The end of May is looking VERY exciting for LA Filmforum as we bring you the following three amazing shows:
May 27 – Restoring the Los Angeles Avant-Garde: Thom Andersen and Morgan Fisher
May 29 – Restoring the Los Angeles Avant-Garde: Things Are Always Going Wrong
May 31 – Dialogues by Owen Land, LA premiere with Owen Land in person!
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Sunday May 31, 2009, 7:30 pm
At the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Dialogues, by Owen Land – Los Angeles Premiere!
Owen Land in person!
Dialogues (2009)
Filmforum is delighted to welcome back legendary filmmaker Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow) for the official Los Angeles premiere of his newest work Dialogues.
On one level, Dialogues (2009, 133 mins, video) is a parody of Scorpio Rising, using era-specific hit records to locate scenes in time; on another level, it’s an interpretation of Plato’s dialogue ‘Phaedo’, in which Socrates proves the doctrine of re-incarnation; on still another level, it is a polemic for the Tantric belief in the sacredness of male-female polarity in the form of thirty “Platonic Dialogues.” Rated R: Restricted to audiences with a knowledge of Art History. – Owen Land
Dialogues is a feature-length self-reflexive experimental film by Apollo Jize (aka Owen Land) with music by the American Buddhist composer Meredith Monk, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Yonkers, New York:
Dialogues (2009)
It was raining torrents in Torrance
But she had no rain insurance
She said to a molester
I’ll go back to Westchester
It never rains at Sarah Lawrence
But, alas, she finally went bonkers
Because it was raining in Yonkers
– Owen Land
More on Owen Land:
Owen Land, formerly known as George Landow, was one of the most original and celebrated American filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s.
Dialogues (2009)
His early materialist works anticipated Structural Film, the definition of which provoked his rejection of film theory and convention. Having first explored the physical qualities of the celluloid strip itself in FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR … and BARDO FOLLIES, his attention turned to the spectator in a series of ‘literal’ films that question the illusionary nature of cinema through the use of word play and optical ambiguity.
His two most complex films are WIDE ANGLE SAXON, in which a man has a spiritual revelation during an avant-garde screening at the Walker Art Center, and ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE, whose disparate cast of characters include two pandas discussing, and making, an avant-garde film about the marketing of Japanese salted plums. Both are models of the unconscious process, with loose narratives that bring together a variety elements through visual and verbal humour. (more…)
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Friday May 29, 2009, 7:30 pm
At the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, Wilshire at Westwood
Los Angeles Filmforum, UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Hammer Museum present
Restoring the Los Angeles Avant-Garde: Things Are Always Going Wrong
New Restorations of Los Angeles Experimental Films
Pat O’Neill, Grahame Weinbren, Fred Worden, David Wilson, Roberta Friedman and Academy preservationist Mark Toscano in person!
FREE Admission!
**NOTE THE CHANGE IN DATE, LOCATION, AND PRICE**
Venusville (1973)
Since its formal inception in 1992, the Academy Film Archive has been working diligently to preserve and restore independent and experimental films. However, over the last five years, the Academy Archive has trained an additional focus on the work of Los Angeles-based artists.
As more films have come to the Academy, and more have been preserved or restored, a fascinating portrait of the Los Angeles avant-garde scene has begun to emerge. While films produced by artists in New York and San Francisco have historically been given an inordinate precedence in accounts of such work, an astonishingly diverse and extensive world of vital avant-garde filmmaking was–and still is–going on right here. Accordingly, the title of this special two-night screening series has a double meaning.
All of the films presented in this program are by Los Angeles artists featuring prints restored by the Academy and making their Los Angeles restoration premieres. But in addition to highlighting the important work of the Academy–and by this selection of film artists, in particular–this series aims to contribute to the growing recognition of Los Angeles, then and now, as a significant center of avant-garde production.
By the Sea (1963, 10 min., 16mm, B/W, sound)
Directed by Pat O’Neill and Robert Abel
Organic and inorganic forms observed and captured at Muscle Beach are flattened onto slides beneath carefully applied cover slips and prepared for closer examination.
Throbs (1972, 7 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by Fred Worden
Demonstrating a remarkable subtlety and restraint, Fred Worden explores the small epiphanies and nuanced areas of visual delight resulting from the energies created by a vibrant chemical reaction of intermingling footage.
Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974)
Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974, 6 min., 16mm, color, silent)
Directed by Gary Beydler
Possibly the most lucid, vivid and awesome demonstration of the building up of still images to create moving ones, Pasadena Freeway Stills simply, gracefully and powerfully shows us the process by which we are fooled by the movies.
unc. 91966, 3 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by Bruce Lane
A haunting, affecting, three-minute epic constructed of memorable images and densely imagined narrative fragments distilled to an essence that registers dread, dissolution, fear and despair, but also a bittersweet melancholy, both for an idealized past and a diseased present.
