Views from the Avant Garde

STIRRINGS, STILL and THE WORLD HAPPENS TWICE were curated by Mark McElhatten
and Gavin Smith.

The ROBERT BEAVERS and GREGORY MARKOPOULOS programs were curated
by Richard Peña

STIRRINGS, STILL (Program 1)

Wednesday, October 8: 7:30 pm
Saturday, October 11: 2 pm

Commingled Containers
(1997, U.S., Stan Brakhage, 4 mins, silent)
The world premiere of Stan Brakhage's return to photographed film.

Triste
(1996, U.S., Nathaniel Dorsky, 18 mins, silent)
"During the Bronze Age a variety of sanctuaries were built for curative purposes. One of the principal activities was transformative sleep. This montage speaks to that tradition. In Triste, the images are a complicated variety of things from normal life, seen very carefully, the poignancy of the montage cannot be reduced to verbal or conceptual interpretation, therefore offering the viewer a more intimate cinema."--Nathaniel Dorsky

The Five Bad Elements
(1997, U.S., Mark LaPore, 27 mins)
"A filmic Pandora's Box full of my version of 'trouble' (death, loss, cultural imperialism) as well as the trouble with representation as incomplete understanding."--Mark LaPore

A dark and astringent film that allows the filmmaker's personal subconscious drives and the equivocal bad conscience of ethnography to bleed through into overt content. In several of his previous films (Depression in the Bay of Bengal and The Sudan Rolls) LaPore applied inspiration received from the early cinema of the Lumiere brothers allowing the integrity of the shot and the long take to convey a sense of continuing development. We witness discrete unfoldings of small narratives and performative processes of labor or unconscious movement that carry the tell tale symptoms of cultural transitions. There is also a heightened and uncanny sense of ordinariness (perhaps most strongly felt in LaPore's work in progress 100 Views of New York) seen with a tweaked awareness of instability and evanescence, the knowledge that the present has no permanent residence, the contemporary is in continuous eviction.

The serendipitous orchestration of the world composing itself in time within the domain of the fixed frame is set in a delicate equipoise with the sensibility and organizing vision of the filmmaker. With his exquisite observational acuity (visual, anthropological, sociological) and formal severity LaPore's approach aspires to a kind of rich transparency. Poetically decisive compositions open up the impedance in the flow and transference of the fabric of the real as it passes away into photochemical illusion. LaPore is expanding a tradition of experimental documentary filmmaking practiced by Calvacanti, Wright, Rouch, Gardener, the Macdougals, Hutton and Gehr, conducting profoundly cinematic, highly distilled personal investigations into the nature of cultural flux and reverie.
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 - seemingly dislocated images uncategorically taken and placed into "improper" contexts, severed from a mappable space or geography - and overextended, unexpurgated scenes in which sight is caught actively probing or transfixed in seeming paralysis. By interrupting already truncated and mysteriously 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 of the image. LaPore's audacities are almost camouflaged by his refined sense of restraint, his austerity and lyrical contemplativeness.

The title of the film is mischievously cribbed from a gang of troublemakers that appears in Chinese filmmaker Xie Jin's film Hibiscus Town but also hints at the biblical concept of The Seven Deadly Sins, of universal ingredients - the four elements - earth, water, air and fire. Bad elements can refer euphemistically to a criminal milieu, "the wrong crowd", as well as suggesting the antiquated medical notion of the circulating "humors" that govern disposition and health. Going to the source of trouble was part of the filmmakers intent. LaPore: "I was more interested in who put those things into Pandora's box than I was in who let them out." In short the film is concerned with notions of basic and invasive influences, economy and eros, the rudiments of human composition, human error and the transgressive. Elements quietly attempts a suspect and perilous curative measure akin to bloodletting. "Key" evidence is spilled along with what would normally be suppressed or discounted as tangential. By exhibiting its own undercurrents and letting them hold sway, Elements thwarts commitment to documentary obligations which would prohibit its strangely moving and tainted disclosures. If we are used to works of transgression announcing themselves as such and then flamboyantly misbehaving as spectacular and bracing "entertainments," LaPore's move to a higher level of accomplishment could catch us off guard or seem oblique. Sound and image are subtly and rigorously counterpointed so as to fall into unnatural relations, blistering as they graze against each other and leaving a stinging afterglow of synethesisia and emotional voltage. By building the film on normally inadmissible 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 of 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.

