Thanks for a great semester!

Please stay tuned for postings about summer shows.

thanks, Kim

Welcome to Spring 2013

1/23  A THIRD CINEMA VOLUME 1  curated  by Juan Daniel Molero
1/30   DEAFINING SILENCE  Holly Fisher
2/6     STOP Jeff Preiss
2/13  Philippe Grandrieux
2/20  MARY FILLIPPO
2/27  Victor  Faccinto
3/6    Stan Brakhage, Marie Mencken, Owen Land, & Ernie Gehr
3/13  spring break
3/20  Jo Dery
3/27  Cate Giordano
4/3   Laura Parnes
4/9   Alumni Rendezvous
4/10 Alison Kobayashi
4/17 Bobby Abate
4/24 Anne Charlotte Robertson
5/1   Gretchen Skogerson
5/8  Sara Driver & Gunvor Nelson

Tonight! 5/8/13 Films by Sara Driver & Gunvor Nelson

Program:


You Are Not I by Sara Driver (1981)

Co-written by Jim Jarmusch, this film's negative was lost in a warehouse fire. It is based on a Paul Bowles story and a print was found among his belongings in his estate. A digitally remastered version was shown for the first time in 20 years in 2010. A 16mm print was donated to MassArt.


Red Shift & Time Being by Gunvor Nelson

5/1/13 Gretchen Skogerson

Program:

 

swf, 29, seeks self (9:00, 2004) examines attraction and repulsion through contrasting educational film footage and phone messages against a story of loss.

housework (3:00,1999) sucks up dirt and germs, both real and imagined.

Frontier Step  (8:40, 2007) reveals a glimpse of the works atop the Superdome from July 2006.  Their uncluttered domain provides a sharp contrast to the unseen, destroyed city of New Orleans below.   

not karaoke redux (6:00, 2005/2013) skates through girls and horses, cascading pharmaceuticals, celebrity blitzing, poverty, excess and the 59th parallel. You can't sing along.

Nightparking (12:00, 2008) records the imprint of industrial and suburban landscapes on their nocturnal inhabitants.

Alone, We Are Together (version 1, 2013) celebrates the beauty of our wired world as well as its frustrations and the inevitability of becoming even more in sync with our devices.

Gretchen Skogerson is a multi-media artist known for pristine, minimalist work.  In recent video work she captured deserted urban landscapes at night.  Currently, she is interested in a form of ensemble storytelling that alternates between on-location and theatrical setups.

http://www.gretchenskogerson.com/

4/24/13 Anne Charlotte Robertson

4/17/13 Bobby Abate

A Party Record Packed with Sex and Sadness (2011)
10 min / HD

A Few Extra Copies (2012)

10 min / HD

The Evil Eyes (2011)
18 Min / HD

Gossip (2011)
8 Min / HD

The Tanti Man (1999)
14min / 16mm color sound

Come Softly (2000)

Web Video

Untitled Super-8 Film as Donna Marie Jones
2003

& PERHAPS A LITTLE TAROT

http://www.sweetkitty.com/

4/9, 2013 Alumni Rendevous also this week 4/10 Alison Kobayashi

The Film/Video Department is pleased to announce its inaugural alumni group show:

Alumni Rendezvous

This series showcases diverse moving image work created by Mass Art BFA and MFA alumni.

Alumni Rendezvous

shorts by:

Cooper Conley-Currier

Elliot Bamberger

Hongsun Yoon

James Melloni

Melissa Bruno

Yuki Akiyama

join us at 7:00pm on Tuesday, March 19, 2013 in Screening Room One (Film Area)

program runtime: 1 hour, 15 minutes

refreshments served

Alumni Rendezvous

 is part of an ongoing series with 2-3 programs per semester.  Film/Video alumni--please contact Gretchen Skogerson (gskogerson@massart.edu) if you are interested in showing your work at a future screening.  Hope to see you on March 19th!

4/10/13 ALISON S. M. KOBAYASHI

Program:

DAN CARTER

video

14MIN,58SEC

2006

Dan Carter donated his answering machine to a secondhand store.

Dan Carter did not remove the cassette tape.

So I took it.

This film is based on the messages.

FROM ALEX TO ALEX

VIDEO

6MIN, 11SEC

2006

In the fall of 2003 I found a letter on the Winston Churchill Blvd QEW overpass.

It was labeled From: Alex To: Alex.

This is a film based on the contents of that letter.

DO GOOD

video

10MIN,38SEC

2009

I catalogued my family’s home video collection.

I came across videos of my sister and I in Brownie and Girl Guide ceremonies.

It made me want to DO GOOD.

It made me want to invite others to DO GOOD too.

Five Brownies created new badges.

Each Brownie made a video that explained what was required to earn her badge.

