No Way Out But Onward by the Disembodied Theater Corporation
REPORT FROM THE GHOST CITY
The Disembodied Theater Corporation brings you an evening of dispatches,
news, songs, and fragments from the Ghost City: the skeletal remains of
abandoned towns, railways, and graveyards that stand as remnants of a lost
society. Filmmaker Ross Lipman in collaboration with Bryan Papciak, Jeff
Sias and Liz Coffey presents this haunting assemblage of ruins, rants, and
shards of memory that paint a collective portrait of dystopia. The evening
includes a live cinema performance of Lipman's NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD, and
excerpts of Papciak and Sias's feature length work-in-progress, AMERICAN
RUINS.
The Disembodied Theater Corporation is an amorphous entity devoted to the
temporary manifestation of non-filmic cinemas.
Featuring:
NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD
An adventure in psychogeography through New York's High Line
PowerPoint performance by the Disembodied Theater Corporation Written and
narrated by Ross Lipman Suite for Bass, Viola, and Trombone by Laura
Steenberge Photos by Leigh Evans, Ross Lipman, Nina Mankin
On June 8th, 2009 New York City's High Line, an abandoned elevated freight
rail that runs through the west side of Manhattan?s old meat-packing
district, was re-opened as an aerial park. Before that it lay empty for
decades. Between its days as an industrial railway and public leisure space,
the High Line was a haunted paradise above the city--a verdant wasteland
inhabited only by occasional taggers, wanderers, and police. In October 2004
a ragtag group of us ventured up to explore. Some experienced trespassers,
others neophytes, the group discovered that the High Line was a space with
its own internal logic, interacting with its visitors in a way unique to
each. No Way Out But Onward is a live cinema account of that day's events;
the modern day equivalent of an old-time Magic Lantern performance.
selections from Lipman's THE PERFECT HEART OF FLUX:
"A wordless testimony to the chaos of urbanity: portraits of ruins
and construction mingle with landscapes, skyscapes, and ghosts of the
distant city. Shards, glimmers, fragments, and visions arise, coalesce
and dissolve in the crucible of time.
These short video works elide demarcations of cinema, creating a
unique visual language that integrates poetic and essay forms in brief
meditations on the nature of organic change."
MET STATE, an award-winning experimental short film by Bryan Papciak.
AMERICAN RUINS, a feature-length work-in-progress by Bryan Papciak and Jeff
Sias.
Contact information:
Ross Lipman: corpusfluxus@oblivio.com
BIOS:
Ross Lipman is an independent filmmaker, photographer, and writer who has
presented work throughout the world at venues ranging from the Oberhausen
International Film Festival to the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. His films
have been collected by institutions and museums including the Sammlung Goetz
in Munich. He is also one of the world's leading authorities on the
restoration of independent and experimental cinema, and was recently honored
with consecutive Film Heritage Awards from the National Society of Film
Critics in 2007 and 2008. In recent years he has been designing film, video,
and performance works exploring urban decay as a marker of modern
consciousness.
Liz Coffey is Film Conservator at the Harvard Film Archive.
BRYAN PAPCIAK & JEFF SIAS
Bryan Papciak & Jeff Sias are a co-directing team. They first worked
together at Olive Jar Studios in Boston, creating highly original and
unusual mixed-media commercial animation productions for clients such
as Cartoon Network, MTV, and Samsung.
Since Olive Jar's closing in 2001, Bryan & Jeff have continued to
collaborate on commercial projects, independent short films, puppetry
venues, and other artistic endeavors through their own company,
Handcranked Productions, LLC.
Jeff & Bryan are two of the four founding members of Handcranked Film
Projects, a Boston-area art and film collaborative. HCF was
established to explore the arts through non-traditional experimental
film, and has recently been featured on Public Television's "Art Close
Up" (aired nationally). The group was conceived as an informal
cooperative whose members share experience and resources in the
production of individual and collaborative film-as-art projects. Bryan
and Jeff are currently producing their own independent in-progress
project AMERICAN RUINS, in conjunction with the Filmmakers
Collaborative, a long-standing non-profit association of independent,
Boston area documentary filmmakers.