Retrospectroscope
(1997, U.S., Kerry Laitala, 4 mins, silent)
Wraith infested spools spark to life. In 1895 Georges Demeny invented the revolving glass disc phonoscope/bioscope. This apparatus was designed for animating chronophotography and "to indulge the curiosity to commit a series of piquant indiscretions." Putting a new spin on this paracinematic apparatus, Laitala built a kind of sibling rival to that previous invention. Made out of plexiglass transparencies and set in motion - the Retrospectroscope.

Pensão Globo
(1997, Germany, Matthius Müller, 14 mins)
Thirteen years after his elegiac Aus der Ferne/The Memo Book, Müller revisits Lisbon, the City of Fate, of longing and decay and divisible selves. Shadowing his protagonist from a hotel cell into the labrynthine streets, the film never sidesteps the stations of dissolution and the sense of imminent destination. With oversaturated colors, both sanguine and succulent, vision swims and slips away in echoing superimpositions. These overlapping exposures convey a sense of proprioception and of the permeable boundaries between life and death.

Secure the Shadow
(1997, U.S. Kerry Laitala, 8 mins)
"Secure the Shadow, Ere The Substance Fade/Let Nature imitate what Nature has Made." This early advertising motto for photography has the ring of a Victorian poem and the shiver of an epitaph. Photography's initial triumph was to arrest the fugitive and to fix a moment in time like an insect in amber. Following the development of Fox-Talbot's transient pictures, it was clear that photography could be more than just The Pencil of Nature - it was also a scalpel and a spade. With a view towards permanence and the everlasting, cameras began indexing the usual, the anomalous, and the pathological. Images ranged from the trachea of the silkworm to the nimbus of the moon, life spied on unaware and the dead composed in idealized sleep. Kelly Laitala's film derives its title and in part its spirit from that motto and that history of imagemaking, but she creates a work that is unique to her own idiolect and concerns, and is distinctly cinema, recalling its genus as the quintessential Frankensteinian patchwork creature. Secure the Shadow is steeped in melancholia, involuntary schadenfreude and a sense of spoil that is both anachronistic and transcendental. A collection of stereoptic medical photographs, a menagerie of unseasonable decay, surfaces throughout the film, arriving in negative haloes of blue haze only to deetherealize into restored pictures of positive deformity. Flesh and spirit are pitted against the industriousness of corrosion with wearying vigilance, as owls transform from sentinel guardians into mocking gargoyles in the twinkling of an eye. The plangent correspondences between emulsion and mortal flesh, editing and surgical suturing and taxidermy, collecting and cataloguing as craft, science and mania, are established directly or in innuendo. The recurrent images of the Crazy quilt (specifically the commerative and mourning quilts that function therapeutically, much like post-mortem photography) is emblematic of the above concerns. As a visual equivalent, the Crazy quilt is often associated with the symphonic collages and derangements of popular songs composed by Charles Ives, whose numinous cacophony is a phantom presence here, breathing life into the film even though it is Ives' less anxious serenities and metaphysical questions that provides shading to Secure the Shadow's turbulent complexion. Laitala's unsettling imagery and design manages to invoke Ives' music of the spheres, the silver swan of Orlando Gibbons, the workaday utensils of life and death, the gnawing deathwatch beetle's deviant arabesque, the spider's web and the awkward makings of The Human Dress.

The Idea of North
(1995, U.S. Rebecca Baron, 14 mins)
In the guise of chronicling the final months of three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron's film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as means of knowing the past and the paradoxic interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact voiceover and allusive sound fragments, evidence and illustration, in Baron's words "meaning is set adrift."

The Present
(1996, U.S. Robert Frank, 22 mins)
"Using the camera with intuition. Being prepared to improvise. Keeping an eye on the moment. Inside and outside. The present."--Robert Frank
Beading impromptus and minor incidents, Frank scrutinizes his surroundings, visits friends and surveys a lifetime's paraphernalia with a confiding air of casual distraction, in search of his subject. With unerring perspicacity for the telling implications of any given instant, this deceptively miscellaneous scrapbook of sifted evidence and shifted tenses is masterfully edited into meaningful shape. Embracing the out of reach and close at hand, The Present is a beautifully vital film of rueless melancholy, laced with prophetic levity.