PLEASURE DOME

video

12MIN 26SEC

2010

Very little is publicly known about what is inside Pleasure Dome. This broadcast was made to learn more about Pleasure Dome from those who inhabit it.

It is clear that there are a number of things that have found their origin in Pleasure Dome but have never escaped Pleasure Dome. We asked the inhabitants to share some of Pleasure Dome’s idiosyncrasies. The content for this broadcast was determined by a lottery system. The first ten names drawn and the idiosyncrasy highlighted by that individual, determined the broadcast’s focus. We hope this approach has created an objective look at a very singular place.

HUNGRY KITTY

video

28 SEC

2011

Hungry Kitty is the first installment of Kobayashi’s YouTube Diptych series. By carefully reshooting YouTube videos from the perspectives of animals, babies and other beings, Kobayashi experiments and playfully reinterprets the gaze of YouTube videos.

DEFENSE MECHANISM ou MÉCANISME DE DÉFENSE (excerpt from performance documentation)

20 minute live performance

2012

In her French debut, Kobayashi invites us into her imagination through her one woman show, produced especially for Ca Tremble. Kobayashi combines consumer security surveillance technology with her ensemble of characters and a collection of tenderly-curated narratives. The presentation resembles a box of Allsorts Licorice - colourful, nostalgic and difficult to predict.

This performance was developed at a 2012 residency at Les Subsistances, Lyon France.

HOW TO BREAK INTO A MOTEL

video

2009

30 SEC

A collaboration by Alison S. M. Kobayashi and Gintas Tirilis.

In the cold winter of 2008 Gintas Tirilis and Alison S. M. Kobayashi explored the

Mississauga, Etobicoke suburbs desperately in search a warm place where they could

smoke cigarettes. What the pair discovered was a strip of motels along Lakeshore Blvd,

just on the edge of Toronto, abandoned. Further exploration into these dilapidated

structures became a nightly routine as they dared to gain greater access and eventually

decided to remove some of the discarded vestiges for preservation.

CURRENT WORK

3 MIN SAMPLE

BIO//

Alison S. M. Kobayashi is a visual artist working in video, performance, installation and drawing. She was born and raised in Mississauga, Canada and is currently based in Brooklyn.

Her interest in found narratives resulted in two video works, From Alex To Alex and Dan Carter. Finding a lost letter in the first case, and a discarded answering machine tape in the second, Kobayashi imagines identities for each person mentioned in the narrative and then performs all the roles herself. In 2006 she won the TSV Artistic Vision Award for Best Local Short Film at the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival and in 2007 was awarded the Mississauga Arts Award for Best Emerging Artist. Her films have been shown in Canada, the U.S., France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Hong Kong.
www.asmk.ca

4/3/13 Laura Parnes

County Down is a multi-platform project, combining web-based elements, a video installation and a feature film component. Mirroring rave culture and the unbridled optimism around technology during the 1990s, County Down presents a society so obsessed with novelty and consumerism that it euphorically embraces its own destruction.

The film uses the structure of youth-culture media products, such as horror and science fiction movies, video games and coming-of-age films as a barometer of cultural depression. In this live-action animation, reality and illusion intermingle, creating a highly stylized world of visual excess.

The multigenerational cast of downtown performers and artists including: Chloe Bass, Becca Blackwell, Ellen Cantor, Patty Chang, Marti Domination, Nicole Eisenman, Jim Fletcher, James Fotopoulos, Gibson Frazier, Daniel Graff, Andy Haynes, William Powhida, Emily Roysdon, Kate Valk, Stephanie Vella and Sacha Yanow. The soundtrack and musical arrangements are by Johanna Fateman, formerly of Le Tigre, and also include music by JD Samson, Wynne Greenwood, Long Hind Legs and Lesbians On Ecstasy. Costumes and styling are by GGrippo.

County Down is the story of Angel, a teenage resident of a gated community. She develops a designer drug with potentially apocalyptic side effects. The drug, called Quix, is the ultimate consumer product, highly addictive and cheap to produce. This substance is a relative of ergot, a rye contaminate responsible for St. Anthony’s Fire, inducing symptoms that include hallucinations and gangrene. It is also the fungus from which LSD is derived. Those that ingest the drug develop immunity but become unwitting carriers. Angel holds the key to the outbreak and its prevention – but her own debilitating addiction to both the drug and her self-made success clouds her judgment.

Angel is intoxicated with power and enraptured by the disaster she set in motion. As Angel’s friends band together to fight the infected adults, their social order becomes more and more distorted. Consumption becomes addiction, which, in turn, hastens the spread of disease. As the authorities close in, Angel clings to her delusions ferociously.

