April 5 – Animated Documentaries Part 1: Portraits

The Even More Fun Trip

Sunday April 5, 2009, 7:00 pm

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Animated Documentaries Part 1 – Portraits

At the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas.  7:00 pm.  Tickets are $10 general, $6 students/seniors, cash or check only at the door.  We’ll be selling tikcets at a table in the courtyard.  Tickets are NOT available through the website for the Egyptian Theatre.

“Animated documentaries” – isn’t that an oxymoron? No longer! Documentary has now moved past the notion that it needs to be an exact representation of reality, although many in the United States still resist the expansive concept. And animation has long included more than kids cartoons, although most people only know the films they see on Saturday morning television.
But now is the time to break through the bounds of the real, to get into the minds of real people in real situations, to find visuals for events that weren’t documented, to raise issues of perception and experience and reality. Why are most animated documentaries linked still to an acceptable aural interview – an illustrated radio documentary? Where does animation fall short, and what objections does it raise? And where does it open up the realm of the possible, and provide a new way to visualize truth?

Backseat Bingo

Join us as we survey the remarkable and burgeoning genre of animated documentaries.

Tonight we look at the range of possibilities of portraits – biographical moments, short profiles, and pointed interviews. Going beyond the filmmaker (we’ll look at autobiographical films later), these play with external representations to bring out key aspects of the personalities of the subjects. Sometimes it’s a more traditional biopic, as in McLaren’s Negatives by Marie-Josee Saint Pierre. Sometimes it’s a more impressionistic portrait, as in Yurico Murakami’s Talking About Amy or the influential Kid Stays in the Picture (with its use of stills manipulation) by Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen; others illustrate sharp political points through the tragic tales of interviewees, as in Sheila Sofian’s Conversation with Haris or Samantha Moore’s The Beloved Ones. Bob Sabiston’s popular work is represented by the fabulously humorous tale of Ryan’s trip to the amusement park in The Even More Fun Trip, and Helen Hill mixes family films, imaginative fancy, paper cut-out animation and traditional drawing in her delicately sad film of her grandfather’s death, Mouseholes. What do you do when an interviewee doesn’t want himself shown on screen? Animation is one strategy, as seen in Liz Blazer’s Backseat Bingo, which brings the humorous views of senior citizens on sex, or in Ellie Lee’s harrowing depiction of abuse in Repetition Compulsion. And we’ll see how students today are using such materials in new portraits, with Sahar Alsawaf’s tale of her Iraqi relative, Uncle Ma’an.

Part 2 coming on Monday April 13, 8:00 pm at the Silent Movie Theatre, co-resented with Cinefamily.  For details, check out the Upcoming Shows tab.

Tonight’s film will include:

Talking About Amy by Yurico Murakami (2006, 8:20, USA/Japan)

Repetition Compulsion (1997)

McLaren’s Negatives by Marie-Josee Saint Pierre (2006, 11 min., Canada)

Backseat Bingo by Liz Blazer (2003, 5:25, USA)

Repetition Compulsion by Ellie Lee (1997, 7 min., 35mm, USA)

Excerpt from The Kid Stays in the Picture by Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen (2002, 93 min, US)

Conversation with Haris by Sheila Sofian (2001, 6 min, 16mm, USA)

Uncle Ma’an (2007)

The Beloved Ones by Samantha Moore (2007, 6 min, UK)

Mouseholes by Helen Hill (1999, 16mm, USA)

Uncle Ma’an by Sahar Alsawaf (2007, 4 min, video, USA/Iraq)

The Even More Fun Trip by Bob Sabiston (2007, 20:45, video, USA)

The Beloved Ones (2007)

April 4 – Journey From Darkness into Light: Films By Kerry Laitala

Saturday April 4, 2009, 8:00 pm

The Echo Park Film Center and Los Angeles Filmforum present
Journey From Darkness into Light: Some Films By Kerry Laitala
Note change in day, time, and location!

Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado Street LA CA 90026
(213) 484-8846
www.echoparkfilmcenter.org
8PM, $5 admission

This “spooktacular” program includes nine short 16mm films from visiting Bay-area filmmaker Kerry Laitala. “For every work [Laitala] produces, she places her fingers on the pulse of the piece and allows it to grow organically without a script or prescribed plan. She prescribes to the concepts laid down by Germaine Dulac, maker of surrealist films in the 1920’s, that cinema should not be enslaved by narrative and theatre, and is interested in expansive forms of media production. Laitala is deeply invested in the process of working directly with the film medium basically is involved in all aspects of production: shooting, developing, editing and sound design as well as optical printing much of material to further re-work it into another form.“ (filmmaker’s bio)
FILMMAKER KERRY LAITALA IN ATTENDANCE!

