urban landscapes of the recent past, charmingly inept dialogue scenes, and close-ups of performers, many now dead. This material, while of no particular commercial use, can be seen as an invaluable document of a lost world of eroticism and sociability.

In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio, Police Department photographed men having sex in a public restroom under the main square of the city. A cameraman hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. He filmed over a three week period, and the resulting movie was used to obtain the convictions of over 30 local men on charges of sodomy. With some of this footage the Mansfield Police later produced Camera Surveillance, an instructional film circulated in law enforcement circles. It showed how to set up a sting operation to film and arrest “sex deviants.” A degraded version of the film found on the internet was reedited to make Mansfield 1962, a haunting, silent condensation of the original.

Making the connection between The Smiths' working-class, Manchester-raised, ethnic Irish experience and that of the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants in Los Angeles, Is It Really So Strange? is the first documentary that allows the fans themselves to speak at length about their lives, their loves and their brief encounters with their idol.

Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.

Through voiceover and static San Francisco landscapes this experimental narrative short tells the melancholy story of a butch dyke pining over a one night stand with a straight girl.

In this essay film, the narrator describes how his fixation on a gay pornographic model from a phone sex advertisement leads to a new project, an elegy for a complex, troubled man named Alain Lebeau.

Home movies are the springboard for an analysis of contemporary meanings of "family".

William E. Jones's autobiographical film about growing up gay in the small Ohio town of Massillon pushes the boundaries of documentary by offering a moving self-portrait within the context of gay political history. William E. Jones returns to his hometown to construct an unconventional and moving autobiography. Challenging some of the most firmly entrenched notions of filmmaking, Massillon tells its story without a single human actor, by combining beautiful images with a seductive voice-over narration.

Rejected photos with holes punched in them.

Old photos with holes punched in them.