Murray and Max Talk about Money (1979, 15 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren
“We are always interested in constructing ways of evoking the pleasures of cinema without implicitly accepting an ideology–of passivity, manipulation, and repressed violence–that we would explicitly reject. Can there be films that remain cinematic without indulging in one form of pornography or another? Murray and Max… is, in part, a proposal, a blueprint, for such a form of cinema.” –Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren
Venusville (1973, 10 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by Fred Worden and Chris Langdon
No montage, no human subjects, minimal visual content, and the artists basically pissing on the fourth wall by calling attention in every way possible to the artifice of what they’re doing. An anti-film school film made at film school.
Rose for Red (1980, 3 min., 16mm, color, sound)
(1980) Directed by Diana Wilson
An unusual, jewel-like homage to unity and discordance in filmic composition.
Stasis (1976, 7 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by David Wilson
The intentional misnomer of the title plays upon the misapprehension that the negation of one dynamic process with its inverse complement would result in something static. A landscape film wherein the invisible landscape between the capturer and the captured is brought mysteriously into view.
Venice Pier (1976, 16 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by Gary Beydler
Shot spatially out of order on the Venice pier over the course of an entire year, Gary Beydler recomposed the footage in editing to make it proceed consistently forward in space, resulting in an intricate mixing up of chronology. Some cuts could represent a jump of months either forward or backward in time. The result is one of gauzy impressionism brought into vivid and breathtaking clarity.
Picasso (1973, 3 min., 16mm, (4/8/1973), B/W, sound)
Directed by Chris Langdon
“When Picasso died I wanted to make the first post-mortem documentary, as I knew would happen anyway, and cheaply. The film took four hours to finish from camera to print and cost a little under $5.” –Chris Langdon
Sears Sox (1968, 5 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by Pat O’Neill, Neon Park, and Chick Strand
A bonus presentation of a short piece of commercial work done by three legendary L.A. artists.
(more…)
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Wednesday May 27, 2009, 7:30 pm
At the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, Wilshire at Westwood
Los Angeles Filmforum, UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Hammer Museum present
Restoring the Los Angeles Avant-Garde: Thom Andersen and Morgan Fisher
Thom Andersen, Morgan Fisher and Academy preservationist Mark Toscano in person!
FREE Admission!
**NOTE THE CHANGE IN DATE, LOCATION, AND PRICE**
--- ------- (1966-67)
Since its formal inception in 1992, the Academy Film Archive has been working diligently to preserve and restore independent and experimental films. However, over the last five years, the Academy Archive has trained an additional focus on the work of Los Angeles-based artists.
As more films have come to the Academy, and more have been preserved or restored, a fascinating portrait of the Los Angeles avant-garde scene has begun to emerge. While films produced by artists in New York and San Francisco have historically been given an inordinate precedence in accounts of such work, an astonishingly diverse and extensive world of vital avant-garde filmmaking was–and still is–going on right here. Accordingly, the title of this special two-night screening series has a double meaning.
All of the films presented in this program are by Los Angeles artists featuring prints restored by the Academy and making their Los Angeles restoration premieres. But in addition to highlighting the important work of the Academy–and by this selection of film artists, in particular–this series aims to contribute to the growing recognition of Los Angeles, then and now, as a significant center of avant-garde production.
Phi Phenomenon (1968)
Thom Andersen and Morgan Fisher:
For the last 45 years, Morgan Fisher and Thom Andersen have been filmmakers, collaborators and friends.
In brilliantly lucid and conceptually rich films and media installations, Fisher has deeply and thoughtfully explored the many facets of the medium and the cinematic experience itself with great wit, intelligence and epiphany.
Andersen, perhaps best known for his most recent, internationally acclaimed film, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), also produced a vital body of short experimental work in the 1960s that exhibits a powerful combination of rigorous artistic clarity and profoundly felt humanism.
This evening’s program offers a very rare opportunity not only to see newly restored prints of Fisher and Andersen’s early film work, but to meet the artists in person for a discussion about their ideas, their films and their friendship and collaboration over the years.
Melting (1964-65, 6 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by Thom Andersen
“Melting is remarkable for its alluding to a forgotten history and its prescience of history to come. Thirty-odd years after Bataille announced the informe, and 32 years before Bois and Krauss brought the informe back from history, and before Bois characterized melting in this way, Thom made his film. What Thom calls the sundae’s passage from edibility to waste, perfectly embodies the entropic. What once could have been eaten now cannot. Waste is something that nothing more can be made of; it has no further use.” –Morgan Fisher
Olivia’s Place (1966/74, 6 min., 16mm, , color, sound,)
Directed by Thom Andersen
“Olivia may have felt no need to change, but the world around her was not bound by such an impractical sentiment. Olivia’s Place is gone. The site where it used to stand is now a sort of plaza between two large old wood frame houses that were moved to their present location from elsewhere in the city. One of these houses is occupied by a restaurant, the other is occupied by the California Heritage Museum.” –Morgan Fisher
--- ------- (1966-67)
— ——- (1966-67, 12 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by Thom Andersen and Malcolm Brodwick
“I consider Thom and Malcolm’s film to be groundbreaking in its brilliant demonstration of the power of a rule to construct a film that unifies shots taken at different times and places. And it is also noteworthy for the new model of the documentary film that it proposes. The brilliance of — ——- is that it refuses the power of montage as that idea has been conventionally understood, only to rediscover its power in a different form, on a new plane. Somewhere Eisenstein describes montage as that mode of construction that goes beyond representing the appearance of an event to capture the feeling of it. — ——- operates in this way, but in a realm that is particularly resistant to representation by means of images, that of memory.” –Morgan Fisher
Documentary Footage (1968, 11 min., 16mm, color, sound)
Directed by Morgan Fisher
Naturalness willfully corrupted by inevitable self-consciousness, unwittingly corrupted by unavoidable naturalness, a role played with incredible nuance and complexity by Maurine Connor.
