WordPress has treated us well for the past couple of years in providing a free and easy way for us to keep you informed of our activities.  But we have moved on to something a bit more professional and visually engaging.  Please bookmark the new website address:

http://www.lafilmforum.org

The new site features an Archives section where we post information about and links to previous seasons, as well as historic materials going all the way backto our beginning in the 1970′s. The slide show on the front page features selections from the archives, including stills from films we have screened in the past, as well as photos of Filmforum guests over the years. In addition, we will be posting updates on the progress of our Getty-funded research and planning project, Alternative Projections, on our Blog.

We hope you enjoy our new look! We welcome your feedback as well, send it here to lafilmforum@yahoo.com.

Best,
Stephanie Sapienza
Board President
Los Angeles Filmforum
stephanie@lafilmforum.org

Los Angeles Filmforum presents The Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour – Program 2

At the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas, Los Angeles 90028

This exciting show mixes new experimental, animation, and documentary work – a great way to catch up on what is happening in film & video art!  Tonight’s touring program highlights several new animated works and three short experimental documentaries. This program explores themes of a changing globalized world through personal, existential journeys and includes films from Paris, London, Winnipeg, New Zealand, and the U.S.

For reservations (not necessary), email us at lafilmforum@yahoo.com.

$10 general, $6 students (with ID) and seniors.

Parking is now easiest at the Hollywood & Highland complex. Bring your ticket for validation. Parking is $2 for 4 hours with validation. Enter that complex on Highland or Hollywood. The theater is 1.5 blocks east.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the original and longest running independent film festival in the United States, recognized as a premiere showcase for risk-taking, pioneering and art driven cinema. The AAFF pioneered the touring film festival concept in 1964 and each year brings a selection of favorite and award-winning short films to more than 25 galleries, universities, art house theaters and cinematheques throughout the world.

The festival: http://www.aafilmfest.org  Trailer: http://www.vimeo.com/5419558

Show screened from DV Cam except the last film, which will be 35mm

Cattle Call

“Cattle Call”
Mike Maryniuk & Matthew Rankin | Winnipeg, Canada | 4 min

Structured around the mesmerizing talents of 2007 Manitoba /Saskatchewan Auctioneer Champion, Tim Dowler, this film tries to create images as dazzlingly abstract, absurd and adrenalizing as the incredible language of auctioneering itself. It is the filmmakers’ hope that the film will induce near-bovine levels of dumbfoundedness in those who gaze upon it.

“Utopia, Part 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall”

Utopia

Sam Green & Carrie Lozano | San Francisco, CA | 12 min
Built in 2005, more than twice the size of the Mall of America, the South China Mall outside of Guangzhou in southern China was designed as a celebration of middle-class consumption and spectacle. Four years after it opened, however, the South China Mall sits almost empty and serves as a foreboding metaphor for the future of global capitalism.

Quiero Ver by Adele Horne

“Quiero Ver”
Adele Horne | Los Angeles, CA | 6 min

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.

“Skhizein”
Jeremy Clapin | Paris, France | 14 min

Skhizein

Audience Award 47th AAFF
Struck by a 150-ton meteorite, Henry has to adapt to living 91 centimeters from himself.

“Retouches”

Retouches

Georges Schwizgebel | Canada | 5 min
Best Animated Film 47th AAFF

A film that mesmerizes with visual acrobatics and a series of passing visions of perpetual motion. Between waves on a shore and a sleeper breathing, Schwizgebel alters the balance of shapes in the world and plays with perception to grasp the fleeting movement of our lives.

“Más Se Perdió”
Stephen Connolly | London, England | 15 min

Best Sound Design Award 47th AAFF
Employing a variety of cinematographic approaches and inspiration from Chris Marker’s “Lettre de Siberie” (1957), Connolly documents socially and politically charged spaces in Cuba, as they relate to notions of utopia and modern ruin.

Nora

“Nora”
Alla Kovgan & David Hinton | Somerville, MA | 35 min

Eileen Maitland Award 47th AAFF

Shot in Southern Africa, this film powerfully illustrates the personal journey of dancer Nora Chipaumire, who was born in Zimbabwe in 1965. With stunning cinematography and choreography, her stories are brought to life through movement, sound, color and text.

