Views from the Avant-Garde premieres experimental films from the frontiers of cinematic possibility.
PROGRAM 1 Song of the Firefly
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Canada, 2002; 4m Yes ? Ja ? Oui ? Thomas Draschen & Ulrich
Wiesner, Germany, 2002; 3m Switch Center
Ericka Beckman, U.S., 2002; 11m Excerpts from a Work in Progress
(Undesirables) Owen Land, U.S., 2002; 11m Night Mulch
Stan Brakhage, U.S., 2002; 2m Very Stan Brakhage, U.S., 2002; 3m Where the Girls Are
Abigail Child, U.S., 2002; 4m Guiding Fictions
Mark Street, U.S., 2002; 5m "SNOWDRIFT (aka Snowstorm)"
Gunvor Grundel Nelson, Sweden, 2001; 10m Osmosis Bradley Eros, U.S., 2002; 16m Film Number 15 Untitled Seminole
Patchwork Film Harry Smith, U.S.,
c. 1965/66; 10m Toccata Hannes Schüpbach, Switzerland,
2002; 30m
Total running time: 105m
Sat Oct 12: 1:00 pm
PROGRAM 2: HEINZ EMIGHOLZ Sullivan's Banks Germany, 1993 - 2002; 38m Maillart' Bridges Germany, 1995 - 2000; 24m The Basis of Makeup Part II
Germany, 1995-2000; 48m
Total running time: 110m
Sat Oct 12: 4:00 pm
PROGRAM 3: PAT O'NEILL The Decay of Fiction
Pat O'Neill, U.S., 2002; 73m
Sat Oct 12: 7:00 pm
PROGRAM 4 The Man We Want to Hang
Kenneth Anger, U.S., 2002; 11m Untitled José Rodriguez, U.S., 2002; 3m Metropolis of Recklessness T h o m a s
Draschen & Ulrich Wi e s n e r, Germ a n y, 2001; 11m Homesick José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 3m Vagaries of Madness
José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 4m Untitled José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 4m Theresa José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 3m Eulogies José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 3m Silence of the Bride
José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 5m Mother revised
Luther Price, U.S., 2002; 20m Mullroy
Tracey MacCullion, U.S., 2002; 28m
Total running time: 98m
Sat Oct 12: 9:30 pm
PROGRAM 5: KEN JACOBS A Place Where There Is No Trouble
A Ken Jacobs Nervous Magic Lantern
performance
Ken Jacobs, U.S., 2002; approx. 90m
Sun Oct 13: 1:00 pm
PROGRAM 6: MICHELE SMITH Regarding Penelope's Wake
Michelle Smith, U.S., 2002; 120m
Sun Oct 13: 4:00 pm
PROGRAM 7: ERNIE GEHR Glider U.S., 2001; 37m Crystal Palace U.S., 2002; 28m City U.S., 2002; 35m
Total: 103m
Sun Oct 13: 7:00 pm
PROGRAM 8 The Visitation
Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S., 2002, 18m Cleft Peter Bianco & Madison Brookshire,
U.S., 2002; 4m untitled Julie Murray, U.S., 2002; 5m Across the Rappahannock
Brian Frye, U.S., 2002; 9m Daylight Moon
Lewis Klahr, U.S., 2002; 13m "1305"
Augustin Gimel, France, 2001; 2m Mekong
Mark LaPore, U.S., 2002; 9m untitled
Julie Murray, U.S., 2002; 8m Ultima Thule
Janie Geiser, U.S., 2002; 10m
Psalm III: "Night of the Meek"
Phil Solomon, U.S., 2002; 23m
Total running time: 101m
Sun Oct 13: 9:30 pm
PROGRAM ONE
Song of the Firefly (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Canada, 2002; 4m) Song of the Firefly is a visual poem which utilizes the camera-less photogram technique that has been previously introduced in Pruska-Oldenhof's 2001 film titled Light Magic. Song of the Firefly transports the viewer to an open field on a warm summer night where the luminous dance of the fireflies can be experienced. This exuberant display of light, as each flash illuminates different portions of the field, reveals fragments of the space in which we are contained, leaving us always waiting in anticipation to see more, just like in cinema. The appeal of the illuminated screen, onto which we project our most secret
fantasies and desires, echoes the open field at night where the sexual energy is transformed into light by these tiny insects. The single discrete flashes and the continuous glow are a form of communication between the male and the female fireflies during the mating period where the female fireflies "respond preferentially to males that possess these 'sexy' signal components" (Branham and Greenfield 1996, Flashing males
win mate success. Nature 381:745-746).
