F i l m f o r u m

Sunday April 6, 2008, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Heinz Emigholz: Photography and Beyond

Opening Night show of a week-long series

The Basis Of Make-Up II (Photography and Beyond 4) (1995-2000, 35mm, color, 48 min.)
Featured are are sixty-nine 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 Pyrenees 1988, an i9ntersection in Owatonna, Minnesota 1995, and a house underpass in Giesshübelstrasse, Zurich 1996. In addition, there are 184 drawings from the series “Die Basis des Make-Up” as positives and negatives. The Basis of Make-Up is “the center around which my feature films revolve. I imagine them as an intermezzo between the long films, the data bank as a breather.” (Heinz Emigholz). More on the film can be found here.

Miscellanea I (Photography and Beyond 5) (1988-2001, 35mm, b&w, 20 min.)
Miscellanea I and II, as their titles suggest, are studies done during the filming of various other projects, “left-overs” that are assembled here in a new and fascinating way.

Miscellanea I is a series studies on 35mm b/w film from 1988 to 1997:
Raw meat at Cabo de Creus and the ruins of “Sant Pere de Rodes” in the Spanish Pyrenees, filmed on October 7 and 11, 1988. Eckhard Rhode, Kyle deCamp and John Erdman at Georges Rodenbach’s grave at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris on September 27, 1988. Eckhard Rhode translates the inscription on the tombstone: “Lord, give me hope to live on in the melancholic eternity of the book”.

This footage was made while shooting the feature film “Der Zynische Körper (The Holy Bunch)”, in which the scene was not included. The power stations “Humboldt” and “Wilhelmsruh”, built by Hans Heinrich Müller in 1926 in Berlin - their interaction with the set-designs in Fritz Lang’s “Mabuse” films and “Metropolis” is still felt today - filmed on April 9 and 10, 1997. Jochen Nickel at Heinz Emigholz’s exhibition “Die Basis des Make-Up 1974-1994″ in the Hamburg Kunsthalle on July 1, 1994. Views of plane trees in Barcelona with Eckhard Rhode on October 4, 1988 - a congenial relationship between the coulour nuances of tree bark and stones and Kodak’s Plus X b/w film. The tympanum of Auguste Rodin’s “The Gates of Hell” at the Zurich Kunsthaus on October 30, 1988. Hans Etter had scaffolding put up in the front of the sculpture so we could film details not visible from street level. The bronze casting of “La Porte de L’Enfer” in Zurich was done in the 1940s near Paris during the German occupation and was a present of the Nazi government to the Swiss arms manufacturer Bührle - as thanks for the good business relationship and the delivery of anti-aircraft guns. More on the film can be found here.

Miscellanea II (Photography and Beyond 6) (1988-2001, 35mm, color, 19 min.)
Miscellanea I and II, as their titles suggest, are studies done during the filming of various other projects, “left-overs” that are assembled here in a new and fascinating way.
Miscellanea II is a series of studies on 35 mm color film from 1988 to 1997:

The memorial to the crew of the crashed “Challenger” space shuttle in the grounds of the “Neil Armstrong Air & Space Museum” in Wapakoneta, Ohio, on April 3, 1995. “The Ladora Savings Bank” by C. B. Zalesky in Ladora, Iowa, April 4, 1995. Both motifs were discovered by chance during a filming expedition to the last eight buildings of Louis Sullivan in the Midwest of the United States. Neil Armstrong was born near Wapakoneta, Zalesky was a scholar of Sullivan.