Flight
(1996, U.S. Greta Snider, 5 mins, silent)
Meticulous and fleet, Greta Snider's Flight is a high contrast memento mori, an impossible dialogue of father and daughter mutual address. A spontaneous response to loss and its afterimage prompts an intricate construction of perishable effects brought to light through indelible flashpoints and suspended farewells.
"Flight is my father's photographic legacy, compiled and transformed into light. I wanted to materialize what spirit ephemera I have remaining from him. His family photographs, his hobbyist pictures of trains and roses, his airplanes and his obsession with birds circling, this material is shot through his eyes. The images are imprinted onto the film, like a fingerprint or trace. It's his movie, really..."--Greta Snider

Total Running Time: 116 mins

THE WORLD HAPPENS TWICE (Program 2)

Thursday, October 9: 7:30 pm
Saturday, October 11: 5 pm

Gladly Given
(1997, U.S. Jerome Hiler, 10 mins, silent)
Illuminated leaves from the sub rosa oeuvre of Jerome Hiler. Although the title is tinged with irony, this film is in fact a gift and a work of gifted seeing made perceptible. Fragile and challenging in its seeming simplicity, Gladly Given unfolds and bristles with the delicacy of a Japanese Floating World painting while being gravitationally drawn into the containments and accidents of the everyday.

Pony Glass
(1997, U.S. Lewis Klahr, 15 mins)
Klahr cruises the elysian backstreets of childhood comic books to make a set of "musicals" ripened by blue-eyed melos and soul-searching psychodrama. Cub reporter Jimmy Olsen proves to be a pony of a different stripe and a man of steel as he ascends beyond good and evil in this bittersweet bildungsroman.

Happy-End
(1996, Austria, Peter Tscherkassky, 12 mins)
Somewhere between resurrection and exorcism, Tscherkassky's found footage palimpsest invites us into the private homemovie domain of a couple known only as "Rudolf" and "Elfriede." Condemned to an eternal New Year's of "bonbons, caramels and chocolats," their neverending annual performance for the camera is a relentless bacchanal rite a deux, seguing from an contagious pop song to requiem ad nauseam.

If You Stand With Your Back
to the Slowing of the Speed of Light in Water
(1997, U.S. Julie Murray, 17 mins)
Murray creates disquieting medleys, mongrel and bewitched combinations of original camerawork and abducted images. With an unparalleled second sight for unhinging and rehinging the apparitional and metaphoric innuendos of the image, Murray creates aberrant epiphanies and unimaginable visual rhymes.
"This film attempts allusions to the influence of water touching water (and other fractal equivalents) upon the ordinary confounding anxiety of complex relations, mannerisms and exchange between the animate and the inert. Combined with loose ascriptions of flaws in the medium itself to subject and content throughout, it aims to illuminate a vital sense innate to perception where inversion is counterbalance, and focal myopia the articulation of space." --Julie Murray

Yggdrasill Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind
(1997, U.S. Stan Brakhage, 17 mins, silent)
"This film, a combination of hand-painting and photography, is a fulsome exposition of the themes of Dog Star Man. In that early epic I had envisioned The World Tree as dead, fit only for firewood; and at the end of Dog Star Man I had chopped it up amidst a flurry of stars (finally Cassiopeia's Chair). Now, these many years later, I am compelled to comprehend Yggdrasill as rooted in the complex electrical synapses of thought processes, to sense it being alive today as when nordic legend hatched it. I share this compulsion with Andrei Tarkovsky, whose last film The Sacrifice struggles to revive The World Tree narratively, whereas I simply present (one might almost say "document") a moving graph approximate to my thought process, whereby The Tree roots itself as the stars we, reflectively, are."--Stan Brakhage

...or lost
(1997, U.S. Leslie Thornton, 5 mins)
Edison snatched the noise of time from an audible chasm, widening the fissures between duplication and extinction. With the invention of the cylinder phonograph in 1878 he succeeded in creating an artificial larynx, a prattling wind-up toy, and a resurrection machine. Thornton's cinematic miniature orbits around the Wizard of Menlo Park and his notion of crossing and annihilating time and space. New Jersey late 1870s: Edison meets Sarah Bernhardt for the inauguration of his talking machine. Geneva 1890s: Bernhardt's voice escapes from the phonograph reciting Phedre, and takes possession of a precocious oblivion seeker with her parents as captive onlookers. New Jersey 1931: a caretaker and assistant to Edison stages his own performance, a historical gloss and imitation of his master's voice.

