Merrill Aldighieri
Award-winning independent filmmaker, artist, producer, and director Merrill Aldighieri is an important documentarian of groundbreaking musical forms—like new wave, punk, post-punk,and industrial—and a pioneer who expanded the fields of film and video. She coined the term “Video Jockey” or “VJ” with a co-worker to describe her nightly performance work, which involved the impact and synergy of film and video on New York City nightlife.
Aldighieri made her first films in high school and graduated with honors from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Those formative years brought her into contact with experimental-film legends Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, William Wegman, and Caroline and Frank Mouris.
Upon moving to Northern California in 1975, she worked at Santa Cruz Access TV (SCATV), the first cable-TV station in the Unites States. Aldighieri moved to New York City in the mid 70s and landed a job at the Muppet Workshop, working on a fundraising film for the feature The Dark Crystal. Her first long-narrative video-film Love Among the Mutants was presented by Jonas Mekas at its Anthology Film Archives premiere. The film includes her first analog computer- animation effects, which she made at Rombex Studios using an analog synthesizer.
The film caught the attention of the media programmer at Hurrah, one of New York City’s seminal dance clubs. The venue was the first to make video installations a focal point of the environment, featuring banks of monitors suspended over the dance floor. Aldighieri created video loops by combining her own recordings, stock film, and photo-emulsion scratched animations to develop a real-time, non-stop flow of projected visuals to work with the DJ’s music.
Aldighieri began filming the bands that performed at Hurrah, accumulating 200 hours of live performances in the process. Her biographical film, VJ Diaries, includes performances by New Order, Gang of Four, Liquid Liquid, Skids, and Mission of Burma, as well as interviews and excerpts featuring 30 different bands. Aldighieri captured the creative underground—recording interviews with luminaries Jim Carroll, Quentin Crisp, Robert Anton Wilson, Tom Murrin, Edgar Oliver, Michio Kaku, and Man Parrish.
In 1981, she created Co-Directions, Inc., a production company that released a series of music video compilations titled DANSPAK for Sony’s new home-video label. Aldighieri created animation for corporate television shows Sesame Street, The Wall Street Journal TV, and Beavis and Butt-Head, and for independent film productions. Her work in the D.A. Pennebaker film The War Room won an Oscar nomination for Best Special Effects.
From 1991-92, Aldighieri made a trilogy of “thought-operas” featuring Robert Anton Wilson, Quentin Crisp, and Dr. John Lilly that were aired on PBS. Her film Metaphoria won an Emmy for Best Documentary of Cultural Significance in 1992; it showed scientists and shamans exploring the mysterious processes of the brain during conscious, altered, and dream states. Featuring counterculture icon Dr. Lilly; Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab; Richard Bolt of the Human Computer Interface at MIT Media Lab; and Native American rights activist Sam Sapiel; Metaphoria examines the frontiers of communication and the role metaphors play in the cognitive process—their pervasiveness in science, poetry, religion, culture, and language.
Aldighieri moved to France in 1995. She made two music documentaries, Road Rant with Lydia Lunch and Seismic Riffs with Tuxedomoon. Since 2000, she has focused on bringing her Hurrah archive to life and completed a dozen hour-long films. Examples of her work are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; L’Étrange Festival Collection, Paris; and Lausanne Experimental Collection, Lausanne, Switzerland.
