“It
was the first time I shot with a video camera. I originally
planned to document a hospital in my hometown. But
when testing the camera, I noticed a reflection of
the windows on the television screen. The movement
of my body while holding the camera affected the movement
on the video screen. The effect cannot be seen
by the naked eye because it resulted from the frequency
of the screen’s refresh rate. Windows
is an improvisation using a little physical movement
to capture natural phenomena through the camera eye’s
mechanism. While shooting and viewing it afterwards,
I felt this segment was the most complete and had
many stories in it.”—Apichatpong Weerasethakul
“The half-remembered spaces—the
obscure but guiding motion of a secret history”—Luke
Sieczek
Television transmissions flash
reflections off waxed floors into the waxworks of
the family room. These programs misted up in the crystal
ball console watched by juvenile earthly occupants
eager for distraction and mild hypnosis. With TV manufacturer
names such as Sylvania, Zenith, Noratheon, Norelco,
Admiral and Magnavox, we knew we were in the realm
of the metaphysical and the mythical. And the realm
of our own backyard and the ever strange terrain of
adults where TV caricatures seemingly did justice.
Insidious and endearing , the world of television
and the set-piece domiciles of sitcoms could ring
true as a common reality or have the effect of implanted
memories. For some even with the laugh tracks and
impossible cheer they were akin to closed circuit
broadcasts of one’s own home, a sanitized mirror
in which to dwell. For others they were like signals
bouncing off of Mars, a never-never land of impossible
attainment but so lacking in dimension, so half human
and bodysnatcher-like that one might wish to be spared
the fate of such depleted perfection.
Like the Amberson staircase that traveled from film
to film on different sets of the RKO lot, certain
notions of domestic bliss and the design attributes
of suburban architecture jumped from station
to station from Bewitched to My Three
Sons to Dick Van Dyke to The Brady Bunch.
Bobby Abate’s new series (so far Sylvania
and Zenith have been completed and Raytheon
and Magnasinic are in the works) is working
with a set of recycled elements that will be put into
play in the arena of photographed houses used as stage
sets for TV sitcoms of the 1960s and 70s.Ultimately
all the pieces will play simultaneously in an installation
that will take place in replicas of the stage sets.
In the case of Sylvania we are in the home
that “belonged” to Samantha and Darren
in Bewitched but without a hint of those
characters ever having existed. The elements presented:
Spiragraphic mandalas, a prowling alien (protector
or intruder?), a naked woman (asleep or dead?) on
a couch of a suburban living room. An unshaven figure
who might be the videomaker or his double looms like
a cyborg in nebulous space. His movements make us
wonder if he is an apprentice to the robot like figure,
or the puppetmaster of the scene, a paradox like the
role of television itself—reflective, instructive
and/or indoctrinating. Can the elements of this mystery
resolve? The series continues…– Mark
McElhatten
“Some years ago I made a
film using 3 still photographs. This one uses
about 200.
My attraction to the idea of series has probably
been fueled by the software I use to look at
digital photos on the computer—as one picture
follows another, the junctions become more important
than any single image. I stack the pictures in a pile
and then fan them out so that they’re all touching.
I set them up for you, but I try to leave a bit of
an opening there as well.
Not Nine is the final (?) iteration of many,
which included various arrangements of pictures, ways
of moving between pictures and selection of pictures.
The sound fell naturally into place.”—Gail
Vachon
“Catalog
is a composition of stillness—inversion of the
spectacle –actors are posed recreating various
photographs in surroundings unfrozen. The soundtrack
is a labile and dense tale of spaces, royalty and
a photograph more mutable than an image should be.”
—Stephanie Barber
Freud
said that some dreams were not meant to be analyzed.
They were like “kittens on the keys,”
unintentional compositions made by scampering feline
paws tickling the ivories. In Ruby Skin (so
named for the complexion of the film emulsion found
fading into red) an eager typing pool “kitten”
is subjugated to a job interview audition. “Our
Lady of the Keyboard” domineers, typing up a
storm, proving her secretarial prowess with stabbing
fingers that show no mercy: “She spares him
nothing.”
The orphic clatter creates a fractured concrete poetry
that sticks to us like cling wrap. A reverse dictation
flowing from the typewriter to the voice supplies
the text for the male narrator who recites evocative
phrases ripe for miscomprehension. Italicized strophes,
brisk staccato issuing from the voiceover but commandeered
by the blade-wielding filmmaker who toys with her
material like a cat with a mouse. Is this a language-poetry
slasher film? Or the keys to the kingdom? Listen:
“Is your city alive?” ... “Devils
in the distance... maples in overcoats... viral snow.”
