Produced at the junction of two millennia, the California Trilogy is James Benning's three-part topographical study of America's "Golden State". Looking to the past while investigating the present, the mathematician-turned-filmmaker condenses three distinct Californian landscapes into a total of 105 shots, each exactly 2½ minutes long. Formal restraint and compositional precision combine with ambient sound and an unheard social commentary to create a hypnotic journey across the 31st US State; from the Great Central Valley (El Valley Centro) through greater Los Angeles (Los) to the Californian wilderness (Sogobi). This 2-disc set presents the complete California Trilogy for the first time ever on DVD.

This dvd is a collection of the early experimental short films of Roger Jacoby. Originally a painter, Roger Jacoby began making experimental film in New York City in the 1960s. For both aesthetic and financial reasons he began to process his own film footage in the bathtub of his darkened bathroom. After receiving an NEA grant in 1974 he was able to buy a simple processing machine. By maintaining control of the processing, and by using an 'outdated' Auricon camera, Jacoby was able to weave texture, color and sound in a highly dramatic way. Many of his films contain the sounds of opera, images of family and often feature his lover of many years, Warhol superstar Ondine. Roger was immortalized in a portrait painted by Alice Neel, the canvas is titled "Rose Fried's Nephew". Roger Jacoby died November 19, 1985 at the age of 40.

Beckman began making films in the mid-1970s using Super-8 sound film. Neither documentaries nor narratives, these works, as Jim Hoberman puts it, are "like primitive cartoons ... enigmatic allegories filled with nervous activity and comic violence, sexual imagery ... perceptual game­ playing and ingenious optical effects."

This first anthology brings together three pieces from 1978-1980: We Imitate; We Break Up (1978); The Broken Rule (1979); and Out of Hand (1980), made after her CalArts studies and featuring many other artists as actors.

Peter Weibel's performances differentiate themselves from other actions performed in the 1960s, for instance in Vienna and California, firstly, through their relation to media and secondly, through their relation to politics. His body politics is body critique that is simultaneously a critique of traditional forms of representation as well as identity politics. Unlike classical body artists Weibel did not only search fort he emancipation of the body, for instance through the sexual revolution but liberation from the body in the age of its constructability via media and gene technology. (Peter Weibel)