“Blue Tide, Black Water”

Blue Tide and Black Water

Eve Gordon & Sam Hamilton | Auckland, New Zealand | 10 min

Amid an ocean of wax one might chance upon a garden of flowering chemicals, where the filmmakers have circumnavigated microscopic reactions, creating an epic in miniature. In 35mm!

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.  Additional support generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

D.W. Griffith in California, with talk by Tom Gunning

At the Echo Park Film Center

D.W. Griffith

1200 N. Alvarado Street (@ Sunset Blvd)

Los Angeles, CA 90026

213-484-8846

For reservations, email lafilmforum@yahoo.com

Note change in location!

For fans of early film, and of Southern California history!  We’re delighted to host the internationally-renowned film scholar Tom Gunning, who will talk about Griffith’s time in California, and these selected, rarely screened films made in So Cal in the years before World War I.  All in 16mm with live musical accompaniment by Cliff Retallick.

In 1910, retreating from the harsh East Coast winter which confined them inside the narrow limits of their NYC studio in a 14th st. brownstone, D.W. Griffith transported the Biograph film company to southern California.  For the next four winters the company made over a hundred one reel (15 minutes) films in the area around Los Angeles, covering every genre in a range of locations: westerns in the deserts and hills; a caveman film in Griffith Park; tales of lost lovers by the seaside; Mexican dramas among the cacti.  These brief films laid the foundation for cinema as a narrative art, but, even more, the displayed a beauty of landscape and detail that year later Griffith claimed Hollywood had completely forgotten. – Tom Gunning

Special Thanks to Tom Barnes for the silent speed projector and to all our print sources: David Shepard, USC Hugh Hefner Moving Image Archive, Academy Film Archives, and Budget Films.

Man’s Genesis (1912, 17 min)

Griffith took on the somewhat daring task of illustrating Darwin’s theory of man’s evolution with Bobby Harron as a cavemen who proves intelligence triumphs over brawn. With Mae Marsh

The New Dress (1911, 17 min.)

A psychological story of Mexican life showing Griffith’s genius for building a story around an object. With Dorothy West.

The Massacre (1914, 20 min)

A true epic in small form, showing Griffith’s ambitions to create a panoramic landscape of action. As he often did, Griffith showed how the American westward expansion destroyed the peaceful lives of Native Americans. With the magnificent Blanche Sweet and Wilfred Lucas.

The Unchanging Sea  (1910, 14 min.)

Griffith used the seaside as a poetic motif to express longing and loss, combined with a deft use of parallel editing to express the cycles of life.  With Mary Pickford and Charles West

The Sands of Dee (1912, 17 min)

One of Griffith most poetic films, based on a poem by Charles Kingsley, as Mae Marsh plays an abandoned lover who haunts the shore.

The Female of the Species (1912, 17 min)

A grim melodrama of survival in the desert in which women play out the central drama of jealousy and revenge (including a rather murderous Mary Pickford).

Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago.  He is the author of the books, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity and of over a hundred essays , especially on early cinema and the avant-garde.  He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute researching the theory and history of the moving image. http://humanities.uchicago.edu/cmtes/cms/faculty/gunning.html

D.W. (David Wark) Griffith (1875-1948)

Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob “Roaring Jake” Griffith, a Confederate Army colonel and Civil War hero. He grew up with his father’s romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth century literature that were to eventually mold his black-and-white view of human existence and history. In 1897, Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph, where he directed over 450 short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith and his personal cinematographer G.W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask, and crosscutting. In the years following Birth, Griffith never again saw the same monumental success, and, in 1931, his increasing failures forced his retirement. Though hailed for his vision in narrative film-making, he was similarly criticized for his blatant racism. Griffith died in Los Angeles in 1948, one of the most dichotomous figures in film history. – from imDb, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000428/bio

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Bodies, Objects, Films: An Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (part 2 of 8 )

Film About a Woman Who… (1974)

Film About a Woman Who...

At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas, Los Angeles

Over the course of our 2009-2010 seasons, Filmforum is proud to present a full retrospective of the media works of Yvonne Rainer.  One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, this is the first full retrospective of her films in Los Angeles.

