MassArt Film Society

2/1/12 two great films

2012-01-30T12:34:00.003-05:00

Body and Soul by Oscar Micheaux 1925
starring Paul Robeson, one of Micheaux's 3 surviving silent films.

Blood of Jesus by Spencer Williams 1941
starring Spencer Williams, Cathryn Caviness and featuring members of Reverend R.L.
Robinson's Heavenly Choir who sing the gospel music score.

2 American "race films." This was a genre of films made for Afro American audiences with all black casts. They were made outside of Hollywood. Out of about 500 made, fewer than 100 still exist.

MassArt Film Society Spring 2012

2012-01-29T15:46:00.001-05:00

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

3/14 Joel Shlemovitz

3/21 Amy Greenfield

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

4/11 Jackie Goss

4/18 Jesse Stead

to be continued

1/25/2012 George Kuchar

2012-01-18T21:55:00.007-05:00

Hold me while I’m Naked

I, AN ACTRESS

CULT OF THE CUBICLES

HOT SPELL

Tonight 1/18/2012 Rebecca Meyers

2012-01-18T14:29:00.009-05:00

glow in the dark ( january-june) (Rebecca Meyers 2004)

Radiators clang while spheres and cypridina phosphoresce. A rubber ball held up to light becomes a snowy crystal. Home science experiments and other attempts to see with the camera in the dark.

things we want to see (Rebecca Meyers 2004)

An introspective work that obliquely measures the fragility of life against boundless forces of nature, such as Alaskan ice floes, the Aurora Borealis and magnetic storms. -Mark Webber, London Film Festival

lions and tigers and bears (Rebecca Meyers 2006)

In lions and tigers and bears, Rebecca Meyers focuses on the urban wildlife, both real and simulated, with which we share our cities. The most unlikely creatures somehow survive in a hostile environment, while animals are also invoked in artworks, corporate logos and other icons. Pets and animal icons testify to a human longing for proximity to wildlife, while the urban landscape offers its fugitive creatures artificial substitutes for the tree limbs and tunnels of the wild - Toronto International Film Festival Program Notes

night side (Rebecca Meyers 2008)

A side of the universe turned away from the sun. -RM

night side is a tone poem of twilight images, colors, and lights that privilege isolation, even loneliness. Birds appear alone, perched sentinel-like on winter branches. Interiors, though absent of human presence, nevertheless beckon through warmly lit reflections of lamps in windows. –Tony Pipolo, Millennium Film Journal

blue mantle (Rebecca Meyers 2010)

And now I roll with drifting currents, the prey
of fishes:
and this gravestone lies
If it says that it marks the place of my burial.
—Leonidas of Tarentum

Say, sea,
Take me!
—Emily Dickinson

Throughout the time when sea-going vessels were the primary means for “bringing man nearer unto man”, whether by means of fish alongside trawlers or tea in clippers, the 40 mile stretch of sea between Chatham and Provincetown, MA, came to be known as an ocean graveyard due to the many thousands of wrecks that occurred there. One, the Frances, which sank in 1872 can still be seen at low tide. The region is steeped in stolid New England history and awash with apocryphal tales immortalized in shanties that grow ever more potent as the mists of time fold in over the details. Blue Mantle is an elegantly composed work which combines these aspects with haunting cinematography. Historical account, literary texts, song and compositional fragments all make this film poem, a documentary of sorts, a soaked ships log, its pages already running with ink.

12/7/11 Jordan Belson Memorial

2011-12-06T20:07:00.002-05:00

Sidney Peterson Lead Shoes
...surreal and significant...historically and culturally...

Christopher McLaine The End, The Man Who Invented Gold, Beat, and Scotch Hop
... film works from the beat period, visual poetry...

Kenneth Anger Invocation of My Demon Brother
...assembled from the scraps of an early version of Lucifer Rising? The music is by Mick Jagger...

11/30/11 Guillermo Gómez-Álvarez

2011-11-28T12:28:00.004-05:00

Una Identidad en Absurdo Vol. 1 (An Absurd identity Vol. 1)
by Guillermo Gómez-Álvarez (Filmmaker in person!)

Una Identidad en Absurdo Vol. 1 (An Absurd identity Vol. 1)
Video 79 min 2011
A musical-ethnographic documentary exploring the representation of the inconsistencies of being “Puerto Rican,” both in the island and abroad. The film is a study on the contradictory behaviors—social, political, and cultural—of a people divided on the search for a country. The movie is intertwined with another observational documentary on the soundtrack recording of the movie itself at Monopolio Records, an independent studio.

Different music artists are presented while recording the documentary’s soundtrack, and, at the same time, present conflicts and controversies within Puerto Rican identity. Psychoanalyst Alfredo Carrasquillo and historian Carlos Pabón provide academic knowledge by “interrumpting” the documentary, thus creating a historical-analysis context for the main subject matters, such as socioeconomics, history, politics, religion, and even ecology. The film is constructed by using archive and found footage as a visually powerful witness, frequently in tune with what is explained or played in music. Triggering the viewer’s questions with the many languages film has to offer. Questions like, “Who are we?”, “Are we (Puerto Rico) a nation?”, “What does being Puerto Rican include or exclude?”, etc.

Followed directly by a q&a featuring the Filmmaker Guillermo Gomez.

Guillermo Gómez-Álvarez. Veracruz, Mexico, 1973. Raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico since he was three years old, Gómez-Álvarez is an alumnus from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus.
There he obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts (1996), majoring in Latin American Studies, and also a Master’s Degree in Arts (2005), majoring in Audiovisual Production. In 2007, he completed a
Master’s Degree in Creative Documentary at Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. He is a fiction and documentary filmmaker, a music video director, as well as a musician and photographer. His first full-length documentary was La Escena [The Scene] ( 2005), on Puerto Rico’s punk subculture, presented at selected theaters in Puerto Rico and the United States; this documentary was part of Gómez-Álvarez Master’s thesis project. La Rosa de María [Mary’s Rose] (2007) is also part of a thesis project at Universtiat Autónoma de Barcelona and aired on Televisió de Catalunya (TVC) in 2007.
Aquel Rebaño Azul [The Blue Flock], Gómez-Álvarez first film, won the Accolade Film Award in 2009. The documentary explores a history of police brutality in Puerto Rico. This film was commissioned by the Puerto Rico Civil Rights Commission, and was presented throughout the island in May, 2010, and also at El Museo del Barrio in New York. Una Identidad en Absurdo Vol. 1 is his latest work, released in April, 2011. Leaning towards an experimental concept, the documentary explores deconstructing Puerto Rican identity through music.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrGuillermogomez

Film Society Fall 2011 Schedule

2011-11-28T09:55:00.000-05:00

9/14/11 F O R E I G N I S S U E S

Films by women from Germany & Austria

curated by Dagmar Kamlah

9/21/11 Films/Videos by Jennifer Montgomery

9/28/11 Radical Light San Francisco in the Sixties with Kathy Geritz

10/5/11 Roger Beebe-multiple projections

10/12/11 George Landow aka Owen Land Memorial Show

10/19/11 Laida Lertxundi

10/26/11 Hope Tucker

11/2/11 Saul Levine

11/9/11 David Sherman

11/16/11 Coleen FitzGibbon

11/23/11 No Show

11/30/11 Guillermo Gomez

Possible Shows in December, stay tuned for more info...

12/7/11 George Kuchar

11/16/11 Coleen Fitzgibbon

2011-11-14T21:03:00.006-05:00

COLEEN FITZGIBBON: DIARY FILMS

Artist In Person!

An evening of recently preserved short experimental film works the by New York based artist Coleen Fitzgibbon. For the past few years, Fitzgibbon has been actively preserving and screening her early Super-8 and 16mm films, many of them not screened since the mid-70’s. This program will include a selection of intimate cinematic sketches, portraits, travelogues and home movies.

Coleen Fitzgibbon is an active experimental film artist who previously worked under the pseudonym “Colen Fitzgibbon” between the years 1973-1980. A student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Independent Study Program, she studied with Owen Land (aka “George Landow”), Stan Brakhage, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci, and worked on film and sound projects for Dennis Oppenheim, Gordon Matta-Clark and Les Levine. She formed the collaborative X&Y with Robin Winters in 1976, The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince and Winters in 1979, and is best known for co-founding the New York based Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab) in 1977 through 1981, along with forty plus artists.

Fitzgibbon has screened her work at numerous international film festivals, museums and galleries, including The Toronto International Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Anthology Film Archives, NYC; Light Industry, NYC; De Appel, Amsterdam; Exit Art, NYC; Subliminal Projects Gallery, LA. Fitzgibbon currently resides in New York City and Montana. http://coleenfitzgibbon.com

COLEEN FITZGIBBON: DIARY FILMS

Trip to Carolee, [1974/2011, Super 8mm xfr’d to digital, color, sound, 5:08 min.]

L.E.S., [1976/2011, digital, color, sound, 16:22 min.]

FM/TRCS, [1974, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 11:48 min.]

Restoring Appearances to Order in 12 minutes, [1975, 16mm xfr’d to digital, b/w, sound, 10:28 min.]

Make a Movie, [1975/2011, Super 8mm xfr’d to digital, color, sound, 9:16 min.]

X Magazine Benefit, with Alan W. Moore [1978/2011, Super 8mm xfr’d to digital, b&w, sound, 11:40 min.]

11/9/11 David Sherman

2011-11-02T20:40:00.001-04:00

Wasteland Utopias

2010, 91 minutes, DV, color/stereo sound

USA, Directed by David Sherman

This cine-essay probes the unlikely 1950’s meeting of outsider psychiatrist/naturalist Wilhelm Reich. and mega-developer Del Webb in the Arizona's Sonoran Desert prompting a contemporary examination of environmental and psychological sustainability.

Summary:

Wasteland Utopias explores the intersection of two radically different utopian thinkers: mega-developer Del Webb and outsider psychiatrist/naturalist Wilhelm Reich. Each found his way into southern Arizona's Sonoran Desert in the late 1950s—Webb building his colossal, panoptically-planned retirement community Sun City and Reich conducting his weather manipulation experiments using Orgone Energy. This unlikely pairing provokes a hallucinatory, magic-conceptualist examination of the disintegrating fabric that connects man with nature, evoking questions about both ecological and social sustainability. Using found footage, documentary interviews, and narrative tableaux, the film interweaves contradictory narratives and critically poetic observations. By juxtaposing these two thinkers—who represent ostensibly opposing visions of a still-undefined future—Sherman asks viewers to consider a multiplicity of perspectives on our endangered natural and social environments.

www.davidshermanfilms.com/Wasteland_Utopias

"Masterpiece"-Craig Baldwin

"It's rare to see a film whose aesthetic principles so elementally parallel the subjects they intend to depict."-Owen O'Toole, Wide Open Cinema

Screenings: European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrueck, Germany; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival; Center For Creative Photography; Union Docs; Phoenix Museum of Art; Globians Doc Fest, Berlin; Echo Park Film Center

BIO:

David Sherman is a filmmaker and media artist, whose appropriation and collage based, experimental films and videos have been exhibited extensively at film festivals, museums and alternative venues throughout the world. Sherman’s 2010 feature cine–essay Wasteland Utopias premiered at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His 2002 experimental documentary To Re-edit the World premiered at the San Francisco International Film. Sherman’sTuning the Sleeping Machine was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial and The New York Film Festival. He co-founded Total Mobile Home the world’s first microcinema in San Francisco in 1993. Sherman has been Administrative Director of Canyon Cinema and was a Professor of Media Arts at California College of the Arts. He currently resides in Bisbee, AZ.

11/2/11 Saul Levine presents his own work!

2011-10-28T12:35:00.006-04:00

Program:
SALT OF THE SEA
1965 (R8,4m) Color, Silent
Founded under water ... all at sea ... made at land.

THE BIG STICK | AN OLD REEL
1967-73 (R8, b/w 17m, 16mm Blowup)) BW, Silent
"The Big Stick/An Old Reel" [...] "intercut[s] two Charlie Chaplin shorts centering on policemen with newsreel footage of police crowd control and street fighting. Levine questioned the social implications of media, not only by making temporal, aesthetic and contextual comparisons of his sources, but by presenting this discomforting ragout in a film gauge whose cost, availability and mobility make simply working it an intrinsically political gesture. Levine also understood how to use very fast cutting in old-style 8mm, a difficult task in that the splice is in the middle of the frame. A cut is therefore void of illusion, and in fact threatens to obliterate a weak image...
"... Levine's adroit use of graphic action from the newsreels and close-ups from the shorts changed the rapid cuts from awkward stumbles to almost profound superimpositions." - James Irwin, Artweek

NOTE TO COLEEEN
1974 (R8, 3.5m, 16mm Blow up) Color, Silent
Opens with a short portrait of Marjorie Keller that I made while she met Colleen Fitzgibbon and I on a corner in New York City. The rest of the film is a note to Colleen a continuation of conversations about portraiture, public and private art, love, friendship and loneliness.

GROOVE TO GROOVE part 2 of A FEW TUNES GOING OUT
w/ MAI CRAMER & JESSE GREEN BLUES BAND
1978-1982 (S8,11m) Color, Sound

BOPPING THE GRAET WALL OF CHINA BLUE
1981 (S8mm, 6m) Color, Sound,
"A portrait of disc jockey Mai Cramer, filmmaker Dan Barnett, and Levine himself. The film cuts between Cramer talking, Barnett working and touring China and Levine engaged in the routines of his life. Incorporated into the portrait are shots of an astronaut floating in space, clouds passing and Chinese women performing their daily exercise. As vast space and clouds float by, the film mixes daily routines, foreign locales and the expanse of the universe in a work of cinematic music and dance." - Marjorie Keller, program note, Collective for Living Cinema, 1983

WHOLE NOTE
1999-2000 (S8,10m, 16mm Blow up) BW, Silent
A portrait of my father in the last days of his life.
"Nothing is as whole as a broken heart"
- Hassidic saying.

LIGHT LICKS are a series of films, which are made frame by frame often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into the frame left unexposed. LIGHT LICKS are ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice.

BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON is a sub series within the LIGHT LICKS, inspired by Psalm 137, a meditation on the experience of forced exile.

LIGHT LICK : BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON:
I WANT TO PAINT IT BLACK
2011 (S8, 12m,16mm Blow up) Color, Silent
I spent the week of thanksgiving 2010 in Prague; I had never been to Europe before and as a Jew born in the 2nd World War, I had a strong association of central Europe with the Holocaust. I found Prague to be an extremely charming and beautiful city, an architectural palimpsest as it hadn’t been bombed. In this LIGHT LICK I responded to the city in the present tense but kept being drawn into its past. The grave of Rabbi Judah Lowe the alleged maker of the Golem alleged descendent of King David and certainly one of the great Jewish scholars and mystics of his time, the absence of a contemporary Jewish community and the wonderful statues bridges and buildings led me to make this dark Gothic reflection of 21st century Prague. -SAUL LEVINE 2011

LIGHT LICK : BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON:
THIS MAYBE THE LAST TIME
2011 (S8, 16mm Blow up) Color, Silent

http://saullevine.com/home.html

http://www.myspace.com/saullevine

http://vimeo.com/saullevine

10/26/11 Hope Tucker

2011-10-21T22:15:00.001-04:00

HOPE TUCKER was born in Memphis in 1974 and began The Obituary Project in 2000. After several years in London, she’s currently travelling around the US and working on more obits and an animated documentary.

Filmography/Awards Info:
The Obituary Project screenings include the Director’s Lounge, Berlin; Ukrainian Museum of Modern Art, Chicago; WTTW Chicago Public Television; Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles; Athens Film and Video Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Portland International Film Festival, Oregon; Onion City Experimental Festival, Chicago; MIX NYC; Dallas Video Fest; Milwaukee Underground Film Festival; MadCat Women’s International Film Festival, San Francisco; and Images Toronto.

10/19/11 Laida Lertxundi

2011-10-13T15:17:00.003-04:00

Cry When it Happens / Llora Cuando Te Pase
2010, 14 min, 16mm

Camera, Editing, Directing: Laida Lertxundi
Sound: Dan Boer, Lindsey Hoffmann, Laida Lertxundi,
Albert Ortega, Lucas Quigley
Sound mix: Ezra Buchla
Music: Beethoven, Black Velvet, The Blue Rondos,
Laura Steenberge
Typography: Lucas Quigley
With: Lindsey Hoffmann, Beau Johnson, Laura Merando,
Albert Ortega, Tanya Rubbak, Laura Steenberge
Location: Los Angeles Benton Montaña de Oro
San Luis Obispo, California, USA
Thank you: Thom Andersen, Betzy Bromberg,
Mark McElhatten, C.W. Winter

Los Angeles City Hall is reflected onto the window of the Paradise Motel. It serves as an anchor for this traversal through the natural expanse of California. Here, we discover a restrained psychodrama of play, loss, and the transformation of everyday habitats. Music appears across the interiors and exteriors and speaks of limitlessness and longing.