The photogram technique combines science and art in order to record the process of transformation. Images created through this technique are traces of light that pass through each object leaving its mark on the film surface. Photograms bring both the maker and the viewer closer to the object, thus revealing the essence, that
neither the naked eye could see, nor the camera lens could capture.
Yes ? Oui ? Ja ? (Thomas Draschen & Ulrich Wiesner, Germany, 2002; 3½m)
Wiesner, who was a heavy drinker, had quit drinking during the work on Metropolis of Recklessness, and was ready for a comeback. We immediately started another film, for which Wiesner provided the soundtrack: a cover version of "La Poupée" by Michèle Polnareff. He gave me the song on a tape with no details, so I do not know who sang this version. The starting material for this film was educational footage from East Germany with its very reduced graphics and high redundancy, educational footage from Austria about medical treatment of pets, one reel of Toys in Babeland, two Tarzans, (the fantastic Tarzan the Fearless with the fabulous Buster Crabbe and a Tarzan with Lex Barker something like Tarzan and the She-Devil), and a lot of other footage, including leader from 30-second American TV commercials...
The last time we worked together on the film was in early December 2000. Wiesner was in a terrible condition and we had to stop after two or three hours of work because he was so exhausted. After a rapid decline in his health, which was a mystery to everybody and thus even more terrifying, Ulrich Max Franz Wiesner died in February 2002 from cancer which was only diagnosed after an autopsy. I could not look at any of our found footage for quite a while and after I turned to it again, the making of Yes ? Oui ? Ja ? was very much overshadowed by my friend's death. So instead of some kind of "visual easy listening" as we originally intended, it turned out rather different.
There were two basic principles we wanted to make use of: the redundant
illustration of the words being sung and the correspondence of one image to the next. The editing was also intended to go along with the rhythm, and we chose the bass line as the primary source for that. I am always very pleased by certain visual effects that appear through the alternation and combination of different materials and different levels of abstraction and different esthetics. A few frames of color in a sequence of black and white , if applied properly, adds color to these scenes, or at least it can appear so in the memory in the viewer, who remembers having seen much more colored footage than he or she actually did. In collecting and editing the footage, I try to value rotten leader with one nice scratch or punch or hole, or a beautifully colored spot, one frame long, as much as any other footage, for example photographed images...This puts the emphasis on specific changes in the image, so they will be viewed as something that should be considered meaningful.
The images should be seen as if they emerge from the unconscious. Whether or not you achieve your goals in life, whatever they may be, is always in question: this is what Yes ? Oui ? Ja ? is about. I may add that in his first self portrait, Ulrich Wiesner has portrayed himself in a Tarzan outfit.
Switch Center (Ericka Beckman, U.S., 2002; 11 ½m)
This film is a tribute to the Soviet architecture of the future, and at the same time a reaction to seeing it transitioned to shopping malls or global corporate office structures.
