Perfect Lives

The story of Stargate SG-1 begins about a year after the events of the feature film, when the United States government learns that an ancient alien device called the Stargate can access a network of such devices on a multitude of planets. SG-1 is an elite Air Force special operations team, one of more than two dozen teams from Earth who explore the galaxy and defend against alien threats such as the Goa'uld, Replicators, and the Ori.

This documentary is a history of The Residents hosted by Penn & Teller. It contains excerpts from most of their videos and some are in their complete form. It also contains the complete "Don't Be Cruel" video, their performance of "From the Plains to Mexico" and "Teddy Bear" on Night Music, and other TV appearances.

An avant-garde omnibus that features works by off-the-wall artists in many different disciplines.

Abstract video art by John Sanborn and Dean Winkler. Dedicated to Ed Emshwiller.

A boy travels through the world of M.C. Escher.

In the year 2023, following the death of Randy Rose, the lead singer of The Residents, his son Randy Junior discovers that his father's ashes have been stolen and listed for sale on eBay by a mysterious culprit. While investigating, Junior discovers the footage for the group's unfinished feature film Vileness Fats in a foot locker in his mother's basement.

Commissioned for the 1980 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York, Olympic Fragments is a taut, expressive reinterpretation of athletic movement, a tour-de-force of dynamic editing and post-production techniques. Through sophisticated visual and aural juxtapositions, Fitzgerald and Sanborn isolate the gestures and movements of athletes in a controlled, powerful display. Eschewing the "thrill of victory" tradition of broadcast television sports coverage, they allow a portrait of individual skill and grace under pressure to emerge from their manipulation of highly fragmented and choreographed imagery — what they term the "skill, beauty and sheer joy of kineticism.

A short survey of the small-gauge narrative film, beginning with the Kuchars' Sylvia's Promise (1962). Primarily focused on East Coast artists, the work of Eric Mitchell, Manuel DeLanda and Ericka Beckman is highlighted.

A live adaptation of art rock band The Residents' 1988 concept album about a disgraced evangelist and his obsession with gender-fluid conjoined twins.

Created in 1984 for the opening of the Computer Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. By Dean Winkler and John Sanborn. Music by Jamaaladen Tacuma.

Short film by John Sanborn

This work explores perception, time and memory, based on the concept that "science has yet to determine the actual resolution of the eye." Using time-lapse, slow dissolves, and ghostly, ephemeral images, the artists manipulate linear time and dimensionality. Evoking subconscious memory, Remains Vivid recalls childhood experiences through use of the "after-image," while Over/Time subtly transposes physical and temporal distance as contrasting, equally resonant landscapes. POV explores the subjective eye versus the camera eye, and the nature of artistic creation. Using a split-screen technique, Similar Nature dissects the activities of four people in a study of time, motion, and simultaneity of gesture. Sax and Violins is a conflation of sound and fragmented image in which the musicians perform separately and are brought together only in the post-production process.

A sequel to Ear to the Ground, Ear-Responsibility finds avant-garde percussionist David Van Tieghem roaming the streets of New York, discovering the inherent rhythms and music in ordinary objects, from sidewalks to subway cars.

Abstract video art set to the music of Philip Glass.

"Awakening from the 20th Century" contends with the collision between the actual and the virtual in the city of San Francisco. "Is life becoming virtual?" Lord asks. "Are we witnessing the end of the City? Will the computer replace the automobile?" These questions are taken up by six prominent writers, musicians, and multi-media workers, who describe their own shifting relationships to technology and public space within the city. Awakening from the 20th Century is structured around imagery from several San Francisco sites: the broadcast transmission tower Sutro Tower; "Critical Mass," an activist bicycle event; and locations from the Dashiel Hammet Walking Tour, which are interspersed with scenes from The Maltese Falcon.

The Planets is an epic video feature commissioned by the new music ensemble Relâche. The score took composer Kyle Gann twelve years to complete and became a multi-media immersion into the myths and mystery of the planets when Relâche commissioned video artist and director John Sanborn to take viewers on a journey out into space, and inside the play between reality and fantasia. The work is in ten parts, each focused on a single planet, and blends together things we know and elements that we imagine about the heavenly bodies in the sky. We see them only through lenses, mental and physical—and we dream up more about them than we understand. We have praised them for the origins of humankind and we have blamed them for controlling our fragile lives from moment to milestone.