Please note that Yvonne Rainer will not be present at this screening.  We were going to screen Trio A and Lives of Performers tonight, but we will screen those on a night in 2010 when Rainer can be present.  We apologize for any inconvenience.

Film About A Woman Who… (1974, 105 mins, b&w, 16mm)

Rainer’s landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger.

“If Lives of Performers is a compendium of possibilities, then Film About a Woman Who… is their fruition.  Again in black and white, again photographed by Babette Mangolte, this film pushes even further Rainer’s initial thoughts on representation, narrative, sexual relationships, and the politics of personal power manipulations.  The effects of feminist thinking becomes even clearer in this work, especially as reflected in hindsight by Rainer’s own remarks (in 1973) on the attraction of film over dance: that since “rage, terror, desire, conflict et al” were not unique to her experience in the way that her body had always been, now she ‘could feel much more connected to my audience, and that gives me great comfort.’  It was during this period, in fact, that a whole new audience was opening up for the work of women filmmakers, and an equally new context for their work….” — B. Ruby Rich, from “Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction”, in The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 7.

One site’s note on the film

On Yvonne Rainer:

When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often controversial subject matter, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “The most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.”

Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.

In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO… (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).

Rainer’s films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F.; NuArt-L.A; Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney.

A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO… was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994.

In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

In 2006 MIT Press published Yvonne Rainer’s memoir, Feelings Are Facts: A Life.

She most recently presented new dance works at REDCAT in June 2009.

Source: http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/director.php?director_id=8

Two extended articles on Yvonne Rainer on Senses of Cinema:

“Yvonne Rainer” by Erin Brannigan

“From Objecthood to Subject Matter: Yvonne Rainer’s Transition from Dance to Film” by Jonathan Walley

Another biography of Rainer

Upcoming in the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective:
December 6 – THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN with Rainer in person, moderated by Berenice Reynaud

Five more screenings in 2010!

Reservations available by emailing lafilmforum@yahoo.com but not necessary

Tickets $10 general, $6 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.  Additional support generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Los Angeles Filmforum and the AFI FEST present 3 premieres!

4:30 Los Herederos with A Letter to Uncle Boonmee

7:30 The Anchorage

Filmforum at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas, Los Angeles CA 90028

Admission free!  But you need to get tickets through AFI – and the ones available pre-show are already taken.  There will be a Rush line and some remaining tickets will be available at the door.  See details below.

Full AFI Film Festival details at www.afi.com/afifest

4:30 pm

LOS HEREDEROS directed by Eugenio Polgovsky

(2008, 90 min., Mexico, HDCAM) – Los Angeles premiere!

Here as in his first film TROPIC OF CANCER, Eugenio Polgovsky uses his camera as an exploratory tool to venture where other filmmakers might easily turn away. And few filmmakers have managed to so intensively document and reflect upon the poorest of the poor. The “herederos” of the title —children who have “inherited” a legacy of grinding poverty—live on the land. They plow, they harvest, they load wood and they build walls with the bricks that they made with their hands. They also frolic, and play and dance. Polgovsky and his extraordinary sound recordist Camille Tauss immersed themselves for three years in the lives of these children as they toil in the states of Guerrero, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Puebla and Veracruz. LOS HEREDEROS is both extremely intimate (the camera’s point of view is like that of a tiny creature scurrying to keep pace with the kids) and pointedly universal, while rigorously refusing to draw conclusions.

–Robert Koehler

One article on Los Herederos

Preceded by

A LETTER TO UNCLE BOONMEE directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2009, 18 min., Thailand/U.K., Digibeta) – Los Angeles premiere!

Winner of two prizes at the 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

In Apichatpong’s hauntingly poetic piece—one part of his ambitious “Primitives” project—the voices of three young men describe to an uncle how their Thai village of Nabua has been abandoned in the wake of war.

Website of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

7:30 pm

THE ANCHORAGE directed by C.W. Winter and Anders Edstrom

(2009, 87 min., U.S./Sweden, 35mm)

U.S. premiere! C.W. Winter and Anders Edstrom in person!

