Spring 2016 Schedule

1/20 Joe Gibbons: SPYING  AND OTHER PROVOCATIONS
1/27 Joe Gibbons: DEADBEAT + CONFIDENTIAL PART 2
2/3 THE EXILE by Oscar Michaulx + RAGE IN HARLEM by Bill Duke
2/10  BLOOD OF JESUS by Spencer Williams + CABIN IN THE SKY by Vincent Minnelli
2/17 ON COPPER WINGS by Dave Fischer
2/24 Jean Rasenberger
3/2  Sustainability Incubator + Rob Todd
3/16 MOOLAADÉ
3/23 Kate McCabe
03/30 Julianna Schley
4/6  Rapture curated by Saul Levine
4/13 Ana Vaz
4/20 Jennifer Reeves
4/27 John Price
5/4 Amy Halpern

5/4/16 Amy Halpern

THREE-MINUTE HELLS 14 minutes, sound, 2012

PALM DOWN 7 minutes, silent, 2012

AMY HALPERN: FALLING LESSONS

Program

INVOCATION, 2 minutes, silent, 1982

THREE-MINUTE HELLS, 14 minutes, sound, 2012

In seven movements.

PALM DOWN, 7 minutes, silent, 2012

Two palindromes; no happy ending.

Demonstration of film’s dangerous qualities of emotional deception;

anticipation & the experience of release

BY HALVES, 7 minutes, silent, 2012
By-product of commercial film production, re-purposed for further transformations and distillation.
FLICKER WARNING:
If you are susceptible to seizures, or
epileptic or are just uncomfortable
with flashing lights, please close AND
cover your eyes AND also turn away
for the length of this film.

2/27/16 Blood Poet Kiss

Kiss (1963 54min bw 16MM)

Andy Warhol’s Kiss is probably the artist’s earliest film work that was screened in public. Harkening back to the time when Hayes Office censors would not allow lips to touch and linger for more than three seconds in Hollywood films, with Kiss, Warhol decided to shoot male/female, female/female and male/male snogs that went on for three minutes. The concept was likely also influenced by a 1929 Greta Garbo film called The Kiss which apparently was screened at Amos Vogel’s influential Cinema 16 experimental film society right around the time that Warhol bought his first Bolex film camera.The Kiss films were started in 1963 and shown in installments during weekly underground film screenings organized by Jonas Mekas. Eventually a 55-minute long version of Kiss was assembled. Among the participants were Ed Sanders of The Fugs, actor Rufus Collins from the Living Theatre, sculptor Marisol, artist Robert Indiana, as well as several of the outcasts and doomed beauties who would come to comprise the Factory’s “superstars.” The woman who you see kissing several guys, is Naomi Levine, who probably also came up with the concept (many of the kisses were also shot in her apartment). Andy Warhol referred to Levine as “my first female superstar.” Dangerousminds

Le Sang d'un Poète // The Blood of a Poet
(1930 55min bw / digital projection)
“Poets . . . shed not only the red blood of their hearts but the white blood of their souls,” proclaimed Jean Cocteau of his groundbreaking first film—an exploration of the plight of the artist, the power of metaphor and the relationship between art and dreams. One of cinema’s great experiments, this first installment of the Orphic Trilogy stretches the medium to its limits in an effort to capture the poet’s obsession with the struggle between the forces of life and death." Criterion

4/20/16 Jennifer Reeves

DREAMS & DISORDERS:
The Films of Jennifer Reeves

Program:
FEAR OF BLUSHING 2001 6 minutes, 16mm
FEAR OF BLUSHING bursts forth with irrepressible hand-painted color, corroded emulsion and a menacing soundscape of looped voices, distorted instrumentals, samples & rhythm. Fleeting visions and voices erupt out of the ominous abstraction in unusual juxtapositions, suggesting a cinematic free-association marked by anxiety, pleasure and shame. Best appreciated in the immediate; the 7200 painted frames fly by at an average of 12 per second.



WE ARE GOING HOME 1998 10 minutes, 16mm
Solarized, tinted, and optically-printed, this is a surreal portrait of desire, ghosts and pursuit of the sensual. Rhythmic color shifts in the emulsion bring life to the rural landscape, which seems to embody the terrain of the subconscious. Three women seek pleasure and the beyond in parallel universes, which never quite intersect. When one finds another, she is either buried in the sand or asleep under a tree.
WE ARE GOING HOME was shot at Philip Hoffman’s film retreat in rural Ontario. The film was made in the memory of Marian McMahon, an experimental filmmaker who died of cancer in the fall of 1996.

TRAINS ARE FOR DREAMING 2009 7 minutes, 16mm
Eight super-8 film years condensed into seven eye-popping minutes. A dreamer moves through landscapes to far seas -over tracks, winding roads, skies and waters- a journey of flight and fancy. The animals are watching, the chicks are chasing sunsets and dancing with sharks. A 98-year old grandmother reflects on life, while the 38-year old director looks back on her own. Dedicated to my late grandmother and to my late father, whose trumpet playing and voice enter the free-associative collage soundtrack.

