Sunday May 18, 2008, 7:00 pm

At the Silent Movie Theatre
611 N. Fairfax Ave. just south of Melrose
Park across the street (free) at Fairfax High School

Los Angeles Filmforum, NewTown and CineFamily present
Noisy People — Films plus a live performance!
Funded in part through Meet The Composer’s MetLife Creative Connections program.

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE IN TICKET PRICES FOR THIS SHOW:
$15 general/$12 members (Cinefamily and Filmforum)
For advance tickets, visit CineFamily’s ticketing website.

Noisy People (2006, 76 minutes, video) Feel like blowing into the wrong end of a horn or slapping a drum with a head of lettuce? These folks do it, and make beautiful music. Skronking saxes, manipulated violins, superb synthesizers - freely improvised or thoroughly composed … Noisy People is a feature-length video documentary following the tightly-knit group of unusual sound artists and musicians from the San Francisco improvisational music community.

But even better, after the screening will be a LIVE PERFORMANCE by a quartet of the subjects of the film — Tom Dill (trumpet), Gino Robair (percussion/electronics), Phillip Greenlief (sax) — and the filmmaker Tim Perkis (electronics). A Q&A session with the performers will follow the screening. More on the film can be found here.

Filmmaker Tim Perkis, himself a well-respected player in the Bay Area experimental music scene, followed his subjects for a year, filming them in their homes and studios, rehearsals and performances. What emerges is a set of funny and lively portraits of some very creative and quirky people — and a portrait of a way of life outside the commercial musical mainstream of America.

They’re not making a living at it — but these artists have pursued their work passionately and in the process have created a world-wide following and a supportive community at home. These are people, who, as composer John Shiurba put it, “aren’t going somewhere, but who ARE somewhere.”

The film features George Cremaschi, Tom Djll, Greg Goodman, Phillip Greenlief, Cheryl Leonard, Dan Plonsey, Gino Robair, Damon Smith. Also appearing are dozens of other creative musicians, including Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith and Jack Wright.

Bios of the filmmaker & performers (click on Keep Reading for more):

Tim Perkis (filmmaker, musician, electronics)
TIM PERKIS has been working in the medium of live electronic and computer sound for many years, performing, exhibiting installation works and recording in North America,Europe and Japan. His work has largely been concerned with exploring the emergence of life-like properties in complex systems of interaction.In addition, he is a well known performer in the world of improvised music, having performed on his electronic improvisation instruments with hundreds of artists and groups, including Chris Brown, John Butcher, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith, Gianni Gebbia, Frank Gratkowski, Luc Houtkamp, Yoshi Ichiraku, Joelle Leandre, Roscoe Mitchell, Gino Robair, ROVA saxophone quartet, Elliott Sharp, Leo Wadada Smith and John Zorn. Ongoing groups he has founded or played in include the League of Automatic Music Composers and the Hub — pioneering live computer network bands — and Rotodoti, the Natto Quartet, Fuzzybunny, All Tomorrow’s Zombies and Wobbly/Perkis/Antimatter.

Recordings of his work are available on several labels: Artifact, Limited Sedition, 482, Lucky Garage, Praemedia, Rastascan and Tzadik (USA); EMANEM(UK); Sonore and Meniscus(France); Curva Minore and Snowdonia (Italy); XOR(Netherlands); Creative Sources(Portugal).

Noisy People is his first feature-length film.

Tom Djll (trumpet)
Born Indiana, 1957. DJILL studied music at Berklee School of Music, the Colorado College, the Creative Music Studio, and Mills College with Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Karl Berger, Lester Bowie, Leo Smith, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, and many others. Tom has spent over twenty years using the trumpet as an analog flesh synthesizer. He has made a lifelong study of the art of improvised music, and has been performing since age seventeen. He has performed with Natsuki Tamura, Andrew Voigt, Biggi Vinkeloe, Chris Brown, Gianni Gebbia, Steve Adams, Fred Frith, and many many others. Tom Djll also writes about music for The Wire, Signal To Noise and other publications. He is also a graphic designer and photographer.

Phillip Greenlief (sax)
Since 1982, Saxophonist/Composer Phillip Greenlief has performed internationally in a variety of settings. Greenlief’s recordings and performances have received critical acclaim in many national jazz publications (Down Beat, Jazz Times, 5/4, Cadence, Modern Saxophone, All About Jazz, The Los Angeles Times, etc.), as well as residing on many Critics Top 10 lists. His duo recordings of improvised music with bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Scott Amendola received 5 stars in the 1999 Music Hound Jazz Essential Album Guide. Phillip is the founder of Evander Music, an independent record label that presents original composition, improvised music and new jazz.

Gino Robair (percussion/electronics)
Gino Robair is a percussionist, music journalist, and published composer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Gino frequently tours North America and Europe as a soloist and often improvises in ad-hoc groups. He has performed and/or recorded with Anthony Braxton, Tom Waits, John Butcher, LaDonna Smith, Otomo Yoshihide, Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn, Nina Hagen, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Myra Melford, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, The Club Foot Orchestra, and he is a founding member of the Splatter Trio. His web site is here.

