MassArt Film Society Fall 2012 Schedule

9/12 Jodie Mack

9/19 Harry Smith

9/26 Murder Psalm Stan Brakhage
        Freeland Minda Martin

10/3  Shirley Clarke  THE CONNECTION

10/10 Shirley Clarke  COOL WORLD

10/17 I AM A QUEEN by Josue Pellot & Henrique Cirne-Lima

10/24  Colin Barton

10/31  Films with Anais Nin by Ian Hugo Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger

11/7    Martha Colburn

11/14  Jennifer Montgomery

11/28   Dave Fischer: Computational Aesthetics

12/5    Nico Pereda

12/5/12 Nico Pereda Greatest Hits

 http://www.interior13.com/en/pelicula/greatest-hits


SYNOPSIS / SINOPSIS
Drifting from fiction to documentary, Greatest Hits tells the story of Emilio, a man in
his fifties who shows up at the family home after fifteen years of absence. His wife
and his twenty-eight year old son receive him with bitterness and confusion. After a
couple of days they decide to kick him out, only to find out that he has left on his own
accord. The son ends up tracking down Emilio and spends a couple of days hanging
out with him in his apartment.
*
Mezclando ficción con documental, Los mejores temas cuenta la historia de Emilio,
un hombre en sus cincuenta que regresa a casa luego de quince años de abandono.
Su esposa Tere y su hijo Gabino de veintiocho años lo reciben con recelo y confusión.
Luego de un par de días, deciden echar a Emilio de casa, pero se percatan que
él ya se ha marchado por cuenta propia. Días después, Gabino busca a su padre y
pasa con él un par de días en su departamento.
Director’s Statement / Palabras del Director
After making several films with the same actors playing similar roles I decided to
make a film about the process of representation. This opened a world of new possibilities
including rehearsals, repetitions and interactions between fictional characters
and the actors playing those characters. I continued this search by replacing
one of the actors with my uncle half way into the shooting. My uncle enters the film
as a documentary subject who has to relate to fictional characters that act as if he
was one of them.
*
Después de hacer algunas películas con los mismos actores interpretando papeles
similares, decidí hacer una película sobre el proceso de representación. Esto abrió
un mundo de nuevas posibilidades, incluyendo los ensayos, las repeticiones y las
interacciones entre personajes de ficción y los actores que interpretan a esos personajes.
Seguí esta búsqueda mediante la sustitución de uno de los actores con mi
tío, a mitad de rodaje. Mi tío entra en la película como un objeto documental que
tiene que relacionarse con los personajes de ficción que actúan como si él fuera
uno de ellos.

11/28/12 Dave Fischer: Computational Aesthetics

Dave Fischer creates abstract audio & video algorithmically - writing his own software and working entirely via numbers and codes. As a long-standing member of Providence's underground art scene, Dave has been the "computer guy" for many projects: running Fort Thunder's web site, building an embedded control system for Forcefield's 2002 Whitney exhibit, etc. He will be showing a baker's dozen shorts totaling roughly one hour, representing work from the past six years, including an excerpt from his feature-length noise epic: "Do Not Peer Into Void".

http://www.cca.org/

Program:
Fission
Crawling Colors
Waves
Reflections
Ylla's World
1D
Water
Excerpt from Do Not Peer Into Void
Declaration
Monkey Man
Flower Devour
Daughters Remix
Vortex

11/14/12 Jennifer Montgomery

Referred Pain

1. Program

VICTORIA, by Olivia Ciummo (10 minutes, HD, 2012)

A visual and sonic poem of places that are in transition.Three sisters, mixed up with nature and distorted, search for a place to rest. The acousmetre shares thoughts of fear, versions of human utopia are taken away by nature, and we are left with impressions of war. Filmed at confrontation sites around the eastern US and the wilderness of North America, with sound by A.E. Paterra.

2. REGARDING THE PAIN OF SUSAN SONTAG (NOTES ON CAMP), by Steve Reinke (4 minutes, DV, 2006)

3. ONE SPECIES REMOVED , by Jennifer Montgomery (38 minutes, HD, 2012)

A video about animal empathy (anthropomorphism) and our struggles with mortality. The title reflects a pun, with two supporting sources. The first, that we often transfer our most profound emotions onto other animals, i.e., "one species removed." The second, the crackpot but very moving theories of Rudolf Steiner. He believed that animals have a group soul, used interchangeably with the term "species." When one animal dies, the group replaces that part of itself. By contrast, each human being is an individual species/soul, so that when we die, a whole species is rendered extinct.

BIOS: 

Olivia Ciummo has screened at the Museum of Contemporary Photography - Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Pittsburgh Biennial, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Media City Film Festival - Windsor, Crossroads Film Festival - San Francisco, as well as galleries, backyards, and cultural centers nationally and abroad. She recieved her MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010, and went on to teach cinema and time-based arts at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania from 2010-12. She am now settling into Princeton NJ where she is working on new films and videos.

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his work in video. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Gallery (Ottawa), and has screened at many festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Oberhausen and the New York Video Festival. In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. A book of his scripts, “Everybody Loves Nothing,” was recently published by Coach House. He has also edited several books, most recently (with Chris Gehman) “The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema.” He has a site that archives his work, www.myrectumisnotagrave.com. His research interests include digital video production, motion graphics/animation, rhetorical and narrative strategies for visual art, the voice and psychoanalysis.