“ Cry When It Happens, one of three films at last year's New York Film Festival that seemed vital. Like Uncle Boonmee and Film Socialisme, Cry sees characters with their vision subsumed in the portholes of dingy technology-and eventually takes on their perspective. In the first image, two girls splay on a couch, antiparallel but touching, vaguely grinning, with the light intensified on their arms and faces. Already the film's both naturalistic, with feeling—a delimited space, real-time hold, physical respite, sense of the bodies touching cloth on all sides—and slightly surreal: their sense of comfort, huddling, belied by the unnecessarily tight squeeze. Eventually two figures in an LA motel room watch TV footage of the sky while one fingers an accordion, and some minutes later, that sky footage becomes the film itself, God's heavens accompanied by the Blue Rondos' "Little Baby."
The song becomes a signal of real-world culture and time against the sky, and every time the movie offers a transformative sight it's inevitably mediated by the physical realities of a blinking TV and preset sound-loop, like a sidekick that won't shut up channeling the transcendental. Lertxundi is precise in her abstraction; her cuts back and forth from the sky to the motel are like the Wallace Stevens rhyme schemes in which the words won't rhyme, but are repeated thuddingly untransformed. Her TV's not different from Stevens's jar in Tennessee—"It took dominion every where/ The jar was gray and bare"—at once both all-encompassing and physically self-contained. Shot-by-shot, like Stevens line-by-line, Lertxundi probably has a better sense of bodily relations, suburban detail, and epic landscape, spaces rising deep in the frame instead of receding, than anyone in America, but her accumulation of precisions makes a through line of disembodied gazes, very much of 2011, in which each portal seems to lead forward or back to the next.”
– David Phelps, The L Magazine

My Tears Are Dry
2009, 4 min, 16mm

Camera, editing, directing: Laida Lertxundi
Sound: Laida Lertxundi, Lucas Quigley
Music: Laura Steenberge, Hoagy Lands
With: Tanya Rubbak, Laura Steenberge
Location: Los Angeles, California

“Laida Lertxundi’s My Tears Are Dry is something of a coda to her wonderful 2008 film Footnotes to a House of Love. It is a haiku-like sunshiny Southern California riff on Bruce Baillie’s classic All My Life, with a towering palm tree instead of the brambling roses. But the simple, yet elegant, skyward tilt at the end is still there. As with her earlier film, Lertxundi is concerned with the feeling of a location. She creates an off-hand, casual tone that is both comfortable and slightly on edge. The effect is gentler here, but the cross-cutting at the beginning between a woman sprawled on a bed playing snippets of the 1961 Hoagy Landis song “My Tears Are Dry” on a portable cassette deck and a woman plucking discordantly on a guitar sets up an uneasy tension (a slight nod to the “Dueling Banjos” in Deliverance?). It’s the experimental film equivalent of lo-fi pop.”
– Patrick Friel, Senses of Cinema

Footnotes to a House of Love
2007, 13 min, 16mm

With: Sandy Ding, Eliza Douglas, Laura Merando,
Sally Oviatt, Lucas Quigley and Laura Steenberge

“Laida Lertxundi ’s Footnotes to a House of Love, also set in southern California, was in some ways the aftermath to the apocalyptic buildup of SpaceDisco-One. The desert, so often a stand-in for other places imagined by Hollywood, here is barren and bright, set to the tune of Leslie Gore and the Kinks playing through an intrepid little tape deck. The tinny sound carries through a broken down house, a house without walls and whose door falls down the moment someone tries to open it. People drift by and a couple makes love on a sheet laid out in the sand; it’s not clear where the house ends and the desert begins. The music plays in most of the film like a radio signal, a relic of another time, now gone. The film is pervaded with the sense of something having happened, though we’re given only brief glimpses of what came after.”
–Genevieve Yue, Senses of Cinema

“Laida Lertxundi’s Footnotes to a House of Love is the type of thing you hope for at a festival: something remarkable by someone you’ve never heard of. not much happens in the film - much to its credit. A young couple inhabits a dilapidated house in the California desert. They read, play the cello, piss, but mostly just walk about. Their actions, however, are entirely peripheral to the film. Footnotes is most centrally about the presence of place, the house and the desert beyond, and the possibilities they seem to invite. narra- tives and relationships are only just hinted at and seemingly swallowed up by the surroundings. There is a subtle mysteriousness to the place that could easily have made it a site for terror, or at least danger, but this is constantly leavened by a gentle, disarming playfulness and teasing.”
–Patrick Friel, Senses of Cinema

“The Grand prize of Basque Cinema, Footnotes to a House of Love, by Laida Lertxundi, begins by weaving a series of brushstrokes in the form of annotations, using fragmentation (and the partial use of off frame) and long shots to transform the non-actor into non-character. Maneuver by which all is left is the referent of the California desert landscape. There is a break with cinematographic boundaries and a departure into the terrain of video art.”
–Cahiers Du Cinema, Spain

Bio:
Laida Lertxundi (Bilbao, 1981) works on film making non-stories with non-actors that explore the terrain of diegetic space, creating a particular sound and image syntax in response to the way desire and expectations are manufactured and imbedded in the language of cinema. She is interested in the histories of experimental film, the possibility of a feminine language and the play between found environments and constructed situations. Her work has been shown internationally in museums, festivals and venues such as MoMa, Lacma, Viennale and the New York Film Festival views of the Avant Garde, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Anthology Film Archives. She recently received the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival and was included in Best of the Decade reviews in CinemaScope Magazine and 25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century in The Film Comment Avant-Garde Poll. She has been a programmer for Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona since 2002 and has also programmed for ZineBi at the Guggenheim Bilbao, CalArts and UCSD. Her writing on film includes Xcentric: 45 Películas Contra Dirección 2006 (CCCB, 2006), La risa oblicua. Tangentes, paralelismos e intersecciones entre documental y humor (Madrid, Ocho y Medio Libros de Cine, 2009) and Bájate del Coche, en Busca de la Belleza Secreta en la Región Paradójica (Revista Bostezo, 2011). Reviews of her work appear in Senses of Cinema, ArtForum and Cahiers Du Cinema among others. She teaches film at the University of California San Diego and lives in Los Angeles, California.
http://laidalertxundi.net/

10/12/11 A Memorial Show for George Landow aka Owen Land

2011-10-05T22:23:00.002-04:00

Some films presenting, not in this order:

Diploteratology: Bardo Follies(1967)

Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particals, etc.(1966)

The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter(1968)

On The Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation of Unconscious, Or Can the Avant-Guard Artist be Wholed?(1979)

Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present(1973)

Whats Wrong with this Picture?(1972)

Wide Angle Saxon(1975)

10/5/11 Multi Projector Experiments by Roger Beebe

2011-09-28T22:00:00.000-04:00

Films for One to Eight Projectors

WHAT:
Experimental filmmaker Roger Beebe, whose films have shown around the globe from
Sundance to the Museum of Modern Art and from McMurdo Station in Antarctica to the
CBS Jumbotron in Times Square, brings a program of his recent mutli-projector films to
the Northeast for a fall 2011 tour. In these films Beebe explores the possibilities of
using multiple projectors—running as many as 8 projectors simultaneously—not for a
free-form VJ-type experience, but for the creation of discrete works of expanded cinema.
The show builds from the relatively straightforward two-projector films “The Strip Mall
Trilogy” and “TB TX DANCE” to the more elaborate three-projector studies “Money
Changes Everything” and “AAAAA Motion Picture” on finally to the eight-projector
meditation on the mysteries of space, “Last Light of a Dying Star.”
"[Beebe’s films] implicitly and explicitly evoke the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand
and Lee Friedlander, all photographers of the atomic age whose Western photographs
captured the banalities, cruelties and beauties of imperial America."
--David Fellerath, The Independent Weekly
“Beebe’s films are both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a
disfigured, contemporary American landscape.”
--Wyatt Williams, Creative Loafing (Atlanta)
"Beebe's work is goofy, startling, and important." --Daniel Kraus, Wilmington Encore
ABOUT ROGER BEEBE:
Roger Beebe is a professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. Beebe
has screened his films around the globe with recent solo shows at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, Anthology Film Archives in New York, and dozens of other venues.
He has won numerous awards including a 2009 Visiting Foreign Artists Grant from the
Canada Council for the Arts, a 2006 Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida, and
Best Experimental Film at the 2006 Chicago Underground Film Festival. In addition to
his work as a filmmaker, he is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small
gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and is currently Artistic Director of FLEX,
the Florida Experimental Film Festival. He also owns Video Rodeo, an independent video
store in Gainesville, FL.
ABOUT THE FILMS:
Last Light of a Dying Star (2008, 4 X 16MM, 3 X VIDEO, 1 X SUPER 8MM, 22 min.)
A multi-projector meditation on the passage from film to video, from abstraction to
representation, and from the technological wonder of space exploration to the banality of
the digital snapshot. Originally made for an installation/performance in a planetarium at
the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA, the film attempts to recapture some of
the excitement of the early days of space exploration and the utopian aspirations of
expanded cinema. Made as an orchestration of a number of different elements, made
and found: handmade cameraless film loops by Beebe and Jodie Mack; 16mm
educational films about eclipses, asteroids, comets, and meteorites; and a super 8 print
of the East German animated film “The Drunk Sun.”
AAAAA Motion Picture (2010, 3 X 16MM, 12 min.)
The Manhattan phone book has 14 pages of companies jockeying to be at the start of the
alphabetical listings. Capitalism triumphs over linguistic richness yet again. Our
challenge: to learn how to write poetry when there’s only one letter left.
Money Changes Everything (2009, 3 X 16MM, 5 min.)
Three days in Las Vegas, Nevada, and three different visions of the discarded past and
the constantly renewed future. A three-part portrait of a town in transformation: a
suburban utopia in the desert, a cancerous sprawl of unplanned development, a
destination for suicides.
TB TX DANCE (2006, 2 X 16MM, 3 min.)
A cameraless film made on a black & white laser printer with an optical soundtrack made
of dots of varying sizes provides the backdrop for revisiting Toni Basil’s appearance in
Bruce Conner’s 1968 film “Breakaway.” Commissioned as part of Mike Plante’s
Lunchfilm series, where filmmakers are asked to make films for less than the price of the
lunch they’ve just been treated to. (This film’s budget was $32.37 worth of pulled pork
sandwiches and peach cobbler.)
The Strip Mall Trilogy (2001, 1 X SUPER 8MM/1 X VIDEO, 9 min.)
A look straight into the heart of the most postmodern of architectural forms, the strip
mall, shot in a mile-long parking lot that could be Anywhere, USA. “He has actually
managed to bust apart the mind-controlling code of relentlessly commercial space and
reconfigure it into a landscape of beautiful colors and forms. It is a remarkable piece of
Super 8 alchemy." --David Finkelstein, Film Threat

9/28/11 Radical Light tour with curator Kathy Geritz!

2011-09-22T13:35:00.004-04:00

Dufus! -Mike Henderson, 1970, 8 mins, B&W,

Doggie Diner and Return of Doggie -DLipton

Duo Concertantes -Jordan

I Change I Am the Same -Severson

Schmeerguntz -Nelson

Valentin De Las Sierras -Baillie

Oh Dem Watermelons -Nelson

Riverbody -Severson

9/21/11 Jennifer Montgomery

2011-09-15T19:41:00.010-04:00

JENNIFER MONTGOMERY: TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS & THE AGONAL PHASE

PROGRAM:

TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS

2000, TRT 19 minutes, 16mm & video

Distributed by Video Data Bank

"Begun as a consideration of the upgrading from manual to digital film editing techniques,Transitional Objects explores the anxiety and loss inevitable in such a transition while also suggesting the consequences of other life transitions. The video takes its title from D.W. Winnicott's theory of children's use of transitional objects to negotiate the gaps between internal reality and the shared reality of people and things. Remarkably layered, Transitional Objects weaves together considerations of splicing, Winnicott, sewing, motherhood, new technology and loss of mastery." –Carl Bogner"Playtime with psychoanalytic theory mischief-maker Jennifer Montgomery, who toys with the boundaries between self and other, and sutures together chimeras before your eyes."–New York Video Festival

THE AGONAL PHASE

2010, TRT 42 minutes, HD
with Christopher Montgomery, Laszlo McKenzie, and Vivian Montgomery. Distributed by Video Data Bank
In the aftermath of a death things may seem very quiet, but there are struggles going on so deep not even those who struggle can recognize them. This film looks and listens for signs of those struggles. Psychoanalytic interjections consider the nature of time and rumination, and are used to step outside of the terribly interiorized state of mourning. JM

"The agonal phase: the visible events that take place when life is in the act of extricating itself from protoplasm too compromised to sustain it any longer. They are like some violent outbursts of protest arising deep in the primitive unconscious raging against the too-hasty departure of the spirit; no matter its preparation by even months of antecedent illness, the body often is reluctant to agree to the divorce." Sherwin Nuland, How We Die

Jennifer Montgomery's film titles include 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). Her newest film, The Agonal Phase (2010), premiered at the New York Film Festival.
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. She now lives in Arlington, MA.

September 14, 2011, 8 pm

2011-09-14T09:49:00.002-04:00

F O R E I G N I S S U E S

Films by women from Germany & Austria

curated by Dagmar Kamlah

Passagen

(Passages)

2010. Germany. 12 min

by Doro Carl

A topography of transit traffic: Throughout a whole year Doro Carl filmed the elevated platform of a commuter train station from a distant camera position. Like on a stage people of all ages and nations enter and leave this passage way.

The video installation was shown as part of an integrative art project, which envisions more social life in an international city. The "Academy of another city" focussed on suburban quarters with a high percentage of migrant population and located the exhibits along subway/rapid transit lines.

Minot, North Dakota

2007. USA. 18 min

by Angelika Brudniak, Cynthia Madansky

Music by Zeena Parkins

Minot, nicknamed the "Magic City," is the home of a U.S. Air Force base and its 150 subterranean nuclear missiles. These weapons of mass destruction, installed almost fifty years ago, are still targeted at Russia. The film examines this troubling nuclear landscape and residents' reactions to the forest of bombs beneath their backyards.

A room with a view in the financial district

2003. Austria/USA. 5 min

by Carola Dertnig

The images of this work, made in June 2001, are talking about several months the artist spent living in the World Trade Center in New York, as part of an artist-in-residence program. Shot with the photo button of a video camera, A ROOM WITH A VIEW... documents a number of empty rooms, abandoned architectures with traces of a working environment, punctuated by framed views of Manhattan as seen through the windows. In a first-person off-camera narration the filmmaker comments on her stay, reflecting the space’s conditions as well as artistic questions and broader economic structures.

Prufrock back in America

2010. Germany. 8 min

by Eva Heldmann

Documentary impressions of a Europeanized man returning to his old American places. Energy still roars through the land that no longer works. An angel appears in a parking lot. A comfortable couple squabbles over a piece of cheese. Filmed 2008 and 2010 between Chicago and the Mississippi River.

"I grow old ... I grow old ... // I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. // Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? // I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. // I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each."

(aus: T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")

Quiet Neighborhood

2011. USA. 16 min

by Dagmar Kamlah

A front porch full of chimes on a beautiful fall day. Packages of leaves waiting to be delivered, the cat finds more to chase after. Another bell calls for donations. The orchestra goes silent when snow covers our small world.

Übung zur Gelassenheit I-III

(Exercise in Placidity I-III)

2004. Germany. 7:35 min

by Doro Carl

Noisy traffic is running unremittingly close to unaffectedly dozing cows. Cars slamming on the brakes cause a twitch of the ear, but there seems to be no flight instinct – the cow is an holy animal. Lethargic composure and hectic activity exist side by side, but the cow seems to be imperturbable. Her invulnerability guarantees her calmness – she is an icon.

Once upon a time

2005. Germany. 25 min

by Corinna Schnitt

In a living room, a camera is slowly turning round, just about thirty centimetres above the carpet. There is no-one to be seen. A cat suddenly appears and moments later a second one enters the room. A dog drinks water from a fish bowl, a bird joins the assembled company, a rabbit hops in, a goose waggles its way among them, somewhere a pig is grubbing about, a goat, a lama, there is no end to it. Gradually the room is filling up with more and more animals which are sniffing at each other, startling each other or munching on a house plant together. In an earlier work by Corinna Schnitt, we saw all kinds of very young children sitting, lying, walking and playing naked together in an idyllic landscape. The religious or romantic association with a primeval world in which living creatures would once have co-existed, also emerges from Once Upon a Time.

“A fairytale-like story: Once upon a time when man’s domesticated companions reconquered civilised space …“ (S.Himmelsbach)

8/24/11 Curated by Tara Nelson and Mike Piso

2011-08-06T13:24:00.004-04:00

Lightning Over Braddock

by Tony Buba

*80 min.
*1988

Lightning Over Braddock is as eccentric a picture of America as has emerged in the last two decades. Like Buba's earlier short films, it chronicles the decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a hard-luck town which once flourished as "Pittsburgh's shopping center." It concerns a director (Buba, playing himself) trying, without much success, to make a movie with a crazy street hustler named Sal, who considers himself responsible for Buba's (modest) success. Like Errol Morris, Buba has a fascination with the idiocyncratic details of daily life, and uses his formidable sense of humor to document the decay of industrial America. Lightning Over Braddock, Buba's magnum opus, might have its tongue in its cheek but its heart is always firmly in the right place.

Five Bad Elements

by Mark Lapore

* 1997
* 32 minutes
* B&W
* OPT
*16mm film

"A dark and astringent film that allows the filmmaker's personal subconscious drives and the equivocal bad conscience of ethnography to bleed through into overall content. ... The hand held camerawork and the particular leverage of THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS both pushes and works against LaPore's previous tendencies in order to create compound fractures of potent abbreviations and overextended unexpurgated scenes in which sight is caught actively probing or transfixed in seeming paralysis. By interrupting already truncated and mysterious unmoored images with sections prolonging the durations and decay time of images normally torn from our sight, LaPore offers not provocation or obsession as much as permission to travel deeper into the image. The image as it pertains to actual experience - not only a filmic event or an approximate residue. That stands in for something else as all images do. Refusing to satisfy curiosity with information, LaPore frustrates the usual complicities between image and documentary fact by dealing with representation as an execution of likeness, while still reckoning with the standard exchange rate of the image in its metaphoric fidelity to the real, the elusive and the tangible aspects to the image. LaPore's audacities are almost camouflaged by his refined sense of restraint, his austerity and lyrical contemplativenes. ... By building the film on normally inadmissable evidence, telegraphed inferences, metaphoric leaps and omissions, damaged testimonies and scattered remains, the film fabricates an impeccable and elegant architecture from a materially incomplete and unsound body. In the fragmented corpus of human beings and continents which is THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS, LaPore has created a film which itself acts as an absorbent object, a kind a metastatic sin eater that aims at expiation through its own contamination, redistributing poisons into a netherworld that still clearly resides at the core of its own physical and visible existence." - Mark McElhatten

Another Summer Show 8/24/11!

2011-08-06T13:17:00.003-04:00

"Lightening Over Braddock" by Tony Buba

"The Five Bad Elements" by Mark Lapore

details soon

2 Summer Shows are scheduled!

2011-06-28T21:18:00.004-04:00

7/20/11 Maple Razsa & Pacho Velez

EnMasse Films is a documentary film partnership between Maple Razsa and Pacho Velez. EMF produces films committed to both ethnographic method and political engagement.(See info below)

7/27/11 Ian Curry

(please note this change from 8/3)

7/20/11 Maple Razsa & Pacho Velez

2011-06-28T20:25:00.000-04:00

OCCUPATION:

A dynamic story of how students and immigrant janitors took on—and defeated—one of the most powerful corporations in the world, Occupation documents the historic three-week sit-in by the Harvard Living Wage Campaign. The Campaign won unprecedented gains for low-wage workers at the world’s richest university, and catapulted the living wage movement to the center of public attention. In demonstrating one local response to corporate power in an age of
globalization, Occupation powerfully depicts how people from dramatically different backgrounds were able to raise their hands together in victory. It is narrated by Ben Affleck.