Winner of Locarno’s Golden Leopard for Filmmakers of the Present

Immersing the viewer in magnificent Swedish landscapes, this sober and meditative film reveals the beauty of nature and the beings that co-exist in harmony there: a Rousseauesque vision of a relationship between a human being and her environment. Ulla, the central character, relates in voiceover how it will be when it snows, but her expectations are disturbed with the arrival of a hunter, whose flashily colored clothing is out of place amidst the island’s greens and browns. Shot with a minimal crew, CalArts graduate C. W. Winter’s and photographer Anders Edström’s first fiction feature unobtrusively combines silence and the sounds of nature in contemplative sequences, sometimes adding snatches of songs about local folklore. Ultimately, the film serves as an ode to a woman whose strength and grace are in perfect harmony with nature.  –Locarno Film Festival

Filmforum is also delighted to be the community sponsor for the following Los Angeles premiere at the Mann Chinese:

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
USA | DIR Werner Herzog
CAST: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Jennifer Coolidge, Fairuza Balk, Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner
After RESCUE DAWN, Werner Herzog returns to American genre cinema, this time taking on the mythic, audience-friendly framework of the gritty urban cop film. Working from William Finkelstein’s tightly compelling script, Herzog sets the plot in New Orleans, which allows for a few surreal Herzogian touches—decaying buildings, men communing with alligators. But this dark, shockingly funny drama keeps the focus on the title character, Detective McDonough, who scarfs down narcotics to cope with his back pain—making bets his body can’t cover—while neck-deep in a murder investigation. Nicolas Cage, in one of his strongest performances, invests McDonough with urgency and compassion, and gets terrific support by Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Vondee Curtis-Hall and Brad Dourif. Having positioned himself, in deed and word, as the ultimate Hollywood outsider, Herzog suddenly earns comparison with masters including Don Siegel, Nicholas Ray and Sidney Lumet. – Larry Gross
Wed. Nov 4, 7:00 pm, Mann 1 / Wed. Nov 4, 7:00 pm, Mann 3

________________________________________________________________

AFI FEST 2009 presented by Audi takes place October 30th – November 5 in the heart of historic downtown Hollywood at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the neighboring Mann 6 Theater (in the Hollywood and Highland Center) and the Roosevelt Hotel, then moves to Santa Monica for two days of screenings November 6 & 7 at the American Film Market (AFM) at Laemmle’s Monica 4-plex, 1332 2nd St..

As our gift to moviegoers, free tickets are available to all festival movies, including a limited number of free tickets to evening red carpet galas. Get your tickets starting October 16 at AFI.com or AFI.com/AFIFEST, or by calling 1-866-AFI-FEST. You can also obtain tickets by going to the Festival Box Office located at the Mann 6 Theatre starting on October 26th, or on the day of the screenings via rush lines.

Become a patron of the festival and purchase an AFI FEST Patron Pass, available now. The AFI FEST Patron Pass provides early entry to screenings, lounge access and other benefits. By becoming a festival patron, you help make this free festival possible and support the art of film. For more details, visit AFI.com or call 1-866-AFI-FEST.

Seating is limited, so get your free tickets starting OCTOBER 16TH! Festival program schedule details will be announced on October 13 at AFI.com

BOX OFFICE & TICKETING INFORMATION

AFI FEST 2009 presented by Audi is making an unprecedented gift to moviegoers: free tickets to all screenings and events at the Festival.

ONLINE
AFI.com/AFIFEST
24 hours a day, 7 days a week

PHONE
1.866.AFI FEST
Oct 16-29: Mon-Fri, noon-7 pm
Oct 30-Nov 7: every day, 10 am-7 pm

IN PERSON
Oct 26-30: noon-7 pm
Oct 31-Nov 5: 10 am-10 pm
AFI FEST Box Office, lobby of the Mann Chinese 6
6801 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood

Nov 6-7: 8:30 am-7 pm
AFI FEST Box Office, lobby of Laemmle’s Monica 4
1332 Second St.
Santa Monica

TICKET WILL CALL BEFORE THE FESTIVAL

Starting October 26, tickets will be held at the AFI FEST Will Call Desk in the Mann Chinese 6 main lobby. On November 6, the AFI FEST Will Call Desk will relocate to Laemmle’s Monica 4.