A Fragment from a Lost Film (1992, 3 min., 16mm, silent)
Introduction to a walking anachronism

Orbit (2006, 9 min., 16mm, hand-made soundtrack)

Orbit

Candy apple light emissions create a series of photic stimulating events that tickle the retinas. “Orbit” takes one into the realm of the mistake…. a playful pulsation of mis-registered images made when a
lab accidentally split the film from 16mm to regular 8. This format was then reconstituted on the optical printer making the colors and contrast further blow out into the atmosphere. Kodachrome color fields create tremulous vibrations whose flickerings hypnotize. The Kodachrome Series, of which “Orbit” is a part, deals directly with chromatic motion studies and creates an illusion of frozen light fields; holding light captive and exploring the phenomenon of retinal afterimage. The soundtrack is comprised of the flutterings of optical noise reverberating to the splices of the film that is intermixed with hand drawn extensions of the visual plane onto the soundtrack area. By combining a series of abstract shapes with permanent marker, the rhythm and tempo of the image is directly enhanced through this mark making process. The fanciful sputterings crackle and snap, tickling the tympanum of the eardrums. We enter through the oval window, while the Gravitron spins eternally.

Out of the Ether (2003, 11 min., 16mm, sound)
A hand crafted 16mm film composed on the optical printer and toned to bring out pulsating hues of oozing greens and yellows. “Out of the Ether” poses the following questions: “What do we
leave behind? Are institutional forces using our hysteria to reap the benefits of possible infection? Whose environment could we possibly be affecting? What unseen forces would unscrupulous beings want to use to infiltrate our bodies and perhaps our consciousness? Who is the enemy? “Out of the Ether” unleashes upon an unsuspecting audience septic musings about fear in the guise of microbial menace and mayhem.

Awake, But Dreaming (2000, 8 min., 16mm, Color, sound)
“This completely hand processed 16mm film was shot in the Hirschgang Oberer, an extended arched hallway at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, where she was in residence intermittently from 1998-2001. “Awake, but Dreaming” recreates a sense of an endless, cyclical dreamscape that is conjured up from the deep recesses of the imagination. A disembodied hovering presence evokes a menace that is intimated through the sonorous resonance, but never manifests itself. However, the dreamer
never reaches the apex of consciousness; only lingers repeatedly in the periphery of alchemically enhanced light and shadow. The cavernous intrauterine space is one of potentials where anything can happen if the viewer can enter the porthole of experience.”

Retrospectroscope

Retrospectroscope (1997, 5 min., 16mm, silent)
The “Retrospectroscope” apparatus has gone through many incarnations; its presence belies the processes that have created it. As a pre-cinematic device, it traces an evolutionary trajectory, encircling the viewer in a procession of flickering fantasies of fragmented lyricism. The “Retrospectroscope” is a reinvention that simulates the illusion of the analysis of motion to recall early mysteries of the quest for this very discovery now taken for granted. The Muses of Cinema represented by the female figures on the disk, have emerged from a dark Neoclassical past. Streams of images revolve around, in an attempt to harness notions of a cinematic prehistory tracing past motions and gestures to burn their dance on the surface of the retinas. This film known as the “Retrospectroscope” was described in the San Francisco Bay Guardian as “A spinning flashing UFO/roulette wheel of Athenian proportions.”

Hallowed (2002, 11 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Hallowed is a 16mm film that portrays a mystical voyage made back in time by an unconscious woman in the throes of a cataleptic state. She finds herself in Plato’s cave where flickering flames incite prehistoric cinematic reverie evoking an experience of magical proportions. She is a spectral being who is transformed from within as viewers witness a chasm between the physical self and psychical self become one.

