Deprecated: mb_convert_encoding(): Handling HTML entities via mbstring is deprecated; use htmlspecialchars, htmlentities, or mb_encode_numericentity/mb_decode_numericentity instead in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/super-cool-ad-inserter/inc/scaip-shortcode-inserter.php on line 37
Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin’s new documentary profiles the Videofreex, a New York-based art-and-news collective operating in the late 1960s and early 1970s; the crew were early adopters of the then-new video format. The cameras were portable, the playback was near-instant and suddenly, anybody could be a journalist. The Videofreex worked the crowd at Woodstock and, more significantly, were on the ground for women’s-lib rallies, anti-war demos and other radical-left actions; they scored a hard-to-get interview with Black Panther Fred Hampton. A collaboration with CBS reveals the limits of challenging the system, and later, the Videofreex relocate to upstate New York, where they set up a pirate TV station for the locals. A necessary corrective for folks who think citizen video journalism debuted with the iPhone.
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2016.
