This collection includes 181 video reels shot between 1971 and 1978 by Martine Barrat. The footage was shot in black and white and with mono audio on open half-inch reels using a Sony Portapak video recorder. There are approximately thirty minutes of footage on the majority of the reels.

Although small portion of the material (about six reels) was shot in Paris, the great majority was shot in New York City, mainly in the South Bronx and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There is extensive and extraordinary footage of the devastated neighborhoods that pockmarked the South Bronx in the 1970s, including gaping abandoned buildings and desolate fields of rubble and debris.

The collection is especially valuable because of Barrat’s efforts to capture the lives and voices of inhabitants of these neighborhoods, especially young black and Latino men and women. There is a good deal of unique documentation of youth gangs in the South Bronx, especially THE ROMAN KINGS and QUEENS, the Savage Nomads, and participants in the federally financed Será anti-poverty program. Barrat not only interviewed gang members but also collaborated with them, allowing them to make their own films, some of which are included in this collection. A small portion of the material gathered here (including the films Vickie and The Trial) was used in the 1978 video and photo exhibition You Do the Crime, You Do the Time at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Segments of the exhibition, along with an interview with Barrat, were featured on the nationally broadcast NBC television special, “Violence in America.” The video was also broadcast in its entirety in Italy, where it received an award for best documentary in Milan.

The reels filmed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan are equally remarkable. In late 1973, Barrat and jazz drummer Charles “Bobo” Shaw opened the La Mama Children’s Workshop at 236 East Third Street, where during the following two years they organized free classes in music, dance, and visual art for neighborhood children. The collection includes footage not only of some of the workshops, but also of concerts in some of the legendary musician-run spaces then flourishing in lower Manhattan. The most valuable may be the rare 1976 footage of an entire concert by a group led by saxophonist Dewey Redman at Sam River’s Studio Rivbea at 24 Bond Street. There are also nearly three hours of footage of a rehearsal by the well-known funk group Kool and the Gang.

As a whole, the Martine Barrat video collection offers an unparalleled vision of the vibrancy and resilience of the arts and everyday life in New York during the mid-1970s.

- Brent Hayes Edwards