Acting
Kathy Acker
Born — Died
1947-04-18 — 1997-11-30
Known for
Acting
Credits
17 titles
Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, the writer William S. Burroughs, the artist and theoretician David Antin, French critical theory, feminist artists Carolee Schneeman and Eleanor Antin, and by philosophy, mysticism, and pornography.
Known for
5.6The South Bank Show is a television arts magazine show produced by ITV between 1978 and 2010. A new series began on Sky Arts from 27 May 2012. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the show aims to bring both high art and popular culture to a mass audience.
The South Bank Show
1978
NRI am so endlessly alone. Whats my illusions, whats my odds, and illusions have to be killed, I don't have more time to destroy. Is my loneliness real and is my longing about what? Then who are this people?
IDn4
1991
5.2A short film based on the literary work of author Kathy Acker. Set in the 60's and 70's, a young female writer explores her identity through sex and writing.
Memory Xperiment: Kathy Acker
2020
6.5Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire - a Mexican soap opera star - and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God's existence.
The Golden Boat
1991
5.4A young woman becomes obsessed with pornography and the mysterious rich patrons of the Times Square porn theater where she works selling tickets.
Variety
1985
NRDocumentary about Kathy Acker where she talks about her writing and her life in New York.
Kathy Acker
1984
Film credits
1990s · 5 titles
NRI am so endlessly alone. Whats my illusions, whats my odds, and illusions have to be killed, I don't have more time to destroy. Is my loneliness real and is my longing about what? Then who are this people?
IDn4
1991
6.5Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire - a Mexican soap opera star - and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God's existence.
The Golden Boat
1991
Film becomes a metaphor for lost history and its “negative“ impact on successive generations who look for stability in an electronic world that lacks sufficient mediation. Video retrieves lost memories for the child who, through her camera, seeks to find her father.
Seeing Is Believing
1992
Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair's liminal, laminal tribute to underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead, featuring image manipulation by Dave Mckean & reminiscences from various countercultural characters. A fitting epitaph for an English margin walker.
The Falconer
1998
7.5Kathy Acker talks about being 14, hanging out at the New York Filmmakers Cooperative with Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, and boyfriend P. Adams Sitney. She speaks to the theft of language, narrative versus myth, and digging herself out of hell. The interview was shot on Halloween night, 1996.
Kathy Acker in School
1997
1980s · 1 titles
1970s · 3 titles
NRHow to play a melody? A magic moment, unrepeatable. Life is just a bowl of cherries. Film as art as life as film.
Dear Jimmy
1978
NRThe day after recording the video piece that has come to be known as BLUE TAPE (but which was never intended to have a title), Sondheim and Acker made a second, related tape. Commenting on and structured after the first, it similarly documents a charged intellectual and sexual encounter but with Sondheim and Acker’s roles reversed. Screened only once, in the UK, this film was presented for the first time in the U.S. at Anthology Film Archives on March 6th, 2023. 1974, 33 min, video.
Blue Tape (Tape 2)
1974
NRSerious discussions of art, philosophy & idealism are put together with explicit scenes of masturbation and sex, by writer Alan Sondheim and punk icon Kathy Acker.
The Blue Tapes
1972
Series credits
Behind the camera
5.2A short film based on the literary work of author Kathy Acker. Set in the 60's and 70's, a young female writer explores her identity through sex and writing.
Memory Xperiment: Kathy Acker
2020
5.4A young woman becomes obsessed with pornography and the mysterious rich patrons of the Times Square porn theater where she works selling tickets.
Variety
1985
NR"Blood and Guts in High School" features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s book of the same title. The book received noteriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes’ interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by US news events from the time period in which the book was written. These events saturate the character's daily experience, informing her adolescent, nihilistic worldview and her desire for rebellion. As the viewer looks back at pivotal historical events (Jonestown Massacre, Moral Majority, Three Mile Island etc.) connections are drawn in relation to our current political situation.
Blood and Guts in High School
2009
NRThe day after recording the video piece that has come to be known as BLUE TAPE (but which was never intended to have a title), Sondheim and Acker made a second, related tape. Commenting on and structured after the first, it similarly documents a charged intellectual and sexual encounter but with Sondheim and Acker’s roles reversed. Screened only once, in the UK, this film was presented for the first time in the U.S. at Anthology Film Archives on March 6th, 2023. 1974, 33 min, video.
Blue Tape (Tape 2)
1974
NRSerious discussions of art, philosophy & idealism are put together with explicit scenes of masturbation and sex, by writer Alan Sondheim and punk icon Kathy Acker.
The Blue Tapes
1972