4/1 Devon Damonte’s A Field Guide to the Endangered Experimental Motion Graphics (in-person)

BIOGRAPHY

Since 1989 Devon Damonte has made, taught, and shown handcrafted direct animation all over, including: REDCat Theater at Disney Hall in LA; New York Film Festival Views from the Avant Garde; Ottawa International Animation Festival; Pacific Film Archive at Berkeley Art Museum; Quickdraw Animation Society in Calgary; and McMurdo Station, Antarctica. He is featured in “The Animation Bible” by Maureen Furniss, and the forthcoming “Experimental Filmmaking: Break The Machine,” by Kathryn Ramey. Damonte is currently adjunct faculty at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA teaching a summer visual music 16mm & 35mm direct animation intensive, he’s also a ringleader of the Crackpot Crafters collective, and he believes we are now all smack dab in the Golden Age of Adhesive Tape.

PROGRAM:

Auroroborous Washialis, 16mm sound

Dreamy mashup of my fixations with snakeskin and glitter washi tape

Catcycle – 3 min, 16mm silent
The righting reflex is explored via Marey’s sequences and exploded beyond the frames of reference materials.

Stalking the Wild Washi – 10-13 min, multi-projector: Begins with Carousel slide-show  w/narration & eye yoga exercises, then 16mm w/sound
A whirlwind AV cinesafari slide-film tour through the wild kingdoms of animal-printed graphic tapes, and beyond.

Buster Balls – 2 min, 16mm w/sound

Follicles from my now-dearly-departed kitty, plus a few blues from Peter Miller, made at Jo Dery’s 24-Hour-Moviemaking-Experiment, Dirt Palace, Olneyville, RI, June 2002.

The Artifacts of Life – 7 min, 16mm w/sound

A group film made entirely of parts left behind by formerly living plants and critters, created by the Crackpot Crafters – Caryn, Devon, Dory, Jason, Jim, Kelsey, Kevin, Linda, and Meesh in 2011.

To Lust for Lacecraft – 3 min, 16mm, silent

Because decorative polyethelene lace doilies are an endangered species too! Presented in loving memory of Kodak’s extinct #7363 hi-con film stock, may the world’s remaining supply roll-in-peace.

Aurouroborous: Lance & Helsing – 7-10 min, multiprojector: 16mm slotload w/ slide overlays, silent w/ acoustic ambient noises

Like the ancient ouroborous snake-eating-its-tail, like a continuous movie film loop, like supercharged electrical harmonies hovering above our atmosphere, like the light amongst us - bouncing, reflecting, bending, refracting, transmitting, absorbing.

Time Current Characteristics – 6 min, 16mm w/sound

Off the grids, out of the box, up on the wrack line is where the beachglass meets the light.

Starrlight Starrbright Starrshine – A Cecile Starr Tribute-in-progress (all are invited to make cinemaStarrs to add in) -2 min.

and more!

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3/25 Mock Up on Mu (Craig Baldwin in-Person)

MOCK UP ON MU (2008) 110 minutes
Directed by Craig Baldwin

A radical hybrid of sci-fi, spy, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up On Mu cobbles together a feature-length "collage-narrative" based on (mostly) true stories of California's post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions, and Beat lifestyles. Pulp-serial snippets, industrial-film imagery, and B- (and Z-) fiction clips are intercut with newly shot live-action material, powering a playful, allegorical trajectory through the now-mythic occult matrix of Jack Parsons (Crowleyite founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab), L.Ron Hubbard (sci-fi author turned cult-leader), and Marjorie Cameron (bohemian artist and "mother of the New Age movement"). Their intertwined tales spin out into a speculative farce on the militarization of space and the corporate take-over of spiritual fulfillment and leisure-time.

BIOGRAPHY

Craig Baldwin is a filmmaker and curator whose interests lie in archival retrieval  and recombinatory forms of cinema, performance, and installation. He is the recipient of several grants, including those from the Rockefeller Foundation, Alpert Award, Creative Capital, Phelan, AFI, FAF, and California Arts Council. Over the last two decades, his productions have been shown and awarded at numerous international festivals, museums, and institutes of contemporary art, often in conjunction with panels, juries, and workshops on collage and cultural activism. His own weekly screening project, Other Cinema, has continued to premiere experimental, essay, and documentary works for over a quarter century, recently expanding into DVD publishing.

Craig Baldwin attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, University of California at Davis, and San Francisco State University (Masters, 1986). In the Cinema Dept. there, he studied under Bruce Conner and became increasingly drawn to collage film form.  His interest in the re-contextualization of "found" imagery led him to the theories of the Situationist International and to various practices of mail art, zines, altered billboards, and other creative initiatives beyond the fringe of the traditional fine-arts curriculum. After three short films, his first to be commercially released was Tribulation 99, a satirical collage rant on conspiracy theory, xenophobia, apocalyptic thinking, and US covert interference in Latin America. 

