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Jon Nealon explains his efforts to film a documentary and restore lost footage from former Greene County-based pirate television collective Videofreex. (Audio)
Jun 05, 2012
Interview by Tom Roe. 15:48
Filmmaker Jon Nealon has a Kickstarter campaign to finish a documentary about the group Videofreex. First based in Manhattan, and funded by both CBS television and Abbie Hoffman, the video collective moved to Lanesville (in the Town of Hunter, near the Ulster County border), in Greene County in the 1970s. The group included Parry Teasdale, now the editor of The Columbia Paper, and formerly of The Independent, and other papers on the Greene County side of the Hudson River.
From Wikipedia:
The Videofreex were a pioneering video collective who used the Sony Portapak for countercultural video projects from 1969 to 1978. They were founded in 1969 by David Cort, Curtis Ratcliff and Parry Teasdale, after Cort and Teasdale met each other at the Woodstock Music Festival. They were based out of a 17 bedroom house in the Catskill Mountains named the Maple Tree Farm. Michael Shamberg, author of Guerrilla Television and founding member of TVTV remarked that “The Freex are the most production oriented of the video groups […] in terms of finished, cleanly edited, high quality tape, which is generally quite entertaining, the Videofreex are clearly the best.” Mirroring the beliefs outlined in Guerrilla Television they believed they could turn the medium of television, at the time dominated by The "Big Three" Television Networks, into a more democratic medium and in 1972 they launched the first pirate TV station, Lanesville TV, using a transmitter given to them by Abbie Hoffman. The Videofreex Archive, containing more than 1,500 original tapes, is housed at the Video Data Bank (http://vdb.org). Work is underway to preserve important titles from the Archive and make them available through distribution. Samples of the group's work is available on the Videofreex YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/videofreex)
From Wikipedia:
The Videofreex were a pioneering video collective who used the Sony Portapak for countercultural video projects from 1969 to 1978. They were founded in 1969 by David Cort, Curtis Ratcliff and Parry Teasdale, after Cort and Teasdale met each other at the Woodstock Music Festival. They were based out of a 17 bedroom house in the Catskill Mountains named the Maple Tree Farm. Michael Shamberg, author of Guerrilla Television and founding member of TVTV remarked that “The Freex are the most production oriented of the video groups […] in terms of finished, cleanly edited, high quality tape, which is generally quite entertaining, the Videofreex are clearly the best.” Mirroring the beliefs outlined in Guerrilla Television they believed they could turn the medium of television, at the time dominated by The "Big Three" Television Networks, into a more democratic medium and in 1972 they launched the first pirate TV station, Lanesville TV, using a transmitter given to them by Abbie Hoffman. The Videofreex Archive, containing more than 1,500 original tapes, is housed at the Video Data Bank (http://vdb.org). Work is underway to preserve important titles from the Archive and make them available through distribution. Samples of the group's work is available on the Videofreex YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/videofreex)