5/2/12 A Little Holy Circus-- Kim Keown and Cirkestra

A Little Holy Circus brought to you by a Woman with Many Names and featuring Peter Bufano of Cirkestra composer of the song A Little Holy Circus

Program:

Screen tests with Jayne NoWek a work in progress by Kim Keown intermittent 
 

Laura Sister Angel 10 min S8 film by Kim Keown with Susan Black performing a live sound track

History Lesson 3 min film by Hazel Manko
 

A Little Holy Circus 4 min film & performance by Faye Raye and Cirkestra performing a live sound track (a work in Progress)





Making the Hairless Woman 31 min short doc by Kim Keown

Cirkestra performing live music

notes:

Screen tests is the first attempt to work on an idea I have had for several years. The reporter, Jayne Nowek, is an aspect of myself that taken alone people may find familiar but not completely recognize. Its like déjà vu. She’s a clunky voice in my head that’s a way of making things clear and simultaneously more confusing; a nerd that wants to delve deeper into the goofiest things.

Laura Sister Angel I call the first film I ever made, and I suppose that’s true outside of animation classes where I made images. At first the film was a way of expressing a feeling or feelings-loss, mourning, anger, sadness. I used the movements and the rhythms to get at all that. But the story developed overtime to incorporate the insight that death manifests, through the various sound tracks used or unused during the film’s screenings. Starting on a 4 track with whispers to telling the entire story from my sister’s death to her reappearance as an angel in my life 20 years later.

History Lesson is the first film my daughter, Hazel Manko, ever made shot on a bolex and edited digitally. I acted as cameraman to her vision. She and my companion, Ed, play roles to a sound tract of one of her father’s songs.

A little Holy Circus is a work in progress to explore projection and performance techniques as well as a concept made up by a “Miss Patty” and executed into the song A Little Holy Circus by Peter Bufano during his 24 hour circus song CD Marathon.

Making the Hairless Woman is a short doc about Peter Bufano, an exclown turned circus musician who did a 24 hour CD marathon. It was made using about 6 hours of HD footage shot during 2 interviews and the 24 hour period, as well as with footage from phones, computers, SD footage shot by Peter Camila and his band members and photographs taken during the marathon by Peter’s cousin Peter. Watch the trailer here for this film. Making the Hairless Woman

Cirkestra  http://cirkestra.com/

“Highly praised” Boston Globe

“Perhaps the most unusual musical group in Boston” Brett Milano: B.U. Today

“Fabulous...timeless and original, a combo you don't see every day Nancy Sheehan:” Worcester Telegram

“Musical Acrobats” Jon Garelick: Boston Phoenix

“If you can have an intimate circus band Cirkestra are it” Boston Phoenix

“Swings like a carnie in a drunken brawl” 7 Days



Kim Keown:

Kim graduated from Emerson College and started working in her field of communication disorders while going to MassArt part time. She was an installation artist for 10 years doing work in gardens and studios in the Boston area before becoming a performance artist. She has also made a few films including Laura Sister Angel, Love Songs, and Making the Hairless Woman. She is currently a studio manager in the film department at the Massachusetts College of Art, a yoga teacher, and the founder of a small multimedia performance group, Circus Mirage, where she manifests fabulous figments of her imagination.

http://circusmirage.blogspot.com/

MassArt Film Society Spring 2012

1/18 Rebecca Meyers

1/25 George Kuchar

2/1 2 Great American Race Films:
Body and Soul by Oscar Micheaux
Blood Of Jesus by Spencer Williams

2/8 Lost and Found
You are Not I by Sara Driver
Borderline(1928) by Kenneth MacPherson

2/15
THE ACCURSED MAZURKA Nina Fonoroff
HEREIN Marjorie Keller

2/22 Xander Marro

2/29 David Linton

3/7 Spring Break-no screening

3/14 Joel Shlemovitz

3/21 Lana Caplan

3/24 PLEASE NOTE: This show is on a Saturday night!
Greg Zinman curates Inner/Outer Spaces