I was invited by Balazs Bela Studio in Budapest to produce a short experimental film in Hungary. I was the first American artist to be invited by this famous film collective after the fall of Soviet power. The collaboration took place in August 2000, culminating in Switch Center, a ten-minute experimental documentary shot in many defunct Danube Water Works locations on the outskirts of Budapest. The architecture of a 1960's water purification plant, left intact for 25 years, inspired me to make a document of the factory, to recreate the workings there in sight and sound. Many of Budapest's industrial sites, which were built during their Soviet occupation, are now being demolished or purchased by commercial interests. While I was meditating on the animation of a three-story water tank, a Pokemon commercial was being filmed down the corridor. -Ericka Beckman
Excerpts from a Work in Progress (Undesirables) (Owen Land, U.S., 2002; 11 ½m)
Undesirables is a fictional account of the demise of the American avant-garde experimental film movement and some of its more notorious practitioners, in the 1970's. In answer to the question of why that movement underwent a drastic decline in the late 1970's, after the promising successes of previous years, Undesirables offers an absurdist hypothesis, but a hypothesis whose component parts are derived from reality. In this hypothetical story, the experimental film movement is neutralized by a deliberate conspiracy instigated by the so-called "ascended masters," and accomplished through their control of a powerful, wealthy, esoteric religious organization, known as the Illuminated Brotherhood. In some cases, dabbling in various spiritual practices has increased the filmmakers' vulnerability. Read more on Undesirableshere.
Night Mulch (Stan Brakhage, U.S., 2002; 2 ½m)
This film is hand-painted and is essentially about the interplay between hypnagogic vision and words, the effect of the one upon the other, the contest between the two. The hypnagogic (hand-paint) shapes are multiple and so variably complex that they tend to suggest a variety of almost recognizable shapes, such as many brightly colored people or a mulch of flowers. The words, such as "Subversive" and "Liberating," along with many which are unreadable, seem to struggle for an equality of viewer comprehension, almost as if the brain were coming to terms again with the origins of written language: the pun "Quills" accentuates this. In all cases, language is subsumed, but leaves a distinctive trail of itself distinct from the painted images. -Stan Brakhage
Very (Stan Brakhage, U.S., 2002; 3 ½m)
The second of these companion films (interspersed by a "Technicolor + countdown") introduces The Movies (narrative dramatic scenes briefly flickering midst hypnagogic-painting) in addition to the closed-eye vision and language combination of Night Mulch. "Subversive" and "Liberating" are repeated, but "Liberating" actually seems to be
withdrawing (zooming away) in the mixture of paints. To emphasize The Movies, there is a brief tribute to the actor Michael Caine. The resolution of these contesting "force-fields" of visual thought (as I imagine them) is a sense of distinction of hypnagog over and above Photography (or Picture - i.e. a collector of framed named things) as well as the words/names themselves.-Stan Brakhage
Where the Girls Are (Abigail Child, U.S., 2002; 4 ½m)
A glimpse into the subversive alien body of a North American suburban teen as she rehearses her baton twirling, obsessively and beautifully. The practice of pose and control, the connection to parade and discipline, the young flesh and costume dress conjoin with ballet, object, fetish, desire and military "air" to create a document that is at one critical and canny. An anti-paean to an ideal of female machine youth conceived for both loop installation and single-screen projection.-Abigail Child
Guiding Fictions (Mark Street, U.S., 2002; 5m)
Images shot on walks in a forest with an old, twisted 35mm camera. The film trudged through the camera, on a last mission. I buried the film in the front yard. Let the dirt on the film kiss the dirt in the ground. Maryland humidity wore it down to its wisps. Much later, sound recorded in Brooklyn. Teenage skateboarders smoking cigarettes and jumping off the steps at my local subway entrance. A Russian festival in the park, much singing and speechmaking, all incomprehensible to me. The schism between the country and city, so clear at last.-Mark Street
"SNOWDRIFT (aka Snowstorm)" (Gunvor Grundel Nelson, Sweden, 2001; 10m)
