If you sat down in front of a camera and were asked to describe what love means to you for three minutes, what would you say? This idea was the driving force for Wendy Clarke’s video art project, The Love Tapes. The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) has recently unveiled Love, Links, Archives, a website hosting Clarke’s collection of Love Tapes, among other video art projects of hers like The Link and One on One. The collection is now fully digitized and searchable, making it possible for the voices of the 1970s and beyond to be heard once again.
Completing this website required years of work from the WCFTR team and multiple graduate students in Communication Arts. Each member contributed to this project in a range of ways from digitizing tapes, to developing the website, to finding solutions for hosting all the collection’s data, to working directly with Clarke, to applying for a federal grant to make all the work possible. These diverse experiences working on this project and navigating the hundreds of hours of footage from the archive have led each WCFTR team member to be drawn to different tapes across the collection. Here are some of their favorites:
Ashton Leach: Project Assistant for Love, Links, Archives
Leach cites this as her favorite tape because the woman talks about love beyond family and friends. The woman highlights how love can be found in hobbies, and “she mentions the love that you can feel for the everyday person you pass, like the cashier, smiling at them and actually looking at them as a person who you can love instead of someone doing merely a service,” Leach said. To Leach, this perspective on love is extremely hopeful. “It’s so beautiful to know that every single person that you run across, not only is loved, but also that you can love them in your 30 second interaction.”
Ben Pettis: Project Assistant for Love, Links, Archives
This clip is one of Pettis’s favorites because it captures the feeling of growing up and is an early exploration of a video call. As these two high schoolers chat, they talk about graduating, finals, and what it will be like to meet each other in person soon. They compare their LA Link experience to talking on the telephone, but even then, they acknowledge the different forms of connection they are forming over a video call compared to what they might have formed had they initially met in person. This early exploration of a communication method that is extremely common today is a refreshing look into how this technology was first utilized and perceived by the public.
Matt St. John: Manuscript Specialist at the WCFTR
This clip sticks out to St. John because “it’s an example of how poetic normal people can be when given the chance.” The man in the video reflects on getting used to young death as a member of the queer community in the 1980s. He talks about the strange feeling of going from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere when it’s summer in one place and winter in the other and compares this feeling to watching so many young people pass away throughout his life. This metaphor is an exceptional example of the power of Clarke’s work and the opportunity it gave everyday people to speak about their lives in a way that is not normally invited in society.
Mary Huelsbeck: Assistant Director of the WCFTR
While Huelsbeck has many favorite clips across the collection, this one sticks out. A woman in New York in 1980 uses her three minutes to say happy anniversary to her husband of 32 years. Throughout the clip, she expresses how she never knew if she’d have the nerve to talk about her love so openly. As she goes on, she mentions how nice it feels to speak about her emotions, something she doesn’t always do. This clip is a wonderful example of the way The Love Tapes allowed participants to sit down and think about the love in their life. Their thoughts trail random patterns and beautifully illustrate the vast ways we love in our lives.
Amanda Smith: Film and Video Archivist at the WCFTR
Smith enjoys this tape of a man who starts out describing his first encounters with love as a child. When he begins to speak, a viewer might assume it will be a sweet story, but as the man goes on, it’s revealed that his first love rejected him, and he is still rather bitter about it years later. To Smith, this clip stands out as a funny and unique example from the collection because it is a reminder that “there are a lot of versions of love and many of them don’t end well for everybody.”
Eric Hoyt: Director of the WCFTR
Eric Hoyt recommends watching One-on-One: Arnold and Ahneva (1991) to appreciate the power and beauty of Wendy Clarke’s video art. The One-on-One project connected incarcerated men with video pen pals on the outside. In the exchange between Arnold and Ahneva, the two describe their passions, fears, and dreams. Arnold’s love for his children and Ahneva’s tenacity as a small business owner comes through powerfully. So too do Ahneva’s bold fashion sensibility and the beautiful softness of color video in this high-resolution scan of a low-resolution format.
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Love, Links, Archives is a joy to peruse. “I hope the general public finds [this collection] because it’s certainly something you can easily get sucked into,” Huelsbeck said when asked what she hopes happens with this project going forward. “The breadth of voices that are represented in [Clarke’s] collection, the feelings and emotions and ideas, you’re not going to find these any place else.”
You can spend some time perusing the collection here: https://wendyclarke.wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu/