Global Village Video was formed by video artist/documentarian John Reilly and
kinetic artist
Rudi Stern in 1969. At the time of their meeting Reilly had just completed a series of tapes documenting the
Woodstock Festival with co-collaborator
Ira Schneider (who later served as president of
Raindance Foundation, 1972–1994). Reilly, Schneider, and Stern partnered to establish “the first closed-circuit video theater to show underground [video] work,” to be called The Global Village Video Center. Their first event consisted of a bank of ten monitors on which they presented "a live mix program featuring music performed at Woodstock, President Nixon speaking on the war in Vietnam, the Black Panthers, student protestors and a couple having sex in a field." The 2013
New York Times Obituary for Reilly states that the early Global Village Video “shows” “amounted to a counter cultural feast: regular visitors included
Abbie Hoffman,
Jerry Rubin, and
Timothy Leary. In 1971, the magazine
Art in America called it "the only commercial outlet for underground video.”
Rolling Stone wrote that Global Village's media environments juxtapose "political, rock, erotic, and humorous tapes on ten monitors which are constantly switching." A Global Village "video environment" called
Innertube was included in the 1970 exhibit "Vision and Television" at Brandeis University's
Rose Art Museum, the first group video exhibition to appear in a museum. In an interview in Radical Software, Reilly and Stern said, "What emerges is a matrix of politics, morals and [the] sounds of a generation." Of those early videos,
Newsweek wrote that they were "crude but intimate in form, blunt and radical in content" and that they "carry an intimacy that is rare in establishment TV." The theater soon after moved to Broome Street in Lower Manhattan, where it also began holding video production workshops upon receiving a grant from the
New York State Council for the Arts to support the creative use of video. Other early video works include tapes of political figures like Hoffman, Rubin,
Paul Krassner,
Jim Fouratt, and
Afeni Shakur, concert footage of popular musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winters, and Phil Ochs, and abstract or non-narrative compositions, including
John and Samantha Making Love. Transcripts for some of these video interviews conducted by Reilly and Stern were published in the
East Village Other, where both were regular contributors. In 1969, Reilly made a video portrait of fellow
East Village Other writer, "Dylanologist"
A.J. Weberman, recording Weberman as he dug through and analyzed the trash outside of what he believed to be
Bob Dylan's New York apartment. In 1971 Global Village Video partnered with
The New School for Social Research to offer courses on community video production. Through these courses Reilly met Stefan Moore, and they collaborated on the experimental documentary
The Irish Tapes about
The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The Irish Tapes was partially funded by
John Lennon and
Yoko Ono, and it was featured in the 1975 “Video and Television Review” series produced by New York City’s
WNET/Channel 13 Television Laboratory. The
New York Times saw
The Irish Tapes as being exemplary of the new style of video documentary that "makes no pretensions to objectivity. Tightly controlled by a few people or even one person, the documentary tends to be extremely suggested. For
The Irish Tapes, for example, several trips to Ulster were made. Scenes of hate and suffering, on both sides of the conflict, were set in a form that opens and ends with glimpses of a St. Patrick's Day parade in New York. Grim reality is powerfully counterpointed with uniformed fantasy. The 'troubles' are portrayed by the participants – defiant, hysterical, puzzled." The documentary has been included in the permanent collection of
The Museum of Modern Art. In 1972, Julie Gustafson enrolled in a Global Village Video course, which resulted in the acclaimed video documentary
The Politics of Intimacy (1973). This project was the starting point of Gustafson and Reilly’s multi-decade collaboration, during which they co-produced and co-directed a number of award-winning video documentaries that were aired on PBS. The 1975 documentary
Giving Birth: Four Portraits (1975), co-produced by
WNET, received the award for "Best Video Documentary" at the 1977 Chicago International Film Festival. The documentary, which follows four couples who have each chosen a different delivery method, including one couple that is having their baby at home, utilizing
Frederic Leboyer's "birth without violence" techniques. It features interviews with Leboyer as well as
Dr. Elizabeth Bing, pioneer of the
Lamaze technique. Although it received positive reviews, one reviewer noting that it "exudes the astonishment and initial elation characteristic of most new parents" and another calling it "a sensitive, intelligent program", the documentary's depiction of childbirth in unobscured detail was controversial. Other productions include
Joe Albert’s Fox Hunt and Other Stories from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey (1979),
The Pursuit of Happiness (1984), and
The Trial of the AVCO Plowshares (1986).