Secure the Shadow…’Ere the Substance Fade (1997, 9 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Secure the Shadow is a meditation on disintegration and mortality. The film utilizes antique Medical stereoscopic images from the Victorian era, which are simultaneously disturbing and beautiful. The filmmaker’s intention is to reveal universal truths about the overwhelming quality of disease to render us ultimately mute, immobilized within a corporeal shell that has succumbed to imminent forces beyond our control. The filmmaker also wants the film to address the myth that dignity is automatically restored upon the visage when facing death. In analyzing the original function of the stereoscopic images, the filmmaker intends to expose their classificatory nature. These anonymous subjects were reduced to paradigms of pathology, embalmed in time within their exterior presence. By re-photographing them on the optical printer and placing them in a mythical home, the filmmaker endeavors to re-animate these visages to ensnare them, or allow them to roam free on the surface of celluloid. Absence transforms to presence as the latent image reveals the manifest content, the slippery territories in between unraveling like the threads joining the crazy quilt that connects images together. An anachronistic Victorian sensibility places the images in a chimerical, historical context that embodies the film with a mind that is paradoxical and alien to our modern day perspective. The title “Secure the Shadow…’Ere the Substance Fade, let nature imitate what nature has made”, comes from a Nineteenth century post mortem photographer who advertised his services. This reference speaks about the function of photography as a democratizing medium that assists in the process of mourning and serves as a physical reminder of loss.

The Adventure Parade (2000, 5 min., 16mm, Black, White & Blue, silent)
A hand processed film that deals with the nature of using found images self-reflexively calling attention to the re-framing imprint of the filmmaker serving to reveal the duplicitous nature of the material. The inherent violence that is hinted at lies beyond the threshold of understanding, and only offers clues of past interventions.
Sponsored By The Princess Grace Foundation-1996

Conquered (2000, 15 min., 16mm, B&W & Color, sound)

Conquered

Filmed entirely at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, this film comes from the depths of a submerged self. The filmmaker incorporated her own imagery with found material from German industrial films, most notably a film about a youth prison. These images were fused with images from a film brought from the United States entitled “The Epic of Everest” summarizing an attempt to reach the mountain’s summit by George Mallory and Sandy Irvine in 1924. Mallory’s body was just recently
discovered below the North face. Killed after a fall, his innards were subsequently eaten out by Goraks.

Sponsored by the Akademie Schloss Solitude and Hakan Warn

March 29 – Ken Jacobs’s Razzle Dazzle the Lost World (LA Premiere!)

Sunday March 29, 2009, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
The Los Angeles Premiere of Ken Jacobs’s Razzle Dazzle the Lost World

Ken Jacob’s is one of the leading practitioners of film and video art in the world. We’re delighted to host the Los Angeles premiere of his newest video work.

Capitalism: Slavery (2006)

Capitalism: Slavery (2006, 3 min., DVD NTSC, b&w, silent)
An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief. – Ken Jacobs

Razzle Dazzle the Lost World (2008, 90 min., DVD NTSC, color and b&w)
Los Angeles Premiere!

Razzle Dazzle the Lost World (2008)

Razzle Dazzle The Lost World is an early Edison shot cut off at its head and tail and along its four sides from the continuity of events like any camera-shot from a bygone day; no, like any camera-shot, immediately producing an abstraction. This abstraction pictures a great spinning maypole-like device lined with young passengers dipping and lifting as it circles through space. They look out – from their place at the start of the 20th century – with a remarkable variety of expressions, giddy to pensive. We observe them but of course they see nothing of this, our America, hopelessly gone to rot, its mountaintops leveled for extraction of coal, rivers and air polluted, crisscrossed everywhere with property-lines; they don’t see its prisons or the corporations leaning in from their off-shore tax-bases to see what more they can take. Early stereopticon images also appear, digitally manipulated to reveal their depths. A digital shadow falls upon the scene and yet, grim as things get, as our crimes and failures then and now commingle, the movie proceeds with a cubist/abstract-expressionist zest. -K.J.

Razzle Dazzle the Lost World (2008)

“An eye-popper and brain-boggler, Razzle Dazzle is also, remarkably, a thing to stir the soul, delivering in its final stretch an astonishing, unexpected political jolt that elevates what appeared to be a mere (if marvelous) formal triumph into a shattering confrontation.” – Nathan Lee, New York Times, June 27, 2008.  See the full review here.
J. Hoberman on the film.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER:

Ken Jacobs was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1933. He studied painting with one of the prime creators of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, in the mid-fifties. It was then that he also began filmmaking (Star Spangled To Death). His personal star rose, to just about knee high, with the sixties advent of Underground Film. In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic -rather than demagogic- cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. A nonprofit filmmaker’s co-operative open to all, it made available film equipment, workspace, screenings and classes at little or no cost. Later he found himself teaching large classes of painfully docile students at St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens.

March 22 – A World Rattled of Habit: Films by Ben Rivers

Sunday March 22, 2009, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
A World Rattled of Habit – Films by Ben Rivers
Ben Rivers in person!