Sunday May 4, 2008, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Southern California Video: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

Filmforum highlights the work of four artists whose work cries out for more exhibition – significant pieces by fine artists of their media. In the second evening of four, we host Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, the Yonemotos will present several works, old and new.

California-based artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto deconstruct and rewrite the hyperbolic vernacular with which the mass media constructs cultural mythologies. Ironically employing the image-language and narrative syntax of popular forms, such as soap opera, Hollywood melodrama and TV advertising, they work from “the inside out” to expose the media’s pervasive manipulation of reality and fantasy.
For more on the Yonemotos, click here or here.

Vault (1984, 11:45 min, color, sound) Directed and edited by Norman Yonemoto. In this tour-de-force of stylized deconstruction, the Yonemotos rewrite a traditional narrative of desire — boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Employing the hyperbolic, melodramatic syntax of Hollywood movies and commercial TV, they decode the Freudian symbology and manipulative tactics that underlie media representations of romantic love, and expose the power of this media “reality” to construct personal fictions. Using the psychoanalytic language of advertising, cinematic and television texts to tell the love story of a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter, they rupture the narrative with psychosexual metaphors and references to pop media and art. Self-conscious strategies such as overtly Freudian symbols, flashback reconstructions of childhood traumas, Wagnerian orchestration and loaded cliches are wielded with deft irony. Vault, which has been termed a “deadpan homage to Bunuel’s amour fou melodramas,” critiques and celebrates the artifice of mass media mythologies.

Blinky (1988, 15:30 min, color, sound) by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto and Jeffrey Vallance. Writes Bruce Yonemoto, “In the novella Blinky The Friendly Hen (1978), artist Jeffrey Vallance documented the supermarket purchase of a frozen chicken and its burial in the Los Angeles S.P.C.A. Pet Memorial Park. Naming the fryer Blinky, Vallance transformed poultry into pet, paying tribute to the billions of hens sacrificed each year for our consumption. Ten years later questions of the true cause of Blinky’s death continue to swirl. Blinky, the videotape, documents the search for this cause. Alas, like the shroud of Turin, Blinky’s death cannot be completely resolved. Blinky’s ten-year story ends where it began, in our culture’s glistening, dreamlike symbol of heavenly closure, the supermarket.”

Kappa (1986, 26 min, color, sound) By Bruce and Norman Yonemoto in collaboration with Mike Kelley. Kappa is a boldly provocative and original work. Deconstructing the myth of Oedipus within the framework of an ancient Japanese folk story, the Yonemotos craft a highly charged discourse of loss and desire. Quoting from Bunuel, Freud, pop media and art, they place the symbology of Western psychosexual analytical theory into a cross-cultural context, juxtaposing the Oedipal and Kappa myths in a delirious collusion of form and content. The Kappa, a malevolent Japanese water imp, is played with eerie intensity by artist Mike Kelley; actress Mary Woronov plays Jocasta as a vamp from a Hollywood exploitation film. Steeped in perversions and violent longings, both the Kappa and Oedipus legends are presented in highly stylized, purposefully “degraded” forms, reflecting their media-exploitative cultural contexts. In this ironic yet oddly poignant essay of psychosexual compulsion and catharsis, the Yonemotos demonstrate that even in debased forms, cultural archetypes hold the power to move and manipulate.

Sounds Like the Sound of Music (2005, 3.30 min, video) by Bruce Yonemoto. Sounds Like The Sound of Music (2005) draws from two distinct and seemingly unrelated Hollywood film classics, George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy (specifically, the Reagan-era Return of the Jedi) and Robert Wise’s 1965 musical, The Sound of Music. Both films express Hollywood’s associations to political narratives of their times: The Sound of Music dramatized Post-War nostalgia for European ideals at the dawn of the Nazi regime; and Star Wars’ depiction of the “good vs. evil” ethos surrounding the final years of the Cold-War era. These relationships to war and cultural imperialism are of great interest to Yonemoto, especially when filtered through the Hollywood entertainment machine.

Filmed in Cuzco, Peru, Yonemoto’s video recreates the opening sequence from The Sound of Music, replacing the Austrian Alps with the Peruvian Andes, the village of Salzberg with Incan ruins and Julie Andrews with a young Andean boy. Sweeping aerial views and a solitary figure accompany the soundtrack, sung by the Andean boy. His song is a translated version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s infective melody into the indigenous Incan language of Quechua, spoken by 13 million people throughout the Andes and South America. Yet the language is probably best known through its place in popular culture; George Lucas’ villain Jabba the Hut (an icon of “Orientalized” evil; a late-Twentieth-Century Godzilla), spoke this disappearing language.
Yonemoto’s work further complicates binary approaches to expressing post-Colonialism by incorporating many ingredients: escapist Hollywood cinema and aspirational Broadway musicals; youth culture and optimism; landscape and cultural artifact; indigenous voices and melodic universality; Europe, Asia, and the Americas; Pre-War, Post-War and Cold War. The resulting mixture is equally complex: beauty and romance, memento and memorial, personal and political.

