4/29 FOR APPEARANCES: Jonathan Schwartz (in-person)

Jonathan Schwartz is an American experimental filmmaker who has been making poetic non-fiction 16mm films for over a decade. In both his travel films and his more diaristic work he draws influence from certain traditional approaches to observational filmmaking as well as from mentors Saul Levine and Mark LaPore. Schwartz makes the camera a catalyst for a transformed dynamic between the figure behind the camera and those in front. Turning his camera on the people and places around him, Schwartz captures jewel-like fragments of gesture, light and color that meticulously stitches together with rich textural field recordings, creating films of great beauty and emotion.

4/22 Divinity Gratis: The Cinematic Alchemy of Betzy Bromberg (in-person)

PROGRAM:

Marasmus  (1981)(16mm, color/sound, 24 min.)

Divinity Gratis (1996) (16mm, color/sound, 59 min.)

Ciao Bella (1978)(16mm, color/sound, 13 min.)

Betzy Bromberg, Director of the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts, has been making experimental films since 1976. Her most recent film, Voluptuous Sleep (2011), premiered at the Redcat Theater in Los Angeles and had its festival premiere at the New York Film Festival: Views From The Avant-Garde.  Voluptuous Sleep was listed as one of the Best Films for 2011 in both the New York Times (Manohla Dargis) and Indiewire (Andrea Picard).  Scott MacDonald included it in his Highlights 2012 in Lumiere Magazine (www.elumiere.net) and has published an interview with Ms. Bromberg in his most recent book, Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema.  Previous to becoming the Director of the Program in Film and Video California Institute of the Arts, Ms. Bromberg worked in the Hollywood special effects industry for many years as a supervisor and camerawoman for the production of optical effects in major motion pictures.  

Ms. Bromberg had a full retrospective of her films at BAFICI in 2007 Her previous film, a Darkness Swallowed (2005) screened at the Sundance Film Festival as well as the Seoul Film Festival (South Korea), the Athens International Film Festival (Greece), the Bradford International Film Festival (England), the Seattle International Film Festival (Washington), The Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona (Spain) and most recently at Ponrepo (Prague, Czech Republic).  Ms. Bromberg’s films have shown extensively in museums, cultural venues and festivals within the United States and abroad. Most notably, her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Cinemateque, the Harvard Film Archives (Cambridge), Anthology Film Archives (New York City), the National Film Theater (London), The Vootrum Centrum (Belgium) and the Centre Georges Pompidou (France).

Marasmus  (1981) in collaboration with Laura Ewig

(16mm, color/sound, 24 min.)

 A woman’s response to technology / the jet lag of birth.

“If there are certain iconic images that represent the obscure history of the American avant-garde cinema, one of them has to be from Marasmus (1981), the extraordinary experimental film by Betzy Bromberg and Laura Ewig.  The image is of a woman’s face pressed flat, white and distorted against glass, two hands splayed on each side.  She could be pushing against an invisible boundary, or easing through a clear membrane as if being born; either way, the image exemplifies L.A.-based Bromberg’s uncanny ability for uniting a philosophical perspective and an almost mythically emotional sensitivity. Like some of the best feminist experimental work of the 1980s and ‘90s, Bromberg’s films invariably reverberate in this space in between, refusing both the cheerless material analysis of one strand of experimental production and the politically disengaged poetic investigation advocated in other camps of the avant-garde.  Instead, her films play on multiple levels, merging politics and poetry, and reveling in the resultant tensions.  With Marasmus, Bromberg merges strange and abject images of confinement and escape with a coldly technological environment, and she pits the desire for continuity and coherence against the pure pleasure of drifting through images…Bromberg’s work has plenty to teach us about formal experimentation and the magic of juxtaposition.” - Holly Willis, L.A. Weekly

Divinity Gratis (1996)

(16mm, color/sound, 59 min.)

 “An hour long and seven years in the making, Divinity Gratis locates personal experience and subjective vision in a history of the human species, culminating the technological revolutions that dominate the last years of the millennium.  References to the atomic bomb and the moon landing, often incongruous or ironic, form a grid on which movement up from primeval elements through the appearance of animals and buildings to the modern city and the worlds of contemporary science and religion, culminating in a more lyrical section in which a young woman – Bromberg herself – is introduced into a condensed recapitulation of the whole film.  Unconstrainedly eclectic and ranging freely among biological close-ups, museum dioramas, Gothic cathedrals, workers in the Los Angeles sex industries, and the Trinity Site on the White Sands Missile Range, where the first atomic bomb was tested, the imagery is almost all made over into the filmmaker’s visual idiolect, where color, texture, and camera movement provide for a sensual improvisatory montage…”  -  David James (2005) from The Most Typical Avant-Garde -History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles

Ciao Bella (1978)

(16mm, color/sound, 13 min.)