BASTARDS:

Bastards of Utopia — Three Croatian activists struggle to change the
world. As children, they lived through the violent collapse of

Yugoslavia. But now, amid the aftershocks of socialism's failure, they
fight in their own way for a new leftism. The activists, whether

clashing with police or squatting in an old factory, risk everything
to live their politics. But as the setbacks mount, will they give up
the fight?

The film, shot during years of fieldwork with a Croatian anarchist
collective, applies EnMasseFilm's unique blend of observation, direct
participation and critical reflection to this misunderstood political
movement. Its portrayal of activism is both empathetic and
unflinching—an engaged, elegant meditation on the struggle to
re-imagine leftist politics and the power of a country's youth.

Maple Razsa

Maple Razsa is an anthropologist, activist and documentary filmmaker. He is committed to using text, images and sound to embody the experience and political imagination of contemporary social movements. Maple’s work from Croatia, Mozambique, and the US has shown in such fora as the George Eastman House, The Harvard Film Archive, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and festivals from Taipei to Turin. As Assistant Professor of International Studies and Associate Director of the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights, Razsa teaches on social movements, human rights, political documentary, and postsocialism at Colby College, Maine, USA.

Pacho Velez

Pacho Velez is a theater director and documentary filmmaker. He is interested in personal stories that help to illuminate greater political issues. He is proud to have worked for the Service Employees International Union, for whom he co-directed a documentary about service workers at Harvard. His films have screened at Silverdocs, the RIFF, and the Telluride Indiefest. He won the Best Documentary prize at the Ivy Film Festival in 2003 and 2004, as well as a Prize for Humanitarian Filmmaking from the New England Film Festival. In 2006, the US Department of Education awarded him a Javits Fellowship. In the fall of 2010, he begins teaching filmmaking at Harvard University.

EnMasse Films is a documentary film partnership between Maple Razsa and Pacho Velez. EMF produces films committed to both ethnographic method and political engagement.

http://www.enmassefilms.org/bastards/synopsis_preview.html

7/27/11 Ian Curry-please note this show was originally advertised as being on 8/3

2011-06-01T14:20:00.000-04:00

Description

*All Films will be projected in Video*

“Invite the Spirits” 2009 4 minutes

Super 8 Black and White Reversal with Kodachrome

Images Taken from the 2008 Whitney Biennal, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, NYC. The film plays the images against each other in a grid of multiple screens creating moving patterns. The audio is a old recording of a Seamus Williams making primitive music with spoons a
nd
forks which develops into a song.

“Good Morning! My Name Mike.” 2010 12 minutes

16mm Black and White Reversal

Portrait of Mike Shayvers in 2010. Mike works the neighborhood of Mission Hill// Roxbury Crossing as a can and bottle collector. A modern day gleaner who lives in a park year round and buys his natural good times with the extra he picks up from recycling bins.

“My Parents Cambodia.” 2011 8 minutes

Super 8 Sound Color Reversal

Portrait of my Mom and Dad living in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in 2010. The film was shot on Kodachrome Sound Super 8 on a visit to Cambodia where my parents had been living for most of the year.

“Having Her Baby” 2008 6 minutes

16mm Color Negative

Portrait of Shana founding member of the noise band Child Bride living with other noise artists in Lower Allston, MA in early 2008.

“100% Del Cid” 2011 8 minutes

Super 8 Sound Color Reversal

Portrait of my friend Pablo Del Cid visiting his extended family in Guatemala in 2010. The portrait follows us from Guatemala City to the Temples to the Hills and back again.

“In Limbo in Queens” 2011 8 minutes

16mm Color Negative

Portrait of my friend Myles living in Queens NYC in between an old girl friend and adjusting his life after moving on and into Brooklyn. Audio for the portrait includes his personal perspectives on making art and living in NYC around that time and background audio from his ambient noise band Helio Taxis.

“Circadian Rhythms” 2009 12 minutes

16mm Color Negative

A Portrait of the Arnold Arboretum in the Spring, Summer, and Fall. The film is a psychedelic experience of the blossoming and fadi
ng of the large selection of beautiful plants there. The sound is derived from tape manipulation recordings by Seamus Williams made in Ja
maica Plain in 2006.

“All Day” 2011 10 minutes

16mm Color Negative

A Portrait of “the back of the house”: dishwasher, prep cooks, and line cooks in a restaurant. The films focus is on the ebbs and flows of a kitchen through out the long working day. Sound is abstracted from the pots, pans, background noise, and personal commentary on being a cook.

Ian Curry Artist Bio

In the spring of 2008 I completed my BFA at Massachusetts College of Art as an Open Major in the Film/Video department. Since then, I’ve continued my work in filming and editing “Having Her Baby” (2008), “Circadian Rhythms” (2009), “Good Morning! My Name Mike.” (2010), “My Parents Cambodia” (2011), and “All Day” (2011). The films I make originate in 16mm or Super 8 film. The subject matter explores the everyday existence of people and places as well as the cameras ability to create new interpretations of them. In all the films I make I try to represent the subject and the environment to put importance on the shared exchange of impact on each other. The way the subject changes the spaces they inhabit and the way the spaces either: strengthen, weaken, or maintain the identity of the subject. The formal concerns of my work are working with light, developing layers, and rhythms inside the camera that create a unique experience of the subject. Many of my film/videos are influenced by: Dziga Vertov, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Conner, and Shirley Clarke.

Thanks for a great spring season!

2011-05-04T23:19:00.000-04:00

Please stay tuned for any special events we will have in the summer and see you all in the fall!

5/4/2011 Dani Lenenthal

2011-04-27T22:43:00.004-04:00

Hearts are Trump Again 9 Minutes 2010

By way of lush formal and associative shifts, Hearts Are Trump Again evokes the ever-present tension between seemingly polarized states of experience. Desire and repulsion; freedom and constraint; pain and pleasure find articulation in images of ferocious dogs and mock conversations about childbearing. Tonally complex and viscerally rich, Hearts Are Trump Again is a lyrical exploration of emotional weather. - Brett Price

54 Days this Winter 36 Days this Spring for 18 Minutes 16 Minutes 2009

Material is presented as short scenes: documentation of the quotidian, interviews, on-camera monologues, and performative or expressive shots that are constructed. So the material, while mostly generated as a diary, is heterogeneous enough to include just about any kind of footage. At one point, a baby cries inconsolably, in another, a boy in a baseball uniform is playing Bach while his mother sits next to him putting on mascara. The 18 minute video montage of impressions has a cumulative effect, accessed and read differently depending on the mental connections the viewer makes.

Show & Tell in the land of Milk & Honey 13 minutes 2007

In this piece Dani Leventhal recounts to camera her experiences of living and working in Israel, the fabled land of milk and honey of childhood lessons. With time spent in a metal factory and a battery farm for chickens, her harrowing tale includes stories of sexual harassment and sick birds. Against this background, there are idyllic images of bees and flowers, cows and calves, intimate caresses, dead birds. Every thing is worthy of Dani's gaze, and is transformed by the encounter, becoming more human or sacred, and we are closer to the pain and beauty of being alive.

Draft 9 28 minutes 2003

“The craft of montage is alive and well in Leventhal’s work. Delicate and harrowing juxtapositions of skinned animals, the tattooed arm of a Holocaust survivor eating bagels in a coffee shop, and neon flowers on a disco floor. In her work emerges something that is extraordinarily immediate, both fresh and painful, hard to watch and yet impossible not to watch." --Genevieve Yue, Senses of Cinema

Biography

Employing a process of accumulation and excision, Dani Leventhal creates videos that unearth a curious beauty in the minutiae of everyday life. In 2003 she received an MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago and in 2009 an MFA in film/video from Bard College. She has screened her work at Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Gene Siskel Film Center, CineCycle and Anthology Film Archives. She showed 54 Days this Winter 36 Days this Spring for 18 Minutes at PS1 MoMA in the Greater New York 2010 exhibition. In 2011 she got a Captial R award from the Wexner Center for the Arts. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Spring 2011 MassArt Film Society Schedule

2011-04-27T14:23:00.000-04:00

Oscar Micheaux on January 19th

Kathryn Ramey on January 26th

Leonard Retel Helmrich on February 2nd Postponed until February 7th due to weather

Rose Lowder on February 9th also on Monday, February 7th at 6 pm The lecture will be held in the MassArt auditorium in Tower Building, 621 Huntington Avenue. Rose is a french filmmaker whose work draws from her background in painting and sculpture. Her lecture will be relevant to anyone concerned with the creative process.

Jonas Mekas on February 16th Lost Lost Lost

Melissa Ragona on February 23rd on

March 2nd: Gunvor Nelson MY NAME IS OONA
Nina Fonoroff THE ACCURSED MAZURKA
Marjorie Keller HEREIN

No Screening MassArt Spring Break March 9th

Co-respondents on March 16th recent work by Lori Felker and Robert Todd

Bill Brand on March 23rd

Paper Tiger Television on March 30th

Pip Chodorov on April 6th

Maya Deren on April 13th

2 Films on April 20th

Meditation on Violence by Maya Deren
Song 23 The 23rd Psalm Branch by Stan Brakhage

Ericka Beckman on April 27th

Dani Levinthal on May 4th

4/27/11 Ericka Beckman

2011-04-27T13:31:00.000-04:00

http://erickabeckman.com/Home.html

Program:
Anthology S-8 Preservation films from the late70s/ early 80’s
We Imitate; We Break up ( 16mm/25 minutes)
Out of Hand (16mm/25 minutes)
You The Better ( 1983) ProRes NTSC file (30 minutes)
Hiatus ( 1999) proresHD file (20 minutes)http://www.artforum.com/film/#entry27902

Over her three-decade career, Ericka Beckman’s playful yet formally demanding films challenge traditional aesthetic, and cultural values, that mix games with fairytales to create hybrids with new rules. Beckman uses play in every sense to shape her message.

...Beckman’s work has been shown at festivals, museums, and galleries around the world. Her one-woman shows include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, Washington,D.C., and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She has been in three Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Amongst the numerous awards received for her work are: Two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, two New York State Council on the Arts grants, and one from Massachusetts Council on the Arts.

Her works are in the film collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, plus the British Film Institute, as well as The Walker Art Center Media Collection.

4/20/2011 Maya Deren Stan Brakhage

2011-04-20T22:18:00.000-04:00

Maya Deren
MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE

and...

Stan Brakhage

SONG 23 THE 23RD PSALM BRANCH

April 13th Maya Deren

2011-04-13T00:14:00.000-04:00

Two films by MAYA DEREN,
AT LAND & RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME,
and the documentary film about MAYA DEREN by Martina Kudlacek
IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN

AT LAND (1944)
photographed by Hella Heyman and Alexander Hammid
At Land is a 15-minute silent experimental film written, directed by and starring Maya Deren. It has a dream-like narrative in which a woman, played by Deren, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey encountering other people and other versions of herself. Deren once said that the film is about the struggle to maintain ones personal identity.[citation needed] The composer John Cage and the poet and film critic Parker Tyler were involved in making the film, and appear in the film, which was shot at Amagansett, Long Island.

RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME (1946)
Choreographic collaboration with Frank Westbrook and Rita Christiani, featuring Anaïs Nin and Gore Vidal. 14 mins, B&W, silent
Ritual In Transfigured Time silently follows Rita Christiani's perspective as she enters an apartment to find Maya Deren immersed in the ritual of unwinding wool from a loom. Deren includes another expression of the external invading the internal with a strange wind that surrounds and entrances her as she becomes transported by the ritual. Ritual in Transfigured Time links the looming ritual with the ritual of the social greeting. Christiani enters a party, meets and greets, moving throughout the crowd like a dancer. Her movements become increasingly expressive and fluid, the ritual becomes a performance. Key themes in this film are the dread of rejection and the contrasting freedom of expression in the abandonment to the ritual.

IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN (IM SPEIGEL DER MAYA DEREN (2002) BY Martina Kudlaceki 103 min
A documentary film about avant garde filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961) by Austrian filmmaker Martina Kudlacek is based on the biography The Legend of Maya Deren. The soundtrack to this documentary was made by the avant-garde composer John Zorn.

Entrance to MassART after 7pm is through Public Saftey on Tetlow St.

4/6/2011 Pip Chodorov

2011-04-01T13:57:00.004-04:00

http://re-voir.com/pip/FreeRadTrailer.mp4

Free Radicals - A History of Experimental Film "The artists and poets of cinema since before WWI have always been free radicals, crazy about filmmaking and pushing the artform in radical new directions. Trapped in a no man's land, excluded both from the art world and the film industry, they boldly created a grassroots network for making and showing their films in a spirit of friendship and solid...arity. They also created a profound body of work that continues to influence our culture. In this film, I want to share a few of the films I love and introduce you to some of the free, radical artists who made them." - Pip Chodorov Filmmaker and film activist Pip Chodorov offers this affectionate overview of some of the leading figures of 20th century experimental film. Narrating in a personal and plainspoken manner ("I'd like you to meet some of my friends and see their films"), Chodorov combines clips and even films in their entirety with conversations with such luminaries as Hans Richter, Robert Breer, Michael Snow, Peter Kubelka and Stan Brakhage in his final recorded interview. The film, which takes its title from Len Lye's direct animation classic, shows how avant-garde filmmakers were often left in a no man's land between the art world and the commercial film industry. It was up to visionaries like Jonas Mekas and the organizations he founded - Film-Makers' Cooperative, Anthology Film Archive - to help struggling filmmakers out. (At one point, Ken Jacobs describes dumpster diving for food.) Warm and inspiring, Chodorov's film is part essay and part loving tribute. - AFI Film Festival http://vimeo.com/20882597 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrsGVmuo6R0 Entrance to MassART after 7pm is through Public Saftey on Tetlow St.

3/30/2011 Paper Tiger Television

2011-03-30T10:51:00.000-04:00

THE PROGRAM

Born To Be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby S/M Watch eagle-eye video and performance artist Martha Rosler tackle the case of surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead as represented by the main-stream media. This tape uncovers the class and gender bias of the media coverage and the courts. X-tra inventive graphics and kooky dress-up illustrate Rosler's insightful analysis of the court battle, waged within the tricky issue of contemporary reproductive control in America. Fun for the whole family!!!
1988 TRT: 28 minutes

TV's Gulf War: Bill Nichols Analyzes TV's Coverage of the Gulf War In quite possibly one of PTTV’s most fascinating and insightful one on ones, film professor and media critic Bill Nichols deconstructs the US media’s coverage of the first Gulf War, brick by theoretical brick.
Nichols exposes the dangerously effective means by which the TV news has established itself as our reality. By perpetuating a sense of fear and urgency, television news coverage of the first Gulf War was able to compress the vast complexities of the issue into a readily consumable product. However, rather than acknowledging the limits of this mediation, TV news channels like CNN were dependent upon producing their own reality and blurring the line between fact and fiction.
1991 TRT: 28 minutes

A collection of Vlog pieces from 2010
Maple Razsa & Michael Hardt Read Riotporn TRT 14:20

Surveilling Surveillance: Interview with Jill Magid TRT 11:21

Paper Tiger Reads: US Department of Defense Contracts (segment) TRT 7:00

Maria Juliana Byck has been a member of PTTV since 2004. She is currently working on the Paper Tiger Detroit project and developing a new show concept on Fashion. After college she lived abroad for 5 years, and has traveled in Asia, Africa, South America, Middle East and Europe. Maria is a recent graduate of the Media Studies Masters program at the New School and works in experimental video.

Patricia González Ramírez graduated from The New School with a BA in Culture and Media. She joined the collective after her PTTV summer internship ended and has been working on the Social Movements project. Outside of tiger-time she works for a worker-owned cooperative business and as a media-maker and educator in a community center.

Nadia Mohamed graduated from New York University in 2009 with a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis. She joined Paper Tiger in the Spring of 2010 and is currently involved in the Public Spaces project and the Detroit project. She works at Deep Dish TV, where she distributes social justice documentaries and helps coordinate a new series on immigration.

Adrienne Silverman has been a member of Paper Tiger Television since July 2009. She received a BA in film from Bard College and an MA in Media Studies from The New School. She currently works editing and doing tape duplication. With Paper Tiger Television, she is currently working on the urban agriculture portion of the Detroit show and a series of screenings in collaboration with The Bronx Museum.

Paper Tiger Television (PTTV) is an open, non-profit, volunteer video collective. Through the collaborative efforts of artists, activists and scholars, PTTV has pioneered experimental, innovative and truly alternative community media since 1981. An early innovator in video art and public access television of the early 80’s, PTTV developed a unique, handmade, irreverent aesthetic that experimented with the television medium by combining art, academics, politics, performance and live television. PTTV has been recognized for critical analysis of information sources and for being on the cutting edge of video with screenings, exhibits and installations in museums and galleries around the world. The PTTV archive houses one of the most unique and important historical alternative media collections, encompassing critical components of the evolution of public access television, video art, video activism, and media reform.

PTTV has a long history of creating radical critiques of mass culture and politics, and providing innovative leadership for documentary filmmakers, artists, media literacy educators and social justice media movements around the world. Many programs examine a particular aspect of the communications industry, from print media to TV to movies, looking at its impact on public perception and opinion. Other videos represent the people and views which are largely absent from the mainstream media. Through the production and distribution of our public access series, media literacy/video production workshops, community screenings and grassroots advocacy PTTV works to challenge and expose the corporate control of mainstream media. PTTV believes that involving people in the process of making media is mandatory for our long-term goal of information equity. The goal of our work is to provide viewers with a critical understanding of the communications industry.