3/28/12 Juan Daniel F. Molero
screening his film REMINISCENCES

4/4 Pam Minty and Alain LeTourneau's Empty Quarter

4/11 Jackie Goss

4/18 Jesse Stead “Motion-Pictures, Videos, Films, Projections and Movies”
from the Today! Episodics

4/25 NEW PROGRAM! Tom Chomont and Andrew Meyer

5/2 Kim Keown & Cirkestra "A Little Holy Circus"

4/25/12 Films by Tom Chomont and Andy Meyer

Tom Chomont titles: 
OPHELIA -- portrait inspired by reading about John Millais' painting Ophelia. 
THE CAT LADY -- Backwards storms, ominous voiceovers, reverse explosions all hurtle towards the quietly petting Cat Lady. 
LOVE OBJECTS -- A portrait of polymorphous lovers that references the Medieval parable of Les Noces du Roi et Reine and the marriage of opposites . . . dichotomy resolved in unity. 
THE MIRROR GARDEN -- A romantic and lyric study of a young friend and readings he encouraged, especially Mallarme. 
EPILOGUE/SIAM -- Two portraits paired, one warm, one cold.
JABBOK -- The story of Jacob wrestling the angel at the stream called Jabbok. 
PHASES OF THE MOON: THE PARAPSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE -- "I usually avoid the term 'film poem', because it was overused in the '40s and '50s. But somehow it fits, PHASES OF THE MOON; it is a film poem and nothing else. A small, miniature film poem, a jewel, if the word masterpiece is too stuffy." (Jonas Mekas).
OBLIVION -- A luminous erotic portrait of a young neighbourhood hustler.


By Andrew Meyer

NIGHT OF THE COBRA WOMAN Directed by Andrew Meyer. With Joy Bang, Marlene Clark, Roger Garrett, Vic Diaz. Horror story of a beautiful girl turns into a man-eating cobra.

4/ 18/11 Jessie Stead

Jessie Stead presents “Motion-Pictures, Videos, Films, Projections and Movies”
from the Today! Episodics

Description:
Join us for a rare full program of episodes from Jessie Stead's "sublimely intermittent epic" Today!. Titles will include the long lost Mystique Lounge episode and the trans-India/Manhattan bank caper known colloquially as Chase Scenes. Also screening will be the Boston premier of the infamous You Are Now Running On Reserve Battery Power, a desktop noir from our late-nite spin-off Today! Nocturnes launched fall 2011. Plus other surprise delights! Today! is not on the internet!

Bio:
Jessie Stead lives and works. Currently based in New York, Stead experiments with unpredictable patterns of cross-disciplined media, material subjection, formal strategies, production/distribution parodies, and the work of fellow artists. Her single channel motion-pictures, installations and performances have been featured at mixed venues internationally, recent engagements include the Greater New York Cinema exhibition at MoMA PS1, the New York Film Festival, Soloway Gallery and Performa 11. Further info at...

www.jessiestead.com

Program:
Though contents may have settled during shipping and handling, Today! is a characteristically
irrelevant daydream and intermittent epic structured in overlapping, dislocated, and re-mixable episodes. Offices are closed for the summer months. (Stead)

You Are Now Running On Reserve Battery Power from Today! Nocturnes
HD / 12 minutes / 2011
An unidentified non-tagonist hazily shares a waking dream with her power-deprived personal
computer. A desktop noir co-starring users of the Chatroulette.com™ site in a random parade of webcam field recordings. Like hitchhikers in an old-fashioned road movie, these strangers born of mouse clicks briefly inhabit a sequence of overlapping zones in various states of undress and intoxication. This low battery neo-nocturne is a late-nite spin-off of the Today! episodics.

You Are Now Running On Reserve Battery Power. Please connect your computer to AC power. If you do not, your computer will go to sleep in a few minutes to preserve the contents of memory. (Apple Inc.)