His first feature-length production, Sonic Outlaws, was an experimental documentary on the emerging "electronic folk culture", exploring the legal, political, and artistic implications of the audio-collage work of culture-jamming collectives like Negativland, Tape-beatles, Emergency Broadcast Network, and the Barbie Liberation Organization. Mr. Baldwin then completed Spectres of the Spectrum, a 90-min. sci-fi spoof utilizing early educational kinescopes to criticize the corporate control of electronic-communications technologies. His latest ‘collage-narrative’ feature, Mock-Up On Mu, parodies the impending militarization of space by means of allegories drawn from urban myths of post-War California subcultures. 

Film Society Schedule SPRING 2015

PROGRAM SUBJECT TO CHANGE
1/21 Shirin Mozzafari (in-person)

2/04 Soon-Mi Yoo (in-person)
2/11 Matías Piñeiro (in-person)
2/18 Maxim Pozdorovkin (in-person)
2/25 João Pedro Rodrigues (in-person)
3/04 Single Stream by Wojtasik, Lee, & Ernst Karel (in-person)
3/18 Robert Todd (in-person)
3/25 Craig Baldwin (in-person)
4/01 Devon Damonte (in-person)
4/08 Ben Rivers (in-person)
4/15 Mati Diop (in-person)
4/22 Betzy Bromberg (in-person)
4/29 Jonathan Schwartz (in-person)
5/06 Gretchen Skogerson (in-person)

3/18 Winterfilms: Robert Todd (in-person)

Winterfilms

Rescheduled due to one of our blizzards. Now that we have officially broken the record for the most snow ever in Boston (108.6 inches), Local Filmmaker Robert Todd has re-assembled a special collection of his snow, ice and frost themed 16mm film for an exciting Mass Art Film Society screening. Come in from the cold and join us in the warm glow of his lyrical films while we dream of the coming spring.

Robert Todd is A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. In the past twenty years he has produced a large body of short-to-medium format films that have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals including the Media City Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Le Rencontres Internationale, Balagan Film Series, Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, Cinematheque Ontario, the Harvard Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, the Paris Biennial, Slamdance Film Festival, and others. His films have won numerous festival prizes, grants, and artist’s awards. He teaches film production at Emerson College in Boston.

Program subject to change:

Trembling Palace (7:00) 2013

Winter Present (6:00) 2014

Threshold (19:00) 2013

Shades of Gray (16:30) 2014

Thunder (11:00) 2004

LoveSong (6:00) 2014

Missing Boy (14:00) 2012

3/04 Single Stream & Other Aural Affairs - Ernst Karel in-person

Ernst Karel makes experimental nonfiction sound works and electroacoustic music.  His recent projects are edited/composed using unprocessed location recordings; in performance he sometimes combines location recordings with analog electronics to create pieces which move between the abstract and the documentary. Recent nonfiction vilms on which he has done sound work include Detour de Force, The Iron Ministry, Manakamana, and Leviathan.  He  is a Lecturer in the Anthropology Department where he teaches a production course in sonic ethnography, as well as managing the Sensory Ethnography Lab and the Film Study Center at Harvard University. Karel's work has been exhibited in the 2012 São Paulo Biennial, MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, and in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. http://ek.klingt.org/

Morning and Other Times (2014) 37 minutes

by Ernst Karel

is a 5.1-channel sound composition which was recorded over the course of a month in early 2014 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The piece takes as its starting point the voices of nonhuman participants in the urban environment, shortly before the Thai military coup of May 2014. 

Single Stream (2014) 23 minutes

by Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Kim Lee, and Ernst Karel

http://www.single-stream.net/

Single Stream takes a close look at the problem of waste, through a visual and sonic exploration of a recycling facility. The title refers to the “single stream” method of recycling in which all types of recyclables are initially gathered together, and sorted later at a specialized facility. With Single Stream, viewers enter one of the largest of these materials recovery facilities in the US. Inside a cavernous building, a vast machine complex runs like clock-work, sorting a steady stream of glass, metal, paper and plastic carried on conveyor belts criss-crossing the space, dotted with workers in neon vests. The interwoven movements of human and machine produce sounds and images that are overwhelming, but also beautiful, and even revelatory. Blurring the line between observation and abstraction, Single Stream is a meditation on our society's culture of excess and its consequences.

Installation version (50' x 8' image, four horizontal audio channels, 2013): Museum of the Moving Image, July-Nov. 2013

Cinematic version (4K CinemaScope, 5.1 surround sound, 2014):
2014 Whitney Biennial

Ann Arbor Film Festival

Festival del film Locarno

Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia

Paweł Wojtasik creates poetic reflections on cultures and ecosystems in the form of short films and large-scale installations. His investigations into the overlooked corners of the environment have led him to pig farms, sewage treatment plants, wrecking yards and autopsy rooms. His work has shown in venues such as PS1/MoMA, Reina Sofia Museum, Berlinale and New York Film Festival. www.pawelwojtasik.com/

Toby Lee is an artist and scholar based in New York, working across video, installation, drawing and text. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University, and she is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.