FILM PHILOSOPHY

Film is a medium for funded professionals.  Mostly it did not work for me because I had to work directly, shooting, viewing, editing and presenting the camera original.  As a result I always ended up with a finished piece that was scratched and with frames missing and burned or chewed up by some element of the process.  Film has a mistique that results from the ubiquitousness of "films" from Eisenstine to John Houston and Fellini to Woody Allen, George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg.  Stories displayed on theater screens throughout the world has created an audience ready to watch whatever the filmmaker could dream to make. 

Film is a bit like ceramics.  There are really no secrets; someone has already tried and done whatever there is to do with the medium.  That is very liberating because it leaves the individual filmmaker free to follow the bliss of creation with access to all of the tools built by those who have gone before.  Today, video technology puts all of those tools in the hands of literally anyone who has interest  and ideas to express.  Suddenly the most elusive medium is falling into the hand of the masses.  We are on the verge of seeing a visual revolution that portends to surpass its parent.   Film was the medium of the twentith century.  Video and its decendants will extend the medium for the twentyfirst century.    --Martin Holt, 2002 

MARTIN HOLT BIO

1940 - Born in Deer Lodge, MT
1960 to 1967 - Studied art with emphasis on ceramics and film making
1967 - BFA University of MT
1967-1969 - Graduate Assistant in art, University of Arizona
1969-1976 - Founded and operated Peerless Pottery, Augusta, MT
1969 to present - Film and video maker specializing in artists at work
1987 - Montana Arts Council individual artist grant recipient

FILM AND VIDEO

1968 Rockit
1969 Zac's Bag
1973 Charlie Fires with Wood
1978 Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Potter
1984 Pete the Potter
1987 The Brayettes
1988 Summer of Mudders
1989 Akio
1992 Sovietski/Amerikanski
1993 Travels in Baltica, Night Train to Saint Petersburg;
1995 Kommun E Kating with 3nemie
1996 Rudy Autio makes Night Music
1998 Games of Clay
1998 Stacker
2001 Bray Dreams
2002 La Mere
2007 Our Founding Mudder Who Art in Heaven: A Workshop with Peter Voulkos

Martin Holt, Videor

Martin Holt is a videor whose subject is real life.  He has documented the work of international artists for 30 years.  An easy familiarity with artists and their work makes his contribution to video documentation in this field uniquely valuable.

Studied film and ceramics as art at the University of Montana, and the University of Arizona in the 1960s.

His films include subjects such as the Rock and Roll culture.  A fifteen minute film, "Rock It" featured Jim Morrison and the Doors with Morrison at his most flamboyant and uninhibited wildness.  The film includes a freak out under a strobe light by a pair of short haired youths at the beginning of the era.

Martin and his wife Suzy documented the filming of Andy Warhol's "Lonesome Cowboys" while on location at the Old Tucson film set and Rancho Linda Vista in the lower Sonoran Desert fifty miles North of Tucson.

Other films from this period are short records of activities and events such as The People's Park demonstration in Berkeley, California where one student was killed by rioting police, and the ensuing mobs were tear gassed in the streets; feeding cattle against the back drop of the Rocky Mountain Front near Augusta, Montana;  workshops with Peter Voulkos and Rudy Autio; residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, in Helena MT; Gary Bates creating a monumental, site specific sculpture in steel that erases the landscape to better experience the relationships of the horizon to the sky in a high mountain valley near Bozeman.

Video replaced film as Martin's medium of choice in 1985. Prior to that Martin and Suzy videotaped the deliberations of Montana's Constitutional Convention using ground breaking portable video technology.  He has created dozens of completed video works that range from pure abstract art in motion and sound to set camera recordings of a presidential speech and Montana writers reading.

Martin focused on the summer residency program of 1988 at the Archie Bray Foundation as young ceramicists from around the world came to make art and share their varied experiences in clay with their counterparts.  "Summer of Mudders" provides several cameos of these young artists working in the forge of this beautiful Montana setting.  Participants included Robert Harrison, Josh DeWeese and Kurt Weiser.

Martin was invited to the last international symposium for ceramic artists in the Soviet Union during its final days in 1991.  Suzy accompanied him and documented the production of twenty international artists working in clay at artist's union house in Jurmala, Latvia.  Martin edited the more than thirty hours of video into several programs that showcased the situation in eastern Europe as the Soviet Union began to unravel, focusing on its effect on established ceramic artists who were part of that milieu.

The ceramics workshop in Norway in the summer of 1993 was an opportunity to revisit the land of Martin's ancestors while giving him an opportunity to document this auspicious event.  Ten international artists, and ten Norwiegen artists came together for six weeks to create art in clay.  Torbjorn Kvasbo agreed that Martin should attend and shoot video for the duration of the event.  "Our Founding Mudder" is part of the result of that work.  There are several more valuable works to come from this footage.

Russian ceramicists in Siberia wanted to expand the awareness of their arts community by bringing clay workers from the USA to Krasnoyarsk to meet Russian artists, and propose art works for inclusion in projects being sponsored by the municipal architect Demi Hannov throughout that city.  Martin and Suzy's experience in Russia from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk is revealed in "Kommun E Kating with 3nemie,"  "Sorokino" and "Kamp Tomohaak."

The Videor’s Journal is a weekly showcase of video work produced by Martin from his own lifetime of footage library, and presenting the work of other videors whose work is  on electronic media.  This one hour show on HCTV, Public Access Channel 11 in Helena, Montana, stimulates him to keep new work coming out of the 3,000-hour archive of material he has collected since 1965.