COLOR NEUTRAL 2014 3 minutes, 16mm
A color explosion sparkles, bubbles and fractures in this hand-crafted 16mm film. Reeves utilized an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this boisterous, psychedelic morsel of cinema as material. Reeves' soundtrack mixes samples from rusty, dusty old machines, records and electric waves to suggest an aural passage through technological progress.

STRAWBERRIES IN THE SUMMERTIME 2013 15 min,pro-res
A two-year-old boy revels in all things tiny and huge on and around a farm. His father nurtures his exuberant and insatiable curiosity of new experiences– from climbing a crumbling wall to discovering the natural world. As a father-son bond grows, the mother with camera observes, gets lost into a solitary landscape and returns. The fleeting and glowing visual field evokes the delicate tension between distance and intimacy. Richly toned black and white positive, negative and solarized images, combined with snippets of voice, suggest the texture of memory. Reeves shot, hand-processed, solarized and colored Strawberries in the Summertime in rural Ontario at the “Film Farm” Independent Imaging Retreat run by filmmaker Philip Hoffman.

LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER 2007, 26 minutes, dual-projection SIDE BY SIDE 16mm WITH SOUND ON CD
Made from the original sewn and painted 16mm film

Jennifer Reeves (b. 1971, Sri Lanka) is a New York-based filmmaker working primarily on 16mm film. Reeves was named one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” in the film journal Cinema Scope in the spring of 2012. Her films have shown extensively, from the Berlin, New York, Vancouver, London, Sundance, and Hong Kong Film Festivals to many Microcinemas in the US and Canada, the Robert Flaherty Seminar, and the Museum of Modern Art. Full multiple-screening retrospectives of her work have been held at Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, Anthology Film Archives in New York, and San Francisco Cinematheque. Currently, her 2014 film COLOR NEUTRAL has been making the rounds of the international film circuit. A new collaboration with Composer/Performer Marc Ribot premiered at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York in August 2015. Ribot and Ikue Mori perform a live score to Reeves' SHADOWS CHOOSE THEIR HORRORS, LANDFILL 16, and HE WALKED AWAY. Marc Ribot performed his original score to the program of Reeves' films at DIA: DETROIT for their Day of the Dead Celebration in 2015.

Reeves has made experimental films since 1990. She does her own writing, cinematography, editing, and sound design. Her subjective and personal films push the boundaries of film through optical-printing and direct-on-film techniques. Reeves has consistently explored themes of memory, mental health and recovery, feminism and sexuality, landscape, wildlife, and politics from many different angles.

Since 2003 Reeves has worked with some of the finest composer/ performers, including Marc Ribot, Skúli Sverrisson, Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Anthony Burr and Eyvind Kang. As the daughter of a trumpeter, gravitating toward film and music collaborations was quite natural for Reeves. Her most ambitious film and music performance, the feature-length double-projection WHEN IT WAS BLUE (2008), premiered at Toronto International Film Festival with live music by composer/collaborator Skúli Sverrisson. Her multiple-projection films with live music have been performed internationally, from the Sydney Opera House and the Berlinale to RedCat in Los Angeles and the Wexner Center in Ohio.

Reeves has also made a number of experimental narratives, most notably her highly acclaimed feature THE TIME WE KILLED. The Village Voice Film Critic’s poll (2005) honored THE TIME WE KILLED with votes from six film critics for categories including: Best Film, Best Cinematography, and Best Performance.

Reeves also teaches animation part-time at The Cooper Union.

4/13/16 Near the Wild Heart: The Films of Ana Vaz

Filmmaker will be present!

Ana Vaz (b. 1986, Brasília) is an artist and filmmaker whose films and other expanded works speculate upon the relationships between history and representation through a cosmology of signs, references and perspectives. A graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy Studio National, Ana was also a member of SPEAP (School of Political Arts), a project conceived and directed by Bruno Latour. Recent screenings include the New York Film Festival – Projections, TIFF Wavelenghts, CPH:DOX, Videobrasil and Lux Salon. In 2015, she was awarded the Grand Prize for the international competition at Media City Film Festival as well as the Main Prize at Fronteira Experimental and Documentary Film Festival for her film “Occidente”. Ana was the recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of artistic excellence and innovation in her moving-image work. 

Sacris Pulso, Ana Vaz 2008 | 16-8mm transfer DVCAM | ST
Sacris Pulso departs from the dismemberment of another film, "Brasiliários", a filmic adaptation of Clarice Lispector's chronic "Brasília", a visionary text that looks at the inaugurated capital as a ruin of or from the future. Through the assemblage of "Brasiliários" with a body of 8mm found footage depicting rituals of travel and family, “Sacris Pulso” takes the form of a voyage of memory and fiction, of a past and future time calling upon the ghosts of Lispector, upon the spectral ghost of Brasília and sewed through the ties of a family fiction.