Papa (the original potato eaters) (2006, 11:14 min, video) by Bruce Yonemoto. Papa (the original potato eaters) is a new media installation by Bruce Yonemoto. Potatoes, indigenous to the farmlands of Andean Peru serve as the principle metaphor in this revisionist documentary. Papa replicates Vincent Van Gogh’s original composition, The Potato Eaters. The “uncivilized, unpeeled dusty faces” of the original Dutch peasants are portrayed by an indigenous Andean Quechua gamily who continue to this day “to earn their meals honestly.”
The Potato Eaters by Vincent Van Gogh has been called his first masterpiece. Painted in 1885, Van Gogh, like the French master Jean-François Millet, wanted to be a true “peasant painter.” This meant Van Gogh tried to paint his subjects with deep feeling, but without sentimentality. He spoke of them leading “a way of life completely different from ours, from that of civilized people.” He strove to paint the faces, “the color of a good, dusty potato, unpeeled naturally,” and to convey the idea that these people had “used the same hands with which they now take food from the plate to dig the earth […] and had thus earned their meal honestly.” (excerpted from the Van Gogh Museum catalogue)

Frederic Jameson in his writing The Deconstruction of Expression wrote that “in Van Gogh [the painting], that content, those initial raw materials, are, I will suggest, to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menace, primitive and marginalized state.”

Following, the model of Luis Bunuel’s landmark 1932 surrealist documentary, Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes), Papa (the original potato eaters) attempts to parody the discourse typically adopted by the ‘voice of god’ documentary form, simply by bringing the underlying elitism of such formalism to the foreground – the distance that is inherent to ‘objectivity’ is revealed merely as cynicism.

Yonemoto has written, “For the great Irish potato famine to Van Gogh’s dark painting, the potato has represented misery. Why should a life of living from the land be one of misery? The prevalent documentary content of ‘marginalized peasant misery’ will be the central image under scrutiny. Does a documentary made in the West always have to portray people of the third world as being unhappy? Papa (the original potato eaters) presents a contemporary Peruvian family whose modest lives contrast with Van Gogh’s representation of stark rural poverty and Jamesons’ whole object world of agricultural misery.”

Video teaser can be viewed here.

A Norman Yonemoto Clip Joint (2007, 20 minute clip of a 45 minute video), by Norman Yonemoto. Clip Joint is a video assemblage of clips and short sequences from motion pictures mostly produced before 1964. Yonemoto isolates these clips from their predominantly Hollywood movie context and creates a new narrative with its own unique logic and meaning.

The polished surface of Hollywood classic movies creates a hyperbolic dream state of surprising complexity no matter how shallow the movies’ content may be. Perfected by an army of artists and technicians of the early Hollywood studio system from 1915 to 1929, these powerful images manipulate the movie-goers’ emotions as well as suspending their disbelief. Yonemoto blends these compelling images into a potent brew of self-reflection and deconstruction.

Sunday April 20, 2008, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
An Evening with Carolee Schneeman

The first of three rare Los Angeles screenings of the work of Carolee Schneemann, with the filmmaker in person.

Carolee Schneemann has never ceased to cross mediums and boundaries to make work that resonates with raw poetic power. From her collaged war or diary films and provocative performances to her photos, paintings and installations, Schneemann’s varied creations deconstruct our ingrained preconceptions and everyday assumptions. In words, images and actions, her art is deeply personal, sharply critical, intensely expressive, and always innovative. Tonight at Filmforum we’ll present part III of Schneemann’s “Autobiographical Trilogy”, Kitch’s Last Meal, a rarely screened dual projection work, along with work to be announced

“Prior to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire.” — Jan Avgikos, Artforum

“The magnitude of Schneemann’s influence is undeniable… When she describes her body as a pleasurable weapon, a missile she sends into our repressive culture to blow it apart, Madonna’s in-your-face eroticism immediately comes to mind.” – Jane Harris, Plexus

(notes by Berenice Reynaud)

This program is part of a series of screenings of the work of Carolee Schneemann that takes place in Los Angeles April 20-25, 2008 at the following venues: Los Angeles Filmforum (April 20), REDCAT (April 21) and UCLA Film & Television Archive (April 25)

Kitch’s Last Meal (1973-78, 54 mins, Super 8mm screening as 16mm, color, dual projection, separate sound)
New restoration of original film reels/separate sound – May 2007
Part III of “Autobiographical Trilogy”.

Schneemann’s cat, Kitch, which was featured in works such as Fuses, was a major figure in Schneemann’s work for almost twenty years. The moving conclusion to the autobiographical trilogy was originally shot on Super-8. The film documents the routines of daily life whilst time passes, a relationship winds down and death closes in: filming and recording stopped when the elderly cat died.

The soundtrack mixes personal reminiscences with ambient sounds of the household, and includes the original text used for Schneemann’s 1975 performance Interior Scroll.

The preservation of Kitch’s Last Meal was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and realized by the Anthology Film Archives.