Today! Chase Scenes
super 8/16mm on DV
12 minutes / 2008
An unidentified non-tagonist with an ice cream headache and squeaky bones is haunted by an
image from New York City of venture capitalists disguised as plastic honey bottles in this diurnal neo-bank-caper known colloquially as Today! Chase Scenes.

Today! TBA
super 8/16mm on DV
37 minutes / 2007
Though contents may have settled during shipping and handling (we canʼt stress that enough)
highlights from Today! TBA might include cameo appearances by the United States Postal Service, quality time in Bangalore with a toilet paper voodoo doll, and a recurring pre-occupation with a useful but problematically self-aggrandizing shopping bag.

4/11 Jacqueline Goss

www.observatoryfilm.com I like stories about people who set out to objectively measure or chart something and then fail in interesting ways when they get tangled up in the natural color and noise of the world. Jacqueline Goss makes movies and web-based works that explore how political, cultural, and scientific systems change the ways we think about ourselves. For the last few years she has used 2D digital animation techniques to work within the genre of the animated documentary. Her most recent videos are “How To Fix The World” --a look at Soviet-sponsored literacy programs in 1930’s Central Asia and “Stranger Comes To Town” –an animated documentary about the identity-tracking of immigrants and travelers coming into the United States. A native of New Hampshire, she attended Brown University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College in the Hudson Valley of New York. She is a 2008 Tribeca Film Institute Media Arts Fellow and the 2007 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in film and Video. Her current project is "The Observers" -- a portrait of the summit of Mount Washington, NH: home to the highest human-recorded wind speed and one of the oldest weather observatories in the western hemisphere.

4/4 EMPTY QUARTER

2011, 16mm black and white, sound, 71 minutes

www.emptyquarterfilm.org

Description

Empty Quarter is a film about the region of Southeast Oregon, an area populated by ranching and farming communities, in Lake, Harney, and Malheur counties. The region is roughly one-third of Oregon’s landmass yet holds less than 2% of the state’s population. Southeast Oregon, though familiar by name is a foreign place, particularly to those who reside in urban environments. It is a landscape in the making, constantly undergoing change. It is a highly politicized landscape, evoking differing opinions concerning resource management and land use. Through a series of stationary shots, recording open landscapes and the activities of local residents, Empty Quarter reflects on the character of the region. Natural areas are viewed among images of industry, various labor processes, land management and recreation. Voices of local residents describe the history of pioneer settlement, social life of rural communities and the struggles of small town economies.

Reviews

“Shot in scantily populated southeastern Oregon, Empty Quarter presents a series of near-static
shots of farms, factories, townscapes, and—in dispassionate middle distance—people going about their mundane daily tasks. These scenes are punctuated by blank-screen commentaries from various residents, each reflecting in some way on what has been lost to the ravages of time and industry. This mix isn’t as dry or dour as it sounds: With patience, the film’s visual rhythm clicks and combines with the palate-cleansing talking-headless voiceovers (which subtly shift our perception of the images that have passed and color the ones that follow) to cohere into a canny, uniquely tactile portrait of American progress in all its ironies.”
–Mark Holcomb, Village Voice
"Empty Quarter isn’t just set in a land that’s approaching the definition of unsettled (the frontier
closing, as defined by Frederic Jackson Turner in 1893, when the population reached one
inhabitant per square mile). And it’s not just filmed in a landscape that visually can be so empty
you lose a sense of direction in it. The film is also probing that sparsely inhabited region of
consciousness where we grasp at straws in order to understand the world. Above and beyond the
issues of human cognition in such a place, and the formal syntax of documentary film that’s
explored to an edge, Alain LeTourneau and Pam Minty have slowed us down enough to
appreciate, as well, how the settler and Native American communities obtain such intelligence as
is necessary to inhabit and sometimes even thrive in such a place."
--William L. Fox, Director, Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art