Les Mains, Négatives, Ana Vaz and Julien Creuzet 2012 | 15' | HD | color | ST
A postcard, flee markets of St. Ouen, Paris, 2012.

A Idade da Pedra (The Age of Stone), Ana Vaz 2013 | 29' | 16mm/HD | color | 5.1 sound
"As artificial as the world must have been when it was created"
A voyage into the far west of Brazil leads us to a monumental structure - petrified at the centre of the savannah. Inspired by the epic construction of the city of Brasília, the film uses this history to imagine it otherwise. "I look at Brasília the way I look at Rome : Brasília began with a final simplification of ruins". Through the geological traces that lead us to this fictive monument, the film unearths a history of exploration, prophecy and myth.

Occidente, Ana Vaz 2014 | 15' | 16mm/HD | color | 5.1 sound
A film-poem of an ecology of signs that speaks of colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geodata. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one's place, one's sitting around a table.

4/6/16 RAPTURE curated by Saul Levine

Program:

RAPTURE, by PAUL SHARITS, 1987 Video 20MIN

TOUCHING, 1968 by PAUL SHARITS, 16MM 12 MIN

FLY by YOKO ONO, 1970, VHS 27MIN

NEAR THE BIG CHAKRA by ANNE SEVERSON/PARKER 1972, DVD 17MIN

RAPTURE, by Paul Sharits, 1987 video 20MIN

A pseudo "rock video" which will never be shown on MTV. There are often visual resemblances between grief and joy and between mystical experiences and the varieties of body contortions of convulsive psychotic states (just as there can be a fine line between the "beautiful" and the "repulsive"--some of Goya's late monster paintings are an example) . "Rapture" is defined as a state of being ecstatically carried away. There is a thin line which I attempt to portray in these tableaux, the border line between the sublime and the repulsive. I wish to have the viewer respond to the tape in an intense but very ambiguous way. One interesting example of the relation of convulsive and ecstatic states is found in the similarities of brain waves of advanced Zen monks, at satori peak levels, and epileptics having grand mal seizures . At the onset of both the satori and seizure states there are greatly amplified alpha waves, which, at certain points of intensity, shift to high amplitude theta waves. The difference between these nearly identical patterns is that all of the epileptic's brain waves become synchronized and his/her mind is flooded while
the Zen monk is trained to allow only one region of the brain to move into a deep theta state and the monk will not visually exhibit any body convulsions. Also, aside from Christian literature stating such things as St.Theresa lifting off the ground in ecstasy, it is well known that shamans, voodoo practitioners, et al . are known to self-induce physical states which resemble convulsions and who for purposes of religious ecstasy/catharsis/insight often collapse after muscular spasms . Perhaps the notion of catharsis is applicable in some of these rites. At the technical level, the chief post-production tool was the ADO (Ampex Digital Optics), a 2-channel digital video synchronizer which digitizes the entire screen image, allowing one to control size, shape, direction, movement, etc. of the whole picture . This is a device often used in T .V . commercials but is an "effect" which is used as one gimmick among many other electrogimmicks. I've tried to use it as a creative device and to articulate it in a more extensive and meaningful way .
"A fierce vision of Dionysian ecstasy"--C .E .P .A., Buffalo

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G 1968 by Paul Sharits, 16MM 12MIN
Made in collaboration with poet David Franks, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G uses flickering of pure color frames juxtaposed with positive and negative still images of Franks threatening to cut off his tongue with glitter-covered scissors and being scratched across the face by fingernails that leave a sparkling trail. Other rapidly alternating still images of eye surgery and a couple in the midst of intercourse are used to heighten the underlying violent, erotic and psychological undertones of the film and are recurrent themes that Sharits would repeatedly pursue in many of his films. The soundtrack is a continuous looped recording of Franks speaking the word “destroy” over the entire length of the film, which eventually becomes unrecognizable as it mutates in the viewer’s ear into other words or phrases. The first of Sharits’ mandala films to utilize sound in a powerful way, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G was an attempt by the filmmaker to reconnect and come to terms with both his mother’s suicide and the birth of his son, events that would have a profound impact on his future films as well.
'merges violence with purity.' - P. Adams Sitney. 'Surrealist tour de force' - Parker Tyler. On the '10 best films of 1969'

FLY by Yoko Ono, 1970, VHS 27MIN
Filmed in a New York attic in two days. John and Yoko asked New York actress Virginia Lust to lie down naked whilst they filmed a fly exploring her body. Approximately 200 flies were used and each had to be stunned with a special gas. The film showed a fly traversing the girl's body from her toes to her head, exploring every part. It was claimed that Virginia Lust also had to be sedated during the filming.

NEAR THE BIG CHAKRA by Anne Severson/Parker, 1972, DVD 17MIN
An unhurried view of 37 human female vaginas – ranging in age from three months to 56 years.
“The impression made by this film, its impact – has been enormous. … This film is a new approach to our femininity.” – Agnes Varda, Image and Sound