Plus additional works to be announced.

Special Thanks to Steve Anker for arrangements for this evening’s program.

The history of Carolee Schneemann’s work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body. Her work questions the exclusivity of traditional western categories by creating a space of complementarity, mutuality, and integration and she has transformed the very definition of art, especially with regard to discourses concerning the body, sexuality, and technology.

Born in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania, she received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. She began her art career as a painter in the late 1950s. Her painting work began to adopt some of the characteristics of Neo-Dada art, as she used box structures coupled with expressionist brushwork. In 1962, Schneemann and her then-husband composer James Tenney moved to New York, where they became involved in the art and music scene and met Claes Oldenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, George Brecht, Malcolm Goldstein, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Schneemann started working with the artists of the Judson Church, and participated in works such as Oldenberg’s Store Days (1962) and Robert Morris’s Site (1964) where she played a living version of Edward Manet’s Olympia. She began to use her nude body in works, feeling that it needed to be seized back from the status of a cultural possession.

Production on her work Eye Body began in 1962. Schneemann created a “loft environment” filled with broken mirrors, motorized umbrellas, and rhythmic color units. To become a piece of the art herself, she covered herself in various materials including grease, chalk, and plastic. In 1964, the reworking of original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy in Paris, London and New York City ushered Schneemann into film and video-making.

The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, featured a retrospective of Schneemann’s works entitled “Up To And Including Her Limits” in 1998 In 2007, a dual exhibit at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo NY & MOCCA Toronto featured recent video installations. Electronic Arts Intermix NYC and Anthology Film Archives NYC collaborated on presentations of newly restored and current film & videos November 2007. Her work has also been shown at such renowned institutions as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the London National Film Theatre.

She has been the recipient of Media Grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, as well as grants from the Gottlieb Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrea Frank Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Schneemann has taught at several universities, including the California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter College and Rutgers University, where she was the first female art professor hired.

MIT Press has just published Imaging Her Erotics - Essays, Interviews, Projects. Editions of Schneemann’s previous writing includes; More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979, 1997); Video Burn (1992); Early and Recent Work (1983); ABC - We Print Anything - In The Cards (1977); Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter (1976); and Parts of a Body House Book (1972). Correspondence Course, a selection of her letters edited by Kristine Stiles is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Partial Film/Videography (works directed by Schneemann)

1965 Viet-Flakes
1966 Red News
1964-67 Fuses
1971 Plumb Line
1973-78 Kitch’s Last Meal
1992 Vesper’s Stampede To My Holy Mouth
1993-95 Interior Scroll - The Cave
1996 Known/Unknown - Plague Column.
1999 Vespers Pool.
2000 More Wrong Things
2003-04 Devour
2007 Carl Ruggles’ Christmas Breakfast
2007 Mop-Mop–Improvisation for Job at New York University
2008 Duo

For more on Carolee Schneemann, please visit her website.

ADDITIONAL SCREENINGS WITH CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN (Click on “Keep Reading”)

Monday April 21 - Program at REDCAT – 8:00 pm

An Evening with Carolee Schneemann
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series

This special evening with Schneemann features a collection of some of the most highly charged political statements, erotic episodes and domestic disturbances in American avant-garde cinema. The program includes three beautifully restored 16mm films, Fuses (1965–7, 29 min., silent), Viet-Flakes (1965, 11 min.), Plumb Line (1968–71, 18 min.), and a recent video, Devour (2003–4, 7:52 min.).

1964-67 Fuses
Film - 16mm, color, silent.
New restoration of original 16mm collaged print–May 2007, 29:51 min.
Part of “Autobiographical Trilogy”. Filming begun in 1964. This self-shot erotic film remains a controversial classic. With awards at Cannes (1968), the Yale Film Festival (1992), and showings at Museums and Universities internationally, Fuses has nevertheless encountered censorship over the years. “[A]notorious masterpiece, a silent celebration in color of heterosexual love making, the film unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, super-imposition and layering of abstract impressions scratched into the celluloid itself… Fuses succeeds perhaps more than any other film in objectifying the sexual streamings of the body’s mind.” - The Guardian

1965 Viet-Flakes
Film - 8mm printed to 16mm, b/w, toned. 11 minutes. Sound collage by James Tenney.
Composed from an obsessive collection of Vietnam War atrocity images, compiled over five years from foreign magazine and newspapers. Schneemann uses the 8mm camera to “travel” within the photographs producing a volatile animation. Broken rhythms and visual fractures are heightened by a sound collage by James Tenney of Vietnamese religious chants, secular songs, fragments of Bach, 60s pop hits. “One of the most effective indictments of the Vietnam War ever made.” – Robert Enright, Border Crossings.

1971 Plumb Line
Film - Super 8, step printed to 16mm, color, sound. 18 minutes, sound by C. Schneemann.
Part II of “Autobiographical Trilogy”. Filming begun in 1968. The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8mm is printed as 16mm, moving images freeze, frames reoccur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames, consuming it’s own substance.

