Movies

It was, as moments go, electric.

The year was 1996, when Dallas wasn't exactly a model of racial harmony. Bart Weiss, founder of the Dallas Video Festival, had asked Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price to lead a discussion on the pros and cons of the controversial 1950s television show Amos 'n' Andy.

The festival was honoring pioneer black filmmaker Spencer Williams, who had played Andy. At the time, Mr. Price was as much of a lightning rod on issues of race as anyone in Dallas. Mr. Weiss fretted openly about the need for security.

"I was worried," he says. Legendary comedian Steve Allen had led an earlier discussion about his own golden era in television and decided, spontaneously, to join the discussion on Amos 'n' Andy. He assisted Mr. Price by talking about anti-Semitism and how comedy has long played a role in defusing racial tension.

"The show goes on, and it's wonderful," says Mr. Weiss, 54, who this year is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Dallas Video Festival, which takes place today and Wednesday at the Angelika Film Center & Cafe before moving on to the Dallas Theater Center on Thursday through Sunday. The discussion "was beautiful ... one of those magical moments you'll never forget."

There have been many more, of course, starting with the first festival in 1987, when actress Edie Adams, the widow of comedian Ernie Kovacs, showed a catalog of memorable clips from her husband's years as a television pioneer.

It did nothing less, says Mr. Weiss, than set the tone for a most ambitious festival, which this year will screen more than 250 titles from 13 countries and is the oldest in the nation devoted to video.

Video has grown exponentially since the festival began and, says Mr. Weiss, now plays the lofty role of transcending the often straitjacketed worlds of commercial television and blockbuster flicks. Beyond that, however, he has been surprised and thrilled at how Dallas, his adopted home (he was born in Philadelphia and lives in the Kessler Park section of Oak Cliff), has embraced and sustained the festival.

"Especially in Dallas, where the culture is rather conservative," says Mr. Weiss, who teaches video and film in the department of art and art history at the University of Texas at Arlington. "But for 20 years, we've screened films and videos that are completely different, quite upstream from popular culture, and we've been able to exist and thrive and build an audience – here. And to me, that's a really amazing thing."

This year's festival promises to be no exception, with titles ranging from Fat Girls to Freaks of Dallas to Making an Anti-Hollywood Movie for Under 40 Grand to Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril.

Mr. Weiss is a big believer in video, which in many ways has guided his own life. Sandwiched between older and younger siblings, both of whom became attorneys, he ended up at Beloit College in Wisconsin, intending to study political science.

But after he found himself attending nightly screenings of Beloit's version of alternative cinema, he embarked on a new adventure by majoring in film. He transferred to Temple University and later obtained a master of fine arts degree at Columbia University in New York City, meaning to teach.

He taught briefly at a college in West Virginia, where the students were so poor many could not afford bus fare to campus, much less Super 8 film. And then, in 1981, he landed a job at Southern Methodist University, where "even the poor students had Mazdas."

After SMU, he wrote about film and video for various Dallas newspapers and for a time during the 1980s was program director for On the Air, which showed music videos at a club on Lower Greenville.

In 1986, Mr. Weiss and Melissa Berry collaborated to present a weekend of video programming titled "Video as a Creative Medium," which morphed into the Dallas Video Festival.

And now, after all these years, perhaps no better description of the growth and range of the festival is the one offered by Mr. Weiss on his all-encompassing Web site:

"Video has finally evolved into a technically beautiful, flexible, accessible and often clandestine medium that works like magic in the hands of artists and storytellers and provides a powerful tool for social change in the hands of media activists."

Even Steve Allen would be proud.

Plan your life

The Dallas Video Festival begins at 7:30 tonight at the Angelika Film Center & Cafe at Mockingbird Station, where it resumes at 7 p.m. Wednesday. It moves to the Dallas Theater Center at 7 p.m. Thursday and continues there through Sunday. For ticket information, call 214-428-8700 or go to www.videofest.org

Bart Weiss, director of the Dallas Video Festival, recounts his 10 top moments from the first 20 years of the festival:

1 Comedian Steve Allen and Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price engage in a spontaneous discussion about race in 1996 in the context of a pro-or-con examination of the 1950s TV show Amos 'n' Andy.

2 In 1987, Scooter Smith produces the first video festival intro, which starts a long line of creative work.

3 In the festival's inaugural program in 1987, actress Edie Adams, the widow of Ernie Kovacs, shows clips from her husband's catalog – "the first artist to work in television." It sets the tone for innovation at the festival.

4 The festival goes interactive in 1992.

5 The festival seizes a home page on the World Wide Web in 1994. "I remember telling all, 'Anyone anywhere in the world will know what we are doing here in Dallas. Ain't that cool!' "

6 Having a full house for the experimental performance of Luke Savisky in 2005.

7 In 2006, the showing of Guts and Glory, a film version of the 24-hour video race, which gave filmmakers 24 hours to produce a film.

8 A virtual-reality program in 1988. Scott Fisher from NASA shows off virtual-reality goggles and gloves.

9 The tribute to Marshall McLuhan and Marlon Riggs in 1993.

10 Getting a fax machine in 1989 "so we could get in touch with Europe without getting up at 3 a.m."