Production Footage (1971, 10 min., 16mm, color & B/W, silent)
Directed by Morgan Fisher
“The cinematic mechanism cannot be completely deconstructed without resort to other means of mechanical image reproduction; a double system of representation is required; the apparent naturalness of the cinematic sign must be put into question by other indexical signs.” –Thom Andersen
Phi Phenomenon (1968, 11 min., 16mm, B/W, silent)
Directed by Morgan Fisher
The phi phenomenon is a perceptual illusion (first described in 1912 by Max Wertheimer) in which a succession of still images produces a disembodied perception of motion. “Phi Phenomenon is astonishing precisely because its object is so familiar, and it fascinates me because it is a motion picture in which there is movement but no apparent movement.” –Thom Andersen
Turning Over (1975, 13 min., Video, B/W, sound)
Directed by Morgan Fisher
Documented live to tape in San Francisco, October 17, 1975.
Total running time of films: approx. 70 min.
Funding for this series was provided by the UCLA Arts Initiative.
(more…)
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Sunday May 17, 2009, 7:30 pm
At the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood
6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas. Park at the Hollywood & Highland complex, $2 for 4 hours with validation. Bring your parking ticket to the theater.
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Descent: Three Stories of Family
Curator and Filmmaker LeAnn Erickson in person!
Descent: Three Stories of Family features three documentaries that explore familial relationships, personal stories, and cultural traditions. Investigating the human landscape through the lens of three distinct stylistic approaches, this documentary program highlights and deconstructs the theme of family.
Folk Songs, by LeAnn Erickson (2007, 12:20, 16mm/digital video)
Images of Flying and Falling, by Ariana Gerstein (2001, 24:00, 16mm/digital video)
No Man is an Island, by Sonja Lindén (2006, 40:20, 16mm)
No Man is an Island (2006)
With a total running time of 80 minutes, the program begins with the film Folk Songs, by university professor and independent video/filmmaker LeAnn Erickson. Folk Songs has been featured at numerous international film festivals including the 35th Athens Film and Video Festival (USA), Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival (Canada), and the Sofia International Film Festival (Bulgaria). A native of the American Midwest Erickson poetically reflects on ‘the old country’ her grandparents left behind when they left Russia in 1913 to settle in the US. In search of her roots, Erickson travels to Russia and back only to find that the path to her immigrant past lies within her family’s own traditions. The Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival program notes state: “This lyrical and impressionistic rumination on the filmmaker’s Bulgarian heritage explores the impact of family and tradition, the links between the old world and the new, and the simple, lovely gestures that unite generations.”
Next is Images of Flying and Falling by Ariana Gerstein, university professor and independent filmmaker. An experimental documentary featured at such international venues as the Black Maria Film Festival (USA), the European Media Arts Festival (Germany) and the San Francisco International Film Festival (USA), Images of Flying and Falling uses moving and still photographic images to revive and recount lost memories of her deceased grandmother. As if piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, Gerstein strategically layers and aligns images and sounds as she reconstructs stories and searches for answers. Gerstein states, “Images of Flying and Falling, is an attempt to connect and hold onto the elusive- asking the viewer- what is reality and how do we shape it in the age of personal computers?”
Images of Flying and Falling (2001)
The final film in the compilation is No Man Is an Island. Sonja Lindén, an independent filmmaker from Finland, combines observational techniques with poetic collage as she follows her father over the course of a year in her documentary No man is an Island. Screening at such internationally acclaimed festivals as the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival (UK), DOK Leipzig (Germany), and the 47th Krakow Film Festival (Poland) No man is an Island is an intimate and loving portrait of Kristen Lindén, a man who has dwelled alone on an island for the past 16 years. As father Linden chops wood, prepares for winter and builds his own coffin, what emerges is a closely observed analysis of existence in its simplest form told with humor and loving respect. Helsinki Documentary Film Festival program notes: “The most touching subjects are found close. No man is an Island portrays the filmmaker’s father poetically, with beautiful and carefully considered photography and music.”
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