2003-04 Devour
Multi-channel color video projection with sound. (7:52 minutes)
“Devour” is a multi-channel video projection realized with support from a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Grant and an Eyebeam Artist Residency. Perceptual tensions drive a range of images edited to contrast evanescent, fragile elements with violent, concussive, speeding fragments. Looped sources of the imagery combine political disasters, domestic intimacy and the ambiguous menace within enlarged details of gestures—both human and mechanical.

The Jack H. Skirball Screening Series is curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud

Friday April 25, 2008, UCLA Film & Television Archive – 7:30 pm

New and Recent Videos by Carolee Schneemann
Schneemann will present a selection of recently released videos, including: Duo (2008), which incorporates extracts from her earlier Infinity Kisses and completes her exploration of human and feline sensual communication; Interior Scroll—The Cave (1995), a performance in a vast underground cave in which Schneemann and seven nude women perform the ritualized actions of “Interior Scroll”— reading the text as each woman slowly extracts a scroll from her vagina; Vesper’s Stampede to My Holy Mouth (1992), in which Victoria Vesna and Schneemann explore suppressed feminist issues of female subjugation, the unconscious, the paranormal and goddess religions; Devour (2003-04), a montage that Schneemann describes as contrasting “evanescent, fragile elements with violent, concussive, speeding fragments… political disasters, domestic intimacy, and ambiguous menace”; Mop-Mop–Improvisation for Job at New York University (2007), which captures an interview for a teaching position that Schneemann spontaneously transformed into a performance; the newly reedited version of Americana I Ching Apple Pie (2007), which documents the artist in front of a packed lecture hall as she demonstrates, with hilarious and deadpan delivery, how to make the quintessential American dessert—apple pie; Body Collage (1967), in which Schneemann paints her body with wallpaper paste and then rolls through a floor covered in shredded paper, transforming herself into a constantly changing, moving collage. (This film was preserved through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the NFPF.); Meat Joy (1964), an erotic rite, a celebration of flesh as material that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.
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April 6 and April 13, 2008, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Heinz Emigholz: Photography and Beyond

Filmforum is hosting the Opening Night and Closing Night screenings of a Week-Long City-Wide Screening Series with Emigholz in Person

For the past 15 years, the idiosyncratic Berlin filmmaker Heinz Emigholz has created a series of films documenting the work of certain 20th-century architects for whom he feels a special affinity. For the first time, five different venues in Los Angeles are joining together to present a week of events centered around this remarkable filmmaker and his Photography and Beyond series. Over the week, nine films from Photography and Beyond will be screened with Emigholz in attendance at Los Angeles Filmforum at the Egyptian Theatre, REDCAT, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Emigholz will also be featured in conversation with filmmaker and teacher Thom Andersen and architect, author and Schindler expert Judith Sheine at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Tonight we’ll be screening three earlier films from the series: Basis of Make-Up II, Miscellanea I, and Miscellanea II.

Since 1984, Emigholz has been working on the acclaimed series, Photography and Beyond, which consists of formally rigorous, revelatory films that examine artistic creativity – in particular the work of architects. It is a series of twenty-five films about art and design – “projections” that become visible as writings, drawings, photography, architecture and sculpture. In these films, Emigholz states, he “look[s] at architectural spaces that I believe have been sorely neglected by ‘architectural history’.” What attracts him particularly is the complex organization of interior spaces and the spatial relations between a building and its immediate surroundings.

The films presented in the Los Angeles film series trace a history of direct influences: Rudolph M. Schindler (1887–1953) studied with Adolf Loos, who was influenced by Louis H. Sullivan. Emigholz’s cinematic “archives” of these architects’ existing buildings, with minimal commentary, provide a rare opportunity for careful contemplation and study of the space, light, and materials of architecture. “I believe that everyone perceives space differently and that art and structure arise out of the perception of these nuances,” Emigholz says. “The world reveals itself to us, and we show each other the world—not just different facets, but our different views. During peacetime, this is an endless process that deserves to be loved.”

[Notes expanded from a text by Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive].

Coordinated by Adam Hyman, Executive Director, Los Angeles Filmforum, the Heinz Emigholz screening series takes place in Los Angeles April 6-13, 2008, at the following venues: Los Angeles Filmforum (April 6 & April 13), REDCAT (April 7) LACMA (April 10), MAK Center (April 11) and UCLA Film & Television Archive (April 12). This series represents an unprecedented cooperation among leading alternative venues in this dispersed city, allowing filmgoers to attend events wherever it is convenient.

Program made possible with the support of the Austrian Consulate General Los Angeles:

Born in 1948 near Bremen, Heinz Emigholz studied drawing in Hamburg. Since 1973, he has worked as a freelance filmmaker, artist, cameraman, actor, author, publisher and producer in Germany and the United States. He has published a number of books, given lectures and has had many exhibitions and retrospectives. In 1974 he started working on the encyclopedic drawing series The Basis of Make-up. In 1978, he founded his own production company, Pym Films. Since 1993, he has been teaching experimental film directing at the Berlin College of Arts. His most recent film, Loos Ornamental, premiered at the Berlinale in February 2008. A major exhibition of his series The Basis of Make-Up recently appeared at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany, from December 2007 to February 2008. Complete details on his art and films can be found here.