PATRON PASSES

PATRON PASS         $500/$450 for AFI Members
• Two Gala Tickets*
• Early seating at all regular screenings**
• Access for one to the AFI FEST Lounge on a space-available basis

FRIEND PACKAGE         $1,000/$900 for AFI Members
• Two FEST Patron Passes (four Gala Tickets)*
• Access to the AFI FEST Lounge for two on a space-available basis

CONTRIBUTOR PACKAGE         $2,500/$2,250 for AFI Members
• Four FEST Patron Passes (eight Gala Tickets)*
• Recognition as a Festival Contributor
• Private thank-you cocktail reception
• Access to the AFI FEST Lounge for four on a space-available basis

STAR PACKAGE         $5,000/$4,500 for AFI Members
• Four Festival Patron Passes (eight Gala Tickets)*
• Recognition as a Festival Contributor at the highest level
• Private thank-you cocktail reception
• Private appreciation dinner
• One Tribute ticket*
• Access to the AFI FEST Lounge for four on a space-available basis

Each Festival Patron Pass includes two Gala Tickets.
*Requires RSVP and hard ticket for admission
**Patrons must be in their seats 15 minutes before the scheduled screening time or admittance cannot be guaranteed.

PARKING
Hollywood & Highland parking garage
6801 Hollywood Blvd.
$2 for up to four hours with theater, restaurant or shopping validation; $1 for every 20 minutes thereafter, with a daily maximum of $10

Santa Monica
Santa Monica City Parking Structure #4
Across the street from the theater
Prior to 6 pm, the first two hours are free; $1 for each additional half hour.
After 6 pm, there is a flat rate of $3.

GO METRO
Ride the Metro to the Hollywood/Highland Metro station.

FESTIVAL THEATERS

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre
6925 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood

Mann Chinese 6
6801 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood

Laemmle’s Monica 4
1332 Second St.
Santa Monica

FESTIVAL LOUNGES

Audi Suite
The Audi Suite/Bridge, AFI FEST’s premier upscale lounge for Festival filmmakers and special guests, is open daily during the Festival from 6 pm to midnight, serving complimentary alcoholic beverages.

Cinema Lounge
The Cinema Lounge is located in the historic, newly restored Blossom Ballroom at the world-famous Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. A relaxed environment for Pass holders, open daily from 11 am to midnight, offering an open bar and unique special events. A great place to meet and mingle with fellow Pass holders.

UCLA Film & Television Archive, Los Angeles Filmforum, Getty Research Institute, CalArts Film/Video, and REDCAT present

Robert Beavers in Person

First time in Los Angeles! None available on DVD.

The Ground by Robert Beavers

At the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Billy Wilder Theater, in the UCLA Hammer Museum

**Note change in time and place – 7:00 pm, at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood

The Billy Wilder Theater is located in the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., at the northeast corner of the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Blvds., just east of the 405.  Parking is $3 in the lot under the theater. Enter from Westwood Blvd., just north of Wilshire.

For advance tickets and directions, please visit the UCLA Film & Television Archives website.

This presentation of work by avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers represents the filmmaker’s Los Angeles debut, after a career spanning from the mid-1960s to the present day, and is organized in conjunction with the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, who will present Beavers’ complete cycle earlier in October.

“Beavers’ films occupy a noble place within the history of avant-garde film, positioned at the intersection of structural and lyrical filmmaking traditions. They seem to embody the ideals of the Renaissance in their fascination with perception, psychology, literature, the natural world, architectural space, musical phrasing and aesthetic beauty.” -Susan Oxtoby, Pacific Film Archive

Interview with Robert Beavers, by Tony Pipolo, from Millennium Film Journal, 1998.