The painting “Building of the Devil’s Bridge” (ca. 1833) by Carl Blechen and the present location of the “Devil’s Bridge” at the St. Gotthard Pass, shot on April 18, 1996, during a filming expedition to Robert Maillart’s bridges. The castle in Arco and the swimming pool built by Giancarlo Maroni between 1932 and 1934 in Riva on Lake Garda, filmed March 23, 1997. Maroni came from Arco, and was D’Annunzios personal architect at the “Vittoriale” in Gardone. The footage was made during the shooting of “D’Annunzios Cave - Interior Design as Political Declaration”, Part 8 - still unfinished - of the series “Photography and beyond”. Ueli Etter cleaning the screens and printing motifs for his exhibition “on a clear day” in Berlin, August 22, 1995. The post offices in Sabaudia and Latina, south of Rome, built by Angiolo Mazzoni in the early 30s, and his railway station (1937) in Latina Scalo, filmes July 31, and August 3, 1995. Jochen Nickel, Ueli Etter und Ronny Tanner at Ueli Etter’s exhibition “you can see forever” on June 21, 1996. Buildings next to the Via Appia near Pontinia on August 7, 1995. Raw meat at Cabo de Creus in Spain on October 11, 1988. More on the film can be found here.

Sunday March 30, 2008, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Southern California Video: Allan Sekula

Filmforum highlights the work of four artists whose work cries out for more exhibition – significant pieces by fine artists of their media.

We start with Allan Sekula in person presenting three video pieces, two recent, one much older, allowing us to see how his work has developed over the years.

Since the early 1970s, Allan Sekula’s works with photographic sequences, written texts, slide shows and sound recordings have traveled a path close to cinema, sometimes referring to specific films, sometimes, as he then described his 1973 work “Aerospace Folktales,” operating like a “disassembled movie” while resisting the “dictatorship of the projector.” However, with the exception of a few video works from the early 70s and early 80s, he has stayed away from the moving image. This changed in 2001, with the first work the Sekula was willing to call a film, Tsukiji, filmed in the Tokyo fish market of that name.

Tsukiji (2001, 43 mins, digital video, color, sound)  Tsukiji is a “city symphony” film of sorts, dedicated to the largest fish-market in the world, and one of the last surviving proletarian spaces in Tokyo. A film about cutting in a double sense, it harkens back to a moment of intersection of modernism and social realism, evoking the ghost of the left-wing Japanese novelist of the 1920s and 30s, Takiji Kobayashi, author of Kani kosen (The Factory Ship) and an early victim of Japanese fascism. – Allan Sekula

“Tsukiji, thus, was a risk for the established artist, who chose to depart from photography for the distant shores of video, a challenge that he rose to magnificently. The pacing of the video is spellbinding, with a masterful interplay between composed establishing shots and painfully intimate close-ups of fish gasping in their dying moments (some of them already without their bodies, whisked away by the swift knives of the fileters), or the lonely and vacant faces of the workers making their rounds. Sekula has a spectacular eye for visual detail, and there are many arresting moments here — from the band-saw dissection of enormous frozen tuna carcasses like chunks of birch wood, their heads stacked like cordwood in bins, or the filleting of live eels by chatting workers, or the horrific descaling of a living fish, its still-gasping mouth smeared with blood. Sekula has spoken of his work in relation to the traditions of still-life painting, and you can see why. These images — wet, sloppy with blood, scales and slime — are outrageously sensual, seducing us even as they elicit repulsion.” — Sarah Milroy, Globe and Mail (Toronto) 3 December 2004

“A masterpiece…” — James Benning, 2001.

Japanese, English

Direction/camera: Allan Sekula

Editing: Michael Jarmon

A Short Film for Laos (2006-2007, 45 mins, digital video, color, sound)  You start somewhere, and you end up somewhere else. You start with something, and you end up with something else.

I imagined I would start with the Mekong. Laos is a landlocked country threaded through by a great river. The boats are like needles in the muddy currents. But no justice can be done to the river in the dry season. Only the monsoon could complete the story. Maybe later: a longer film.

During the war, some thirty years ago, I read Fred Branfman’s book Voices From the Plain of Jars. No one was as relentless as he in exposing the secret American campaign that made Laos the “most bombed country on earth,” and thus a laboratory for imperial strategies that are both criminal and ineffective. As an American, I felt an obligation to visit the Plain of Jars, to see what we had done there.

In the retelling, the story of the war and the “mystery of the jars” begin to intertwine. An ancient civilization forged an electrical connection to the sky and a secret magnetism brought American bombers to earth, where they were refashioned into spoons.

The ancient Greeks tell us that the god of the forge chased the young goddess of war. In Laos, the guiding spirit of the forge is a scavenger, picking up after the demons of war.

Following now the story of metal rather than the story of water, I visit the blacksmiths of Ban Had Hien. The metal now comes from old truck springs. The competition from Chinese factory-made tools is tougher by the day. How long can this village economy sustain itself?

My grandfather was a blacksmith, and I still remember after fifty years the syncopated rhythm of the hammer and the glowing prize in the grip of the tongs. That was my first exposure to artifice in the old-fashioned sense, and thus to what art is all about.

In Laos, the rhythm of the forge is also the rhythm of the hearth, not so far from cooking over a wood fire. But there are other rhythms as well: the relentless industrial output of the brickmaking machine, the shoveling of gravel, the counting of money by young girls learning the lessons of the market, the quiet flux of voices at the river’s edge as the fireboats float away on the dark river.
– Allan Sekula

“Call it an essay on what the world’s made of, i.e. water and fire and iron and earth. Wryly ironic, compassionate, and unprepossessingly simple.” — Olaf Möller, Film Comment, January 2008.

Allan Sekula (direction, writing, camera, sound)

Elizabeth Hesik (editing)

English, French, Lao. (Lao subtitled version)

Performance under Working Conditions (1973, 20 mins, black and white, video)  Originally produced as a companion piece to a photo novel about working in a pizza restaurant, this early video performance is rarely shown, even though its title was lifted for a 2003 retrospective of Sekula’s work at the Generali Foundation in Vienna.

The structure is that of live television, an empty studio with two cameras and a switcher, no editing after the fact. Two cooks try to reproduce the gestures and banter of their work minus the ingredients and utensils of the kitchen. This is labor performed as madcap talky pantomine, without capital. There’s a line here that goes back to the anarcho-syndicalism of Laurel and Hardy.

Direction: Allan Sekula

Performance: Gregg Arreguin, Allan Sekula, David Scholar

Camera: Lennart Bourin

More on Allan Sekula, click on “Keep Reading” below.

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Sunday March 23, 2008, 7:00 pm

At the Echo Park Film Center
1200 Alvarado Street (at Sunset, northeast corner)

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
You Pick ‘Em 2! A selection of experimental films from Canyon Cinema

**NOTE THE CHANGE IN LOCATION**

For the second time, Filmforum asked you, the audience, for your choices from the vast Canyon Cinema catalogue. Rarely screened classics, curiosities, forgotten wonders?

Films include:

Hand Eye Coordination by Naomi Uman (2002, 16mm, 10min)
The film tells the story of its own making.

Womancock by Carl Linder (1965, 16mm, 15min)
Requested by Dominic Angerame, Canyon Cinema:
Here’s my pick – the film has never been rented or probably seen by anyone west of the Mississippi.

“Carl Linder’s Womancock has a rippling surreality to it, using montage-collage cinema, superimposing images within the frame and juxtaposing pieces of film and snips of music and talk to make statements about women. Which is? His women are pretty disgusting (albeit, erotic) creatures. But, more importantly, Linder has manipulated his pictures and our minds with so much unobtrusive artistry that we don’t know until later how thoroughly he had done his job.” - Michael Ross, LA Free Press

Notebook by Marie Menken (mid 1940s-1960s, 16mm, 10min)
These are too tiny or too obvious for comment, but one or two are my dearest children. “It is a very personal film which she keeps adding to … a masterpiece of filmic fragments, only shown once, but wow!” - P. Adams Sitney

Hold Me While I’m Naked by George Kuchar (1966, 16mm, 15min)
Requested by Fumiko Amako:
I’m embarrassed to say this, but haven’t seen any films by George Kuchar except for the clips from John Waters’ documentary film.

“A very direct and subtle, very sad and funny look at nothing more or less than sexual frustration and aloneness. In its economy and cogency of imaging, Hold Me surpasses any of Kuchar’s previous work. The odd blend of Hollywood glamour and drama with all-too-real life creates and inspires counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality.” - Ken Kelman

“This film could cheer an arthritic gorilla, and audiences, apparently sensitized by its blithely accurate representation of feelings few among them can have escaped, rise from their general stupor to cheer it back.” - James Stoller, The Village Voice

Some Manipulations by Jud Yalkut (1967, 8mm, 3min)
Requested by Carlos Kase

With Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, Jean Toche, Steve Rose, and Al Hansen.

A four-screen within one frame film, shot in un-slit regular 8mm, in four sections of four performance / happening / destruction art events presented in 1967 at the Judson Gallery below Washington Square in New York City. The Manipulations series, curated by the Judson’s director Jon Hendricks, was a series of evening performances of actionist art, some directly related to the international Art and Destruction movement.

Some Manipulations captures the confrontational light pieces of Jean Toche, an avant garde musical performance by Nam June Paik and cellist Charlotte Moorman, an actionist painting event by Steve Rose, and a classic Dada lecture/performance by Al Hansen.

Bottle Can by Luther Price (1993, S8mm, 20min)
Requested by Bradford Nordeen:
May I please put in a suggestion for Luther Price’s Bottle Can. It is impossible to see his work and I would greatly appreciate it!

If I lived a thousand years ago
I’d probably be running half naked
in the scorching sun
over jagged rocks
ripping open the bottoms of my feet
and tearing off my toes.

Blood-curdling screams behind me
A tribe of men chasing me
If they caught me
they’d probably chop my head off
(excerpt)
Dark Dark by Abigail Child (2001, 16mm, 16min)
“Dark Dark is a ghost dance of narrative gesture melding four found story fragments: Noir, Western, Romance and Chase. The music of Ennio Morricone provocatively interacts with the images, tantalizing the audience with webs of memory, meaning and elusive folly.” AC

Dark Dark travels behind the scenes to re-view storytelling and its place in our cultural movie-influenced milieu. With loving attention to its ’slates’ and ‘waits,’ its anonymous crew and actors, Dark Dark creates a comic but somehow disturbing voyage into the ’story.’

Sunday March 16, 2008, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT
Works of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative in two programs

Curator Mark Webber in person!

The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative was established in 1966 to support work on the margins of art and cinema.  It uniquely incorporated three related activities within a single organization – a workshop for producing new films, a distribution arm for promoting them, and its own cinema space for screenings.  In this environment, Co-op members were free to explore the medium and control every stage of the process.  The physical production – printing and processing – of a film became a vital part of its creation, and is what distinguished the LFMC films from other avant-garde work of the period.

Tonight:

SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: Programme 1 (Part II in Filmforum’s series)

SHOOTSHOOTSHOOT is a LUX project curated by Mark Webber.
Funded by Arts Council England, British Council, British Film Institute and the Esmée Fairburn Foundation.

Slides by Annabel Nicolson (1970, 11 mins)
“A continuing sequence of tactile films were made in the printer from my earlier material. 35mm slides, light leaked film, sewn film, cut up to 8mm and 16mm fragments were dragged through the contact printer, directly and intuitively controlled.  The films create their own fluctuating colour and form dimensions defying the passive use of ‘film as a vehicle’.  The appearance of sprocket holes, frame lines etc., is less to do with the structural concept and more of a creative, plastic response to whatever is around.” — Annabel Nicolson, LFMC catalogue,1974