3/23/11 Bill Brand

2011-03-23T22:56:00.000-04:00

Bill Brand's films and videos have screened since 1973 in the US and abroad in museums, festivals and independent film showcases. His 1980 Masstransiscope, restored in 2008, is a mural in the subway system of New York City that is animated by the movement of passing trains. Bill Brand lives in New York City and is Professor of Film and Photography at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Since 1976 he has operated BB Opti...cs, an optical printing service specializing in 8mm blow-ups and archival preservation for independent filmmakers, libraries, museums and archives. Since 2005 he has taught film preservation at the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation graduate program.

SCREENING:
Moment
1972 b/w, sound, 25 min

Before The Fact
1974, 16mm, color, sound, 6 min. with Saul Levine

Chuck's Will's Widow
1982 color, silent, 13 min

from Suite 1996-2003:
My Father's Leg, 1996, color, silent, DV video, 3 min
Interior Outpost, 2003, color, sound, DV video, 10 min

Swan's Island
2005, color, sound, 16mm, 5 min. with Katy Martin

Susie's Ghost
2011, 16mm, color, sound, 7 min. with Ruthie Marantz

Flattened City
2011, HD, color, sound, 5 min. text by Carolina Noblega

Montevideo, Uruguay: Works-in-Progress
HD, color, sound, 20 min.

March 16th 2011 Co-respondents Recent work by Lori Felker & Robert Todd

2011-03-16T08:30:00.000-04:00

THE DESCRIPTION:
To Co-respond, or “respond” together, implies a match, which is (used) to light a flame or, in other words: to create light together, or to make light, to lighten, or to illuminate while at the same time unburdening, which suggests a vertical movement (a sort of anti- or counter-gravitational movement) and allowing the freedom to “move” more readily, and in this case interactively, one “note” in the correspondence opening a portal through which correspondent and correspondee can mosey, float, stride, jump, or ooze, and con- sider from both sides, the “outside” becoming an inside from within which other casements can be carved, other throughways considered, taken, burst apart and re-imagined. If there is an end point it’s formed/ found on the edge of the horizon of this hall of revolving mirrors, dissolving what seemed to be a clear illusion of singularity, exploding the personal while turning over, under, upward, sideward, onward.
THE ARTISTS:
Lori Felker www.felkercommalori.com
Lori chose Filmmaking as her official second language in 2003-ish, bumping German into third place. Eventual fluency is important to her, so she employs many forms/formats, practices frequently with others, and tries hard not to shy away from expressing her thoughts on human behavior, travel, inter-activity, frustration, failure and political irritants.
Robert Todd www.roberttoddfilms.com/
After a lifetime torn between music and drawing/painting, film sauntered into the picture in 1989 and offered Rob Todd’s maker-innards a truce that seems to have endured ever since. A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, he continually produces short works that resist categorization.
The works in this program have been included in programs at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival, Migrating Forms, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, WNDX Festival, and the WiP Festival.

this is the program:
Co-respondents Recent work by Lori Felker & Robert Todd
70min program (1 HD video, the rest on 16mm)

This Is My Show HD, 15min, 2009, - a televisionary excursion by Lori Felker:
“Working with Nature” can be grueling and painful, but your hostess Adrienne is ready and willing to walk you through what it takes to perfect and control your surroundings. Adrienne brings you the very best in high quality, high definition gardening television, as she takes all of the necessary tools into her own hands for your edification and enjoyment.

Mere Mystery 16mm, 12min, 2010, Lori Felker - multiple pathways taken through a National Park's set of Trails of Tales. People we don’t know. People we’ve never met. Gift Shop ceremonies. Sky ride hustling. Pale limbs on a been-there tree.

Imperceptihole, 16mm, 14min 2010
A high contrast correspondence film, a science non-fiction fairy tale. Things are never as polarized as they appear -
Circling and searching, falling and landing, entering and exiting; actuality lies between seasons, states, planes and worlds.
Correspondents: Robert Todd (Boston) and Lori Felker (Chicago)
The correspondence:
- RT and LF shoot together, same location, two cameras.
- Retreating to their respective home bases, RT sends LF a roll of film, giving her no parameters for shooting.
- RT shoots while LF shoots.
- LF sends RT her film for processing.
- RT sends LF a copy of their processed film rolls.
- RT and LF watch the film copies simultaneously while on the phone.
- Repeat 4 times.
- Last round: each shoots a roll in his/her own city, then they meet in one location with these shot rolls in hand, which they swap and double-expose without revealing the contents of the original exposure.
- RT and LF meet to edit together three times, and within this timeframe they concoct a title for the project.
- RT and LF meet once more to create the soundtrack as a live performance.

Golden Hour 16mm, 16min, 2009 Robert Todd
What if the Looking Glass were, at the same time, a window and a mirror, if the window was the mirror, the mirror the window? And your projection through this transparent/reflective plane did bring you to a world that is as externally rich as the self, in its internal churnings shift- ing through dark and light, directs it to be – the self and the world open to each other, if but for a moment? And that window offers itself to you as a space in your life, held shimmering in your being and your vision throughout that sustaining moment, that golden hour.

Weapons Expert Demonstration 16mm, 3min, 2010 Robert Todd
Selected Articles 0015-0148, GC504667B/A15 (1) Program Objective: The objective of the Fast Reaction Weapons Demonstration (FRWD) program is to demonstrate technologies associated with high-speed miniature munitions dispensed within the context of the high speed dispensing event, performance, sub-pack stabilization and desired deceleration of the sub-munitions/sub-packs, and sub-munition secondary dispense event.
(2) Subject: Demonstrator Platform courtesy of Lucas Wheeler.

March 2, 2011

2011-03-02T09:36:00.000-05:00

MY NAME IS OONA Gunvor Nelson

...MY NAME IS OONA Gunvor Nelson
1969. 16 mm, 10 min.
Gunvor Nelson’s career began in the 1960s in the dynamic Bay Area in California. Her debut film, Schmeerguntz, was created together with Dorothy Wiley in 1966. The film, whose title is a Germanised version of the Swedish word for sandwich, ‘smörgås’, humorously reveals the contrast between the feminine ideals conveyed in the media and the crass real life of most women. Today, both Schmeerguntz and her film Take Off from 1972 are classics in feminist experimental film. In the 1970s, Gunvor Nelson was a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, where her unique filmic style came to influence many young film-makers. In the early 1990s, after more than 30 years in the USA, she returned to Sweden. She settled in Kristinehamn, where she currently lives and works.

THE ACCURSED MAZURKA Nina Fonoroff

THE ACCURSED MAZURKA Nina Fonoroff
1994 | 40 minutes | COLOR | OPT
16mm film, 24 fps
"A collage virtuoso, Fonoroff uses the enveloping sound of music from movie melodramas and gothic radio plays plus a third-person, softly spoken voice over to bind wildly diverse images: home movies, off-the-TV detritus layered opticals with colors so delicate they look hand tinted. The Accursed Mazurka is an excavation of female sexuality that loses its dangerous edge only when it shears off onto a neatly framed chronicle of therapeutic experiences." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice

HEREIN Marjorie Keller

HEREIN Marjorie Keller
(1991) 16mm, color, sound, 35 min
Experimental filmmaker, author, activist, film scholar, and cultural worker Marjorie Keller (1950-1994) created a uniquely personal and feminist body of work for twenty years beginning in the early 1970s. Keller also served on the board of directors of the Collective for Living Cinema, was the founding editor of their journal, Motion Picture from 1984 to 1987 and was Director of the New York Filmmakers Cooperative in the late 1980s. Writer J. Hoberman called her “an unselfish champion of the avant-garde.” Her films deftly combine home movie and diary styles through a potent politicized lens. Herein (1991), Keller’s final film, charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman’s autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side, street prostitution & drug addiction, all inflect the sense of place, space & history.

2/23/2011 Melissa Ragona

2011-02-16T22:55:00.002-05:00

Expanding Space: Andy Warhol’s Sound Experiments
Melissa Ragona, Associate Professor School of Art, Carnegie Mellon University

Description of the talk:

This lecture foregrounds Warhol’s experiment in audio recording—he
recorded over 4,000 audio tapes from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s—
and argues that his work in sound serves as a template for his
innovations across photography, film, video, and television. His
various formal artistic strategies relating to categories such as
duration, transference across media, and spatialization have been
largely credited to his film work. What has previously been
unappreciated, however, is the extent to which his reconceptualization
of these categories began with his early work in tape recording. The
model of the 24-hour movie (initial articulations of this model
include SLEEP /EAT /KISS [1963-64]), I will argue, was born out of the
aesthetic structure of his early tape recording experiments. Likewise
Warhol’s early sound films, such as HARLOT(1964), MORE MILK YVETTE
(1966), and SCREEN TEST #1 (1965) demonstrate agility with speech,
noise, and silence that had already been tested in hours and hours of
tape-recorded experience.

Melissa Ragona’s essays and reviews have appeared in October, Frieze,
Art Papers and in the edited collections Lowering the Boom: Critical
Studies in Film Sound, eds. J. Beck and T. Grajeda (U of Illinois
Press, 2008), Women’s Experimental Cinema, ed. Robin Blaetz (Duke
University Press, 2007), and Andy Warhol Live (Prestel, 2008), among
others. She is currently completing a book on Andy Warhol’s tape
recordings tentatively titled Readymade Sound: Andy Warhol’s Recording
Aesthetics, forthcoming from University of California Press, Berkeley.
She is an Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Art History in
the School of Art at Carnegie-Mellon University.

2/16/2011 Jonas Mekas Lost Lost Lost

2011-02-16T13:40:00.002-05:00

http://jonasmekasfilms.com/available/index.php?film=lost_lost_los

Lost Lost Lost
1976, 178 min. 16mm, color and black & white
"These six reels of my film diaries come from the years 1949-1963.
They begin with my arrival in New York in November 1949...
...The period I am dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to desperately grow roots into the new ground, to create new memories. In these six painful reels I tried to indicate how it feels to be in exile, how I felt in those years. These reels carry the title Lost Lost Lost, the title of a film myself and my brother wanted to make in 1949, and it indicates the mood we were in, in those years. It describes the mood of a Displaced Person who hasn't yet forgotten the native country but hasn't gained a new one. The sixth reel is a transitional reel where we begin to see some relaxation, where I begin to find moments of happiness. New life begins. What happens later, you'll have to see the next installment of reels ..."

-- Jonas Mekas

2/9/11 ROSE LOWDER

2011-02-09T10:37:00.000-05:00

http://roselowder.blogspot.com/

French experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder will bring new and older films to the USA in
February 7‐19th, 2011. This will be her first trip to the US since 1989.
Lowder will hold a US premiere of 3 new films in Boston at Massachusetts College of Art and
Design on February 9th and the Paramount Theater on February 11th, before continuing on
to Milwaukee, Chicago and New York City. She will also deliver a free lecture at MassArt on
February 7th.
Lowder has made over 50 avant‐garde and experimental films since the 1970’s, influencing
generations of filmmakers and enthusiasts worldwide. Her 16mm films are composed
frame‐by‐frame, and feature profound investigations of rural Europe and its inhabitants
with an undercurrent of ecological concerns. She was originally trained as a painter and
sculptor in Lima and London, turning to filmmaking as both an artistic practice and method
for research in photographic and visual perception. Lowder is 70 years old.
This tour is curated by MassArt film graduate student Tara Nelson and funded in part by
MassArt Curatorial and the Cine 2000 program of the French Cultural Embassy. Screenings
are co‐sponsored by and presented at MassArt Film Society; School of the Museum of Fine
Arts; ArtsEmerson's Paramount Center; University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee’s Union
Theater; the Gene Siskel Arts Center and Anthology Film Archives.
Description of 2010 film, Fleur de sel (Sea Salt Flower) from Rose Lowder
“In Sea Salt Flower I tried to penetrate the Guérande Salt Marshes cinematographically; this
is a land of birds and salt, recently designated a « Grand Site National » to protect it from the
devastations of modern life. Far from the reverberations of contemporary society, the place
has a rhythm of its own throughout the year. After winter restoration work, the mosaic of
shallow salt pans are prepared, which by means of minute skilful adjustments, enable the
water to circulate; combined with the effects of the sun and the wind, these allow the salt to
crystallize. By the end of the process, as at the end of the film, the fine salt flower crystals
float on the surface above the bigger crystals on the bottom in all directions at once.” –Rose
Lowder

2/7/11 L E O N A R D R E T E L H E L M R I C H

2011-02-07T17:34:00.000-05:00

“Position Among the Stars”
by Leonard Retel Helmrich (Filmmaker will be present!)
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY2, 2011 8PM FILM DEPT Screening Rm 1

One family, three generations, facing globalisation in Indonesia

"Position of the Stars”, the final part of a trilogy, follows the award- winning documentaries “Eye of the Day” and “Shape of the Moon”. Through the eyes of grandmother Rumidjah, we see the economical changing society of Indonesia and the influence of globalization reflected in the life ... of her juvenile granddaughter Tari.

IDFA awards for best Feature-length Film and Best Dutch Documentary

"After 32 years of dictatorship Indonesia became a democracy in 1998. This triggered a lot of changes in a short time span. For a country like Indonesia, which is the fourth largest county in the world, the changes made there have also a global effect. And since human drama is globally recognized by all human beings of all cultures, I focus in my films on the ordinary people of Indonesia. They are the people who have to deal with those changes like globalization, religious fundamentalism and the politics of the county. By seeing the human drama we will understand the effects of those changes on ordinary people."

http://www.positionamongthestars.com/

leonardretelhelmrich@gmail.com

FILM D I R E C T O R

Leonard Retel Helmrich was born in 1959 in the Netherlands. He finished the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in 1986 and in 1990 he made his first feature film The Phoenix Mystery. Since then Retel Helmrich’s films have screened and won acclaim at film festivals world wide, garnering major awards for both his drama and documentary work. His awards include the inaugural Grand World Documentary Award at Sundance 2005 and the prestigious Joris Ivens Award at IDFA Amsterdam 2004 for his Indonesian feature documentary “Shape Of The Moon” (Stand van de Maan). In 2010 he won for the second time the Grand VPRO/IDFA Award for feature documentary for “Position among the Stars” (Stand van de Sterren) together with the IDFA Award for the best Dutch documentary. It was for the first time in the IDFA history that someone has won an award for the second time.

He has served on the jury of many film festivals, including Shanghai, Warsaw, Seoul, Sibiu Romania and Amsterdam, and has had major retrospectives of his work run at Visions du Réel in Nyon (Switzerland) and Rencontres Internationales Du Documentaire in Montréal and at the ASTRA in Sibiu Romania. He has also lectured and screened his films at numerous educational institutions including the Flaherty Seminar program in New York, and at Harvard University where he was on a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. During his fellowship he was editing his latest film “Position among the Stars” which is the third film of his trilogy on contemporary Indonesia and he is currently writing a book on “Single Shot Cinema”.

Leonard shoots as well as directs all his own films, and is best known for a philosophy and approach he calls ‘Single Shot Cinema’, which involves long takes with a hand held but smooth camera moving close to the subject, and above all in his films it is the framing and movement of the camera that captures and leads the emotions of the audience. He has run over 20 workshop programs in Single Shot Cinema technique for film festivals, television broadcasters, independent film makers film schools and universities worldwide – in Europe, Asia, North America and in Africa.

in addition on Monday, February 7th at 6 pm a lecture by filmmaker Rose Lowder

2011-02-07T10:12:00.000-05:00

The lecture will be held in the MassArt auditorium in Tower Building, 621 Huntington Avenue. Rose is a french filmmaker whose work draws from her background in painting and sculpture. Her lecture will be relevant to anyone concerned with the creative process

OFTEN ONE DOES NOT KNOW WHERE ONE IS GOING
In this lecture I shall try to trace how I came, after a long training as an artist, to work with film. How, after having viewed every type of film, edited many for over ten years in the film industry, attended screenings of experimental films from the early 1960's, I was intrigued by the way the cinematographic apparatus worked in relation to the process of perception. While well aware of what had been done by other filmmakers at the time, I discovered some possibilities to develop which needed to be carried out to see where they would go. Without any scientific training I delved into a variety of books on perception while studying the way the visual aspects of successive images made the image on the screen evolve in time and space. Venturing along a number of pathways does not solve to problem of making a good film as there is no need to do what has already been done. To discover a promising line is extremely difficult. Even after accomplished something that seems valid one comes across all sorts of problems which prevent one from advancing for a more less long period. And it depends on one's aim: if one hopes to make a film dealing with a subject which is relevant for today in a way which extends the possibilities of the medium, one has a life time's work ahead without any guarantee of success.
- Rose Lowder

1/26/11

2011-01-26T13:10:00.000-05:00

Kathryn Ramey

ENDLESS PRESENT: BIOGRAPHY OF AN UNKNOWN FILMMAKER a film by Cornealius Thistle, 2002, 16mm, 30 min.

An unconventional and multi-layered approach to autobiography, incorporating hand-processed abstractions, ethnography, and the work of artist On Kawara and anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell. Honorable Mention, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2003.

the passenger, 2006, 16mm, 17 mins.

With whispered voice-over, text on screen, singing and kinesic anthropologists Jacques Van Flack and Ray Birdwhistell intoning analysis, the passenger is a hand-processed multi-vocal film meditation on madness, motherhood, psychoanalysis and the possibility of escaping one’s fate. Funded in part by the LEF Moving Image Grant.

Yanqui WALKER and the OPTICAL REVOLUTION, 2009, 16mm, 33 min.

Yanqui WALKER and the OPTICAL REVOLUTION is an experimental documentary about a, now obscure, American expansionist and military dictator, William Walker who, through force and coercion, became president of Nicaragua in 1856. Funded in part by the LEF Moving Image Grant. Best Short Doc, Athens International film +video festival 2010. Jury Selection (1st prize), Black Maria Film festival, 2010.

Short Biography
Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film and socio-cultural research. She has been the recipient of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, three LEF New England Moving Image grants, the Social Science Council Research Council on the Arts dissertation fellowship and has been a resident artist at Yaddo Corporation. Her award winning films have screened at international film festivals including the TriBeCa film festival, the Toronto International Film festival, Ann Arbor Film festival, Black Maria Film festival and L’Alternativa Independent Film Festival of Barcelona among others. She is an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston.

http://www.rameyfilms.com/

1/19/2011

2011-01-19T00:19:00.000-05:00

films by Oscar Micheaux

BODY AND SOUL
Body and Soul is a 1925 race film produced, written, directed, and distributed by Oscar Micheaux and starring Paul Robeson in his motion picture debut.