BIO

Laura Parnes has screened and exhibited her work widely in the US and internationally, including Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece., LOOP Festival, Barcelona, Spain; Light Industry, Brooklyn, NY; Kusthalle Winterhur, Switzerland; Overgaden- Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; iMOCA, Indianapolis, IN; Cinematexas, Austin, TX; Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Whitney Museum of American Art (1997 Whitney Biennial), NY; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand; PSI Contemporary Art Center MoMA, NY; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, FL; and Brooklyn Museum, NY.

Her solo exhibitions include; LA><Art, LA, CA; Alma Enterprises, London; Locust Projects, Miami; Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LA; Participant Inc, NY; and Deitch Projects, NY. She has had solo screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC;  MoMA PS1, LIC; The Kitchen, NYC; CATE 10 Year Anniversary, Presented by the School of Art Institute of Chicago and Video Data Bank, Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago Ill; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, CA; and Vtape, Toronto. She was presented by Participant Inc. in a two-person exhibition at No Soul for Sale at X Initiative, NYC, NY.

3/27/13 Cate Giordano

Program

1.  Peg Bordelon Series "Ass and Titties", 10:46.  2013

A southern transplant named Peg Bordelon winds up in New York City, hell bent on making a film called “Ass and Titties.” Posing as a “Women’s Studies” major at a non-existent college, Peg claims to be making a film that is a celebration of female sexuality. Recognizable by her curly hair and American flag bandana, Peg is often found skulking through the streets of Brooklyn, camera in hand, looking for attractive young ladies who are ready to embrace their womanhood.

2.  Hunter in the Woods, 7:59.  2007

Hunter Dodge escapes his unhappy relationship with Joy by retreating to the woods and building himself a wife out of scrap wood. Basking in his delusional paradise, Hunter is content with his silent, self-created partner, Susannah. However, Joy finds Hunter and drags him kicking and screaming back into reality.

3.  Species, 14:09.  2008

Trapped in the belly of a Trojan Lion, Jonah and Dot are falling out of love. Jonah, a writer, fights to remain true to his artistic visions, despite mounting pressure from Dot to earn money. Dot runs off with a shape-shifting insurance salesman named Hugh, leaving Jonah to incubate in the belly of the lion.

4.  Heritage, 30:23.  2012

It is 1888 and all the buffalo are gone, leaving one of the largest cities in South Dakota empty.  Now there are only two residents left.  One of them is Beau, a hunter once regaled for his 4000 buffalo pelts and his disgruntled wife, Ruby.  In the absence of buffalo to kill, Beau erects an enormous statue of a White Buffalo on his property, while a horrified Ruby begs him to abandon his project.  When an out-of-town preacher arrives with his brainwashed followers and destroys Beau's buffalo and steals his wife, Beau embarks on a journey to find the real White Buffalo.  Shot "on location" in the streets of New York City, "Heritage is a melodrama about a man, played by a woman, who learns to deal with the reality of change and the freedom of being alone.  

3/20/13 Jo Dery

Info on this show to come soon

3/6/13 Programmed by Saul himself

These are rarely screened films, a Film Society not to be missed.

Program:

Anticipation of the Night, 16mm, 40 min,1958
STAN BRAKHAGE

A daylight shadow of a man in its movement evokes lights in the night. A rose held in hand reflects both sun and moon like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promisory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. The moon moves over a pillared temple to which all lights return. There is seen the sleep of innocents in their animal dreams, becoming the amusement, their circular game, becoming the morning. The trees change color and lose their leaves for the morn, they become the complexity of branches in which the shadow man hangs himself. (Stan Brakhage)

"... a film in the first person. The protagonist, like the members of the audience, is a voyeur, and his eventual suicide is a result of his inability to participate in the 'untutored' seeing experience of a child. Anticipation consists of a flow of colors and shapes which constantly intrigues us by placing the unknown object next to the known in a significant relationship, by metamorphosing one visual statement into another." (P. Adams Sitney)

Notebook 16mm, 7min, 1940-1962
MARIE MENKEN 

Regarding Notebook, filmmaker Marie Menken once stated that "these are too tiny or too obvious for comment, but one or two are my dearest children." Menken was being far too humble, as Notebook is considered by many aficionados of experimental cinema as being her greatest work. Notebook was assembled in 1962 and 1963 from bits and pieces of films Menken had shot over the years; some of these short takes date as far back as the late '40s. Individual segments are organized into brief chapters, which include such experiments as single-frame footage of neon signs at night, single-frame footage of the moon, a shot of a leaf collecting water in a light rainstorm, and others. Stan Brakhage stayed with Menken and her husband, Willard Maas, when he first settled in New York in the 1950s. Brakhage was shown many of the individual pieces that ultimately made up Notebook, and later gladly acknowledged his own stylistic debt to them, which is most readily apparent in Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night (1958). ~ David Lewis, Rovi