SNOWDRIFT (a.k.a. Snowstorm) delves into the realm of the abstract and experimental. Movement begins and ends with images of snowflakes, fleeting, floating, whirling and dancing to and from one another in constant restlessness. Sudden changes in direction, composition, background, density, color and contrast interrupt the perpetual flow. Toward the end of the video, cold rectangular image fields rotate around one another and the comical sound heard in earlier sections, where the image of a moose appears briefly in the background, is repeated. Fred Andersson, doctoral candidate in art at Lund University in Sweden, writes in Gunvor Nelson STILL MOVING i Ljud och Bild (Karlstad University, Sweden, 2002, p. 98): "All these elements make Snowdrift a good example of Gunvor Nelson's complex approach to shaping and manipulating her visual material and allowing the properties of the media to become visible. In the short passages of the video where the moose appears accompanied by a wordless song, she again shows us how she empowers certain motifs with a strong poetic significance." Condensed poetic imagery is expressed/rendered in the many twists and turns, layers and angles of this multi-facetted, mysterious art work. - Sue Anne Moody
Osmosis (Bradley Eros, U.S., 2002; 10m)
Oscillating Simultaneous Memories Of Sensuality's Intimate Spectrum. The elemental, the organic and the constructed in a process of absorption and diffusion.-Bradley Eros
Film Number 15: Untitled Seminole Patchwork Film (Harry Smith, U.S., 1965-6; 9m)
"I collect (the Seminole patchwork) because they are indexes to a great variety of thoughts. They're like encyclopedias of designs. You can look in the Oxford English Dictionary if you want to study words, but because the designs are so ancient, it's like having something superior to a book. The collection has been built up fundamentally to have an index of design types that I might want to use in my paintings.
These are technological processes of some sort. The problems that I'd set myself on have to do with correlating music into some kind of visual thing, into some kind of diagram. Being as my essential interest in music was the patterning that occurred in it-intuition or taste being only a guide to directions where this patterning might occur-it was just as well to collect some other object. I'm sure that if you could collect patchwork quilts from the same people who made the records, like Uncle Dave Macon or Sara Carter's house, you could figure out just about anything you can from the music.
Everything could be figured out regarding their judgement in relation to certain intellectual processes. At the end of all this gathering of data whether it's music or whatever, it has to be correlated with other fields of knowledge."-Harry Smith View the Harry Smith Archives here.
Toccata (Hannes Schüpbach, Switz., 2002; 30m) Il tocco means not only touch; it can also mean a small quantity, a single brush stroke in painting, the striking of a bell or piano keys. ---
The surroundings meet the eye. The direct touch releases an interior impulse. Surfaces open to states of being. From this encounter the image originates. From the images, an inner place.
In film, as in the mind, distant spaces and bodies are brought together as are the layerings of time. A house, an Italian city, traffic, and the movements of people are filmed visibly in the present. But the images embrace a living and extended continuity. The light of a day links my eyes to the eyes of a person having lived there in the same city, two, three, or five hundred years ago. On a church wall, a sculptor has left an arched curtain in stone. In its protruding, its recessing, the film becomes ... still.-Hannes Schüpbach / 2002 Total running time: 104m Sat Oct 12: 1.00
PROGRAM TWO Three Films by Heinz Emigholz
"Photography and beyond" is a series of films about art and design - "projections" that become visible as writings, drawings, photography, architecture and sculpture. A reverse visual process is analyzed: seeing as expression, not as impression. The eye as the interface between the brain and the outside world, the gaze as a compositional power that projects an idea into the outside world or comprehends it by means of cinematography. From the writings, drawings and studies of the works of various architects something indescribable is formed: an expression in film of the objectification of mental thought.
Sullivan's Banks (Germany, 1993-2002; 38m)
Photography and beyond - Part 2: Architecture as Autobiography - Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924)
"All buildings have arisen, have stood, and stand as physical symbols of the psychic state of the people ... throughout the past and the present, each building stands as a social act", Sullivan wrote in the 1906 essay 'What is Architecture'. "In everything that men do they leave an indelible imprint of their minds. If this suggestion be followed out, it will become surprisingly clear how each and every building reveals itself naked to the eye; how its every aspect, to the smallest detail, to the lightest move of the hand, reveals the workings of the mind of the man who made it, and who is responsible to us for it."
Maillart's Bridges (Germany, 1995-2000; 24m)
Photography and beyond - Part 3: Architecture as Autobiography - Robert Maillart (1872-1940)
The film shows 14 concrete roof constructions and bridges designed and built by Robert Maillart between 1910 and 1935: The warehouse on Zurich's Giesshübelstrasse (1910), the filter building in Rorschach (1912), the Maggazini Generali warehouse in Chiasso (1924), the aqueduct near Chatelard (1925), the bridge over the Valtschielbach (1925), Salginatobel Bridge (1930), Spital Bridge (1931), the bridges over the Bohlbach and the Rossgraben Bridge (all 1932), the bridge over the Schwandbach and the Thur Bridge near Felsegg (both 1933), the footbridge over the River Toess in Winterthur (1934) and the Arvebrücke near Geneva (1935).
Robert Maillart revolutionized concrete-based construction. By reducing the material to the essential load-bearing elements and redesigning these in his structures, he developed a completely novel world of forms. His interests and inventions - the girder-less and hollow-box arch, beam-less floor slab, three hinged arch and round-arched bridge with curving platform - amounted to an encyclopedic exploration of the opportunities presented by concrete. The complex simplicity and elegance of the load-bearing structures set new aesthetic standards the world over. However, his rejection of massive construction methods and his reduction of forms to the essential lines of structural strength provoked mistrust among building authorities and led them to impose absurd conditions. His pioneering experiments can be found in out-of-the-way valleys of small cantons that gave him a free reign for his design.
The Basis of Makeup Part II (Germany, 1995-2000; 48m)
Photography and beyond - Part 4: Drawings and writings by Heinz Emigholz
"Basis film and master tape" for the feature films The Holy Bunch, (Der zynische Körper), Second Nature and Black Harbor.
Featured are 69 of Heinz Emigholz's illustrated notebooks from 1983 to 1996, three sketch books from the 80s and 90s, and cinematic studies of his exhibition "Der Untergang der Bismarck" at the Zwinger Gallery, Berlin 1988, a castle moat in Riva, Italy 1997, a casting of Aguste Rodin's "The Gates of Hell" in front of the Kunsthaus in Zürich 1988, an olive grove near Norma in Italy 1995, a magnolia tree in Basle 1996, burnt meat at Cabo de Creus in the Pyrennees 1988, an intersection in Owatonna, Minnesota 1995, and a house underpass in Giesshübelstrasse, Zurich 1996. In addition, there are 184 drawings from the series "The Basis of Make-Up" as positives and negatives.
The writings and visual representations are the property and legacy of a person who appears in the film The Holy Bunch as an editor, in Second Nature as a fashion designer, and in Black Harbor as a charcoal burner. "The Basis of Make-Up" films are the center about which my feature films revolve. I imagine them as anintermezzo between the long films, the database as an interlude. The paradoxical nature of film is taken to an extreme: giving something that is taken away
immediately."