THE EXILE
The Exile was a 1931 American film by Oscar Micheaux. A drama–romance of the race film genre, it was Micheaux's first feature-length talkie, and the first African American talkie.[1] Adapted from Micheaux's first novel, The Conquest (1913), it has some autobiographical elements: like the film's central character Jean Baptiste (played by Stanley Morrell), Micheaux spent several years as a cattle rancher in an otherwise all-white area of South Dakota.

Happy Holidays! Thanks for a Great Year!

2010-12-10T14:57:00.008-05:00

...and stay tuned for posts in January about the Spring 2011 Film Society Schedule. I will leave the fall 2010 schedule and show info. up below until then, but you can always access previous 2010 posts below by clicking on Older Posts or any post in our archives can be accessed on the right under Past Screenings. Feel free to enjoy the history.

Hello and welcome to the fall 2010 series

2010-12-09T15:58:00.000-05:00

So far the schedule is as follows; please stay tuned for changes and updates...

9/15 Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson
9/22 German experimental film curated by Dagmar Kamleh
9/29 Bradley Eros
10/ 5 (tuesday addition) Multimedia Performance by Maile Colbert
10/6 Mary Helena Clark and Fern Silva
10 /13 Gunver Nelson
10 /20 Thomas Comerford
10/27 Nicky Taveres
II/3 Saul Levine curates a birthday show-Sidney Peterson, Christopher McLaine, Kenneth Anger
11 /10 Martha Colburn
II/17 Minda Martin
12/1 FLAMING CREATURES Jack Smith

BLONDE COBRA & LITTLE STABS OF HAPPINESS Ken Jacobs

CHUM LUM Ron Rice

12/8 Kate Dollenmayer

12/8/2010 Kate Dollenmayer LAST SHOW THIS YEAR!

2010-12-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

Works in 16mm and digital video

see 3 things

The Whole Other Side to My Busyness

Glossolalia (We Saw Aliens)

Camping With

Owens Valley Home

The Dream Is Still a Dream

Wandering

Kate Dollenmayer was born in Vermont and grew up in Massachusetts. She studied geology, animation, film and video at Harvard University and California Institute of the Arts. After nearly ten years in and around Los Angeles, she has recently returned to New England and now lives in Bennington, Vermont.

12/1/2010 look at the line up!

2010-12-01T13:35:00.000-05:00

FLAMING CREATURES Jack Smith

BLONDE COBRA Ken Jacobs

LITTLE STABS OF HAPPINESS Ken Jacobs

CHUM LUM Ron Rice

11/17/2010 Minda Martin

2010-11-17T17:38:00.000-05:00

FREELAND a film by Minda Martin

Description

As a child, filmmaker Minda Martin's life was one of poverty, constant relocation and even homelessness. Mixing found footage, historical documents, and personal interviews, she traces her family's history to the forced Cherokee relocation in the 1800s. What emerges is a challenging, heartbreaking and visually-arresting documentary that draws unsettling parallels between land, history, Cherokee culture and American identity. Martin creates a unique cinematic landscape that conveys the trauma of displacement and the reality of poverty.

Please visit the following website.

mindamartin.org

11/10/10 Martha Colburn

2010-11-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

In recent years I have expanded my technique to include the use of multi-plane glass animation, whereby you have three to five layers of artwork animated between sheets of glass.

With each new film, I construct a new ‘animating stand’ to use for the actual filming; rigging layers of glass for depth, a network of wires in the air, odd boxes made from shelving and mirrors and so on.
I work completely analog on 16mm and 35mm film and my special effects are not a computer-determined program. I hand paint the film after it is filmed , frame-by-frame or use special materials to create the desired effect.

11/ 3 10 Saul Levine curates for his birthday

2010-11-03T14:18:00.000-04:00

Sindney Peterson Lead Shoes
...surreal and significant...historically and culturally...

Christopher McLaine The End, The Man Who Invented Gold, Beat, and Scotch Hop
... film works from the beat period, visual poetry...

Kenneth Anger Invocation of My Demon Brother
...assembled from the scraps of an early version of Lucifer Rising? The music is by Mick Jagger...

10/27/2010 Nicky Tavares

2010-10-27T09:30:00.000-04:00

Film and Video by Nicky Tavares

This program features video that explores individual relationships with technology and the presentation of the self, as well as recent experiments with film.

Part 1

Saint Edward's Circle (5 minutes, Video, 2008)

A domestic adventure in cleaning, both real and virtual.

Fwd: Update on My Life (28 minutes, Video, 2010)

A hybrid live-action and animated documentary, Fwd: Update on My Life follows Dr. Deanie French, a professor and pioneer of internet-based learning and web accessibility, who decides one day to take a holiday from her prescription of mood stabilizers and go on the Atkins diet. With newfound energy, she promptly leaves her husband and sets out starting up multiple businesses, making 10 new "special friends," and directing a documentary about her life.

Our New Home or Being the Best There is at Selling Service Plans (15 minutes, Video, 2010)

In the early 1980s, my father, a recent Portuguese immigrant, took a job with RCA as a salesman and moved our family to a suburb of Atlanta. With the extended family we left behind in mind as an audience and what was then RCA's latest camcorder, my father recorded an extensive collection of home videos including several tours of our new home narrated in Portuguese. Responding to my father's archive, I attempt to make a narrated video tour of my apartment in Portuguese and interweave it with footage of my parents struggling to watch and translate it into English. The result is a humorous and mutually embarrassing reflection on first and second-generation immigrant experiences.

Part 2

At the age 4, I had a very clear picture in my mind of what a pumpkin should look like. When my pre-school teacher announced that we were to draw one for Halloween, I sat quietly because along with my mental picture of a pumpkin came an equally clear understanding that I lacked the skills to translate it to paper. I watched as my classmates’ sloppy versions unfurled knowing all the while that I was better than that. When my teacher insisted I complete the assignment, I cried so much that she told me to sit in the corner for the rest of the afternoon. For me, Halloween serves as an invitation to reflect on my creative process. With this in mind, the second half of this program presents recent short films dedicated to discovering new ways of working.

Pasqua (1 minute, Double 8mm, 2010)

Gary's Best (1 minute, Double 8mm, 2010)

Cabin, Not Kevin (1 minute, Double 8mm, 2010)

Untitled (3 minutes, Double 8mm, 2010)

Four and Twenty Birds, North and South (20 seconds, 16mm)

Lala's Film (3 minutes, 16mm, 2010)

Call Me by Heart (4 minutes, 16mm, 2010)

TBA

Nicky Tavares is a Boston-based multimedia artist primarily working in film and video. Her first documentary, Fwd: Update on My Life, is currently screening nationally at film festivals and micro cinemas including the Balagan Experimental Film Series, VideoFest, Hot Springs Documentary Festival and the Kent Film Festival. In addition, her work has been featured in The Boston Globe and O Jornal: The Portuguese English Journal. She is a Walker Foundation Scholar (2003) and a World Studio Foundation Scholar (2005). She holds a B.A. in photocommunications from Saint Edward's University and an M.F.A. in Film and Video from Massachusetts College of Art. She has taught courses in film and video at Massachusetts College of Art and Mount Ida College.

10/20/2010 Thomas Comerford

2010-10-20T10:27:00.000-04:00

The Indian Boundary Line, 2010, 16mm/8mm/super-8mm on digital betacam, color. 41 mins.

Description:
Over the last eight years, Chicago musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked/Marquette, 2005). The Indian Boundary Line (2010) follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory.” In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences. Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on a span of land in Chicago about 12 miles long, but suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape -- as well as the consequences -- which have accompanied the transformation of the “New World.”

Land Marked/Marquette (Series), 2005, 16mm sound, color, 23 mins.

A series of clear, concisely observed landscape studies of sites and monuments in Chicago connected to 17th century exploration by Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette. In examining the monuments to Marquette, the "stories" the monuments tell, and the relationship of the monuments to their surroundings,the film deploys different audio-visual and stylistic tactics, allowing for the contemplation of both historical representation and the transformation of the land in the passage of time.

BIO:
THOMAS COMERFORD (b. 1970, Richmond, VA) is a media artist, musician, and educator residing in Chicago. Trained in sculpture, performance, and the classics, he began making films in the early 1990s. In 1997, he embarked on an influential series of films, made with a pinhole motion picture camera and home-made microphone, under the title, Cinema Obscura (1997-2002). His recent films are site-specific to Chicago and explore the evidence, revision, and erasure of histories in the landscape. His work has screened at many festivals and venues, including the Gene Siskel Film Center, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the London Film Festival. Comerford has also toured the United States with his films, screening in spaces ranging from church basements and backyards to regular old movie theatres. As songwriter, singer, and producer for the rock band Kaspar Hauser, Comerford has performed his music around the Midwest and eastern U.S. and released three LP records. He currently teaches film production, DIY exhibition, and punk rock history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

thomascomerford.net

kasparhausermusic.net

10/13/2010 Gunver Nelson

2010-10-13T22:33:00.000-04:00

SCHMEERGUNTZ

By Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley.

"SCHMEERGUNTZ is one long raucous belch in the face of the American Home. A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public surface deserves to have such films as SCHMEERGUNTZ shown everywhere - in every PTA, every Rotary Club, every club in the land. For it is brash enough, brazen enough and funny enough to purge the soul of every harried American married woman." - Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly

RED SHIFT

Starring: Carin Grundel, Oona Nelson, Gunvor Nelson, Regine Grundel, Ulla Moberg, Gunnar Grundel.

Assistant: Diane Kitchen

RED SHIFT is a film in black and white about relationships, generations and time. The subtitle is ALL EXPECTION. The movement of a luminous body toward and away from us can be found in its spectral lines. A shift toward red occurs with anybody that is self-luminous and receding. There is uncertainty about how much observable material exists.

"It involves Gunvor Nelson, her mother and her daughter. Carefully and with great tenderness, it focuses on these three women, trying to show us their relationship, succeeding with an emotional impact that is hardly ever found in such a subject. It is not the social context which is exploited but the little gestures, everyday events. RED SHIFT is a radical film; it sets new measures for avant-garde filmmaking dealing with personal problems." - Alf Bold, The Arsenal, Berlin

TIME BEING

An animated film blending media (painting, stills, cut-outs and collected objects) that evokes images from the filmmaker's hometown of Kristinehamn, Sweden.

10/6/2010 Mary Helena Clark and Fern Silva

2010-10-06T10:54:00.001-04:00

Since 2005, Fern Silva has been an active filmmaker whose personal journeys and impulsery disposition give rise to his visionary process. He has created a body of film, video, and projection work that conveys a congruent existence through the aesthetics of reflections and detriments within controlled microcosms. His work has been screened and performed at various festivals, galleries, and cinematheques including International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, Images Festival, IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Biennale Bandits-Mages Festival, Roulette Gallery, Millennium Film Workshop, White Box Gallery, 119 Gallery, and P.S.1. Fern Silva is from central Connecticut, he received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and his MFA from Bard College.

After Writing, Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2007; 4m (16mm color/silent)

This film is both a portrait of an abandoned schoolhouse and an investigation of the remains of language in one of the quietist places. Scraps of text gathered from molding filmstrips and peeling chalkboards are photographed and intercut with pinhole shots of the ruins from which they came.

And The Sun Flowers, Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2008; 5m (video/color/sound)
Notes from the distant future and forgotten past. An ethereal flower and disembodied voice guide you through the spaces in between. - MHC

Sound Over Water, Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2009; 5m (16mm color/sound)

A metamorphosis, flocks to shimmer, on a granular day. Blue water and blue sky meet on emulsion. A film for lost memories. -MHC

While You Were Sleeping, Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2010; 10m (video color/sound)
This is your life. It rides like a dream. -MHC

10/5/2010 "where Under" Multimedia Performance by Maile Colbert

2010-10-05T11:39:00.000-04:00

co-composition: Rui Costa

vocal performance: Manuela Barile

underwater sound and video recordings: Andrea Parkins, Rui Costa, Maile Colbert

production residency: Binaural www.binauralmedia.org

Binaural Nodar

“What was the first sound heard? It was the caress of the waters” -R. Murray Schaffer

“The wise man delights in water.” -Lao-tzu

Sadly inspired by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, “Where Under” asks us to take a different perspective of the importance of our clean water; as life forms born of water, evolved from water, and constructed primarily of water. Shot and recorded in Northern Portugal within the Rio Paiva, the cleanest river in Europe; the film is composed of an underwater ballet and sound composition provoking us to consider the importance of this underwater world.

Biography:

Maile Colbert is a multi-media artist with a concentration on sound and video relocated from Los Angeles, US to Lisbon, Portugal. She holds a BFA in The Studio for Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art, and a MFA in Integrated Media/Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts.   She has had multiple screenings, exhibits, and shows, including The New York Film Festival, LACE Gallery, MOMA New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, The Portland International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, the Future Places Festival in Oporto, HOERENSEHEN 2.0 in Berlin, the Störung Festival in Barcelona, the Teatra Municipal in Guarda, the Observitori Festival in Valencia, and has performed and screened widely in Japan, Europe, Mexico, and the States. She recently was a part of a featured installation at the 2009 UN Climate Conference.  She was a visiting lecturer teaching Sound Design at UCSD; designed sound and composed for Rebecca Baron's film How Little We Know of Our Neighbors, winner of the Black Maria Film Festival Best Film, designed sound for Adele Horne's feature documentary The Tailenders, broadcasted on PBS POV and winner of a 2007 Independent Spirit Award, Allan Sekula's epic The Lottery of the Sea, and designed sound for Betti-Sue Hertz's multi-media mutli- channel installation at the Centro Cultural Tijuana for the 2005 inSite Festival.   She is currently finishing a new release, "Come Kingdom Come", an experimental opera on millennialism and apocalyptic thought and theory with opera singer Gabriela Crowe, singer Jessica Constable, and the Poetry of Ian Colbert; and is in pre-production on an epic multi-disciplinary performance of a fictionalized and personalized Portuguese Maritime history, and the definition of "home".

9/29/10 Bradley Eros

2010-09-29T10:00:00.001-04:00

Bradley Eros:

An artist working in myriad media: experimental film
& video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text,
expanded cinema & installation. Also a maverick curator,
designer, researcher & investigator. Concepts include:
ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science,
erotic psyche, poetic accidents, cinema povera & musique plastique.

Exhibited at 2004 Whitney Biennial & The American Century,
The New York Film Festival, London Film Festival, MoMA,
The Kitchen, Pacific Film Archives, The Warhol Museum, Arsenal in Berlin,
Lightcone in Paris; he also works with the New York Filmmakers' Cooperative,
Anthology Film Archives, Issue Project Room, Spectacle,
& co-directed the late Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema.

Various quotes about Eros’ solo & collaborative works:

“Eros’ richly layered tapestries of hallucinatory images are riddled with provocative rituals,
from sex to science to surgery, that are guaranteed to produce frissions of pleasure” -Village Voice

“Technologist of the flesh, he creates hypnotic and voluptuous montages,
reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s mystic incantations.” -Dargis, Village Voice

“Eros and Liotta (as Mediamystics) have worked for years in an area somewhere between cinema and ritual,
finding alchemy in the chemistry of body and film. Their beautiful ‘fungus eroticus’ is sensual and disturbing,
raw and lysergic.” -Owen O’Toole, Spool

“The films and performances of Bradley Eros are dark, mysterious, biomorphic, psychedelic and subterranean.
Investigating cycles of decay and regeneration, the poetic nature of his work is substantiated by equally haunting soundtracks.” -Film Threat

Descriptions of works to be shown:

Mutable Fire!
(1984. super-8 on video, color, sound, 7 min)

Totems of destruction and desire. An operation on the combustible urges in a junk black mass. A swiftly-sliced nightmare of history and erotic autobiography.

Pyrotechnics
(1986. super-8 on video, color, sound, 11 min)
made with Aline Mare/Erotic Psyche

Telepathic music from the lab. The human tabula rasa and the pregnant androgyne in the ecstasy of transmissions. Science-friction myths of bio-electric energy.

Dervish Machine
(1992. 16mm, B&W/color, sound, 10 min)
made with Jeanne Liotta/Mediamystics

Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin’s Dreamachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.

Osmosis
(2002. 16mm, color, sound, 10 min)

A panoramic composition for three simultaneous images blown-up to 16mm from an original triple projector performance. This highly personal document of architecture, nature, and intimacy is constructed from thirty years of original super-8 material.

Deliquescence
(2003, DVD, originally double film projection,
B&W and color, sound, 9 minutes)

An ephemeral film of subterranean science,
Deliquescence creates an aquatic environment that
emphasizes the liquidity of projected light. The work
employs external glass lenses, plus violet and
rose-tinted gels, and strategic hand-masking to
interlace the figures in a sexual melange, overlaying
a particularly tender fragment of pornography with the
amorphous undulations of a Japanese documentary on
marine flowers.

burn (or, The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics)
(2004, DVD, originally super-8mm in a 16mm projector,
color, sound, 5:15 min.)

The work uses a short strip of super-8 footage of 1970s bondage porn pulled through the projector gate and burned frame-by-frame, in a live performance. A soundtrack fragment of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver seeps beneath the disintegrating images. Here the fragility of the plastic material is both magnified and transformed, serving as a physical fact of film and a brutal metaphor.

“No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time Knowledge, unless it carries with it its substance as well as its lucidity.” -Antonin Artaud

Aerodynamics of the Black Sun
(2006, HD/DVD, color, sound, 6:00 minutes, originally plastic gels in a 16mm projector)

“Life is a process of involuntary oxidations.”
-Novalis

Aerodynamics of the Black Sun is an alchemical process
reflecting decay and regeneration in the solar realm.
The elasticity of materials under chemical change creates
metaphors & abstractions for manipulated plastics burning
in the gate. These pyrographic ruptures are inspired by
entropic phenomena and disintegration, as well as by artists
who explore surface distress, puncture & erosion, such as
Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri.