His films play as fragments of stories, like the crumbly bits of dreams that cling to waking consciousness. — Ed Halter, The Village Voice

This year’s most noteworthy new discovery was the work of Britain’s Ben Rivers, a relatively young and highly prolific artist filmmaker. What’s most striking about Rivers’ work, apart from the sheer physical pleasure of his hazy chiaroscuro, is its resonance with specifically British cinematic traditions… Here’s hoping North Americans receive more opportunities to experience Rivers’s gentle, poignant cinema. – Michael Sicinski, GreenCine Daily

Tonight we’ll be screening:

We The People (2004, 1 min, 16mm, b/w)
The mob rages. The person flees.

House (2005/7, 5 min, 16mm, b/w)
The old dark house, where only fragments remain of a once animated domestic history, reoccupied by a history of horror films. Crumbling interiors. Stained, peeling walls and forgotten furniture. Dust sheets on rotting floorboards. Shattered windows. The unfolding process of abandonment, decay and renewal.
Searching this landscape for signs of half remembered narratives; obsessively making models to re-imagine the boarded up, gently decomposing remnants of a home.

This Is My Land (2006)

This Is My Land (2006, 14 min, 16mm, b/w)
A hand-processed portrait of Jake Williams – who lives alone within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Jake always has many jobs on at any one time, finds a use for everything, is an expert mandolin player, and has compost heaps going back many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working – I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and be apart from the idea of industry – Jake’s life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future.

The Coming Race (2006, 5 min, 16mm, b/w, Ireland)
A film in which thousands of people climb a rocky mountain terrain. The destination and purpose of their ascension remains unclear. A vague, mysterious and unsettling pilgrimage fraught with unknown intentions.

The title The Coming Race is after a Victorian novel by E.G.E. Bulwer-Lytton, published 1870, concerning a subterranean super-race who live under a mountain – which at the time was considered by some to be a work of fact.

Astika (2006, 8 min, 16mm, Denmark/UK)
A portrait of Astika, who lives on an island in Denmark. He has lived in a run down farm house for 15 years and his project has been to let the land around him grow unchecked, but now he has been forced to move out by people who prefer more pristine neighbours.

‘Astika by Ben Rivers was the next film, a piece that I wish was a living installation! I absolutely didn’t want to leave this zone the second it began; with incredible textures of rock and cement, like a micro/macro world much like our newly coined sister planet Gliese 581. The depiction of overgrowth with red and gold contrast objects injects a richness to the environment this man Astika, a man living on an island in Denmark, lives in. His project has been to let his farmhouse grow over around him, now being forced to move because of his inherent eccentric lifestyle. The kind of overgrowth captured by Rivers is a kind laden with richness, life and magic. The field recordings of the garden and Astika speaking are ambiguous to the point where you can’t tell if he’s talking about killing himself, or the beauty of the birds who fear his presence. The haptic screen and gorgeous interference of glass and foliage only add to the haunting and rich view of this film. It is a vision of freedom I can’t wait to approach in my real life.’ Ashby Collinson (review from PDX festival, Portland)

Ah, Liberty! (2008)

Ah, Liberty! (2008, 20 min, anamorphic 16mm, b/w, 2008)
A family’s place in the wilderness, outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format, but is undercut with a sense of apocalyptic foreboding. There’s no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived, rituals performed.

“To name an attitude black and white suggests reduction, but in this rural, ethnographic portrait the artist unravels a thousand tones of each. How long does it take until this overflowing bath becomes a lake, until the simple forest drive (there is nothing simple here) tranforms these children into airborne angels of light? There is a tender brutality at work here, nothing is polished or smooth or well rounded, instead the advventure of seeing is undertaken ready to fall and bruise, to be wounded by its search. And it is from this necessary wound that the artist joins in with the life of a family grown wild out of doors with the horses and chickens. For its compassion, its refusal of the sentimental, its quick witted montage and dramaturgy of the everyday, the Tiger Award goes to Ah, Liberty!” (Jury Statement, Rotterdam International Film Festival 2008)

Origin of the Species (16 min, 16mm, colour, sound)
A film begun as a portrait of S, a 75 year old man living in a remote part of Inverness-shire. S has been obsessed with Darwin’s works for much of his life. Since a child he has wondered at life on Earth and, though he never became an academic, found in Darwin many answers to his questions. The film images concentrate on the mysterious geography of his world; his garden – from the microcosmic to the grand; the contraptions and inventions he’s made; his isolated patch of land where he has built his house after a life of travelling and working around the world. The soundtrack has S heard discussing his take on life on Earth and humans place upon it. The film attempts to span from the beginnings of the world up to an uncertain future.