-Heinz Emigholz For more information on the series, go to: www.pym.de/filme_e.html Total running time: 110m
Sat Oct 12: 4:00
PROGRAM THREE The Decay of Fiction (Pat O'Neill, U.S., 2002; 73m) The Decay of Fiction is an intersection of fact and hallucination in an abandoned luxury hotel. The hotel is in Hollywood. The walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown, and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Cocoanut Grove. The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked. A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sun rise. Voices and tinkles waft across the lawn. A contingent of vaguely sinister men arrives and asks for Jack. Jack is expecting trouble, but not this kind of trouble. Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean. The sun sets and rises again. Two detectives seem to turn up everywhere, searching for Communist literature and telling one another pointless stories of underworld intrigue. In the kitchens and behind the scenes daily routines continue, individuality melts, and workers fuse with the outlines of their activity. Winter passes, and then another summer, and finally it is Halloween, and there is a costume ball which claims the life of Rhonda, the evasive soprano. And then the building comes down in a clatter of Spanish tiles and concrete, and fact has finally become fiction, once again. Sat Oct 12: 7:00
PROGRAM FOUR The Man We Want to Hang (Kenneth Anger, U.S., 2002; 11 ½m)
An evocation of the British occult master Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) through the drawings, paintings and objects by and about him. These artifacts were assembled
from the collections of Keith Richmond, Jimmy Page, and the Ordo Templi Orientis International. The title is a reference to an infamous headline in the Sunday Express
denouncing Crowley, and also punningly to hanging his pictures. -Kenneth Anger
Untitled (José Rodriguez, U.S., 2002; 3 ½m)
Metropolis of Recklessness (Metropolen des Leichtsinns) (Thomas Draschen & Ulrich Wiesner, Germany/Austria, 2001; 11m)
Untertauchen, Zelleteilen, Scheibeschießen, Augenschließen - Türenschmeißen,
Kurvennehmen, Mädchensehen, Stehengeblieben! Lichtgeblendet,
Schalterdrücken - Topfsetkaufen, Welterklären, Lukashauen, Möbeldreschen,
Sternesehen... - Ulrich Wiesner Metropolis of Recklessness starts out with a trip that becomes a journey into film itself. After the appearance of self-referential and sexy china girls, people are moved to have intercourse, but remain completely out of focus. Intercourse leads to cell-sectioning and childbirth and a release into space. Being born one may ask "what should I become?" (in the German original, written on a wheel: "was soll ich werden") The filmmakers answer that pretty realistically with someone blowing his head off. The bullet in the head triggers beautiful visual effects, which also refer to death and decay, and therefore justify the decision. The film then shows various possibilities for how someone could spend his life. But somehow all efforts seem to be in vain and everything runs out.
I always had a longing to work with found footage, but did not consider anything specific until I met Ulrich Wiesner. At this time I was working on an archive for the best works by former students of Peter Kubelka in Frankfurt. My aim was to make internegatives of the films that were done on reversal with magnetic sound and thus protecting them from decay. The last person missing on my list was Ulrich Wiesner, who was living more or less underground as a painter, using the name Max Franz. Another friend of ours who just had started a new gallery in Frankfurt was preparing an exhibition with him and so we met for the first time around 1998. Around this time I saw for the first time two of his films Afrika Bonus and Deutschland Lacht on video. Wiesner had no idea where the originals were, so he gave me everything that looked like film or a film can, and gave me permission to use the footage. I had the idea that we should work together, which we started to do some time around 1999, after his exhibition. After a while we also found part of his film Afrika Bonus, a parody of Kubelka's Afrikareise, but without its soundtrack (which I reconstructed later, still remaining a little unsatisfied by the result). Deutschland Lacht was complete.
Soon we had the feeling we would need more material than Wiesner had in his
collection, so we started to buy footage like maniacs, mostly on the Internet and from private individuals. This was rather difficult, as we were both completely broke, Wiesner had serious financial troubles - he had not sold anything for a while and was in debt to his bank. Finally we got the film completed and had a hard time getting an internegative - the material was so worn that every lab refused to do it. Norbert Schliewe, a German filmmaker, did it on an old Krass Optical printer; the film broke so many times we thought we'd never make it.
After all that, we sent the film to Sixpack, who rejected it - they said it was so bad it left them speechless. They told me I had made nothing with the material, just quoted it.
Also the first festival (except Frankfurt, where we showed the terrible first print without of sync sound which made it a very bad screening) we tried to enter, the Diagonale in Austria, refused to show the film. This hit us hard - we had spent almost two years of work, all our money and ideas, everything we had we had put into this film. I had always promised Wiesner that it would become a huge success.