Interview with Robert Beavers in the Yale Daily News, 2009

AMOR (1980, 15 min. 35mm, color, Italy/Austria)

AMOR uses themes of cutting and sewing as metaphors. Cloth is cut and fabric is sewn; shrubs are trimmed and hedges form majestic garden archways; and a male figure claps his hands as if to signal a sync cue on which there is a visual cut. Central to this work are the complex emotions surrounding love, separation, and the metonymic twinning of objects, including that of edited image and sutured sound. —Susan Oxtoby, Pacific Film Archive

THE STOAS (1991-97, 22 min., 35mm, color, Greece)

The Stoas includes images of the deserted industrial arcades (stoas) of Athens during siesta and the refreshing waters of a bountiful river. “An ineffable, unnamable immanence flows through the images of The Stoas, a kind of presence of the human soul expressed through the sympathetic absence of the human figure” (Ed Halter).—Susan Oxtoby, Pacific Film Archive

THE GROUND (1993-2001, 20 min., 35mm, color, Greece)

The Ground uses seemingly simple components – the sun-baked landscape of a Greek island, the blue waters of the Aegean Sea, and images of a man chiseling stone – to conjure the fundamental experience of holding something close to one’s heart. A repeated close up of a man pounding his bare chest, then gesturing with hand outstretched, lends dramatic tension to the film’s expression of devotional love. —Susan Oxtoby, Pacific Film Archive

PITCHER OF COLORED LIGHT (2007, 24 min., 16mm, United States/Switzerland)

Beavers’ most recent film, Pitcher of Colored Light is a loving portrait of his mother depicted in her Massachusetts home and garden, shot across several seasons. —Susan Oxtoby, Pacific Film Archive

More on Robert Beavers:

Robert Beavers (1949–) began his extraordinary career in film at the precocious age of seventeen, the same year he met Gregory Markopoulos, the influential avant-garde filmmaker who would become his partner for life, and permanently relocated to Europe. Together Beavers and Markopoulos bravely dedicated themselves to a singular mode of art cinema that adamantly refused all commercial impulses and maintained a careful distance from the major currents of contemporary American experimental cinema. Until the mid- 1990s, Beavers, like Markopoulos, strictly controlled the exhibition of his work, restricting screenings to an annual series of outdoor events in Greece. In the last decade Beavers has selectively exhibited his films in and outside of Europe, always to tremendous critical acclaim.

Frequently drawing inspiration from European art and architecture, Beavers’ films are equally noted for their intricate mosaic-like structure and exquisite framing as their insightful exploration of history and art. The thematic and formal complexity of Beavers’ films is balanced by the sensuous beauty of every image contained within them. For the last ten years Beavers has re-edited and re-worked the sound for almost all of his films and organized them into an ambitious omnibus work entitled My Hands Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure.

– From Harvard Film Archives

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom with Puffy Cheeks) by Ken Jacobs

Anaglyph Tom

Los Angeles Premiere!  Ken Jacobs in Person! 3-D!

Filmforum at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas, Los Angeles CA 90028

For reservations, email us at lafilmforum@yahoo.com, but they aren’t essential.

Parking is now easiest at the Hollywood & Highland complex.  Bring your ticket for validation.  Parking is $2 for 4 hours with validation.  Enter that complex on Highland or Hollywood.  The theater is 1.5 blocks east.

Radical genius Ken Jacobs 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 – the 3-D version of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son.Not on DVD, you won’t have any other chances to see this.

“It’s wonderfully fitting that, in the year of Hollywood’s much ballyhooed 3-D renaissance, Jacobs has routed the technology back to the very origins of cinema itself. In the feature-length Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks), also premiering here this week, Jacobs repurposes another early Edison short — the same one he first stretched like a rubber band into 1969’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son — this time stereoscoping the picaresque one-reeler using red-and-blue anaglyph technology, so that Edison’s prepubescent pig thief and crowds of antic villagers now seem to invade the space between the screen and the audience. In addition, Jacobs uses digital effects to bisect, trisect and otherwise slice and dice the orig inal images, repainting his canvas with a restless vigor.

“Like much of what interests Jacobs, 3-D technology dates back to the turn of the last century, though the filmmaker admits that his initial reaction to the popular 3-D boom of the 1950s was one of little enthusiasm. “Coming from painting, the surface was most important to me,” Jacobs says. “I studied with a great teacher” — German abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann — “who said, ‘You mustn’t break the surface. Whatever you do in space, you mustn’t break the surface.’ And [3-D] was breaking the surface in a big way. Gradually, I chose to sin and got deeper and deeper into it.” Still, Jacobs adds, ‘My 3-D is not like the movies coming out now or before; I’m not that interested in the verisimilitude of re-creating a world in depth. I’m playing with depth. I’m playing with the eyes. Curious things can happen.’” – Scott Foundas, LA Weekly.