A World Rattled Of Habit (2008)

A World Rattled Of Habit (2008, 10 min, 16mm, col/b+w)
A day trip to Suffolk, to see my friend Ben and his dad Oleg…

More on Ben Rivers:
Ben Rivers was born in Somerset, England, in 1972. Studied Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art, 1990-93. He has exhibited at many international film festivals and galleries, and won numerous awards, most recently Tiger Award for Short Film, IFF Rotterdam 2008 and Best Experimental Film, Vila do Conde 2008. He has been the recipient of a number of commissions, including a London Artist’s Film and Video Award, for which he made two new works – On the Origin of Species and Ah, Liberty!

March 15 – Do You See What I See? New Works from Adele Horne, Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin

Sunday March 15, 2009, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Do You See What I See? New works on vision and digitization by Adele Horne, Rebecca Baron & Doug Goodwin
With Adele Horne, Rebecca Baron, and Doug Goodwin in person!

Filmforum is delighted to welcome back some of our good friends with new films. We last hosted Adele Horne with her documentary The Tailenders, which went on to win an Independent Spirit Award. Her new short works investigate realms of vision and interpretation of visual phenomena in delightful ways.

We’ve screened Rebecca Baron’s films in a few different shows, most recently How Little We Know of Our Neighbors. With the Lossless Series, she and filmmaking partner Doug Goodwin look into the small and large changes done to film images through digitization, compression, and digital manipulation, and by extension raise questions of the potential of the de- and re-construction of all images from/of the past.

Tonight we will be screening:

15 Experiments on Peripheral Vision (2008)

15 Experiments on Peripheral Vision by Adele Horne and Paul VanDeCarr
(2008, 29 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
This film is a series of short experiments, each of which explores peripheral vision in a different way: attempting to capture it on film, conducting perceptual experiments, and telling stories about interpreting things seen from the corner of the eye.

The Image World (2008)

The Image World by Adele Horne
(2008, 6 minutes, 16mm, black and white, silent)
The world seeks to replicate itself. Smooth surfaces create reflections, objects cast shadows, and apertures transmit the appearance of what lies beyond them. When sunlight falls through the spaces between leaves on a tree, the “pin-hole” apertures in the foliage create images of the sun on the ground below. This film records replicas of the sun as they appear and disappear in the dappled light under trees.

Quiero Ver (2008)

Quiero Ver by Adele Horne
(2008, 6 minutes, filmed on 16mm and finished on Digibeta, color, sound)
On the 13th of each month, hundreds of people gather at a site in the Mojave Desert to see visions of the Virgin Mary appear in the sun. They point Polaroid, cell phone, and video cameras at the sun, and compare interpretations of the resulting images.

The Lossless Series by Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin
“Lossless” is a series that explores the effects of digital compression and file sharing on the film image. “Lossless” investigates film’s dematerialization, foregrounding the structural components of digital media. The project also considers the impact of the digital age on filmmaking and film watching, its social aspects and its political economy.

Lossless #2 (2008)

Lossless #2 (2008, 3 mins, b/w, sound)
What happens when a treasure of the avant-garde becomes a bittorrent in a peer-to-peer scenario? Lossless #2 is part of a series of works that unearths the effects of compression and distribution on the digitized film image.

Lossless #3 (2008, 10 mins, color, sound by Ernst Karel)
Lossless #3 is a deconstructed version of John Ford’s The Searchers, in which missing keyframes turn the American West into a melting ribbon of ochre and rust.

Lossless #4 (2008)

Lossless #4 (2008, 14 mins, b/w, silent)
Lossless #4 is derived from Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity. We ran a debugging routine on a digital version of the original film that uses vectors to follow movement in the image to instruct the subdivision of the video’s macro-blocks. We then removed Gehr’s image entirely, leaving only the movement of the vectors, The formal qualities of Gehr’s film are detectable, and the hypnotic effect of the shifts in the lens’s focal length in the original are now substituted with a purely graphical representation, creating a perverse replacement of the optical effect of the original.

Lossless #5 (2008, 3 mins, b/w sound by Ernst Karel)
A Busby Berkley water ballet turns into geometrical abstraction.

Filmmakers’ Bios: