{"id":5523,"title":"From Portapak To Camcorder: A Brief History Of Guerrilla Television","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/portapak-camcorder-brief-history-guerrilla-television","version":"f2d841aaff788c296ad50948560414ff4ccc59ec69cc3ac5153ac1ccd9ae7dc2","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4359275+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Deirdre Boyle"}],"authorKeys":["Deirdre Boyle"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Journal of Film and Video","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"Spring/Summer 1992","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"44","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"43467","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0183","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022From Portapak To Camcorder: A Brief History Of Guerrilla Television.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/portapak-camcorder-brief-history-guerrilla-television.","publication":"Deirdre Boyle. From Portapak To Camcorder: A Brief History Of Guerrilla Television. Journal of Film and Video. vol. 44, no. 1 \u2013 2 (40545). Spring/Summer 1992.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5523.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0183","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"},{"label":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0183/","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0183/","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null},{"label":"https://www.vasulka.org/archive/Writings/portapak2camcorder.pdf","url":"https://www.vasulka.org/archive/Writings/portapak2camcorder.pdf","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":40209},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":682}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Formatted versions: https://archive.org/details/ETC0183/ https://www.vasulka.org/archive/Writings/portapak2camcorder.pdf Nearly 30 years since the video portapak launched an independent television movement in the United States, a new generation of video activists has taken up the video camcorder as a tool, a weapon, and a witness. Although the rhetoric of guerrilla television? may seem dated today, its utopian goal of using video to challenge the information infrastructure in America is more timely than ever and at last practicable. Today\u0027s video activism is the fulfillment of a radical 1960s dream of making \u201Cpeople\u0027s television.\u201D The 1960s: Underground Video In 1965 the Sony Corporation decided to launch its first major effort at marketing consumer video equipment in the United States-an auspicious moment for the debut of portable video. The role of the artist as individualist and alienated hero was being eclipsed by a resurgence of interest in the artist\u0027s social responsibility, and as art became politically and socially engaged, the distinctions between art and communication blurred (Ross). At first there were few distinctions between video artists and activists, and nearly everyone made documentary tapes. Les Levine was one of the first artists to have access to half-inch video equipment when it became available in 1965, and with it he made Bum, one of the first \u201Cstreet tapes.\u201D His interviews with the winos and derelicts on New York\u0027s skid row were edited before electronic editing became possible. Rough, unstructured, and episodic, Bum was characteristic of early video. Street Tapes \u201CStreet tapes\u201D were not necessarily made on the street. In 1968, with the arrival of the first truly portable video rigs (the half inch, reel to-reel CV Portapak), video freaks could hang out with drug-tripping hippies, sexually liberated commune dwellers, cross-country wanderers, and yippie rebels, capturing spontaneous material literally on their doorsteps. During the summer of 1968 Frank Gillette taped a five-hour documentary of street life on St. Mark\u0027s Place in New York City, unofficial headquarters of the Eastern hippie community (Yalkut). Gillette was one of a number of artists, journalists, actors, filmmakers, and students who were drawn to video. They were \u201Cthe progeny of the Baby Boom, a generation at home with technology-the Bomb and the cathode ray tube, ready to make imaginative use of the communications media to convey their messages of change\u201D (Armstrong 20-21). Turning the limits of their technology into a virtue, underground videomakers invented a distinctive style unique to the medium. Some pioneers used surveillance cameras and became adept at \u201Cfree-handing\u201D a camera because there was no viewfinder (Teasdale). Tripods, with their fixed viewpoints, were out; hand-held fluidity was in. Video\u0027s unique ability to capitalize on the moment with instant playback and real-time monitoring of events also suited the era\u0027s emphasis on \u201Cprocess, not product.\u201D Process art, earth art, conceptual art, and performance art all shared a de-emphasis on the final work and an emphasis on how it came to be. The absence of electronic editing equipment-which discouraged shaping a tape into a finished \u201Cproduct\u201D-further encouraged the development of a \u201Cprocess\u201D video aesthetic. The early video shooting styles were as much influenced by meditation techniques, like t\u0027ai chi and drug-induced epiphanies, as they were by existing technology. Aspiring to the \u201Cminimal presence\u201D of an \u201Cabsorbers\u201D of information, videomakers like Paul Ryan believed in waiting for the scene to happen, trying not to shape it by directing events. The fact that videotape was relatively cheap and reusable made laissez-faire work as feasible as it was desirable. Underground video groups appeared throughout the United States, but New York City served as the hub of the 1960s video underground scene. Prominent early collectives included the Videofreex, People\u0027s Video Theater, Global Village, and Raindance Corporation. The Videofreex was the movement\u0027s preeminent production group, acting as its technological and aesthetic innovator; People\u0027s Video Theater used live and taped feedback of embattled community groups as a catalyst for social change; Global Village initiated the first closed-circuit video theater to show underground work (followed by the Philo T. Farnesworth Obelisk Theater, a project of the Electric Eye in California); and Raindance served as the movement\u0027s research and development arm. Since the chronicling of any movement tends to encourage its expansion, Raindance played a key role, producing underground video\u0027s chief information source and national networking tool, Radical software (edited by Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny). In addition, Raindance members contributed to a cultural data bank of videotapes from which they collectively fashioned \u201CMedia Primers,\u201D\u0027 collages of interviews, street tapes, and off-air television excerpts that explored the nature of television and portable video\u0027s potential as a medium for criticism and analysis. Hundreds