April 6 show at Filmforum (full details)

April 13 show at Filmforum (full details)

Information on non-Filmforum shows in this series: REDCAT, LACMA, MAK CENTER, and UCLA FILM AND TELEVISION ARCHIVE.

FOR MORE ON THE OTHER SCREENINGS IN THE HEINZ EMIGHOLZ PHOTOGRAPHY AND BEYOND FILM SERIES, CLICK “KEEP READING” BELOW.

Mon Apr 7 – REDCAT - 8 pm

Schindler’s Houses (Photography and Beyond 12) (Germany, 2007, 99 min., 35mm, color)
West Coast premiere
THIS SCREENING IS ALREADY SOLD OUT. Schindler’s Houses is screening again on April 12 at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. See below.

Jack H. Skirball Screening Series

This encounter with the “space architecture” of fellow maverick Rudolph Schindler (1887–1953), who practiced in Los Angeles from 1922 to 1953, seems not only natural but almost inevitable, and Schindler’s Houses has become the most popular of Emigholz’s architecture films, even as his rejection of all the clichés and conventions of architectural photography has sparked controversy. Schindler’s Houses is also a witty and incisive portrait of Los Angeles, perhaps the best documentary about the city ever made.

“Schindler’s Houses” shows forty buildings by the Austro-American architect Rudolph Schindler from the years 1931 to 1952. Schindler’s pioneering work in Southern California is the cornerstone of “California stye” residential architecture. All the material for the film was shot in May 2006. The film is thus also an up-to-date portrait of urban life in Los Angeles that has never been documented in this form before. More on the film at http://www.rudolph-schindler-film.com/

”Architecture projects space into this world. Cinemaphotography translates that space into pictures projected in time. Cinema then is used in a completely new way: as a space to meditate on buildings.“ –
–Heinz Emigholz
REDCAT is located in downtown Los Angeles at the corner of W. 2nd St. and S. Hope St., inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex.

Tickets are $9 for the general public, $7 for students with valid ID. Tickets may be purchased by calling 213.237.2800 or at www.redcat.org or in person at the REDCAT Box Office on the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets (30 minutes free parking with validation).
The Jack H. Skirball Screening Series is curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud

Thursday April 10 - LACMA – 7:30 pm

Los Angeles Premiere
Goff in The Desert (Photography and Beyond 7) (2002/03, 35mm, color, 110 min.)
A look at the work of Kansas-born architect Bruce Goff, who used brick, wood, glass, and stone to create surprising patterns and take buildings in radical directions. The film shows 62 buildings – from small petrol stations to representative museums – designed by the American architect Bruce Goff (1904-1982). As such, it is the first comprehensive filmic catalogue of nearly all his surviving creations. Bruce Goff is the great unknown of an original American form of architecture. His constructions and designs run contrary to the ideals of the by contrast well-known International Style movement. Bruce Goff’s work sparked legendary controversies during his lifetime. Nearly all his buildings stood like a shock in the landscape, paving the way for new, as yet unimaginable avenues in architecture. Includes the Japanese Pavilion at LACMA. More on the film at http://www.bruce-goff-film.com/en/english.html

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Leo S. Bing Theatre, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036
Admission to the screening is FREE, but tickets are required and can be picked up at the box office from noon on the day of the screening. Information: (323) 857-6010

Friday, April 11 – MAK Center – 7:00 pm

Reception for Heinz Emigholz at R.M. Schindler’s landmark Kings Road House/Studio (1921- 22). The evening will include a conversation between Heinz Emigholz, noted experimental filmmaker Thom Andersen, and architect, author and Schindler expert Judith Sheine. In addition to enjoying the exchange between Emigholz, Andersen, and Sheine, visitors will be able to tour the house and grounds of Schindler’s signature creation.

MAK Center for Art and Architecture
The Schindler House, 835 North Kings Road, West Hollywood CA 90069, 323-651-1510
Open to the public, $7 admission, free for Friends of the Schindler House

Saturday April 12 – UCLA Film & Television Archive – 7:00 pm
North American Premiere
Loos Ornamental (Photography and Beyond 13) (2008, 35mm, color, 72 min.)

Emigholz’s latest film meticulously reveals the architecture of a pioneer of European Modernism, Adolf Loos (1870–1933). A mentor to both Schindler and Richard Neutra, Loos helped launch modern architecture with his foundational text decrying decorative building, fittingly titled Ornament and Crime, in 1908. Loos Ornamental shows 28 still-existing buildings and interiors by the Viennese architect in the order of their construction. Loos’s vehement turn against ornamentation on buildings triggered a controversy in architectural theory while the “spatial plan” he developed launched a new way of thinking about built space. His houses, furniture for shops and apartments, facades, and monuments were built between 1899 and 1931. They were filmed in 2006 in Vienna, Lower Austria, Prague, Brno, Pilsen, Nachod, and Paris. More on the film here.