Undesirables (Work-In-Progress), 1999
16mm original, transferred to vhs video, tansferred to DVD, b/w, sound, 12 mins
OWEN LAND (formerly known as George Landow)

A rough-cut of selected scenes, edited as a sampler to be used in fundraising towards completion of the film "Undesirables". “The idea started with a casual comment made by Stan Brakhage, must have been way back in the early 1970s. It stuck in my mind. Now that I think about it, Brakhage may have meant this as a joke. He said, “Someday Hollywood will probably make a film about us,” ­ ‘us’ meaning the experimental filmmakers ­ “and I wonder which actors will play us?” Think about that first of all: the idea that Hollywood would make a film about experimental filmmakers is totally ridiculous. The fact that one would think about which actor was going to play me at some time in the future, I think that’s very funny. Eventually it germinated in my mind and I thought it was an interesting idea… A film about experimental filmmakers, especially in the very formative period, approximately 1968 to 1972. The movement went from a high point where there was a lot of publicity generated in the media, and seemed to peter out shortly after that. At a certain time, I guess it was in the 1980s, there was some discussion in film circles about the decline of the experimental film and people were theorising about why it happened and some people suggested maybe because of video, and I guess there were other theories too. So I thought, “Why not come up with a fantastic theory about why that happened?” ­ a fictional theory ­ and put that into a film?” (Owen Land, interviewed by Mark Webber, 2004)

UNTITLED 81 Ernie Gehr 16mm
Ernie Gehr (born 1941) is an American experimental filmmaker closely associated with the Structural film movement of the 1970s. A self-taught artist, Gehr was inspired to begin making films in the 1960s after chancing upon a screening of a Stan Brakhage film. Gehr's film Serene Velocity (1970) has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Gehr served as faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute. His films are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco.


Remedial Reading Comprehension US 1970, 16mm, color, 5 min.
OWEN LAND (formerly known as George Landow)

Landow rejects the dream imagery of the historical trance film for the self-referential present, using macrobiotics, the language of advertising, and a speed-reading test on the definition of hokum. The alienated filmmaker appears, running uphill to distance himself from the lyrical cinema, but remember, “This is a film about you, not about its maker.”

Owen Land was born in Connecticut, USA in 1944. His films in the 1960s and 1970s are some of the first examples of the so-called "structural film" movement. Retrospective screenings of Land’s films have been held at the Edinburgh Film Festival, The Tate Gallery in London, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

2/27/13 Victor Faccinto

Victor Faccinto

Program:

*16mm*

Exercise (13 mins.) hand altered 16mm film
Book of Dead (15 mins.) hand altered and bleached 16mm film
Filet of Soul (16 mins.) paper cutout animation

*Video*

Visual Remains, 2001 (5:50) altered and bleached 16mm film on DVD
Facts and Figures, 2012 (10:30) details from the lives of Thomas Edison, Teddy Roosevelt and Fatty Arbuckle

Information:
Nightmare, 2009 (7.5 mins.)
To Hell and Back, 2010 (13 mins.)

Digital animation of hand-altered and anatomically correct Barbie dolls with
overlapping and interacting live video actors.

The Video Vic character in Nightmare and To Hell and Back was created in 1969
and appeared in four 16mm animated films completed between 1969 and 1974.
These films were made from hand painted paper dolls and background sets.

Faccinto returned to animation in 2007. The digital video editing programs that
had become available offered tools that made it possible to combine real life
video, 3-D background sets and animated dolls into a living visual world of its
own.

To Hell and Back is a visual journey through levels of Hell revealing the
subsequent trials and revelations experienced by the film’s central character.

Facts and Figures, 2012 (10.5 mins.)

A hybrid documentary made with found and created visual materials, digitally
constructed into a visual presentation of selected details from the lives of
three American historical figures: Thomas Edison, Teddy Roosevelt and Fatty
Arbuckle.

Victor Faccinto began making 16mm animated films during the late 1960s in
northern California. He moved to NYC in 1974 where he continued his work as
a filmmaker and painter. Between 1972 and 1974 his early “Video Vic” animated
films were included in the New American Filmmaker’s Series at the Whitney
Museum of American Art as well as numerous national film festivals. In 1975 he
was selected for a Cineprobe screening at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

He was represented by and exhibited with Phyllis Kind Gallery, NYC from 1980
through 2006. Between 1994 and 2009 he developed and produced live multi-
screen, 16mm film projection performances. In 2007 he began experimenting
with digital video, evolving techniques used to create Video Sculptures, a series
recent video work. He is currently represented by Luise Ross Gallery, NYC.
Faccinto lives in North Carolina. He recently retired after 34 years as director of
the Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University.

