It produced and showcased "Guerrilla TV" style video documentaries that featured subject matter and stylistic qualities not seen on mainstream television of the period.
[1] At the time of their meeting Reilly had just completed a series of tapes documenting the Woodstock Festival with co-collaborator Ira Schneider (who later served as president of Raindance Foundation, 1972–1994).
[2] Their first event consisted of a bank of ten monitors on which they presented "a live mix program featuring music performed at Woodstock, President Nixon speaking on the war in Vietnam, the Black Panthers, student protestors and a couple having sex in a field.
"[3] The 2013 New York Times Obituary for Reilly states that the early Global Village Video “shows” “amounted to a counter cultural feast: regular visitors included Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Timothy Leary.
In 1971, the magazine Art in America called it "the only commercial outlet for underground video.”[1] Reilly, Schneider, and Stern also featured the works of several other innovative video artists.
[4] Rolling Stone wrote that Global Village's media environments juxtapose "political, rock, erotic, and humorous tapes on ten monitors which are constantly switching.
"[27] Other productions include Joe Albert’s Fox Hunt and Other Stories from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey (1979),[28] The Pursuit of Happiness (1984),[29][30] and The Trial of the AVCO Plowshares (1986).
That documentary chronicled the activists' trial for entering into a manufacturing plant of the AVCO Systems Division and damaging parts and equipment that would be used to make nuclear weapons.
Gontarski at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco; Not I (1989), with theater direction by Lawrence Sacharow; and Quad I + II (1988), adaptations by the Suzanne Lek Dance Company.
Those young filmmakers - Tiffanie Johnson, Tracy Morton, Kimeca Rodgers, Cassandra Swaing, and Peggy Wang - use Gustafson's documentary and their short videos to discuss their lives, their goals, their loves, and their families.
[3] In addition to regular fall and spring screening series, Reilly created the Global Village Annual Documentary Festival in 1974, and Gustafson joined him in producing the event for the next 15 years (1975–1989).
[43] Renee Tajima-Peña wrote in The Village Voice in 1989: “For years Global Village has promoted the documentary under a banner of urgency, ‘the endangered species.’"[1] Between 1976 and 1981, Gustafson and Reilly also collaborated on “The Independent Producer, Public Television and the New Video Technologies,” a national series of workshops bringing information on new video technologies and networking opportunities for public television programmers and independent producers.
[44] These workshops helped lay the groundwork for the current golden age of independent documentary production and distribution in public TV, cable and the Internet.