TRANSTRANS
(TRANSFORMERS Transformed)
Bradley EROS + Tim GERAGHTY
{2009, 12 minutes, HD / digital video}
Soundtrack mix includes Francois Bayle, Frank Zappa,
Einsturzende Neubauten, Terry Fox, Christian Fennesz.
All text from F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909)
& Manifesto on Futurist Cinema (1916).
Commissioned by PERFORMA 09

“Our cinema must detach itself from reality
and become deforming, synthetic and dynamic!”
~ F.T. Marinetti
A radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via
synthetic collapse and critical revenge on its old & new
fascist tropes > celebrating SPEED. NOISE. + DANGER.
The fervent declarations & violent poetry of the Futurists
are superimposed on the mythic morphology of the Autobot
blockbuster’s machine mayhem. Images of death & destruction
reign in a delirium of transformations as, to quote Marinetti:
“We Decompose the Universe!”

FOR THE LIVE EXPANDED CINEMA SHOW on THE 30TH,
I plan something like this:

musique plastique

This presentation will alternate a live ephemeral
cinema performance using piezoelectric-generated
electronic sound - with hand-manipulated
celluloid film strips and colored plastic gels with
external lenses and filters, to create a "pyrographic
chemystery" of metaphors & abstractions AND
multiple-layered projections of chemically-treated
hand-developed subterranean science & mirror-displacements
with field recordings & other sonic distortions.
(insect electronics > volcanic erosions > arctic negations)

Eros accompanied by roe enney on synthesizer & electronics.

9/22/10 Experimental films from Germany

2010-09-22T21:53:00.001-04:00

URBAN FOREST / HUMAN JUNGLE

Experimental Short Films from Germany

When I started making films in the 1980s I was part of a thriving artist community in Frankfurt/Main. There was a lot of controversy about Peter Kubelka, the influential and eccentric teacher of film and cooking at the “Städel”, Frankfurt’s art academy. We had excellent programmers at the Filmmuseum and a regular “Avantgarde & Experiment” series. Our discussions reached beyond Kluge and Adorno and for many the American avantgarde was existential.

This program collects some highlights from that period and later years. The first part spins around urban topics, extended into outer space and rooted back to the woods. The second part diversifies the use of found footage, respectively found clothes and sounds.

All films (originally 16mm/35mm) are shown on DVD and have never been presented in the US (very few exceptions), despite awards and glory at the homebase.

Dagmar Kamlah / Curator

I. Urban Forest

Urs Breitenstein: ZEIL-FILM. 1980, 6 min

The camera is placed on the main shopping street “Zeil”. In a structural pattern of acceleration the camera rotates, stopping ever shorter at varying sections, offering an intense urban experience.

Dagmar Kamlah: GARNIT. 1989, 3 min

In the 80's the city of Frankfurt was uplifting itself into a postmodern boomtown. The film shows what in fact happened to the walls throughout the city.

Bertolt Hering: VON DEN LUSTIGEN DINGEN (Of Merry Things). 1986, 10 min

The film examines “furnishings” of the streets by self-testing; an animated and humorous approach to public space.

Gunter Deller: SCHATTENGRENZE (Shadow Bounds). 1999, 16mm, 9’20 min

In a moody urban environment, the camera mingles with the shopping masses, concentrating on ritual proceedings, typical gazes and movements. The varying intensities of light on the 16mm footage, the use of abstract visual elements and an associative montage of urban structures and surfaces, create a cinematic poem that seems to be dedicated more to the wilderness than to civilization.»

Lutz Garmsen: DIES IST DAS HAUS VOM NIKOLAUS. 1992, 35mm, 10 min

The title: This is the house of Santa Claus refers to a children’s rhyme that accompanies the drawing of a house in one line. The film interpretes the creation of the world in a fantastic interstellar vision, with a not happy ending love story interwoven.

Thomas Bartels: HAUT DER DINGE. 2009, 35mm, 6’30 min

Skin of Things oscillates between a self-portrait as artist and a manifestation of the fragmented nature of human perception via cinematic techniques.

Jörn Staeger: REISE ZUM WALD. 2008, HDvideo/35mm, 7 min

Journey to the Forest begins with a rustling tree seen through a window… (then, outside) pathetic remains of plant life meant to give the illusion of a bit of nature in the middle of the city (...) the camera glides through graphic-looking green areas, Avenues and monocultures, further and further out of the city until it gradually loses itself in the depths of the primeval-seeming forest.

II. Human Jungle

Pola Reuth: KOOL KILLER. 1981, 5 min

Breathtaking… A man dives off the 10-meter platform into the pool like the Rolling Stones play the crowd. A play with schemes of virility, establishing the political context of the cult of beauty beyond the psychological denotation of narcism.

Thomas Draschan, Ulrich Wiesner: YES QUI JA. 2002, 4 min

The starting material for this film was educational footage from East Germany. The music, a song by Michèle Polnareff called "La Poupée" in a cover version, was chosen by Ulrich Wiesner. The basic structure of the film: an alternation of redundant illustrations of the words of the song and abstract parts.

Anja Czioska: ONE PUSSY SHOW, 1998, 6’30 min

- a filmed performance: I started my 16mm camera and played with my clothes' collection of 10 years. You see me changing pieces, dancing and joking around to a soundtrack of the 60s. The camera took 2 x 3min at 12 frames/sec. I had fun.

Dagmar Kamlah: KULI. 1987, 3 min

Everybody (in Germany) knows Kuli: Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff - the quintessential TV quizmaster of the 60-70's. He is an icon, a John-Wayne-equivalent delivering the punch in a German way. In 1986 he was still active in a sequel yachting the mediterranean sea. As editing assistent on that production I rescued some random footage, which was not supposed to get exposed at all.

Gunter Deller: RIVERRUN & TOUCHDOWN, 2008, 7’30 min

This “found footage & stolen sound” production juxtaposes homemade travel footage - unknown source, found on flea market - with sounds well recognizable for American moviegoers.

9/15/2010 Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder

2010-09-15T14:16:00.001-04:00

GIBSON + RECODER

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder's work makes light almost seem physical, and it reminds us of the typically hidden aspects of cinema - the projectionist, for example - and revels in the profound pleasures of the basic mechanics and transformative powers of the essential qualities of of cinema In place of a description or review, then, I offer answers to some questions I asked Luis and Sandra about their work:

How does a project take shape? How do you plan or prepare for a performance? Is there a script?

Projects take shape from project to project, from show to show, from one end of the collaboration to the other, from one audience to the other, etc. The work reverberates or ricochets in the in-between.

There is no written script for the performance. There are a certain number of movements, gestures, paths that improvise their way through the individual work, the temporal passagework.

Would you say that your work participates in, continues or redefines an existing tradition? I'm curious about how you see your work in relation to other work and practices...

We hope that the work participates in elaborating the tradition. Not traditionally but controversially, that is by throwing it - literally projecting it - into relief and dispersing into the scattering wind conventional notions accumulating around the so-called tradition.

What actually happens for you during a performance? Is it relatively simple from your perspective, or is it an active, unfolding event?

We try to imagine what it is like to attend such a screening. What is the audience expecting, or not expecting? What remains to be seen or not seen? Every step or transition steps into the spectator.

To set up the spectatorial imaginary: to assume the role of the one who arrives early, the one who arrives late, in the middle (always in the middle), and who is always already leaving early. To identify with all aspects of this hesitancy that knows nothing but beautiful radical indecision.
From an interview with Holly Willis:
http://www.kcet.org/socal/voices/beautiful-radical-indecision.html

GIBSON + RECODER

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder originally met at the 2000 International Film Festival Rotterdam where they each screened their work. Since then they have been collaborating on performances and installations using the film medium as their modus operandi. Their work has exhibited at major art museums and film festivals including the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Redcat (CA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), Sundance Film Festival (UT), Tate Modern (London), Kill Your Timid Notion (Dundee), and Image Forum Festival (Tokyo). Gibson and Recoder’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Cinema Foundation, as well as in numerous private collections. Recent collaborations with sound artists and composers include Daniel Menche, Olivia Block, Adam Sonderberg, and Ben Owen.

Film Society Show added 8/25/2010!

2010-08-24T11:40:00.010-04:00

Super 8 Films by Anabel Vázquez

Recent raw and in-camera edited super 8 films
Including a 2007-2008 collaboration film with Barcelona artist Montse Morcate,
plus a selection of 1999-2005 films.

http://www.anabelvazquez.com

August 18, 2010 Saul Levine

2010-08-18T13:21:00.000-04:00

Saul Levine himself!
BREAKING TIME- A PORTRAYAL IN 4PARTS AND THREE REELS

In the fall of 1977, I returned to the New Haven area to live with my parents and aunts after being unemployed for a year. I resumed working in my father's gas station and small used-car lot as both a service attendant and driver of cars between New York and New Haven. BREAKING TIME is a four-part work made up of four separate films on three reels. Each film is a complete work itself and may be shown separately. I feel that together they make a different work.

The return to my home allowed me to look back on the working people and places of my childhood with the eyes of an adult. It was a continual struggle to make a past present and I was only able to complete [the series] after I left the area. The work also reflects my experiences in the past working as a traffic surveyor and the automotive and petroleum base of the culture I grew up in.

Part 1: Mortgage on My Body

Stations throughout Connecticut and even New York City. Riding around with my father and back to the gas station.

1978-1983

Part 2: Arrested

Mainly a portrayal of my father, the blizzard of 1978 and the summer and spring.

1977-1983

Parts 3 and 4: Lien on My Soul and Portrait Not a Dream

LIEN ON MY SOUL is a cityscape of New Haven shot from an East Rock park. Includes the 4th of July, a wedding, lovers, bikers, kids - an ecological meditation.

PORTRAIT NOT A DREAM: My mother's cry of rage.

WHOLE NOTE

A portrait of my father in the last days of his life. "Nothing is as whole as a broken heart" - Hassidic saying.

AUGUST MOON AND SEE

A portrait of Nancy Golden, a summer evening and Nancy photographing rocks at Singing Bea

LIGHT LICK DAILY CAMERA 2010

Light lick shot mainly in Boulder Colorado mountain high

August 11, 2010 Javiera Ovalle and Malena Szlam

2010-08-11T17:38:00.000-04:00

Memoria Vista: Film and Video by Javiera Ovalle and Malena Szlam

Javiera Ovalle and Malena Szlam are Chilean artists living and working in Montreal. In their respective bodies of work, each uses film and video to revisit intimately lived moments and past interactions with public spaces. Exploring moving images’ power to convey memory, both document and distort landscapes that traverse continents.

Embedded in their work is an attempt to connect with urban spaces that span a non-linear spectrum between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Whether they are recording in Santiago or Valparaíso in an area in which they moved for years, or in newer environments abroad in Canada or Europe, both artists visualize enigmatic aspects of their interactions with landscapes. While Ovalle deals with the separations and mergers in which language shapes social behavior, Szlam approaches the presence and absence of pictures in our rapidly mutating visual culture. A persistent sense of constructing and deconstructing memory and the images that form around it is counterbalanced by the candid need to connect – to articulate (visually) the inarticulable when moving through different cultures, spaces, families and frames.

Memoria Vista is curated by Liz Munsell, independent curator of DiscordiaFilms and Curatorial Research Associate in Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

August 4th, 2010 Gordon Nelson and Tara Merenda Nelson

2010-08-04T14:04:00.000-04:00

Experimental Short Films by Gordon Nelson and Tara Merenda Nelson

Join us for a night of experimental 16mm and Super 8 films by spouses Gordon and Tara Nelson. This unique film performance features live multiple projections, original sound compositions and kaleidoscopic visuals. Abstractions of nature, autobiography and other-worldly adventures are thematically explored in this program.

Microdots
Super 8 Sound

Frankensteined Film
16mm Sound

Cloud Study
16mm dual projection

Noisolpmi
16mm

River
16mm dual projection

43rd Street Treelapse
Super 8 triple projection

Nitebrite
16mm/animation

Dome
16mm/animation

Snow
Super 8 sound

Marathon
Super 8 color

.....and a few surprises!

Bios:
Tara -
I was born on St. Thomas in 1975 but had to leave just after I learned to swim. I was raised in southern Maryland near the Chesapeake Bay, back when they still had tobacco farms everywhere. I have lived in Chapel Hill, Portland, Buffalo and Vienna and Boston, but I like Pittsburgh most of all. It's a place like no other. My favorite filmmaker is Rose Lowder, who lives in France and makes the most beautiful movies you ever saw. I hope to meet her one day.

I make films that explore the psychological space of creativity in search of the imagination. My husband Gordon helps me.

Gordon -
Gordon Nelson is a Scottish born filmmaker, educator and curator who was raised in Pennsylvania and is married to Tara Merenda Nelson. He has taught filmmaking classes at Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Massachusetts College of Art and Design and curated film programs at the Carnegie Museum of Art. He is also a founder of Jefferson Presents, a microcinema collective with over 100 independent programs. His films, videos and curated programs have been seen across the United States and as far away as New Zealand.

July 28, 2010 Brittany Gravely

2010-07-28T14:22:00.000-04:00

Brittany Gravely presents:

AMERICAN PSYCHE: The Cinematic & The Civilized A Powerpoint presentation which attempts to invoke American Psycho's immortal Patrick Bateman and study his relationship to the state of souls in a soulless environment. As the möbius strip of media and reality binds us to delusion and denial, it can also carry cosmic messages. Video clips, primitive sketches, live narration, charts and graphs help illustrate the nature of Modern Civilization and how the fate of Christian Bale may be tied to our own. This occasionally- awkward, whirlwind lecture includes some violence and nudity, very little intellectual terminology, time for Q&A and perhaps meditation.

Artistically Brittany Gravely has focused primarily on 16mm film for the past several years, but also creates works in sound, video, installation, and many media of the second dimension. She graduated in 2001 with an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her films, for which she is the writer, director, editor and sound designer include 2001’s Introduction To Living In A Closed System (New York Film Festival, Images Festival, MFA Boston, videoex, New York Underground…) and Blood of the Earthworm of 2006 (T.I.E. Cinema, Black Maria, New York Underground, Antimatter, Chicago Underground…). In 2008, she and Jennifer Pipp formed Architecture of the Sun to accompany live music while manipulating dual 16mm projections and have performed in clubs and galleries in Brooklyn, Boston and Providence. Her latest experiment is a Powerpoint presentation on American Psycho. Recently certified in palmistry, she is also currently studying herbalism and devising therapeutic film projects. She lives in Boston and works at Documentary Educational Resources, an educational video and film distributor.

July 21, 2010 Disembodied Theater Corporation

2010-07-21T14:25:00.000-04:00

No Way Out But Onward by the Disembodied Theater Corporation

REPORT FROM THE GHOST CITY

The Disembodied Theater Corporation brings you an evening of dispatches,
news, songs, and fragments from the Ghost City: the skeletal remains of
abandoned towns, railways, and graveyards that stand as remnants of a lost
society. Filmmaker Ross Lipman in collaboration with Bryan Papciak, Jeff
Sias and Liz Coffey presents this haunting assemblage of ruins, rants, and
shards of memory that paint a collective portrait of dystopia. The evening
includes a live cinema performance of Lipman's NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD, and
excerpts of Papciak and Sias's feature length work-in-progress, AMERICAN
RUINS.

The Disembodied Theater Corporation is an amorphous entity devoted to the
temporary manifestation of non-filmic cinemas.

Featuring:

NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD

An adventure in psychogeography through New York's High Line

PowerPoint performance by the Disembodied Theater Corporation Written and
narrated by Ross Lipman Suite for Bass, Viola, and Trombone by Laura
Steenberge Photos by Leigh Evans, Ross Lipman, Nina Mankin

On June 8th, 2009 New York City's High Line, an abandoned elevated freight
rail that runs through the west side of Manhattan?s old meat-packing
district, was re-opened as an aerial park. Before that it lay empty for
decades. Between its days as an industrial railway and public leisure space,
the High Line was a haunted paradise above the city--a verdant wasteland
inhabited only by occasional taggers, wanderers, and police. In October 2004
a ragtag group of us ventured up to explore. Some experienced trespassers,
others neophytes, the group discovered that the High Line was a space with
its own internal logic, interacting with its visitors in a way unique to
each. No Way Out But Onward is a live cinema account of that day's events;
the modern day equivalent of an old-time Magic Lantern performance.

selections from Lipman's THE PERFECT HEART OF FLUX:

"A wordless testimony to the chaos of urbanity: portraits of ruins
and construction mingle with landscapes, skyscapes, and ghosts of the
distant city. Shards, glimmers, fragments, and visions arise, coalesce
and dissolve in the crucible of time.

These short video works elide demarcations of cinema, creating a
unique visual language that integrates poetic and essay forms in brief
meditations on the nature of organic change."

MET STATE, an award-winning experimental short film by Bryan Papciak.

AMERICAN RUINS, a feature-length work-in-progress by Bryan Papciak and Jeff
Sias.

Contact information:

Ross Lipman: corpusfluxus@oblivio.com

BIOS:

Ross Lipman is an independent filmmaker, photographer, and writer who has
presented work throughout the world at venues ranging from the Oberhausen
International Film Festival to the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. His films
have been collected by institutions and museums including the Sammlung Goetz
in Munich. He is also one of the world's leading authorities on the
restoration of independent and experimental cinema, and was recently honored
with consecutive Film Heritage Awards from the National Society of Film
Critics in 2007 and 2008. In recent years he has been designing film, video,
and performance works exploring urban decay as a marker of modern
consciousness.

Liz Coffey is Film Conservator at the Harvard Film Archive.

BRYAN PAPCIAK & JEFF SIAS
Bryan Papciak & Jeff Sias are a co-directing team. They first worked
together at Olive Jar Studios in Boston, creating highly original and
unusual mixed-media commercial animation productions for clients such
as Cartoon Network, MTV, and Samsung.
Since Olive Jar's closing in 2001, Bryan & Jeff have continued to
collaborate on commercial projects, independent short films, puppetry
venues, and other artistic endeavors through their own company,
Handcranked Productions, LLC.

Jeff & Bryan are two of the four founding members of Handcranked Film
Projects, a Boston-area art and film collaborative. HCF was
established to explore the arts through non-traditional experimental
film, and has recently been featured on Public Television's "Art Close
Up" (aired nationally). The group was conceived as an informal
cooperative whose members share experience and resources in the
production of individual and collaborative film-as-art projects. Bryan
and Jeff are currently producing their own independent in-progress
project AMERICAN RUINS, in conjunction with the Filmmakers
Collaborative, a long-standing non-profit association of independent,
Boston area documentary filmmakers.