Homesick (José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 3m)
Vagaries of Madness (José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 4 ½m)
Untitled (José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 4m)
Theresa (José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 3 ½m)
Eulogies (José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 3 ½m)
Silence of the Bride (José Rodriguez, U.S., 2001; 5 ½m)
PROGRAM FIVE A Place Where There Is No Trouble
Nervous Magic Lantern, first performance
(Ken Jacobs, U.S., 2002; approx. 90m)
The Nervous Magic Lantern is a rudimentary projector, less an object
than an arrangement of lamp and optics bounding a small open space
for the placement and manipulation of things, a miniature stage area; a
spinning shutter alternates light and dark, providing the "nervous"
factor. (A flicker that most people adapt to quickly. Warning- flicker
can trigger seizures in persons afflicted with epilepsy and other
unusual
brain conditions.) This particular use of flicker makes possible an
illusion of movement in depth, controllable by the
projectionist-performer.
No special spectacles are needed to see the depth events, available even
to those with single-eye vision.
A Place Where There Is No Trouble turns forms in space and tours
imaginary landscapes. Impossible changes abound, the four dimensions
turn outlaw. Perhaps more significant than what is seen are the shifts
in perspective from where it is seen.
Music: Solitaire, by Barbara Kolb; Edmund Niemann, piano, Jonathan Haas,
vibraphone.
Amen De La Creation from Visions De L'Amen, by Olivier Messiaen;
Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod, pianos.
Eros et Psyche and Prometheus et Psyche from Concert for Bassoon and
Orchestra by Thomas M. Sleeper; Kathryn Sleeper, bassoon.
Nothing carries my name without the profound involvement of my wife Flo
Beth.
Trouble:
"I've enjoyed performing my discoveries in cine-seeing these many years.
I thank you for the attention you've accorded these demanding and
intentionally problematic works. I could do more; from where I see it's
nothing but scratched surfaces. But it seems reasonable to suspect
that New York and New Yorkers, unloved by this Administration, are one
of the easier trade-offs in its gamble for control of Earth's oil
deposits. When most Democrats betray us, including our own Schumer and
Clinton, it's time to finish the kitchen cabinet - as Jack Smith
was determined to do in his Lower East Side apt before yielding to
AIDs. I apologize now for the part I've played as simp-taxpayer in
fulfillment of this manly CEO dream of further pillage.
Another reasonable thought in insane circumstances: While I understand
that New York can't be protected (and that its leveling would be a
real-estate bonanza, should something called America survive, with the
New New York an up-from-the-ashes triumph with music by Aaron
Copland), is it too much to expect from this government some minimizing
of the pain of chemical and biological and explosive destruction? I
heard of cops, buried alive in WTC rubble, that - enviably - were able to
turn their guns on themselves. Shouldn't we, for instance, be sending
our kids off to school with something to cut pain and terror short?
This performance is dedicated to Robert C. Byrd and to Edward Kennedy
and to those others in Congress and the Senate that heeded their
constituencies (and the warnings of the CIA) and voted no to dismissal
of the Constitution and to a criminal war of aggression."
-
Ken Jacobs 11 October 2002 Manhattan Island Sun Oct 13: 1:00
PROGRAM SIX Regarding Penelope's Wake (Michele Smith, U.S., 2002; 120m)
A two-hour film consisting of heavily edited frame by
frame collage/montage/hand painted/ripped/cut/etched
found footage culled from numerous sources, including
Themes from the Odyssey, 8mm stag films, a 1970's
public speaking instructional film, Self Protection
for Women, The Frog Prince, a biography of Vincent Van
Gogh, ethnographic documentaries, science films, home
movies, and other assorted educational films.