Artist statement:

Perhaps this is a shortcoming in view of current expectations that artists explain
their creativity in a few paragraphs, but the truth of the matter is that for the
most part I do not create what I think or plan in advance. My creative decisions
are made in real time during execution and directed by an instinctive visual
perception that decides right from wrong and guides my next move forward.
What it may mean or reference once completed, is always a surprise to me.

About my video sculptures

The primary driving force behind my recent video work lies in the “hunt,” a
timeless on-going process of exploration and experimentation in search of
new visual territory that may only be identified and captured at the moment it is
revealed.

In a process more akin to sculpture than linear filmmaking, I remove moving
images from their backgrounds and utilize them as bricks and lumber to construct
“video sculptures.”

Creating digital “video sculpture” is much like putting together a picture puzzle.
It begins with one or two pieces found in a box without the picture on the cover.
The expectation is a long term commitment coupled with a series journeys down
dead end streets, and a redundancy of labor parallel to that of a coal miner. The
rewards come during those brief moments of clarity when a new “puzzle piece”
reveals itself and another step may be taken forward.

2/20/13 Mary Filippo

How I Can Enjoy Mine When You Don't Have Any

I began this film in 2004 auditing introductory economics courses.  I thought I'd gain a better understanding of the forces behind increasing inequality in the U.S., globalization, sweatshops, ecological breakdown, etc. Ha!

What I found was an imaginary world depicted in geometric models.  It was a world so different from my experience and understanding, that I knew it was all wrong.  But it took me years to tease out the assumptions behind the models, and to "deconstruct" them, and several more years to figure out how to represent what I learned to you.

This is an educational film about my own education, and it's for someone like you.  Someone who will probably never take an economics class, or if you do, might be unlucky enough to find yourself in a class like the ones satirized in this film.

I'll be showing the first 2 parts and selections for the 3rd part, of what will be a 3 part film.

 Some key critics of main stream economics speak in the film; Herman Daly, Richard Wolff, John Bellamy Foster, and many others.

2/13/13 LA VIE NOUVELLE a film by Philippe Grandrieux

Location back to normal:
Filmmaker in person!
8pm FILM DEPT
Screening Rm 1

LA VIE NOUVELLE
a film by Philippe Grandrieux
format 35mm 1/85 / son dolby srd & dts / running time 1h42

Since its premiere screenings in late 2002, Philippe Grandrieux's second feature La Vie Nouvelle (A New Life) has been a cause célèbre.

On its theatrical release in France, it was savaged by a large number of prominent newspaper and magazine reviewers. But the film has many passionate defenders, whose responses have been collected in Nicole Brenez's forthcoming book La Vie nouvelle: nouvelle vision

Like Grandrieux's groundbreaking debut feature Sombre (1998), La Vie nouvelle explores a punk-Sadean view of the human animal and crumbling social structures; far more than Sombre, it has divided audiences and ignited rejection from an affronted critical mainstream. But its advocates believe that this extreme cinema, founded on a philosophic investigation of evil, is also a blow for avant-garde liberty.


Pulsating filmmaking
The films of Philippe Grandrieux pulsate. They pulsate microcosmically: in the images, the camera trembles and flickers so violently that, even within a single, continuous shot, no photogram resembles another. And they pulsate macro-cosmically: the soundtrack is constructed globally upon unidentifiable, layered, synthesized, ambient noises of breath or wind, sucked in and expelled, which underlie the entire film and constitute its disturbed heartbeat, returning to our ear when all other sounds have disappeared. In the very beginnings and endings of his films, over the credits, there is nothing but this strangely bodily sound.

And then there are the pulses of music and dance. Grandrieux's films are severely mutated musicals. There is even a song delivered in a seedy Sarajevo nightclub by Anna Mouglalis in La Vie nouvelle, reminding us of the spaced-out performances of Isabella Rossellini in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Asia Argento in Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel (1998). The dance music in Grandrieux's films is always driven, anguished. A robotic techno beat overlaid by punk cries, slurs, growls, murmurs. Trance music, fit for Jean Rouch's maîtres fous.

But it is men who are the masters in Grandrieux's spectacles. Boyan in La Vie nouvelle is lord of the dance: before the disco crowd, he pumps his fist manically into the air. And more than this: he is the marionette master. Mélania is his puppet. We know already from Sombre how much intensity and importance Grandrieux invests in images of control: its hero, in hiding, literally works Punch and Judy dolls to elicit screams of terror and ecstasy from small children. And so much of the texture of that film—from the disquieting images of cars in ghostly, floating motion to the eerie, disembodied loudspeaker announcements at outdoor sports events—evokes a sort of Mabusian "remote control" of people and a dispossession of their wills.