of hours of documentary tapes were shot by underground groups, tapes on New Left polemics and the drama of political confrontation as well as video erotica. Video offered an opportunity to challenge television\u0027s authority, to replace often negative images of youthful protest and rebellion with the counterculture\u0027s own values and televisual reality. Observers outside the video scene found early tapes guilty of inconsistent technical quality. Critics faulted underground video for being frequently infantile, but they also praised it for carrying an immediacy rare in Establishment TV (Aaron). The underground\u0027s response to such criticism was to concede there was a loss-in technical quality when compared to broadcast. Hollywood had also been fixated on glossy productions until the French New Wave\u201D filmmakers in the early 1960s created a demand for the grainy quality of cinema verite, jump-cuts, and hand-held camera shots. Like the verite filmmakers 10 years before them, video pioneers were inventing a new style, and they expected to dazzle the networks with their radical approach and insider\u0027s ability to get stories unavailable to commercial television. The networks did try underground video, briefly. In the fall of 1969, CBS pumped thousands of dollars into the ill-fated \u201CNow\u201D project, a magazine show of 16mm and portable video documentary vignettes that promised to show America what the 1960s youth and culture rebellion was really about. Nearly everyone with a portapak in New York worked on the show, but CBS concentrated its resources and hopes on the Videofreex, who interviewed Abbie Hoffman at the Chicago 9 conspiracy trial, got Black Panther Fred Hampton on tape days before he was murdered, and captured scenes of alternative life and hot tub enlightenment along the California coast. CBS executives eventually rejected the 90-minute show, later titled \u201CSubject to Change,\u201D euphemistically finding it \u201Cahead of its time\u201D (Videofreex; West). Aware of the centrality of media in modern life, of the way television shapes reality and consciousness, video pioneers tried to gain access to mass media. Arrogant and naive, they learned the hard way that television had no intention of relinquishing its power. They would have to look elsewhere for funding sources and broader distribution outlets for their work, forced to take seriously A. J. Liebling\u0027s observation, \u201CFreedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.\u201D The \u201CNow\u201D project marked a turning point as the underground discovered its freewheeling rebellious days were over. The time had come for an information revolution. Influenced by theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, artist-activists began to plot their utopian program to change the structure of information in America. In the pages of Radical Software and in the alternative movement\u0027s 1971 manifesto, Guerrilla Television, they outlined their plan to decentralize television so that the medium could be made by as well as for the people. Adopting a sharply critical relationship to broadcast television, they determined to use video to create an alternative to the aesthetically bankrupt and commercially corrupt broadcast medium. As the underground began to search for other ways of reaching their audiences, cable TV and video cassettes seemed to offer an answer. The 1970s: Alternative TV The 1970s ushered in a new era of alternative video. The underground became an above-ground media phenomenon as magazine articles on the \u201Calternative-media guerrillas\u201D appeared in mainstream periodicals like Newsweek and New York Magazine. When federal rules mandated local origination programming and. public access channels for most cable systems, cable seemed to promise a new, utopian era of democratic information, functioning as a decentralized alternative to the commercially-driven broadcast medium. The new AV format portapak, appeared in 1970, conforming to a new international standard for half-inch videotape. For the first time, tapes made with one manufacturer\u0027s portable video equipment could be played back on competing manufacturer\u0027s equipment. Not only did this boost competition among video manufacturers and accelerate the development of portable video, it also facilitated the exchange of tapes, which would become even more widespread once the 3/4-inch U-matic cassette became available in 1972. The new AV format, with an eyepiece that allowed instant playback in the camera, proliferated across the country as more and more people began to explore the medium. Government funding for video was inaugurated by the New York State Council on the Arts in 1970. With it, the \u201Call-for-one\u201D camaraderie of early video activity which had begun to break down in the scramble for CBS dollars the year before-soon deteriorated into an all-out funding battle as video groups competed for their share of the pie (Aaron, \u201CAlternate\u201D; also see Vassi). Within a year, sharp divisions between \u201Cvideo artists\u201D and \u201Cvideo activists\u201D surfaced. In time alternative videomakers subdivided into two factions: community video advocates and guerrilla television producers. Guerrilla Television Although exponents of guerrilla television professed an interest in community video, they were generally far more interested in developing the video medium and getting tapes aired on television than in serving a localized constituency- Probably the best known guerrilla television was produced by an ad hoc group of video freaks assembled in 1972 to cover the political conventions for cable television. Top Value Television (aka TVTV) produced hour-long, documentary tapes of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions and made video history, providing national viewers with an iconoclastic, alternative vision of the American political process and the media that cover it. TVTV relied on the technical and artistic expertise of groups like the Videofreex, Raindance, and the San Francisco-based group, Ant Farm, adding a distinctive way of producing and promoting the event for cable television. In Four More Years (1972), TVTV\u0027s crew of 19 threaded its way through delegate caucuses, Young Republican rallies, cocktail parties, antiwar demonstrations, and the frenzy of the convention floor, capturing the hysteria of zealots while entertaining viewers with the foibles of politicians, press, and camp followers alike. With a style loosely modeled on New Journalism and dedicated to making facts as vivid and entertaining as fiction, TVTV used a sharp sense of irony to puncture many an inflated ego. As self-proclaimed guerrillas, they tackled the establishment and caught it off guard with the portable, nonthreatening equipment that gave them access to people and places where network cameramen, burdened with heavy equipment and the seriousness of commercial TV, never thought of going. Like cinema Write in the 1960s, guerrilla","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":40209,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}