At the Academy by Guy Sherwin (1974, 5 mins)
“Makes use of found footage hand printed on a simple home-made contact printer, and processed in the kitchen sink.  At The Academy uses displacement of a positive and negative sandwich of the same loop.  Since the printer light spills over the optical sound track area, the picture and sound undergo identical transformations.”  — Guy Sherwin, LFMC catalogue, 1979

Shepherd’s Bush by Mike Leggett (1971, 15 mins)
“Shepherd’s Bush was a revelation.  It was both true film notion and demonstrated an  ingenious association with the film-process.  It is the procedure and conclusion of a piece  of film logic using a brilliantly simple device; the manipulation of the light source in the  Film Co-op printer such that a series of transformations are effected on a loop of film  material.  From the start Mike Leggett adopts a relational perspective according to which it is neither the elements or the emergent whole but the relations between the elements  (transformations) that become primary through the use of logical procedure.”  — Roger Hammond, LFMC catalogue supplement, 1972

Film No.1 by David Crosswaite (1971, 10 mins)
“Film No.1 is a 10-minute loop film.  The systems of super-imposed loops are mathematically inter-related in a complex manner.  The starting and cut off points for each loop are not clearly exposed, but through repetitions of sequences in different colours, in different ‘material’ realities (i.e. anegative, positive bas-relief, neg-pos overlay) yet in constant rhythm (both visually and on the soundtrack hum) one is manipulated to attempt to work out the system structure … The film deals with permutations of material, in a prescribed manner but one by no means ‘necessary’ or logical (except within the film’s own constructed system/serial.)” — Peter Gidal, LFMC catalogue, 1974

Dresden Dynamo by Lis Rhodes (1971, 5 mins)
“This film is the result of experiments with the application of Letraset and Letratone onto clear film.  It is essentially about how graphic images create their own sound by extending into that area of film which is ‘read’ by optical sound equipment.  The final print has been achieved through three separate, consecutive printings from the original material, on a contact printer.  Colour was added, with filters, on the final run.  The film is not a sequential piece.  It does not develop crescendos.  It creates the illusion of spatial depth from essentially, flat, graphic, raw material.” — Tim Bruce, LFMC catalogue, 1993

Versailles I & II by Chris Garratt (1976, 11 mins)
”For this film I made a contact printing box,with a printing area 16mm x 185mm which enabled the printing of 24 frames of picture plus optical sound area at one time.  The first part is a composition using 7 x 1-second shots of the statues of Versailles, Palace of 1000  Beauties, with accompanying soundtrack, woven according to a pre-determined sequence. Because sound and picture were printed simultaneously, the minute inconsistencies in exposure times resulted in rhythmic fluctuations of picture density and levels of sound.  Two of these shots comprise the second part of the film which is framed by abstract imagery printed across the entire width of the film surface: the visible image is also the sound image.” — Chris Garratt, LFMC catalogue, 1978

Silver Surfer by Mike Dunford (1972, b/w, sound, 15 mins)
“A surfer, filmed and shown on tv, refilmed on 8mm,and refilmed again on 16mm.Simple loop structure preceded by four minutes of a still frame of the surfer.  An image on the borders of apprehension, becoming more and more abstract.  The surfer surfs, never surfs anywhere, an image suspended in the light of the projector lamp.  A very quiet and undramatic film, not particularly didactic.  Sound: the first four minutes consists of a fog-horn, used as the basic tone for a chord played on the organ, the rest of the film uses the sound of breakers with a two second pulse and occasional bursts of musical-like sounds.” — Mike Dunford, LFMC catalogue supplement, 1972

Footsteps by Marilyn Halford (1974, b/w, sound, 6 mins)
“Footsteps is in the manner of a game re-enacted, the game in making was between the camera and actor,the actor and cameraman, and one hundred feet of film.  The film became expanded into positive and negative to change balances within it; black for perspective, then black to shadow the screen and make paradoxes with the idea of acting, and the act of seeing the screen.  The music sets a mood then turns a space, remembers the positive then silences the flatness of the negative.” — Marilyn Halford, LFMC catalogue, 1978