Prost (Cheers)
(1996, Austria, Gerhard Ertl & Sabine Hiebler, 4 mins)
Toasting to blood & soil and beer & milk, this edition of Hiebler-Ertl's "Spot Check" series enlists TV's soft sell to summon dormant spirits of glory and dread. Time marches back from a present of pastoral plenty to a former golden era where, as if possessed, history and myth spin in diminishing circles of degeneration.

Life Wastes Andy Hardy
(1997, Austria, Martin Arnold, 22 mins)
Martin Arnold greets us with garlands and then slips us a mickey. Somewhere under the rainbow (and above the subliminal) is a land where father knows best and a son's love for his mother knows no bounds. Inducing seizures into the dream that kicks and putting a stethoscope to the stars, Arnold amplifies their vocal ejaculations, unlocking the pubescent mating calls pent up in every fitful gasp. Judy's musical supplications rise like a call to prayer and as an abracadabra summoning objects of desire into the magnetic fields of mock innocence. "The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression... If pièce touchée expresses sexuality, and passage a l'acte aggression, then perhaps Andy Hardy finds melancholia."--Martin Arnold

Total Running Time: 102 mins

PROGRAM III: ROBERT BEAVERS

Saturday, October 11: 7:30 pm
Based in Europe since the late 1960s, the American filmmaker Robert Beavers has created over the past three decades a major body of work practically unknown in his native country. His films are composed of delicate montage structures which often foreground the sensuous, physical connections between his subjects and the worlds that envelop them.

Efpsychie:
The details of the young actor's face--his eyes,eyebrows,earlobe, chin, etc.--are set opposite the old buildings in the market quarter of Athens, where every street is named after a classic ancient Greek playwright. The nearness of the face and its slight movement are the means of balancing all of the film, from below street level up to the rooftops. In this setting of intense stillness, sometimes interrupted by sudden sounds and movements in the streets, he speaks a single word, 'teleftea,' meaning the last (one), and as he repeats this, it moves differently each time across his face and gains another sense from one scene to the next, suggesting the uncanny proximity of eroticism, the sacred and chance.

Windseed:
A seed which floats in the air, a whirligig, a love charm. This magnificent landscape, both hot and dry, is far from sterile; rather, the heat and dryness produce a distinct type of life, seen in the perfect forms of the wild grass and seed pods, the herds of goats as well as in the naked figure. The torso, in itself, and more, the image which it creates in this light. The sounds of the shepherd's signals and the flute's phrase are heard. And the goats' bells. Imagine the bell's clapper moving from side to side with the goat's movements like the quick side-to-side camera movements, which increase in pace and reach a vibrant ostinato.

The Stoas: I sought in these small industrial arcades the spaces which can be seen first from one side and then from the other, a shape of emptiness, then the divinity of the river--this deep sense of appearance--and finally the grasping of the grape. ---Robert Beavers

PROGRAM IV:
GREGORY MARKOPOULOS

Saturday, October 11: 9:15 pm
A major figure of the American avant-garde cinema from the 40s through the 60s, Gregory Markopoulos (1928-1992) spent much of the final decades of his life working on an enormous project, the Eniaios, 22 cycles of film which balance basic mythological and love themes with the film portraits and films of place. His uniquely powerful technique of editing frame by frame has been extended in the Eniaios through the editing of the largest unit, the film cycle. We are pleased to present the world premiere of the first cycle in this series. Eniaios comprises more than 100 films re-edited to form a unit of 22 cycles. Each cycle is three to five hours in length. While the early Markopoulos films give visible form to throughts and emotions--transcending linear time through a flexible multilayering of past, present and future--in Eniaios time and memory increasingly become elements in the projection, as the protagonists' search shades into the spectator's own aesthetic quest. Throughout his career, Markopoulos had emphasized the importance of the spectator's active participation in the work. Here the viewer's alertness becomes especially crucial, as time is overcome through a balance between intensity of the instant and prolonged vision. Markopoulos' concept of film as film--a vision of film as a series of interconnected images that can express the infinite, and a privileging of cinema's inherent material possibilities--reaches its ultimate fruition. --Kristin M. Jones