PXL THIS 16 reviews and articles:

http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/short-run/pxl-this-16/15029/

 

http://www.santamonicaargonaut.com/articles/2006/11/16/entertainment/wo3.txt

 

http://www.fylmz.com/editorial/article_43.html 
 
"Gerry Fialka's PXL THIS festival snaps, crackles and pops off the screen with the funky, user-friendly energy of real first-person cinema. Goofy, gorgeous, and altogether groovy, his provocative program of pieces produced with the Fisher-Price PXL 2000 toy video camera is not only downright entertaining, but more, its blipping and buzzing black 'n' white picture-bits coalesce into a veritable inspiration to all those who cherish the playful, spontaneous gestures and low-cost of electronic folk art." -Craig Baldwin. 
 
Established in 1991, Clap Off They Glass Productions supports independent video-making by sponsoring the annual PXL THIS Festival, which is the oldest of its kind in the world. Even with no corporate sponsors, no color brochures, no big shot movie director board members, no ticketmaster access, PXL THIS has been featured on PBS, IFC and NPR, and most recently screened at MIT. PXL THIS spans many genres: documentary, poetry, drama, art, music, political activism, cinema povera, comedy and the avant-garde. The unique Fisher-Price toy camcorder PXL 2000, which records sound and image directly onto audio cassettes, continues to empower artists. This failed toy was only made in the US from 1987 to 1989. The magical PXL 2000 restores a certain humanity to the overpowering technology of video. The irresistible irony of the PXL is that the camera's ease-of-use and affordability, which entirely democratizes movie-making, has inspired the creation of some of the most visionary, avant and luminous film of our time.
 
Films featured in past PXL THIS festivals are archived and available for viewing at the Academy Film Archive in Hollywood. For viewing appointments and information, please call (310) 247-3016 x 387, or visit the archive's web site at www.oscars.org/filmarchive. 
 
"In past years, PXL THIS gave us some fascinating work...definitely an out-there experience. In the last few years, PXL videos have made it to such hallowed domains as the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, and the London Film Festival, where they have been admired for their characteristic spontaneity, highly personal perspective, visual uninhibitedness and raw, grainy truths." - Mary Beth Crain, LA Weekly. 
 
"PXL THIS is worthy of praise...spellbinding. The shifting bricks of light and dark that form the Fisher-Price PXL 2000's picture lend themselves well to personal essays, creating an invigorating mesh of ambiguity and intimacy in every frame." - Paul Malcolm, LA Weekly. 
 
"Since the start of the 21st century, I've attended the annual screenings of the PXL THIS toy camera festival at San Francisco's OTHER CINEMA. I have discovered several patterns of Pixelators that are similar to the pioneering video artists of the 60's. One, they reclaim film as a one-person project. Contrary to the popular belief that filmmaking must be collaborative, the solo vision is dominant and documented here. Two, in PXL-land, personal and deeply individualistic issues - frequently in the form of confessionals - are dominant. Pixelvision forms a quiet sub-genre within the larger category of the 'personal essay' film, an intimate art-world of privacy, whose entries frequently resemble message-in-a-bottle intimacies. These patterns show that expanding the vocabulary of moving image art is still possible - and, indeed, is growing." -Steve Polta, San Francisco Cinematheque curator. 

 

According to filmmaker Bryan Konefsky: "Pixelvision is the haiku of cinema: the minimum of means delivering the maximum of meaning. The PXL 2000 toy camera's limited image-quality forces moviemakers to focus on essentials, and thereby to produce a richly connotative cinematic experience. In fact, PXL may be the best instantiation of Stan Brakhage's luminous quote: 'The true meaning of cinema can be found between the frames.'" 
 
In spirit, the PXL-2000 toy camera resembles the cheap throwaway still camera, known as the Holga. Writing in ESQUIRE, Joshua Liberson called the Holga: "The world's most unserious serious camera...the Holga takes strangely beautiful, dreamlike pictures. Its two-part interlocking design allows light to bleed through constantly from the sides, making it almost impossible to take a boring picture, regardless of the subject matter." 
 
"Most exciting art movements have been reactions against technical sophistication. Many have gone 'backwards' to find honesty and truth, the essence of things." - Guy Maddin