A personal film about love and mortality.

“Ciao Bella is a summer-in-the-city travelogue that mixes verite of Lower East Side bikers, Times Square topless dancers, and Coney Island crowds to achieve a highly charged atmosphere of manic exhibitionism and sexual raunch.”  - J. Hoberman, Art Forum

4/.15 Radical visions: 16mm Films of Barbara Rubin and Sara Driver

Please join us for this unique opportunity to see the these rare films by two exceptional yet seldom heralded women artists.

All films projected on celluloid!

 Christmas On Earth (1963) 29 minutes
2 Channel 16mm Projection with color slides.
Directed by BARBARA RUBIN

An erotically charged classic of 1960s underground cinema. Originally titled "Cocks And Cunts", Christmas On Earth is a film of sexual tableaux vivants, gay and straight, where two separate reels of film are superimposed on each other, with additional light effects layered on these images, all accompanied by a contemporary rock radio soundtrack, as specified by Rubin. Christmas On Earth is considered to be one of the first legitimate works of multi-media art.

This double projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning around and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works produced by the American postwar avant-garde. Many consider it to be an essential document of queer and feminist cinema It is still largely unknown to art history. Christmas on Earth in fact deserves to be located within a larger esthetic discourse on contemporary art forms such as Happenings, expanded cinema and installation. Rubin "was one of the first people to get multimedia interest going around New York," Andy Warhol said. Rubin's filmmaking practices were a type of performance and sexual agitprop that foreshadowed the emergence of critical body art at the end of the 1960s. An investigation into the little-known history of Barbara Rubin and her singular work Christmas on Earth deepens our understanding of a period when artists pushed self-determined and guiltless sexuality into the public sphere to catalyze social revolution.

One weekend, she corralled five friends into the Ludlow Street crash pad rented by musicians John Cale and Tony Conrad and instigated a night of playful debauchery. "Barbara held us hostage for 24 hours, from early evening to the next day. It was very Cocteau-ish. We were locked in and hermeticized in this apartment, it was a very freewheeling situation," recalled Malanga, one of the performers in the film. A novice with a camera, Rubin filmed the quivering couplings and posturing bodies.



Barbara Rubin 
"Barbara was the moving force and coordinator between us all." – Lou Reed

Rubin (1945-1980) was a filmmaker and writer who started working for Jonas Mekas at the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque in 1963. This was the year she filmed Christmas On Earth in the Lower East Side apartment of Tony Conrad and John Cale at 56 Ludlow Street. Rubin's creativity and lively spirit brought her in contact with many of the key counter-cultural figures of the 1960s. She became an indispensable right hand to Mekas, helping to set up screenings around the country and in Europe. In a thwarted attempt to show Jack Smith's banned Flaming Creatures at the Third International Experimental Film Exposition in Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium, in December 1963, Mekas, Rubin and film critic P. Adams Sitney occupied the projection booth. Rubin sought out the greatest talents of her generation, befriending Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan. She traveled to London in June 1965 to help organize the landmark International Poetry Reading with Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall. In the art world, Rubin is perhaps best known for first bringing Warhol to hear the Velvet Underground at Cafe Bizarre in Greenwich Village in December 1965. A few months later Rubin helped organize "Up-Tight," the first Warhol and Velvet Underground evenings of abrasive music, strobe lights, lewd dancing and film projections (including Rubin's own Christmas on Earth), at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in February 1966. The ensemble was later dubbed the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and Rubin and her camera joined them on a legendary road trip in March. Rubin was one of the few people Warhol would listen to with rapt attention, according to Malanga, his former assistant and collaborator.

Rubin's involvement with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable was short-lived, however. There is no record of her participation in the group after its April 1966 run at the Dom nightclub on St. Mark's Place. Her next few years were consumed with new projects infused with '60s utopianism. She was most obsessed with her far-fetched 1965 script Christmas on Earth Continued, which called for the participation of all her heroes, including Walt Disney, the Beatles and Jean Genet, in the construction of a Fairy City set in Ireland.