Pursuit of Happiness looks at the carceral system's effects on the happiness of the people affected by it, including inmates, prison workers, and activists, and their families. It was the first Global Village documentary to feature
Molly Rush and the
Plowshares activists, whose trial would become the subject of
The Trial of the AVCO Plowshares. That documentary chronicled the activists' trial for entering into a manufacturing plant of the AVCO Systems Division and damaging parts and equipment that would be used to make nuclear weapons.
Howard Zinn testified for the defense, making a case for the importance of non-violent civil disobedience in the history of American democracy. From 1978 through the 1980s Gustafson served as co-director of Global Village Video alongside Reilly, and between them they received numerous awards and honors related to their video making and teaching activities, including fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a
Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as grants from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the
Rockefeller Foundation, the
Sony Corporation of America, the
Ford Foundation, and
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 1992, Gustafson directed
Casting the First Stone, her highest profile and most widely acclaimed documentary, which was broadcast on PBS's
POV series. The documentary was praised by critics for its balanced, complex portrayal of abortion providers and reproductive health workers at the Women's Suburban Clinic in
Paoli, Pennsylvania as well as the clinic's protesters, including
Randall Terry, who attempted to shut down the clinic. Starting in the late 1980s, Global Village produced a series of videos about or adapting the work of
Samuel Beckett. Those include the short videos collected as part of the 1992 documentary presentation
Peephole Art: Beckett for Television, directed by Reilly and Melissa Shaw-Smith:
What Where (1988), with theater direction by
S.E. Gontarski at the
Magic Theatre in San Francisco;
Not I (1989), with theater direction by Lawrence Sacharow; and
Quad I + II (1988), adaptations by the Suzanne Lek Dance Company.
What Where was produced with the assistance of Beckett, who offered feedback on the staging and video effects over video from Paris. Reilly and Shaw-Smith also directed the documentary
Waiting for Beckett (1994), the first American documentary on the writer.
Waiting for Beckett chronicles Beckett's life and work, including footage of dozens of stage, television, and film productions. It also includes behind-the-scenes footage of Beckett working on the Global Village production of
What Where. It received positive critical notices, with critic Robert Koehler saying that it "is sure to stand as one of the lasting records Samuel Beckett's life and work." The 1990 film
Waiting for Godot in San Quentin documents a production of Beckett's play
Waiting for Godot in
San Quentin State Prison, directed by Jan Jonson. The documentary follows Jonson and his incarcerated performers, "Happy" Wilson and "Twin" James, as they rehearse for and stage the play for an audience that includes actor
Bill Irwin, who had received great acclaim for his own recent performance in an off-Broadway staging of the play. In 2005, Gustafson released
Desire, a documentary that she directed in collaboration with members of the Teenage Girls Documentary Project. The documentary profiled a group of teenage girls in New Orleans from a variety of backgrounds, with the girls contributing their own short videos about their lives that are interspersed throughout. Those young filmmakers – Tiffanie Johnson, Tracy Morton, Kimeca Rodgers, Cassandra Swaing, and
Peggy Wang – use Gustafson's documentary and their short videos to discuss their lives, their goals, their loves, and their families. Three of the girls are single mothers, and they speak openly about the extreme difficulties they are experiencing as they try to do their school work and prepare for the future while being caring, supportive mothers for their young children. The film received very positive reviews, including an endorsement from acclaimed documentary filmmaker
Barbara Kopple, who said of
Desire that it is "a film so full of spirit and life you don't want it to end." ==Documentary Festival==