Thus assembled, Regarding Penelope's Wake weaves
between multiple experimental narratives, structural
abstractions, intertwining rhythms of form and light,
visual metaphors, and the interactions between the
elements. Form becomes amorphous as time is spun
within the individual viewer's attentions.-Michele
Smith
Glider (U.S., 2001; 37m)
Cool, delirious and mysterious. Futuristic, yet ancient. A voyage into a pictorial space-world that seems to be governed by extra-terrestrial optical and gravitational laws.
Crystal Palace (U.S., 2002; 28m)
A heavy snowstorm provides the blanket and the spark, but its really "between the frames" (to use film language) that sets the crystals on fire and unmasks this winter landscape populated by felt, yet otherwise unseen forces and creatures - both, real and imagined.
City (U.S., 2002; 35m) City is grounded in the familiar every day world of the street. Yet, the ground often gives way plastically, opening up a dense and paradoxical field for visual musings and delight as colors, solids and transparencies as well as spaces within spaces weave a tapestry of a somewhat familiar "city." Though recorded in a specific location (downtown San Francisco), the anonymity of the spaces and architecture transposes and shapes them into a portrait of a mid-size downtown, anywhere USA. Total: 103 min
Sun Oct 13: 7:00
PROGRAM EIGHT The Visitation (Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S., 2002, 18m) The Visitation is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the necessity to describe an occurance, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one's own psyche. The place of articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts. - Nathaniel Dorsky
Cleft (Peter Bianco & Madison Brookshire, U.S., 2002; 4m)
reeds and shadows
cacophony of days dissolving
dissolute, reluctant whispers
flying wild in the night
interstices suspended
anima: luminous breath
emblazoned on the exoskeleton
impinging
rib cage contracts about the heart beat
night writing reeds
twisting in the twilight
untitled (Julie Murray, U.S., 2002, 5m)
Across the Rappahannock (Brian Frye, U.S., 2002; 9m)
On December 12, 1863, General Ambrose Burnside's Army of the Potomac engaged General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Before Burnside's army could enter the town, Union engineers were forced to lay pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock River under withering fire. Close combat through the streets of Fredericksburg and multiple assaults on the Confederate army entrenched in the heights behind the town resulted in heavy Federal casualties, which forced an eventual withdrawal.
In November, 2001, I attended a small and relatively informal reenactment of the battle of Fredericksburg. About a hundred men and women did their best to illustrate the actions of the thousands of young men who offered their lives a century earlier. An air of absurd theater suffused the entire event, which provided the ground for its peculiar truth. Everyone played their part exceedingly honestly and well, and left something on the film I was myself surprised to find there.
Daylight Moon (Lewis Klahr, U.S., 2002; 13m)
There are things I could say about Daylight Moon but very few I want to before someone has seen it. But I will say this: of all the films I've made using collage to muck around in the past, this one gets the closest to what I'm after.
"1305" (Augustin Gimel, France, 2001; 2m)
A pinhole camera as an instrument to measure luminosity. Birth and growth of light according to Fibonacci's "suite." Total eclipse of the sun decomposed into a thousand of unknown fires.
Mekong (Mark LaPore, U.S., 2002; 9 ½m)
untitled (Julie Murray, U.S., 2002; 8m)
Ultima Thule (Janie Geiser, U.S., 2002; 10m)
A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over cloud-covered hills, an unlikely ferry to ultima Thule: the farthest point, the limit of any journey. The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, time loses its line.
Psalm III: "Night of the Meek" (Phil Solomon, U.S., 2002, 23m)
A Kindertotenlied
in black and silver, on a night of gods and
monsters...
In Germany, Before the War:
Iām looking at the river,
but Iām thinking of the sea,
thinking of the sea,
thinking of the sea...
Iām looking at the river,
but Iām thinking of the sea,
thinking of the sea,
thinking of the sea...
Yes ? Oui ? Ja ? 
Switch Center 
"SNOWDRIFT (aka Snowstorm)"
Toccata 
The Basis of Makeup Part II
Glider 
Crystal Palace
City 
PROGRAM EIGHT
"1305"