MassArt Film Society Summer Shows!

2010-07-12T14:42:00.008-04:00

Hello and Welcome to the Summer Series at the MassArt Film Society. Below is the schedule. Scroll down for more detailed information on any of the following shows...

7/21/2010 Ross Lipman: NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD by the Disembodied Theater Corporation

7/28/2010 Brittany Gravely presents AMERICAN PSYCHE

8/4/2010 Experimental Short Films by Gordon Nelson and Tara Merenda Nelson

8/11/2010 Malena Szlam films and video

8/18/2010 Saul Levine Breaking Time and more!

8/25/2010 Anabel Vázquez Super 8 Films

Spring Schedule 2010!

2010-05-19T09:20:00.000-04:00

Our Spring screenings were as follows. Please stay tuned for the fall schedule. We will start screening right after Labor day. For more information about these shows and older schedules click on older posts below...

1/20 Oscar Micheaux BODY AND SOUL
1/27 Dan Barnett WHITE HEART, PULL OUT FALL OUT, & CHINESE TYPEWRITER
2/3 Asma Kazmi
2/9 David Crawford memorial show
2/10 No Screening due to Snowstorm
2/17 Leonard Retel Helmrich-Shape of the Moon
2/24 Rose Lowder curated by Tara Merenda Nelson and Gordon Nelson
3/2 Andrew Lampert and Saul Levine-The Golden Mean (a concert of Charlesmagne
Palastine)
3/3 Andrew Lampert
3/10 Spring Break-no screening
3/17 Holiday-no screening
3/24 Chick Strand's films
3/31 Jonathan Schwartz
4/7 Ruth Lingford
4/14 Barbara DeGenevieve
4/20 No Screening
4/21 Verena Paravel
4/28 Bobbie Abate
5/5 Mark Street and Lynne Sachs

May 5, 8 pm Last screening this spring!

2010-05-05T19:12:00.000-04:00

Films by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street

The Last Happy Day
38 min. 2009
by Lynne Sachs

The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones -- small and large -- of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war. Premiere: New York Film Festival, 2009.

Collision of Parts
15 min., 2010
by Mark Street

A kaleidoscopic reverie recorded over a period of five years in various urban milieus. An excavation of the concept of montage: small moments public and private brush up against each other, creating a charged tapestry of the immediate. Inside and outside, motion and stasis, home and travel, light and dark: a series of antimonies struggle to be heard and seen. Premiere: Tribeca Film Fest 2010.

Caudro por cuadro (Frame by Frame)
8 min., 2009
by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street

In “Cuadro por caudro”, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguayan media artists to create handpainted experimental films in the spirit of Stan Brakhage. Sachs and Street collaborate with their students at the Fundacion de Arte Contemporaneo by painting on 16 and 35 mm film, then bleaching it and then hanging it to dry on the roof of the artists’ collective in Montevideo in July, 2009.
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany -- sites affected by international war--where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In April 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque presented a full retrospective of her work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

For more info: www.lynnesachs.com

Mark Street graduated from Bard College (B.A, 1986) and the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 1992). He has shown work in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series (1991, 1994), at Anthology Film Archives (1993, 2006, 2009), Millennium (1990,1996), and the San Francisco Cinematheque (1986, 1992, 2009). His work has appeared at the Tribeca (5 times), Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense (Spain), Mill Valley, South by Southwest, and other film festivals. His work ranges from the abstract (Winterwheat, 1989; Echo Anthem 1992; Fulton Fish Market, 2004, Trailer Trash, 2008) to improvised narrative feature films (At Home and Asea, 2000; Rockaway 2005), His projects has been supported by a number of grants from foundations, including the Jerome Foundation, the Film Arts Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council and the NY Experimental TV Center. In 2006 he was asked to participate in the Hallwalls Artists Residency Program in Buffalo, NY. Some of his film work has been performed live (at Tonic and Galapagos in NYC) with accompanying musicians, including Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins, Bradford Reed and Jane Scarpantoni. In 2007 at Hallwalls he presented a multi media show entitled Inside and Out: Infected Districts and Memory Lanes with Buffalo performance and music groups Real Dream Cabaret and Open Music Ensemble. He has curated and judged several film and art exhibitions including Ventana al Sur: An Evening of Argentine Experimental Film (with Lynne Sachs) at Anthology Film Archives and Pacific Film Archive in 2009 as well as Video Landscapes (2005) and Real Abstractions (2007) both at Fordham University’s Center Art Gallery. Two of his personal essays “Film is Dead: Long Live Film” and “Festival of Flight” appeared in Film Arts Magazine in 2008. An essay about film funding “Who’s Asking?” appeared Millennium Film Journal # 51 entitled Experimental Documentary. Cinema Argentina – An Argentine excursion: film frames and talk therapy (with Lynne Sachs and Pablo Marin) appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Gonzo Circus. He has led community workshops a variety of venues (Echo Park Film Center in LA, Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, NC, Fondacion d’Arte Contemporaneo in Montevideo Uruguay) on a variety of topics, including “The Devil is in the Details: Urban Street Videography.” He is Assistant Professor of Film in the Visual Art Department at Fordham University-- Lincoln Center where he teaches film/video production and other courses that engage contemporary artistic practice.

http://markstreetfilms.blogspot.com
273 Carroll St. Brooklyn, NY 11231
718 522 5856
Mstreet430@gmail.com
www.markstreetfilms.com

April 28, 2010 Bobbie Abate

2010-04-28T17:56:00.000-04:00

Verena Paravel April 21st 2010

2010-04-21T12:18:00.000-04:00

Interfaces / 5 short videos shot through Skype. Each video combines and explores media, the intimacy of long distance relationship and layers of space.

Interfaces Series

#1 With Such A Wistful Eye 2008 15mins

#2 Habitat 2008 12 mins

#3 I Only See Problems 2009 11 mins

#4 Presented With Severe Pain 2009 23 mins

#5 I Have no Friends 2010 16 mins

Barbara DeGenevieve April 14, 2010

2010-04-14T13:13:00.001-04:00

Barbara DeGenevieve: SELF EXAM - Exploitation, Objectification and Bad Behavior

Steven X and Barbara C, (18 min)
The Panhandler Project (approx. 20 min of 60) Desperado, (approx. 30 min of 68) La Petite Mort (6 min)

Barbara DeGenevieve's work has bothered people since she was in grad school. In her lecture she will address academic and social accusations of exploitation and objectification, her work's relationship to pornography, and her own ethical position in regard to all of these issues. DeGenevieve is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Bio:
Barbara DeGenevieve is a project based artist who works with video, audio, photography, performance and writing. She has exhibited and screened her work internationally, published her writing, and received support through an Art Matters Fellowship, 3 Illinois Arts Council Grants, and 2 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Art Fellowships, the last of which was revoked by the National Council on the Arts because of the sexual content of her work.

http://www.degenevieve.com/
http://massartfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Ruth Lingford April 7th

2010-04-07T10:00:00.001-04:00

March 31st Jonathan Schwartz

2010-03-31T15:44:00.000-04:00

March 24, 2010 Films by Chick Strand!

2010-03-24T17:55:00.000-04:00

ANGEL BLUE SWEET WINGS

ANSELMO

COSAS DE MI VIDA

Coming Up For Air

Mujer de Milfuegos (Woman of a Thousand Fires)

No screenings 3/10 & 3/17

2010-03-10T08:42:00.000-05:00

Due to spring break and our beloved evacuation day holiday there will be no screenings for the 2 weeks following Andrew Lampert.

March 3, 2010

2010-03-03T09:21:00.000-05:00

NEW TO YOU: SOME RECENT AND REALLY OLD WORKS BY ANDREW LAMPERT,
So that you know what to expect in advance.

I’ve slowly started to stop making films, less interested lately in producing images than moving them. It’s no longer a matter of framing the shot, I’m talking about projecting. Gathering in the dark, together, is far more important than what we watch. Content is interchangeable, hardly relevant, I care more about the throw. Something gained in this loss, and while it hurt for awhile, these were only growing pains; not killed, stronger. Don’t take this introduction as a dismissal of moviemaking or a disavowal of shadows. Think of it more like a foreshadowing of the beginning of the end.
NEVERTHELESS, tonight’s circus starts with a selection of films spanning early to late, an over-generous sampling of recently recovered, forever premature footage by a bored Midwest high school dilettante with super 8 camera. Expect numerous reels with necessary explanation; context is everything.
But wait, Boston, there’s more! Expect more contemporary pieces previously unseen in the state of Massachusetts, including:
JACKA SPADES (a.k.a. GET THIS PICTURE HERE)
2009, Super 8mm, 34 minutes, black and white, sound.
Steve Dalachinsky, with the aid of Yuko Otomo and cinematographer Andrew Lampert, is given the chance to direct his dream film. This is not that, but rather the result of what they shot that day presented in real time as they filmed it. In the end, this is always what the film was supposed to be; what Steve wanted is another story heard on the soundtrack of the images gathered within. Shot last February on the streets of Soho, and mostly edited in-camera, this movie is never shown the same way twice. JACKA SPADES (a.k.a GET THIS PICTURE HERE) is the second installment in Lampert’s TABLES TURNED trilogy. In this series, the filmmaker hands over direction of the movie to his subjects. “I think I always wanted to be the actor, not the director.” – Steve Dalachinsky from the soundtrack.
- - - -
Andrew Lampert, born 1976, St. Louis, MO. Resides in Brooklyn, NY. Primarily makes films, videos and live performances. Screenings, shows and exhibitions include NY Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Whitney Biennial, Getty Museum, Kill Your Timid Notion (Scotland), British Film Institute, The Kitchen, Cinema Project (Portland), Podewil (Berlin) & many others. Collaborates when possible with musicians including Okkyung Lee, Alan Licht, Steve Beresford, Peter Evans, etc. Works as Archivist at Anthology Film Archives, NYC.

March 2, 2010

2010-03-02T09:27:00.000-05:00

Andrew Lampert and Saul Levine-The Golden Mean (a concert of Charlesmagne
Palastine)

February 24, 2010!

2010-02-24T09:26:00.001-05:00

Rose Lowder Films

The MassArt Film Society, History of Art Department and Graduate Programs present A FEAST OF ROSE LOWDER: Experimental Films That Will Nourish Your Soul. Please join curators Tara and Gordon Nelson for a rare screening of french experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder's 16mm films from 1978-1989. The screening will be held in Screening Room 1 of the North Building at MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston MA 02115. On the T take the green line E train to Longwood stop.

Film Titles include:
Toulement, rouerie, aubage
Couleurs mecaniques
Champ Provencal
Rue Des Teinturiers
Parcelle
Les Tournesols
Impromptu

February 17, 2010 Leonard Retel Helmrich

2010-02-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

Tonight!

Shape of the Moon (Stand van de maan)

Directed by Leonard Retel Helmrich
Indonesia/Netherlands 2004, color, 92 min.
Indonesian with English subtitles

The end of the Suharto regime ushered in an era of rapid sociopolitical change in Indonesia. Shape of the Moon registers those changes on aging matriarch Rumidjah and her family. Rumidjah is a Christian, but her son Bakti converts to Islam to marry a Muslim woman. Shape of the Moon juxtaposes this family drama against the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Indonesia, itself a response to the country's uncertain future. Meanwhile, Rumidjah tires of the chaos of Jakarta and longs to return to her home village. However, she remains devoted to her eleven year-old granddaughter and knows that the countryside holds little promise for younger generations.

A memorial screening to celebrate the life and creative work of David Crawford 2/9/2010

2010-02-09T21:16:00.000-05:00

still from "Stop Motion Studies Tokyo 2004"

David Crawford (1970-2009) studied film, video, and new media at the Massachusetts College of Art and received a BFA in 1997. He received several Turbulence.org Commissions, including Here and Now (1998), National Velvet (2000), and Stop Motion Studies - Tokyo (2003). In 2000, his Light of Speed project was a finalist for the SFMOMA Webby Prize for Excellence in Online Art. In 2003, Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies project received an Artport Gate Page Commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art, an Award of Distinction in the Net Vision category at the Prix Ars Electronica, and became part of the public collection of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (SMS - Series 6). In 2004, he received an MSc from Chalmers University of Technology and taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Crawford received his PhD in 2009 from the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at Göteborg University in Sweden. His artwork has been featured by the Guardian and Leonardo. His writing has been published by Princeton Architectural Press and SpringerWienNewYork.

http://web.me.com/jmcecil/DavidCrawford/Welcome.html

February 3rd 2010 Asma Kazmi

2010-02-03T19:06:00.000-05:00

Asma Kazmi received a B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and an M.F.A. from the School of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She approaches her practice from a post installation/object centric position, which allows her to create multidimensional works where people, media and objects come together. Asma Kazmi is the recent recipient of At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago Award, given by the University of Illinois in Chicago and the Critical Mass Grant, awarded by The Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis, MO. Her work has been exhibited and included in collections such as the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis; Webster University; Boots Contemporary Art Space, St Louis; The Guild Gallery, NYC; Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago; Boston Underground Film Festival; Balagan Film and Video Series, Boston; Women In Film & Video/New England; and the MassArt Film Society. Asma Kazmi was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan.

January 27, 2010

2010-01-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

3 Films by Dan Barnett

Chinese Typewriter
Pull Out Fall Out
White Heart

January 20, 2010 Please Note Cancelation Below!!!

2010-01-19T12:10:00.005-05:00

Still Showing:

Oscar Micheaux Body and Soul

Not Showing:

Charles Burnett Killer of Sheep is Canceled! We are not showing this film!

We do not have public performance rights to show this film. We are dedicated to the open forum of this venue so although we could chose to show it to the class alone we have chosen instead to cancel this portion of the screening so we can continue to offer this special kind of education to our community and friends.

MassArt Film Society Fall 09 Schedule was as follows...

2009-12-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

9/9/09 Werckmeister harmóniák, 2000
Werckmeister Harmonies] by Bela Tarr

9/16/09 Chick Strand: A Trubute

9/23/09 Video Lounge on the Road
curated by Lana Z. Caplan

9/30/09 NORA and Movement Revolution Africa

10/7/09 Phil Solomon artist will be present

10/14/09 Shapeshifter film,video and performance presented by Michelle Handelman

10/21/09 WHAT OF THE NIGHT

Observando El Cielo,” By Jeanni Liotta, Moonplay by Marie Menken, Songs 9,10 by Stan Brakhage, The Stars Are Very Beautiful by Stan Brakhage, Nocturne by Phil Solomon, night side by Rebecca Meyers, BY NIGHT WITH TORCH AND SPEAR by Joseph Cornell

10/28/09 Nancy Andrews cosponsored with Balagan

11/4 09 Luther Price Distant Pleasures

11/11/09 Holiday: No Screening

11/18/09 Movement as Meaning
Curated and Presented by Daniel Barnett

11/25/09 Happy Thanksgiving: No Screening

12/2/09 Anne Charlette Robertson
Apologies: Serious films and a video diary

12/9/09 Video Sur

See details on all these shows below...

Video Sur in NYC!!!

2009-12-19T13:26:00.000-05:00

http://www.uniondocs.org/video-sur-experimental-latin-american-shorts/

VideoSur: Experimental Latin American Shorts

UNION DOCS

Saturday, December 19 - 7:30pm
Suggested donation $7
Discussion with curators and artists, Ivanna Bergese, Julio Lamilla, Liz Munsell and Anabel Vazquez following the screening. Special music performance before the show. Presented with Cinema Tropical and the MassArt Film Society.

December 9, 09 last fall viewing date

2009-12-09T08:55:00.000-05:00

Returning to MassArt Film Society...

VideoSur’s second incarnation includes documentation of performance and art action, noise video and stop motion animation. Inspired by the spirit of exchange, VideoSur is an exhibit of experimental shorts conveying the complex cultural vision of Latin American artists. Co-curated by Julio Lamilla, Liz Munsell and Anabel Vázquez.
http://discordiafilms.blogspot.com/

December 2, 2009

2009-12-02T09:35:00.000-05:00

Anne Charlette Robertson

Apologies
Serious films and a video diary

Apologies

Artist Residence Diary

MY Cat My Garden and 911

Spirit of 76

Going To Work

November 18, 2009

2009-11-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

Movement as Meaning
Curated and Presented by Daniel Barnett

The films of Daniel Barnett are among the most complex (and least understood) works in all of cinema. Taking Peter Kubelka’s aesthetics of shot-to-shot/frame-to-frame collision and articulation to elegant extremes, works such as 1975’s White Heart and 1987-90’s Endless embody profound expressions of visual language that remain regretfully outside the genre’s assimilated canon. With the publication of his Movement as Meaning: In Experimental Film (Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam/N.Y., Consciousness, Literature & the Arts), Barnett articulates in words the aesthetic that has long been at the heart of his filmmaking practice, discussing the relationships between narrative language, image making and the relationships of motion and sequence to thought while pondering the possibility of “thinking without words.” Following a brief introduction by Barnett on these topics, four works discussed in the book and central to his theses will be screened: Stan Brakhage’s Fire of Waters, A. Keewatin Dewdney’s The Maltese Cross Movement, Saul Levine’s The Big Stick/An Old Reel and Barnett’s own The Chinese Typewriter. (Steve Polta)

November 4, 2009

2009-11-04T09:30:00.000-05:00

Luther Price presents a show of his work:

DISTANT PLEASURES

IN BLACK AND WHITE super 8mm 1994

DOOR NUMBER TWO MINUS THIRTY SEVEN super 8mm 1997

RITUAL 629 super 8mm 1999

ERUPTION ERECTION super 8mm 1990

YOU’’VE GOT THE TONI 16mm 2005

THE MONGREL SISTER 16mm 2007

SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE 16mm 2005

TURBULENT BLUE 16mm 2007

DIPPING SAUCE 16mm 2005

TAMPONIA 16mm 2007

October 28, 2009

2009-10-28T10:58:00.000-04:00

Balagan Film Series and Mass College of Art Film Society Present:

The Films of Nancy Andrews (in person)

Program:

"On A Phantom Limb" (2009) 35 mins
"The Haunted Camera" (2006) 31 minutes

On A Phantom Limb (2009, 35 mins)

“The monster did not choose this for her self, to be an amalgam for alchemy.”