Jennifer Montgomery's film titles include One Species Removed (2012), The Agonal Phase (2010), Deliver (2008), Notes on the Death of Kodachrome (2006), Threads of Belonging (2003), Transitional Objects (2000), Troika, (1998), Art For Teachers of Children (1995), I, a Lamb (1992), Age 12: Love With a Little L (1990), and Home Avenue (1989). She is currently completing a film with the artist Josiah McElheny.

These films range from experimental essays to experimental features, and are distributed by Zeitgeist Films, Waterbearer Films, Women Make Movies, and Video Data Bank. Her work has shown at international festivals, as well as the 2008 Whitney Biennial (NYC), MoMA (NYC), the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), the ICA (London), and the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis). She has been the recipient of many grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jennifer Montgomery currently teaches at Bard College and lives in Arlington, MA.

11/7/12 Martha Colburn in Person

Martha Colburn is a filmmaker and multimedia artist. Born in Pennsylvania, she now lives and works between Holland and New York City. Although Ms. Colburn's style is unmistakably her own, the scope of her work is broad and difficult to encapsulate; her expertise (especially in stop-motion animation) have led to teaching, speaking, and lectures at film forums and universities worldwide.

A 1994 BFA graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, Ms. Colburn also studied for two years at Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, earning an MFA equivalent in 2002.

As she began to make films in 1994, Ms. Colburn performed live with a combination of 16mm and Super-8 projectors, using mirrors, colored gels, strobing devices, and hand-painted screens, with the live accompaniment of musicians. Initially, the majority of Ms. Colburn's films were videos for musical groups in which she and her friends played. The remainder of the 1990s saw Ms. Colburn appearing in film festivals and workfilm tours, networking and presenting her films across Europe and the United States. In 1997, Ms. Colburn received her first awards: the Kenneth Patchen Award at the National Poetry Film Festival, and the Jury's Choice Award at the Super Super-8 Film Festival; the following year, she won the Jury's Choice Award for No-Budget Filmmaking at the International Hamburg Short Film Festival in Hamburg, Germany. Concurrently, she worked as a visiting Professor of Animation at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1999, she received the honor of Best Animated Film at in both New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals.

Ms. Colburn left Baltimore in 2000 to study at Rijksakademie, assisted with a grant from Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. During her time there, she began producing multimedia art installations. in addition to her continued filmmaking. In 2002, she won two awards—the Sarah Lawrence College Film Award, and Best Animated Film at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Following graduation from Rijksakademie that same year, Ms. Colburn opted to remain in the Netherlands, finding that it afforded her opportunities and resources to explore process and possibilities. Presenting in both solo and group exhibitions (and receiving an award in 2003 for Best Animated Film at the New York Underground Film Festival), Ms. Colburn also resumed teaching, as a visiting artist/lecturer (Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo, Norway), a workshop host (Nanjing Art Institute in Nanjing, China), or a tutor (Dutch Art Institute in Enschede, the Netherlands).

During this time, Ms. Colburn's films grew more explicitly humanistic and politically expressive, eschewing the total abstraction of her earlier films, and gravitating toward specific social concerns without compromising her distinct style. She received a Stadsdeel de Baarsjes Grant, as well as support from the Dutch Film Fund, in 2004, and saw significant gains in the public profile of her work. Ms. Colburn provided animation for the feature film The Devil and Daniel Johnson, which won the award of Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. Particularly notable was the induction of Ms. Colburn's highly topical Cosmetic Emergency to the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

As a participant in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council art residency program, in 2005, she began collaborating with musicians (including some former cohorts) in what would become an integral part of her presentation: live accompaniment to her films. These live sound/ musical and film explorations resulted in performances at Museum of Art & Design, The Knitting Factory, Rotterdam Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, artists space and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. From 2008-2010 she created commissions from Creative Time (for the Times Square video screen), Performa ( NY performance art festival) for which she made the futurist themed film 'One & One is Life', Electric Literature for a film by the author Diana Wagman, and music video for Serj Tankian, Deerhoof, Friendly Rich and They Might Be Giants.

In 2010 her film Triumph of the Wild was included in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ms. Colburn's work is also included in the collections of Mlle Monique Burger (Switzerland), Frans Hals Museum De Hallen (Netherlands), Collection Stedelijik Museum (Amsterdam), Chadha Art Collection (London/Amsterdam) And Dimitris Gigourtakis (Greece), Laurence Dreyfus (Paris), Collection Haak (Eindhoven, Netherlands), Ben & Irene Krohn (USA)

Program:
 
2012
Mechanical Mammoth (music video for Mystical Weapons)
DVD
2011
Anti-Fracking Film for WBAI radio
DVD
2010
Dolls Vs. Dictators
 DVD
2009
Triumph of the Wild- DVD
2008
Myth Labs DVD OR MINI DV
2006
Destiny Manifesto MINI DV OR DVD
Meet Me in Wichita  MINI DV OR DVD
2003
Secrets of Mexuality 16MM
2000
Cats Amore 16,MM

1999
Spiders in Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical   16MM

1998
There’s a Pervert in Our Pool   16MM


1997

Evil of Dracula   16MM

Hey Tiger!   16MM

Asthma  16MM