Saturday April 12 – UCLA Film & Television Archive – 8:45 pm (Separate admission)
Schindler’s Houses (Photography and Beyond 12) (2007, 35mm, color, 99 min.)
Emigholz depicts 40 buildings by architect Rudolph Schindler, revealing Schindler’s singular vision, his acute attention to spatial relations and to the natural environment, and his captivating and idiosyncratic architectural vocabulary. For full film notes, see April 7 above.

UCLA Film & Television Archive
Billy Wilder Theater, located on the courtyard level of the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., at the northeast corner of the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Blvds., just east of the 405.
$9 general; $8 Cineclub members/students/seniors; $7 Cineclub members who are seniors/students. $10 advance tickets; purchase online at www.cinema.ucla.edu. Separate admission for each show.
Parking: $3 in the lot under the theater. Enter from Westwood Blvd., just north of Wilshire

Sunday April 13, 2008, 7:00 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Heinz Emigholz: Photography and Beyond

Closing Night show of a week-long series

Sullivan’s Banks (Photography and Beyond 2) (1993-2000, 35mm, color, 38 min.)
Emigholz presents the buildings of the great American architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924).
At the age of thirty-five, Sullivan was one of America’s most famous architects. The skyscraper trilogy (”Wainwright Building”, St. Louis 1892, “Guaranty Building”, Buffalo 1896, “Bayard Building”, NYC 1899) that he designed together with Dankmar Adler can be found in every dictionary of architecture. The basis of his creations was the separation of construction and facade made possible by the invention of reinforced concrete. He consistently draped his buildings with facades that no longer had a load-bearing function as a form of free expression. From one building to the next, both inside and outside, he varied and perfected his modular ornamental designs in brick, steel, plaster, terracotta, glass, ceramics, mosaic, marble, light, relief, stencil designs, wood and metal.

We find ourselves in the heart of Americana. Walt Whitman was Sullivan’s role model, and just like him, Sullivan drew upon the sign language of nature rather than historical styles. This language is accessible to all and is therefore the basis of democracy. Democracy must be a vessel for the repetition of human experience. Its sites must preserve human dignity.

“All buildings have arisen, have stood, and stand as physical symbols of the psychic state of the people … throughout the past and the present, each building stands as a social act”, Sullivan wrote in the 1906 essay ‘What is Architecture’.

“In everything that men do they leave an indelible imprint of their minds. If this suggestion be followed out, it will become surprisingly clear how each and every building reveals itself naked to the eye; how its every aspect, to the smallest detail, to the lightest move of the hand, reveals the workings of the mind of the man who made it, and who is responsible to us for it.”

More on the film can be found here.

Miscellanea III (Photography and Beyond 10) (1997-2004, 35mm, 22 min.)
A collage of architectural footage taken in the U.S. in April and May 2002 during the filming of Goff in the Desert and in Italy after March 24, 1997 in preparation for the project D’Annunzio’s Cave. MISCELLANEA (III) shows the portal, designed by Louis H. Sullivan, to the Chicago Stock Exchange on Monroe Street in Chicago, which was erected in 1894 and torn down in 1972; ruins of a glass factory in Henryetta, Oklahoma, from which Bruce Goff bought the colorful pieces of glass he often used; a railway bridge over a creek in the desert on Highway 62; the General Patton Memorial Museum on Interstate Highway 10 and an intersection in Twenty Nine Palms, California; “Gateway West” - the Mexican border - and City Hall in El Paso, New Mexico; a study of downtown Oklahoma City and the national memorial designed by Hans Butzer in honor of the people killed in the bombing of the Murrah Building on April 19, 1995; the Community Center designed by William Wesley Peters in 1982 and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower from 1956 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; the Tower and geodesic Gold Dome that Robert B. Roloff built in 1958 in Oklahoma City from Buckminster Fuller’s plans; the jungle gym Bruce Goff built in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1963 for children; a Lockheed T-33, the training version of the first twin-jet US fighter plane, built on a German model, exhibited as a sculpture in front of the Center of Commerce in Del Rio, Texas; three buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright from the 1920s, in which Bruce Goff had a hand; the oldest cement fence in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the oldest brick silo near Bartlesville, and a concrete schoolhouse from the 1920s in Dewey, Oklahoma; the burial sites of Louis H. Sullivan and Bruce Goff in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago; the warship “Puglia” built into a mountain slope on the grounds of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s mausoleum, the “Vittoriale” in Gardone on Lake Garda - his body and those of ten loyal followers in sarcophagi on marble steles, high above Lake Garda. More on the film can be found here.

