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
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