This short, avant-garde film features a cyborg heroine who is a metaphor for the postmodern condition--fragmented, reconstructed, hybrid, virtual, part history/part future. The film narrative blends archival documentary footage, animation, and original 16mm live-action footage with a rich musical score and sound collage to tell the story of a woman/bird creature. “On a Phantom Limb”sometimes whimsically and sometimes disturbingly conveys the human encounter with mortality.

The Haunted Camera (16mm film, B&W, 30 minutes, 2006, written, directed, cinematography, editing, puppets and animation by Nancy Andrews, music by John Cooper) This is the final installment in the Ima Plume trilogy. An homage to film noir, it explores Ima Plume’s investigation of her own death. Ima, Public Illustrator, grapples with trying to express things that might not be seen or drawn including: spirits, electronic voice phenomena and studies of animal locomotion. The film combines chalk and drawn animation, puppetry and live action. It is both fiction and documentary. Inspiration for the content and style is taken from pioneers of film, vaudeville, photography and spiritualism.

Bio

Nancy Evelyn Andrews lives in Seal Harbor, Maine, where she makes films and music. Her work explores questions like: What is our place in the universe? What do we really know? How do we try to grasp the past, or the future? How can humans interface with the natural world at this juncture in history? She works in a hybrid form combining storytelling, documentary, puppetry, animation, and vaudeville. Her characters and stories are synthesized from various sources, including history and autobiographical material. Her work has been presented by the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Jerusalem Film Festival, Flaherty Seminar,Nova, Cinema Bioscoop, Brussels, Belgium, and Taiwan International Animation Festival, among others; and is in the film collections of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, LEF New England Moving Image Fund, Illinois State Arts Council, The Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (supported by the Jerome Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts), and National Endowment for the Arts. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Master of Fine Arts in 1995, and her undergraduate studeis were at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, BFA, 1983.

Nancy is currently on faculty at the College of the Atlantic where she teaches performance art, video making and film history.

October 21, 09 What of the Night

2009-10-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

Nocturne

Finding similarities in the pulses and shapes between my own experiments in night photography, lightning storms, and night bombing in World War II, I constructed the war at home.

"A screaming comes across the sky." - Gravity's Rainbow

"NOCTURNE strongly evokes one of Brakhage's most exquisite films, FIRE OF WATERS (1965). Its setting is a suburban neighborhood populated by kids at play and indistinct but ominous parental figures. A submerged narrative rehearses a type of young boy's nighttime game in which a flashlight is wielded in a darkened room to produce effects of aerial combat and bombardment. A sense of hostility tinged with terror seeps into commonplace movements .... Fantasy merges with nightmare, a war of dimly suppressed emotions rages beneath a veneer of household calm .... In NOCTURNE, found footage is worked so subtly into the fabric of threat that its apperception comes as a shock ploughed from the unconscious." - Paul Arthur

1980 (revised 1989), 16mm, b&w/si, 10m,

Marie Menken: Moonplay

(1964-1966) 16mm, black and white, sound, 5 min

Sound by Teiji Ito. A lunar fantasy in animated stop-motion.

Stan Brakhage: Song 9 Wedding source and substance

Song 10 Sitting around

also...

Observando El Cielo,” By Jeanni Liotta

The Stars Are Very Beautiful by Stan Brakhage

night side by Rebecca Meyers

BY NIGHT WITH TORCH AND SPEAR by Joseph Cornell

October 14, 09

2009-10-14T15:11:00.000-04:00

SHAPESHIFTER a night of film and video curated by Michelle Handelman

Works that investigate revolutions of exchange both political and sexual, transfiguration,
transmutation and radical distortions of psychological entropy. Featuring work by:
Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin, Tara Mateik, Jillian Mcdonald, Bjorn Melhus, Shannon
Plumb, Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley, Abbey Williams.

PROGRAM
Das Zauberglas (The Magic Glass)
Bjorn Melhus, 6 min, 1991
A short meeting of a shaving man and his female reflection in the magic glass/the TV monitor. A
tale about coming and going and the desire of an incomprehensible virtual image. Based on the
German version of the 1950's Western romance, "Broken Arrow".

Burn
Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley, 10 min, 16mm trans to video, 2002
A house burns from the inside while its occupants focus on the emotional issues of their lives.
Burn is a stunning evocation of those unspoken, unconfronted somethings, those secrets; at first
niggling at the edges, then - provoked by a word or a gesture - suddenly searing through
everything and everyone in its path. Belinda McKeon, The Irish Times.

Bad girl! Bad girl!
Abbey Williams, 30 sec (excerpt), video, 2008
Williams makes near motionless performances in a series of video portraits in which she
superimposes herself over a still image, insistently trying and failing and trying to equal the figure
in the frame, dissolving herself over art historical images and pop culture iconography. Williams
attempts to assume literal visual semblance in an effort to become their figurative equivalent.

Mum
Abbey Williams, 7min, video, 2007
Williams visually dissects old mummy films by digitally removing the monster entirely to leave
only a levitating female victim. Intercut with recreated imagery where the artist inserts herself
into the narrative as the female with frenetic editing and staccato sound these altered and
reconstructed images are woven (along with scientific footage of reproduction) to create an
abstract narrative of sexual and progeny anxiety.

Horror makeup
Jillian McDonald, 7 min, video, 2006
I transform myself from normal to zombie in the midst of a daily subway commute. Instead of
improving my features, like the woman who steadily applies makeup en route to work or play, I
become gruesome. This work takes cues from the legion of women who perform beauty rituals
on the subway in a curious private zone where they seem unaware of anything outside their
activity, and the rising cult of zombies in popular culture, where zombie lore flourish.

Endless Love
Tara Mateik, 4:30 min, video, 2005
A music video screen test for the Tin Man as Lionel Richie for the Diana Ross duet, Endless
Love, as part of, Man Behind the Curtain--a reproduction of the musical fantasy The Wizard of
Oz. In search of a transgender Diana Ross impersonator to resurrect Dorothy.

Paper Collection
Shannon Plumb, 19 min, video, 2007
Portraying herself as model, photographer, magazine editor and fashionista, Plumb delves into
concepts of beauty, the fashion industry and the nature of superficiality. Viewed through Plumb's
self-conscious lens of humor and naiveté, this film chronicles both the cultural significance and
the accompanying absurdity that prevails in a world where surface and appearance are of the
utmost importance.

La Mulatto
Abbey Williams, 30 sec (excerpt), video, 2007
Williams superimposes an image of herself bound with rope onto the bust of a slave; La
Négresse (1872) by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. We watch as the artist struggles to “hold the pose”
and as a result a striking new form is created. “ La Mulatto conflates an image of a 19th century
terra-cotta bust with the artist’s self-portrait, employing a post-black sense of multi-racial
identity while examining the ever present question of cultural identification.

Don’t let me down
Abbey Williams, 09:00 min, video, 2009
. Williams set out on this body of work in anticipation of the birth of her first child and completed the work prior to her expected due date. Then the unthinkable happened, her son died in labor and was delivered stillborn. In many ways all of the works now take on the dual function of living as a testament to the most devastating kind of loss imaginable and the nine months the artist spent contemplating her expectant new life as a mother.

Man Probe Experiments
Darrin Martin and Torsten Zenas Burns, 6 min, video, 2004
Improvisational medicine is practiced via etheric communication with organic & inorganic prop
exchange, the life-students are reinvigorated as both energy conduit and exploratory probe.

PYT
Tara Mateik, 4:00 min, video, 2004
Suspend your disbelief and salute the constant state of preadolescent gender in Never Never
Land where the principal boy, Peter, is played by a woman. In 1903 Nina Boucicault played
Peter Pan in the original London production. Reviewer Denis Mackail enthusiastically noted that, others will be more boyish, or more principal-boyish, or gayer and prettier, or sinister and
inhuman, or more ingeniously and painstakingly elfin, but Miss Boucicault was the Peter of all
Peters…she was unearthly but she was real. She obtruded neither sex nor sexlessness…In the
spirit of Boucicault PYT throws social codes of masculinity into crisis.

BIOGRAPHIES
Robert Appleton and Brandon Olson have performed together in several productions including
the 2004 Chris Tanner show Ravaged by Romance at Lamama (NYC). Appleton’s work has been
described as, “Drawing inspiration from the shroud that falls as twilight begins, permitting one to transform oneself, reinventing personas. He deals with issues of decadence, loss of control, and nonconformity.” Brandon Olson is an actor and performance artist whose work has been
dazzling downtown denizens for a decade in New York since moving here from Seattle, WA.
He's collaborated on many projects with many artists including Tabboo!, Karen Finley, Lavinia
Co-op, the Frances Ethel Gumm Memorial Players, Tony Ousler, and Patricia Field.

Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin began their collaborations in the video and sculpture
programs at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University where they both received their
B.F.A.s. They have based their works on their research into diverse speculative fictions and
reimagined educational practices. Their collaborations have exhibited at venues including The
New York Video Festival, Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, The Madrid Museum of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, and the
Paris/Berlin International. http://www.darrinmartin.com/ and http://www.holyokeresearch.blogspot.com/

Tara Mateik is an artist and educator living in New York City. In his videos and performances he
typecasts himself as theoretical and cultural transvestites from pop music, competitive sport,
and weird science. In 2002 he founded The Society of Biological Insurgents (SBI), an embryonic
cell organization that wages strategic operations to overthrow institutions of compulsory gender.
Mateik’s work has been exhibited at venues that include The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Roebling Hall and Reena Spaulings in New York, the Black Maria Film Festival and LACE in Los
Angeles. http://www.taramateik.com/

Jillian Mcdonald is originally from Winnipeg, Canada, Jillian Mcdonald makes video and performances in Brooklyn and elsewhere. Awards include a NYFA Video Fellowship, Canada Council for the Arts Grants, and residencies at LMCC's Workspace, Headlands Center for the Arts (California), and The Western Front (Vancouver). She was commissioned to create artwork for Lilith Performance Studio in Sweden, The Whitney Artport, and Nuit Blanche in Toronto. Recent solo shows were at Rosenthal Gallery in San Francisco, Moti Hasson in New York, Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, YYZ in Toronto, and Sala Narañja in Spain. http://www.jillianmcdonald.net/

Bjørn Melhus is a German video artist whose work touches our time’s most current themes: the
loss of personal identity in a world of technical images and the horror vision of computer
generated perfect and sexless humans. Despite these serious issues, Bjorn Melhus performs with
humor and irony, triggering laughter by dealing in a playful way with the world of images and
sounds created by commercial media. Being trained in the production techniques of film and
television, all roles are played by Melhus himself, creating a trivial and at the same time horrific
world of twins and doubles. http://www.melhus.de/

Shannon Plumb's cinematic studies of life's various roles and characters explore the complexities embedded in the ordinary and extraordinary. From the humble persona of a new mother to iconic figures from the silver screen, Plumb portrays these characters with zest and humor. Inspired by the curious spirit of slapstick comedy and the physical humor of silent film legends such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Her work has screened internationally including Sara Meltzer Gallery (NYC), and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. http://www.shannonplumb.com/

Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley have collaborated on several films including Burn, Sugar and The Drowning Room. Their work has shown internationally including the Berlin Biennial, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Roebling Hall, (NYC), PS1 Contemporary Art Center, (NYC) and The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). In 2003 Reynold Reynolds was awarded the John Simone Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and in 2004 he was invited to The American Academy in Berlin with a studio at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien for one year. In 2010 he will have a eight month residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany). http://www.reynold-reynolds.com/.com and http://www.patrickjolley.com/

Abbey Williams' work has been exhibited at Tate Britain (London), PS1/MOMA (new York), The
Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), The Wadsworth Antheum Museum (Hartford) and The Studio
Museum of Harlem (New York). The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. http://www.abbeywilliams.com/

Michelle Handelman makes confrontational works that explore the sublime in it’s various forms
of excess and nothingness. Her recent project DORIAN, premiered at Participant, Inc., NYC and
will be featured in Virtuoso Illusion, curated by Michael Rush at The MIT List Center for Visual Art (winter 2010). Her work has shown at Pompidou Centre, Paris; ICA, London; Performa 05;
American Film Institute, SF MOMA; Jack the Pelican, NY and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. She directed the feature documentary BloodSisters and collaborated for several years with Monte Cazazza, pioneer of the Industrial music scene. Her writing appears in Inappropriate Behaviour (Serpents Tail, London), Apocalypse Culture (Feral House Press, Los Angeles) and Herotica 3 edited by Susie Bright (Plume Books, SF). She lives in New York and is an assistant professor in Film/video dept at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston.
http://www.michellehandelman.com/

October 7, 09

2009-10-07T16:44:00.000-04:00

Phil Solomon

MISSING IN ACTION

Mass Art alumni Phil Solomon will making a return visit to Film Society with some things old and some things new, including the local premiere of the third and last installment of the series IN MEMORIAM (Mark Lapore) entitled STILL RAINING, STILL DREAMING (2009). This series of elegiac digital videos is culled entirely from recorded game play from the notorious Grand Theft Auto Video game series.

Solomon will also be showing rarely screened works made during his thirteen years of living in the Boston area, including WHAT'S OUT NIGHT IS LOST (1983) and CLEPSYDRA (1992).

Dedicating the show to two of his dearest friends in life who are now "missing in action", Solomon will be also be showing collaborations made with Stan Brakhage and Mark Lapore, in addition to some short clips from his personal collection of home movies and Brakhage salons. This screening is presented in conjunction with a Monday night screening of different works at the Harvard Film Archive.

SEASONS...(with Stan Brakhage) (2002)

WHAT'S OUT TONIGHT IS LOST (1983)

CLEPSYDRA (1992)

PSALM I: "THE LATENESS OF THE HOUR" (1999)

CROSSROAD (with Mark LaPore) (2005)

STILL RAINING, STILL DREAMING (2009)

(see https://webmail.massart.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=6bf33969659b4b36bdd7e19c1b96c463&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.philsolomon.com for short film excerpts from all the above)

September 30, 09

2009-09-30T19:55:00.000-04:00

NORA and Movement Revolution Africa.
www.movementrevolutionafrica.com/nora/
www.movementrevolutionafrica.com

Alla Kovgan is a Boston-based filmmaker, born in Moscow (Russia). Her
films and films that she co-directed have been presented worldwide
including at the Sundance Film Festival, Lincoln Center, Montreal Film
Festival, ZDF (Germany) and numerous others. The latest film that she
co-directed "Traces of the Trade" was broadcast on PBS in 2008. Since
1999, Alla has been involved into interdisciplinary collaborations:
creating intermedia performances (with KINODANCE Company), dance films
(with Alissa Cardone, Victoria Marks, Nicola Hawkins), and documentaries
about dance such as “Movement (R)evolution Africa” together with Joan
Frosch. Her latest dance film "Nora" was commissioned by the
Experimental Media Performance Art Center (Troy, NY). It is her
collaboration with filmmaker David Hinton, choreographer Nora
Chipaumire, and musician Thomas Mapfumo. "Nora" won Grand Prix at Black
Maria FF, Creativity Award at Films on Art FF in Montreal, Afropop Award
at the Real Life Documentary FF in Ghana among others. It got into
Torotno, Vancouver, Cinema du Reel, Melbourne, Oberhause, Durban Film
Festivals and will appear on PBS in 2010. Since 2000, Alla curates St.
Petersburg Dance Film Festival KINODANCE in Russia and co-curates of
Balagan Experimental Film Series in Boston. She is a 2009 recipient of
the MCC Fellowship Award in Film. Websites:
www.movementrevolutionafrica.com/nora/
www.kinodance.org
www.balaganfilms.com
www.kinodance.com/russia/

--
Alla Kovgan
Filmmaker, KINODANCE
88 Winslow Ave., #2
Somerville MA 02144
USA
Tel: 1-617-571-4742
akovgan@kinodance.com
http://movementrevolutionafrica.com/nora/
http:/www.kinodance.com/russia/
http://www.kinodance.org/
http://balaganfilms.com/

September 23, 09

2009-09-23T15:30:00.006-04:00

Video Lounge hits the Road

Originally programmed for 4 months of screenings as part of the 2009 DownStreet Art festival in North Adams, MA, the Video Lounge is on the road and heading to MassArt Film Society. Curated by Lana Z Caplan, including works by 15 artists, the Video Lounge is divided into 4 programs which use contemporary video to examine themes from authorship and consumption, cultural taboos, desire and repulsion, relationships, politics and pop culture (with a portrait of an all girl, feminist, 50’s do-wop, punk rock band for good measure). Total running time: 110 minutes

Artists:

Natalie Bookchin https://www.bookchin.net/

Katrine Burkitt

Lana Z Caplan (https://www.lanazcaplan.com/)

Goatsilk (https://www.goatsilk.com/)

Michelle Handelman (https://www.michellehandelman.com/)

Saul Levine (https:saullevine.com)

Mike Olenick (https://www.mikeolenick.com/)

Marisa Olson (https://www.marisaolson.com/)

Liz Nofziger (https://www.nofzilla.com/)

Adie Russell (https://www.adierussell.com/)

Rich Remsberg (https://www.atlasfilms.org/)

Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez (https://www.anabelvazquez.com/)

Ben Russell (https://www.dimeshow.com/)

Julianna Schley

Suara Welitoff

More information:

Performing for the Camera: Possess and Consume: In each of the videos in this program, the artist uses themselves in the video to create works that examine authorship and consumption, cultural taboos, desire and repulsion.

Re/Use: Looping and recycling: These works use appropriated imagery from archival footage, MTV, 80’s aerobics tapes, and more, recycling to create a contemporary statement examining current issues and ideas under the lens of history repeated.

Video Music: Not made for MTV: A twist on music videos, these works all use music to drive their imagery, subverting the original intention of the music, or of the experience of listening.

Video Portrait: Views into Another: Portraits of relationships, pop culture, an all girl, feminist, 50’s do-wop, punk rock band and a pioneer woman all wrapped up into one powerful look into another.

Online program notes and artist bios from the video lounge in North Adams here:

https://lanazcaplan.com%2fvideolounge%2fvideolounge_1.html

https://lanazcaplan.com%2fvideolounge%2fvideolounge_2.html

https://lanazcaplan.com%2fvideolounge%2fvideolounge_3.html