Chicago-based journalist and artist Anda Korsts was among the first people to herald consumer-grade video as a political tool, enabling people who were underrepresented in mainstream media to share their perspectives with a large audience. This program collects several experimental documentary shorts on which Korsts collaborated between 1972 and 1982. The first, a scathing report on the ’72 Republican National Convention by the student collective Top Value Television, is explicitly radical and employs numerous avant-garde techniques. More subtle (and more illuminating) is the episode of It’s a Living, a 1976 PBS series inspired by Studs Terkel’s book Working. Three different women—a middle-class homemaker in Skokie, a wealthy model living on the Gold Coast, and a working mother in Cicero—discuss their daily routines, their commentary providing a corrective for the lack of female voices on American television. Total running time is approximately 70 minutes.
Anda Korsts’s Video Metropolis
1 hour 10 min • 2014