Maillart’s Bridges (Photography and Beyond 3) (2001, 35mm, 24 min.)
Swiss architect Robert Maillart revolutionized concrete-based construction. By reducing the material to the essential load-bearing elements and redesigning these in his structures, he developed a completely novel world of forms. The film shows fourteen concrete roof constructions and bridges designed and built by Robert Maillart between 1910 and 1935: The warehouse on Zurich’s Giesshübelstrasse (1910), the filter building in Rorschach (1912), the Maggazini Generali warehouse in Chiasso (1924), the aqueduct near Chatelard (1925), the bridge over the Valtschielbach (1925), Salginatobel Bridge (1930), Spital Bridge (1931), the bridges over the Bohlbach and the Rossgraben Bridge (all 1932), the bridge over the Schwandbach and the Thur Bridge near Felsegg (both 1933), the footbridge over the River Toess in Winterthur (1934) and the Arvebrücke near Geneva (1935). Shooting took place in April 1996.

The complex simplicity and elegance of the load-bearing structures set new aesthetic standards the world over. However, his rejection of massive construction methods and his reduction of forms to the essential lines of structural strength provoked mistrust among building authorities and led them to impose absurd conditions. His pioneering experiments can be found in out-of-the-way valleys of small cantons which gave him a free reign for his design. More on the film can be found here.

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.

Sekula’s books include Photography against the Grain (1984), Fish Story (1995) Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes (1996), Dismal Science (1999), Performance under Working Conditions (2003) and TITANIC’s wake (2003). These works range from the theory and history of photography to family life in the grip of military industrial complex to explorations of the world maritime economy.

His work was included in Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. He exhibits frequently outside the United States. Among other places, he has taught in the Cinema Studies Program at New York University, in the now-defunct Department of Photography and Cinema at the Ohio State University, and since 1985, in the Program in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts.

Filmography:
Performance under Working Conditions (1973)

Talk Given by Mr. Fred Lux at the Lux Clock Company Manufacturing Plant in Lebanon, Tennessee, on Wednesday, September 15, 1954 (1974)

Reagan Tape (1984) Co-directed with Nöel Burch.

Tsukiji (2001)

Gala (2005)

The Lottery of the Sea (2006)

Short Film for Laos (2006)

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

Sunday March 2, 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

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 2 (Program 1 is on March 16)
The 1960s and 1970s were a defining period for artists’ film and video in which avant-garde filmmakers challenged cinematic convention.  In England, much of the innovation took place at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, an artist-led organization that incorporated a distribution office, projection space and film workshop.  Despite the workshop’s central role in production, not all the work derives from experimentation in printing and processing.  Filmmakers also used language, landscape and the human body to create less abstract works that still explore the essential properties of the film medium.

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

Threshold by Malcolm Le Grice (1972, color, sound, 10 mins)
“Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the  possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity … With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating ‘richness’ of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image.”(Deke Dusinberre, LFMC catalogue, 1993)

Seven Days by Chris Welsby (1974, color, sound, 20 mins)
“The location of this film is by a small stream on the northern slopes of Mount Carningly in southwest Wales.  The seven days were shot consecutively and appear in that same order. Each day starts at the time of local sunrise and ends at the time of local sunset.  One frame was taken every ten seconds throughout the film.  The camera was mounted on an Equatorial Stand, which is a piece of equipment used by astronomers to track the stars. Rotating at the same speed as the earth, the camera is always pointing at either its own shadow or at the sun.  Selection of image (sky or earth; sun or shadow) was controlled by the extent of cloud coverage.  If the sun was out the camera was turned towards its own shadow; if it was in the camera was turned towards the sun.”
(Chris Welsby, LFMC catalogue, 197

Key by Peter Gidal (1968, color, sound, 10 mins)
“Slow zoom out and defocus of …”(Peter Gidal, LFMC catalogue, 1974)

Moment by Stephen Dwoskin (1968, color, sound, 12 mins)
“One single continuous shot of a girl’s face before, during and after an orgasm.   A concentration on the subtle changes within the face - going from an objective look into a subjective one and then back out … Moment is not a woman alone, but with her ‘in person’.  Have you ever really watched the face in orgasm?”
(Stephen Dwoskin, Other Cinema catalogue, 1972)

Associations by John Smith (1975, color, sound, 7 mins)
“Text taken from ‘Word Associations and Linguistic Theory’ by Herbert H. Clark.  Images taken from magazines and colour supplements.  By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language,  Associations sets language against itself.  Image and word work  together/against each other to destroy / create meaning.”
(John Smith, LFMC catalogue, 197

Deck by Gill Eatherley (1971, color, sound, 13 mins)
“During a voyage by boat to Finland, the camera records three minutes of black and white 8mm film of a woman sitting on a bridge.  The preoccupation of the film is with the base and with the transformation of this material, which was first refilmed on a screen where it was projected by multiple projectors at different speeds and then secondly amplified with colour filters, using positive and negative elements and superimposition on the London Co-op’s optical printer.”(Gill Eatherley, Light Cone catalogue, 1997)

Colours of this Time by William Raban (1972, color, silent, 3 mins)
“Whilst working on previous time-lapse films, I found that colour film tended to record the actual colour of the light source rather than local colour when long time exposures were used.  Using this phenomenon, Colours of this Time records all the imperceptible shifts of colour temperature in summer daylight, from first light until sunset.”
(William Raban, LFMC catalogue, 1974)