Women under the influence. In Grandrieux's films, women seek more than the ecstasy of a trance in their dancing. They are beyond the momentary, transcendental grace of dance offered to Cassavetes-style heroines like the sad ex-lover (Robin Wright) in Sean Penn's The Crossing Guard (1995) or the battered wife-and-mother in Gary Oldman's Nil By Mouth (1997). Or rather, Grandrieux's women seek through that trance-dance to escape, to violently tear themselves out of their own skins. To leave behind the impossible contradictions of the intersubjective bind in which they caught, bought and sold and bartered like slaves, like chattel. Right in the heart of the worst moments—when they are scared, drunk, drugged, on display, menaced from all sides—Grandrieux's women dance. Think of the woman semi-naked in the car headlights in Sombre or, in the same film, Elina Löwensohn hurling herself about to punk-rockabilly as she tries to tell her new beast-captor: "I'm in danger".

Danger. Grandrieux is a filmmaker of the body, but rarely the variable space or interval between bodies, as in Visconti or Murnau or Mizoguchi. There is no space between bodies in Grandrieux; they are jammed together in a difficult, fraught intimacy. All clinches, all embraces are potentially violent, charged with the alienness of the Other and the terror of negotiating his or her too-close presence. From Boyan's cutting of Mélania's hair—a gesture as excruciatingly extended in time as it is collapsed in space—to the terrified inside-out souls lost in subterranean darkness, from the homoerotic rituals of men greeting and drinking to heterosexual violation and a cannibalistic death: bodies meet not in ecstatic abandon but on fearful alert.

Mise en scène—the art of bodies in space—is always, subtly or overtly, a dance, but this is the dance of death, the living death of everyday power relations. The two scenes of Mélania's prostitution, one placed directly after the other in Grandrieux's cinema of cruelty, provide an inventory of bodily postures figuring fright, uncertainty, panic and stress, a primal, physical language of animals under threat: Seymour's instant post-coital blues, Mélania's vulnerable nakedness, and the icy upper-body stress of the French client, who finally withdraws into himself and away from the Other in order to masturbate in a fuzzy, atomised blur.

There are many women on stage in Grandrieux's films—showgirls, gyrating as they display their sad flesh, draping themselves over men in order to solicit money as they gaze at themselves vacuously in a mirror (Mélania performs this gesture early in La Vie nouvelle, exactly as Seymour becomes entranced by his fantasy of her). The trance or flight offered by dance cannot happen on stage like this, during work hours.

It must happen within the Dionysiac confusion of a crowd that is saturated by music and noise, fuelled by intoxicating substances, as it does for the wildly dancing women in Emir Kusturica's Underground (1995) and Black Cat White Cat (1998), women who party like it's 1999. Yet when does the Grandrieux heroine ever leave the stage, completely? That is the question posed in the remarkable five-minute dance sequence towards the end of La Vie nouvelle, shortly before Boyan invites Seymour into the thermic inferno.

Contriving paradoxes
The sequence develops in stages, closely tied to the progressive layering of tracks in the techno music mix. It begins in silence, with that ambient wind sound soon entering, plus a floating, chiming chord every few seconds. In a first phase, the sequence shows us Boyan caressing Mélania as if to mold her. He is the metteur en scène and the choreographer here, and he directs his puppet to twirl. As often in La Vie nouvelle, Grandrieux cleverly contrives unusual, paradoxical effects of speed and movement, always based on the unexpected and uncanny comparison of different vectors or planes in the image.

Like the woman who, in the opening shots, remains with eyes wide open while her companion blinks furiously (it is a fast-motion effect), or the other local inhabitants who, while in out-of-focus close-up, later seem to glide slowly through the day-lit landscape on some unseen conveyor belt, here Mélania's spin is irreal: she is clearly on some rotating disc we do not see—a device pioneered by Jean Cocteau in the credits of La Princesse de Clèves (Jean Delannoy, 1961) and extended over an entire film by Miklós Jancsó in A zsarnok szíve, avagy Boccaccio Magyarországon (The Tyrant's Heart, 1981)—and meanwhile the camera's own circular movement confounds the spatial and perceptual paradox.

Boyan's hands fan, flutter, guide, caress, mock Mélania. Boyan turns to his own dance reverie—this is the second phase of the sequence, devoted entirely to shots of him, as a techno beat and a fast bass pattern on a single note enter. Lighting and posture (particularly his hunched position as viewed from the back) transform the marionette master momentarily into a Nosferatu, and images of his face resemble a demon. Then (phase 3) the scene reintegrates Mélania in her increasingly accelerating choreography. Two repeating synthesized notes, a tone apart, fill out the musical space between the bass line and the floating chime-chords. More techno percussion enters, capped off by a disco high-hat cymbal. Mélania's spinning reaches a frenzy, a crescendo. An inspired noise effect has also joined the fray: a whooshing, whip-like sound. At first it seems keyed to Mélania's twirl, but almost instantly it gains a musical, sensorial autonomy, disengaged from synchronisation with the action.