Rubin left New York City in the late 60's and helped Ginsberg's Committee on Poetry purchase land to establish a 90-acre farm in Cherry Valley in upstate New York. A spiritual seeker already turned on to Kabbalah, Rubin discovered the nearby Hasidic community in Sharon Springs. Her visits introduced her to the baal tsuvah movement, a new brand of countercultural orthodoxy. She later stated her plan to burn Christmas on Earth, signing the missive with her new Yiddish name, Bashe Bruche. She married and moved to France with her partner and had 5 children, dying in childbirth in 1980 at the age of 35. -- Excerpted From Art in America, 12/1/05 by Daniel Belasco

YOU ARE NOT I (1981) 48 minutes, 16mm b&w with sound
Directed by SARA DRIVER
Cinematography by Jim Jarmusch


A haunting adaptation of a 1948 short story by Paul Bowles about a woman who escapes from an asylum, You Are Not I played widely in the international film festival circuit in the early Eighties. Then, a leak in a New Jersey warehouse destroyed the negative, leaving director Sara Driver with only a battered, unprojectable copy. Miraculously, a print was found among the holdings of Paul Bowles in 2009, and now the film has been restored and is available once again. Undoubtedly one of the most impressive works to emerge from the post-punk downtown scene, the film was beautifully shot by Jim Jarmusch (who also co-wrote the screenplay) and features Suzanne Fletcher, Nan Goldin and Luc Sante. - from Film Society at Lincoln Center

Sara Driver (born December 15, 1955) is an American independent filmmaker from Westfield, New Jersey. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch,Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films,Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981). She served on the juries of various film festivals throughout the 2000s.

4/8 Fringes & Fragments: The Short Films of Ben Rivers (in-person)

Please join us Wednesday evening for a special screening and conversation with award winning UK filmmaker Ben Rivers. Rivers will be presenting 4 shorts films including the Boston premiere of "Things" which was just awarded top prizes at Ann Arbor Film Festival and Rotterdam.

Location: Mass Art Screening room 1. 621 Huntington Ave. Boston MA

MBTA Directions: Take the green line (E train) to Longwood stop.

Entrance to MASSART after is through South Building entrance on Huntington Ave.
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/766250196821470/

Ben Rivers (Somerset, 1972) studied Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art, initially in sculpture before moving into photography and moving-image. His filmmaking treads a line between documentary and fiction, often filming people who have in some way separated themselves from society. Rivers creates oblique narratives imagining alternative existences in marginal worlds, taking from J. G. Ballard the belief that optimism can be born out of crisis, and that utopia can exist as a personal state of mind or as collective thought.

He is the recipient of awards including FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film Two Years at Sea; the inaugural Robert Gardner Film Award, 2012; Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel 42, 2011; and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists, 2010, and two-times winner of Tiger Award for Short Film, Rotterdam International Film Festival. In 1996 he co- founded Brighton Cinematheque, which he then co-programmed through to its demise in 2006. He continues to programme on a peripatetic basis. He is represented by Kate MacGarry Gallery.

THINGS (2014, 21 mins, 16mm, b/w+col)

Things is a travelogue in which the filmmaker leads himself and the viewer through a tour of the four seasons, without ever once setting foot across his doorstep - focusing on unexplored things inside his own four walls. A year-long journey through domestic surroundings that at the same time is a trip into imagination and collective memory - revealed in the collected fragments of images, film, objects and sounds, a bed, books and, observed through a window pane, a squirrel in the garden.

As the seasons change, parallels and associations are made with things previously seen; an intricate web of clues to a life, there for the viewer to unpick. 

Ann Arbor Film Festival - winner Stan Brakhage Film at Wit's End award 2015

International Film Festival Rotterdam – winner Tiger Award for Short Film 2015

This Is My Land (2006, 14 min, 16mm, b/w)

A hand-processed portrait of Jake Williams – who lives alone within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Jake always has many jobs on at any one time, finds a use for everything, is an expert mandolin player, and has compost heaps going back many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21^st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working - I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and be apart from the idea of industry - Jake's life and garden are much the same - he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future. 

A World Rattled Of Habit (10min, 16mm, col/b+w, 2008)

A day trip to Suffolk, to see my friend Ben and his dad Oleg…

“So, that’s why my outlook and things very different than normal people, because I was not in a normal propaganda one area only, I was exposed all of a sudden to all opposites, you see and then you get clear mind.” Oleg Meschko

Sack Barrow (16mm, 2011, color)

Sack Barrow explores a small family run factory in the outskirts of London. It was set up in 1931 to provide work for limbless and disabled ex-servicemen until the factory finally went into liquidation this year. The film observes the environment and daily routines of the final month of the six workers. Years of miniature chemical and mineral processes transform the space into another world. Towards the end an extract of The Green Child by Herbert Read describes the descent into a watery cave world.