“The film image is constantly
fluctuating between object-representation and surface
abstraction. Repetition does not bring clarity nor is
it meant to. No attempt is made to deny either the subjectivity
of film or its representational mode; rather the viewer
works through and against the film with the filmmakers;
so to speak.”—Karen
Mirza and Brad Butler
“Predictions examines machines which offer insights into love, the future,
and You. Six frames of video and simultaneous audio were shot at the Musée
Méchanique in San Francisco.” –Katherin McInnis
“A haiku or love letter to the charm of two
dimensional images. The spectacle awaits our adoration,gives
a tender intimation of collusion.”–Stephanie
Barber
Thornton’s countdown continues, moving back
in time, taking down dreadful minutes from half-learned
history lessons. If the German Führer’s
vanity (“He is formless, almost faceless, a
man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose
framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He
is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised, and insecure.
He is the very prototype of the little man.”—Dorothy
Thompson) once made him averse to all photographs
earning him the label of “an opponent of the
camera” there was of course, a turning point
in the will to power. As with many dictators and
presidents of the last and present century, Hitler
entered a mirror stage of demagoguery and histrionic
stagecraft. An acting coach might scoff but such
feeble and furious impersonations are of the most
persuasive order. When coupled with authority they
can bring down the house and set the world on fire.—Mark
McEllhatten
Call it When Worlds Collide or Storm
Center Ballroom or Kali Goes Shopping. The
Girl Who Lost Her Head comes in all colors and
sizes but it is more an omen and a ceremonial object
than a consumerist’s toy. Once we were promised
the moon, and the moon fell dead at our feet. You
can see now by what light the new course is set and
against what we are to be measured. Ken Jacobs once
bitingly referred to Gothic stained-glass windows
as “advertisements.” The Girl Who… is
fashioned from advertisements and televisual materials
into something akin to digital stained-glass windows.
The heart of the world is arrhythmic. Marathons of
cinders, lightning rounds with twirling ribbons of
gift-wrapped disasters unfolding on the global dancefloor.
All falls down. Lose your head. Pick up the pieces.
Pick up the beat. “You don’t need a weatherman
to tell which way the wind blows.” The
Girl Who Lost Her Head is not a manic hodgepodge
but rather a prayer rug of abject devotion and irrepressible
formal ambition—a certain kind of paradigm
of cinema as a recombinant art.—Mark McElhatten
“A lunar eclipse
observation (11/09/03) made from the roof of my building
in NYC, documented and translated through Kodachrome.
In the 4th C. BCE, Aristotle founded The Lyceum,
a school for the study of all natural phenomena pursued
without the aid of mathematics, which was considered
too perfect for application on the imperfect terrestrial
sphere. This film then, in the spirit of...”—Jeanne
Liotta
A chorus of archaic voices howl
and whisper, seeping through the cavities of urban
ruins. Every city is an archeological layer cake
of demolition, decay and scandalous erection. The
rise and fall of commerce spurs the reincarnation
of spaces. Movie palaces are converted into tabernacles.
Churches deconsecrate and become shoe stores. Graveyards
are excavated and the dead are disinterred, evicted
as unwanted tenants. Parking lots bloom like weeds
as plentiful as graveyards. These mutated spaces
funnel faded glory, funk, and buried treasure and
the voices of the past speak in fuzz tones. To translate
the voices that trickle through brick, mortar and
granite may require a historical scholar. To translate
the noise bandwidth of interstellar space into human
glossolalia, and then again into near English, requires
a madman or a poet. One man’s
ceiling is another man’s floor and one person’s marvel of a gaping
ruin is another’s garage of convenience. In Detroit Park Julie
Murray combines these restless polarities, mining the offerings of such rare
hybrids to make a construction site all her own. –Mark McElhatten
“Detroit
Park is a composition of shots collected in two visits and then arranged
along a thought-line using ideas that came to mind while filming as well remembering
some historical details about the site. Michigan Theatre was an elaborately
decorated theater at the heart of a busy and vibrant downtown Detroit in the
1920s. The advent of television in the 1950s saw a significant drop in public
performance attendance and it was finally closed in 1967. Sometime in the 1970s
it was converted into a parking lot, where floors and ramps were installed
with only the most necessary intrusion upon the old interior. The great carapace
of elaborately molded plaster ceiling still hangs from a network of trusses
attached to the roof and even the great stage curtains remained hanging, though
these have since rotted away, looking more like a ragged cutty sark than the
rich red drapery they began as. This video is an attempt to cast a number of
speculative lines to imagined ghosts of its past while showing a picture of
its present.”—Julie Murray
“In his 5th floor walk-up on the Lower East
Side, Jack Smith was determined to complete the beautification
of his kitchen cabinet. AIDS was pressing. His
friends pitched in, accepting slave status. Jack
demanded this and Jack demanded that but because
he wanted it perfect (as he had wanted his films
to be perfect), and because perfection proved elusive,
the remodeling finally had to be abandoned. Each
friend going his or her own sad way. We are
living under the imminent threat of GODS. The
Republican ploy of allying with the religious right
for votes is proving shortsighted (grasping individuals
tend to be shortsighted) and, as in Iraq, our own
religious crazies are now avid for fulfillment. Of
prophecy. You’ve got to hand it to those
who resist, for the sake of the grass and the animals
and the children, and for the preservation of the
occasional work of art among the Fabergé eggs,
and who knows but that they will succeed against
all odds and swerve their respective societies away
from sure doom. We like to think so, and it’s
easy to, after a lot of movies and the fact that
all the living are beneficiaries of the ones who
made it through—through normal attrition, that
is, all those Papas and especially Mamas that did
succeed in sending forward their young. In the
late 1930s two Jewish teenagers came up with
the story of a couple that sent their infant
child on a lone trip of escape through
space from an exploding planet. We all know
the story: the boy would survive on Earth but would
have to keep his identity secret. Were Joe
Shuster and Jerry Siegel dreaming out loud? Was
Krypton the Old World heading into WWII and was the
child escaping the fate of the Jews of Europe? The
Jews then, all of us now. Jack’s friends
failed to convince him to make a will. ”Why
bother?” he asked. ”To protect your
work in the future.” ”The future?” Jack
replied, “The future will be worse.”—Ken
Jacobs
Music by Tom Hamilton. “For 25 years I’ve been interested in
an optical/perceptual cinema. A cinema where the
eye is called out from its routine and autonomic
operations and is challenged to make sense of stimuli
coming not from the natural world out in front of
the eyes, but rather from a source behind the eyes,
the conscious mind. A kind of feedback loop in which
the conscious mind employs the seductive powers of
cinema to seed the perceptual mind with curiosity
and imagination, qualities not native to perception. Blue
Pole(s) tries hard to up the ante on the notion
that film is a visual rather than literary art and
that seeing as a perceptual process precedes and
models thought.”—Fred Worden
Total Runtime: 99m
Program 1: STRAUB-HUILLET’S A
TRIP TO THE LOUVRE
Program 2: THE DAILY PLANET (Unearthed)
Program 3: DAVID GATTEN’S SECRET
HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE: A TRUE ACCOUNT IN NINE PARTS
Program 4: THE TERRESTRIAL
OBSERVATORY
Program 5: BLUE MOVIE with special guest VIVA
Program 6: ALLEN ROSS’S GRANDFATHER TRILOGY
Program 7: LARRY GOTTHEIM
Program 8: MANUAL OVERRIDE (“Slip
Inside this House”)
Program 9: SHADOWHUNGER
Program 10: HEINZ EMIGHOLZ
|
Sat Oct 1: 12:00 NOON |