The sequence, now centering on Mélania, reaches its high point of visual defiguration (phase 4). The camera shakes so much in response to her dance that her face in close-up is flattened, stretched, lost, found, from one frame to the next. One can longer tell what exact gestures she is performing, where she is situated in the room, or even where the line of her body ends and the surrounding environment begins (a pictorial subversion common in Grandrieux). If one freezes these frames of her face, arms, neck and shoulders, a hundred things can be seen or hallucinated, hidden by the défilement: a torso, a cloud, an insect, a mask, sexual organs.

In this fury of defiguration, a miracle is performed, a magical and lyrical transport. The music fades, and there is only, for about five seconds, the whooshing whip sound. Mélania seems weightless, detached from time and space. She is freed at last. But at a certain moment, during this movement of her body, there is a subtle transition—from the reddish background of the rehearsal room to bright lights piercing darkness. The transportation has (although we don't realise this immediately) reversed its direction and fallen back to earth. Mélania is now in a nightclub. The sound tells us this before the image: fade up on a cheering crowd, and the return in full force of the techno music. There is no escape for her.

Now (phase 5) Mélania is again the center of attention with Boyan, adored by a crowd. Their dancing is intense. While Boyan is certain of his movements, always in control, Mélania dances to get out of herself—an impulse conveyed in her constant violation of, and flight from, the borders of the compositional frame. Sudden cut to a sixth and final phase: the wind-breath sound is prominent, and the music is only a distant, muffled rumble, as if in an adjacent room. Mélania has passed out and is held in Boyan's arms. Away from the crowd (who are glimpsed eerily still in their frenzy, but without the fullness of their soundtrack), Boyan poses with her limp body, like the Pietà, or James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958). Close-up on Boyan, who looks blankly, then smiles wickedly and throws his head back to laugh. End of sequence.

Is all this a matter of men and women, fixed gender roles, in Grandrieux's cinema? Not quite. For, in the generalised and systematic confusion of forms, identities and elements that is La Vie nouvelle, all gestures are dispersed, shared. Roscoe, too, raises his arms to dance like Boyan; but he is alone, the master of nothing, and his little pirouettes anticipate Mélania's frantic, imprisoned spinning. Roscoe and Seymour will also be seen in Pietà-like arrangements. Seymour will be embraced, sculpted, led by Boyan's hands, just as Mélania has been. And the Francis Bacon-style concentration on Mélania's upturned neck during her dancing lift-off and set-down links her to Seymour in the final moments of the film as to the anonymous Sarajevan at in its prologue... La Vie nouvelle, this "immense clip" of a film (as Raymond Bellour has called it), bound together by rhythms, pulsations, and screams of horror. -----------Adrian Martin

CREDITS
cast
Seymour > Zach Knighton

Mélania > Anna Mouglalis

Roscoe > Marc Barbé

Boyan > Zsolt Nagy

the Frenchman > Raoul Dantec

hired man > Vladimir Zintov

sad man > Gueorgui Kadourine

prostitute 1 > Simona Hülsemann

guitar player > Josh Pearson

Boyan’s men > Salvador Gueorguiev, Ivan Velichkov, Peter Petrov

prostitute 2 > Diana Guerova

Boyan’s wife > Boïka Velkova

stuntmen > "Les loups de Genain" / Étienne Duplan / Didier Dupré

written by > Philippe Grandrieux and Éric Vuillard

dp > Stéphane Fontaine

camera > Philippe Grandrieux

sound > Jean-Paul Mugel

continuity > Annick Lemonnier

editor > Françoise Tourmen

sound editor > Valérie Deloof

mix > Stéphane Thiébaut

grading > Isabelle Julien

casting > Frédérique Moidon > France

casting > Kerry Barden > USA / Ilka Valtcheva > Bulgaria

make-up > Géraldine Garetier

wardrobe > Ann Dunsford

original music > "Étant Donnés"

original song > "Smell my scent"

written by > Josh Pearson ("Lift To Experience") and Philippe Grandrieux

published by Delabel Music Publishing

with the kind permission of Bella Union Records UK

produced by Catherine Jacques

executive producers > Pierre Benqué (Maïa Films) / Emmanuel Schlumberger (L Films)

an LPZ / L films / Maïa films / coproduction

French production / Arte France Cinéma

with the participation of Blue Light (Alain de la Mata) London / Canal+

Centre National de la Cinématographie / Gimages 5

distribution > Mars Distribution

international sales > Wild Bunch

© 2002 / LPZ / Maïa Films / L Films / Arte France Cinéma
http://grandrieux.com/

Stop by Jeff Preiss-LOCATION CHANGE to Tower Auditorium SEE ABOVE

 

