The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd is a video directed by Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America involving footage filmed between 1970 and 1975 following the lives and marriage of Carel Rowe and Ferd Eggan. Originally shown as a 3- channel video, 8-monitor installation including live feed of the audience for The Kitchen in New York in 1971, the edited video is now distributed by Video Data Bank and Electronic Arts Intermix. The edited video consists of an hour-long tape selected from over 30 hours of footage that includes both footage of the marriage and subsequent consummation, shot from 1971-1972, and footage of an interview of Carel, Ferd, and Ginsberg produced for WNET's Video and Television Review in 1975. The video is most readily available as a 33:15 segment on a collection of videos and video segments produced by Video Data Bank, Surveying the First Decade: Volume One: Program 3: Approaching Narrative: "There are Problems to be Solved".The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd is often classified as video vérité, somewhere in between cinéma vérité and reality television, though the footage predates An American Family, a documentary series often considered the first example of reality television.The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd blends modes of camera address, featuring shots taken by Ginsberg of the couple in private or among friends, as well as first-person camera confessional shots. Ginsberg, through the recently founded Video Free America, received some of the first Sony Portapaks in America in order to shoot the footage. Seeking to film the making of a pornographic film, Ginsberg found Carel and Ferd, who were looking to make an erotic film from their wedding, in order to repay a man whose car Ferd had recently crashed. Ginsberg began shooting the day that Richard, an old friend of Carel's, came by to talk about the wedding. This initial session was spontaneous, and in this instance Ginsberg says that in using video media, he was able to capture this footage impulsively, the video came about by chance. Though the footage is centered on the event of the wedding, the camera's insertion into the lives of Carel and Ferd before the event means that much of the footage anticipates the wedding self-consciously. Though the footage is cut to highlight specific moments and events, most of the footage is edited straightforwardly so as to not interrupt the narrative flow, the limited editing testament to Ginsberg's belief that with videotape any editing at all is "sapping its strength as a real-time medium."