The keyboard seems connected to memory and the five
senses, eliciting the smell of hot buttered popcorn
and crisp autumn leaves, more related to synesthesia
than Pavlov, delivering declarations (“every
word a jewel”) that are alarming and sensuous,
quizzical yet ultimately intelligible in every sense
of the word.—Mark McElhatten
“Driven attempts
to blur the lines between video gaming and reality,
finding in both a seductive resonance”—Scott
Stark
“.........
that was a job done mr’s smith and a good super
too munny .... went out and got the girls each a fancy
set of earings with a matching necklace.... I hope
they like the coler i picked for them... ant youla
said kitty would like the green ,so i got her emerald
green and harriet the blue, for her eyes ... anne
,the orange and pink for sandy....they will go real
nice with her powder blue sute.. did she spill wine
or something on that sute?....poor little micheal
running into the road that way... they never did find
his other shoe... and stuart was never the same after
that ..why they had the mailbox on the other side
of the road ...i’ll never know...I think i feel
up to taking a walk to get some of that beacon ...
surprise everyone with breakfast...i’ll make
homefries....why did micheal go out to tat mailbox
again?....something he mailed out for a contest from
a cerial box..... i’ts chilly... my blanket......did
i get the right size rain and shine for kitty?...
the arms look awfully short... i thought i got the
right size.... It said in the paper,... beauty queen
dies .... she made her way down all those stairs and
into the street.. she must have wanted to live....
oh , he makes me clintch my fist... i see the way
he looks at me when he walks by...those girls going
off like that....that poor woman was worried sick
....mr’s callahan knew they coul’nt stay
, so after she made hamberger stew,... she told the
girls she was going on vacatoin.... she new that poor
woman was worried sick with those girls taking off
the way they did...without saying a word where they
were going ...she new they could’t stay so she
sat there and told them she was going on vacation....and
that womans keeping me here in this room ..feeding
me the same god forsakin food day in and day out ...day
after day....if ant youla only knew what was going
on arround here , she would’t say she my favorite
anymore.....i’ll have my cup of tea now .....
oh she has pritty hair......the way she keeps it up
like that..hawaii five o comes on after gunsmoke and
then police woman ..........”—Luther Price
“A mournful
dissolving jewel set in bruised magenta sends out
votive glints of dying light. A lone bird chirps and
branches cover our eyes. Working from a stack of abandoned
multiple film prints (nearly identical and close to
thirteen in number) Luther Price makes reiterative
loops that underline futility, echo hope, and mark
every camera movement with the vain promise of fresh
outcome and inevitable predestination.”—Mark
McElhatten
“A diatribe directed at certain
species of flowers that have forgotten their place
in the big picture.”—Joe Gibbons
The perennial Gibbons persona has been no stranger
to any genus of flower, from forget- me-nots to les
fleurs du mal. Mightier than the rose, our botanical
pugilist picks on specimens less than his own size,
quoting Ecclesiastes and offering life lessons
with last rites of occasional mercy and ruthless pruning.
Tidy tips for candytufts: “Life is short,”
“A moment’s sunlight on the grass.”
Gibbons personifies Pascal’s definition of man
as a thinking reed, albeit with a switchblade.
A Time to Die serves as a timely update of
some of Gibbon’s early Super-8 films, where
he sucker punched garden varieties and showed nature
who was boss. A Time to Die also has a similar
quality of menace, menchalolia and the philosophical
punch lines that were once evidenced in the Donne-like
meditations of his Pixelvision pieces such as Elegy
and Sabotaging Spring.”—Mark
McElhatten
“The hero of Instructions
for a Light and Sound Machine is easy to identify.
Walking down the street unknowingly, he suddenly realizes
that he is not only subject to the gruesome moods
of several spectators but also at the mercy of the
filmmaker. He defends himself heroically, but is condemned
to the gallows, where he dies a filmic death through
a tearing of the film itself. Our hero then descends
into Hades, the realm of shades. Here, in the underground
of cinematography, he encounters innumerable printing
instructions, the means whereby the existence of every
filmic image is made possible. In other words, our
hero encounters the conditions of his own possibility,
the conditions of his very existence as a filmic shade.
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine
is an attempt to transform a Roman Western into a
Greek tragedy.”—Peter Tscherkassky
Total Runtime: 104m
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
|
Sun
Oct 2: 5:30 PM |
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