Jeff Preiss’ Stop

Director Jeff Preiss, has spent 17 years compiling 2,500 rolls of film shot from 1995-2012 for his film Stop which was featured at the 50th New York Film Festival this fall and will be screened as part of MoCA’s show Blues For Smoke from October 21 through January 7 in Los Angeles. Giampaolo Bianconi of the Brooklyn Rail takes us on an elaborative and descriptive journey behind the making’s of this beautifully personal and nostalgic film.

 

 

Bio

Jeff Preiss is a New York Based Filmmaker who first became known in the early 80s through his 8mm films chronicling Lower Manhattan and his participation in alternative screening venues, particularly Films Charas and The Collective For Living Cinema. In 1988, after shooting the Academy Award nominated Chet Baker bio-documentary Let's Get Lost, his work began to span music video and commercial production. In 1995 he became a partner in the production company Epoch Films. During the past 30 years he has produced a series of experimental films and film installations for venues including Musée d’art moderne de la Ville Paris, Museum Boijmans Rotterdam, MediaCity 2000 Biannual Seoul Korea, Neue Nationaigalerie Berlin and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles. In 2004 he co-founded the Lower East Side gallery ORCHARD where he made a series of films in collaboration with with Andrea Fraser, Nicolás Guagnini, Christian Philipp Müller, Josiah McElheny, Moyra Davey and Anthony McCall. Work From this series is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, NY and The Reina Sofia, Madrid. In 2012 his experimental feature film, STOP was a selection of the 50th New York Film Festival. He currently serves on the board of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York.

1/30/13 Holy Fisher

http://www.otherwisepictures.com/

d e a f e n i n g   s i l e n c e


a film by holly fisher

NTSC
TRT 118 mins
DVD available for preview only

(c)2012 Otherwise Pictures llc
all rights reserved


 synopsis

d e a f e n i n g  s i l e n c e  is a fusion of beauty and terror, observation and anger, roving visuals and intimate stories either funny, contemplative, or horrific – a subjective, layered depiction of Burma under brutal military dictatorship. My first trip was legal, shooting video as a fake tour guide doing research; the next was on foot, under-cover with ethnic Karen guerrillas, to film internal exiles surviving in a free-fire jungle war zone.

Colonial archival imagery and clips from You Tube are woven within this tapestry of fragments, often in ironic counterpoint, and always to pierce the chokehold of censorship. This is a living history of a country arrested in time, a hybrid documentary focusing on ethnic genocide, but with constant poetic resonance and a rich multiplicity of references to history and popular culture.

1/23/13 A Third Cinema Vol. I curated by Juan Daniel F. Molero

program: 

1976 – LUGAR SAGRADO (1976 – Sacred Place, directed by Carlosmagno Rodrigues & Alonso Pafyeze, Brazil, 2009, 6 min.)

Three living beings are kept in the bottom of a pool. Video of physical and emotional immersion, where there’s no metaphysics, no  feelings of spirituality, no mysticism- just the torpor of the condition of being alive and reluctant.

DROP IN THE DARKNESS. Directed by Carlosmagno Rodrigues & Cris Ventura, Brazil, 2011, 7 min.)

A movie about the Christian conversion based on the Letters to the Seven Churches, Chapter 2, Verse 19 of the biblical Book of Revelation, which talks about the speeches used for people’s conversion. The movie is filmed with vertical tracking shots that refer to the Hell archetype.

Permanencias (Ricardo Alves Jr, Brazil, 2011, 34min)

From the inside the air is heavier.

AHENDU NDE SAPUKAI (I Hear Your Scream, directed by Pablo Lamar, Paraguay/Argentina, 2008, 11 min.)

At dawn, a man watches the horizon as he stands near his wooden house that dominates the landscape. After a few moments, he returns to his simple dwelling and a short while later a small funeral procession emerges. The man does not take part in it and remains alone, staring into the emptiness before him.

NOCHE ADENTRO ( Pablo Lamar, 2009, Paraguay/Argentina, 18 min)

The newlyweds have already left the party where the guests are still dancing. The bride has bled to death and the groom carries the body. He drags her down the stairs and along a long corridor until they fall down. At the shore the groom gives her away to the river, floating in a boat.

MARTES DE CH’ALLA (Tuesday Ch’alla, directed by Carlos Piñeiro, Bolivia, 2009, 12 min.)

 Images and situations linked to a kept belief among construction workers who know a way to invoke some kind of blessing through a secret ancient ritual.