Read the full profile by Scott Foundas but note that they have the date of tonight’s screening wrong

Also see the profile with Ken Jacobs by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

Curated by Steve Anker. This screening concludes a weeklong residency by Jacobs at CalArts, REDCAT, UCLA and Los Angeles Filmforum

ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom With Puffy Cheeks) (2008, 118 minutes, DV-Cam)
In 3-D!

The real subject of ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom With Puffy Cheeks) is depth-perception itself.  Our beloved performers from the 1905 TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON again encapsulate human absurdity for our amusement but this time in entirely illusionary 3-D.  They step from -and back into- the screen surface.  This is cosmic play with all strings pulled.    – Ken Jacobs

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.

In 1969, after a week’s guest seminar at Harpur College (now, Binghamton University), students petitioned the Administration to hire Ken Jacobs. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, the Administration -during that special period of anguish and possibility- decided that, as a teacher, he was “a natural.” Together with Larry Gottheim he organized the SUNY system’s first Department of Cinema, teaching thoughtful consideration of every kind of film but specializing in avant garde cinema appreciation and production. (Department graduates are world-recognized as having an exceptional presence in this field.) His own early studies under Hofmann would increasingly figure in his filmwork, making for an Abstract Expressionist cinema, clearly evident in his avant garde classic Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1969) and increasingly so in his subsequent devising of the unique Nervous System series of live film-projection performances. The American Museum Of The Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, hosted a full retrospective of his work in 1989, The New York Museum Of Modern Art held a partial retrospective in 1996, as did The American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin in 1986 (during his 6 month stay as guest-recipient of Berlin’s DAAD award). He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, etc. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant. A 1999 interview with Ken Jacobs can be seen on the Net as part of The University Of California at Berkeley’s series of Conversations With History: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/

http://www2.binghamton.edu/cinema/faculty.html

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.  Additional support generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Anaglyph Tom

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

At the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas, Los Angeles

The GoodTimesKid and The Whirled

With Azazel Jacobs and Ken Jacobs in Person to introduce the show!

The GoodTimesKid

In a Los Angeles (and maybe a global) first, we host the father and son filmmakers Ken and Azazel Jacobs.  Ken Jacobs comes with The Whirled, a short long unseen in Los Angeles (if ever) a series of improvisations with Jack Smith.  Azazel Jacobs presents his second feature film The GoodTimesKid.

Note change in day!

This screening is part of a weeklong residency by Ken Jacobs at CalArts, REDCAT, UCLA and Los Angeles Filmforum.  Special thanks to Steve Anker and Cal Arts for arranging the week, and Mark Rance and Benton Films for arranging tonight’s screening.

Check out Manohla Dargis’s new NY Times profile on Ken Jacobs in anticipation of this series.

The Whirled by Ken Jacobs (1956-61; 18 min)

The Whirled

The Whirled is a collection of four short improvisations, three of them featuring Jack Smith for the first time on film.  Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice (1956) was shot in front of Jack’s downtown NY loft on 150 feet of 16mm film, exactly as seen here.  Next day I shot Little Cobra Dance on the remaining 50 feet (also intact).  We fell off the couch laughing at what we’d done in this off-hand way, which marked the end of my fastidious art-film approach.  In 1963 a snatch of the first film was shown on TV when I was somehow invited to participate in a quiz program (another poor chump participating was the painter and Happenings performer Carolee Schneemann).  After years of shooting my raging epic Star Spangled To Death starring Jack as The Spirit Not of Life But of Living, and after a few months of being on the outs with each other, we got together for one last stab at friendship and filmmaking with The Death Of P’Town, 1961.

The GoodTimesKid by Azazel Jacobs (2005/2009; 77 min.)

A story about stolen love and stolen identities, literally shot on stolen film… Momma’s Man writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ second feature is an absurdist comedy of errors, a punk-rock slice of DIY rebellion, and a warmhearted frolic that captures the “amour fou spirit of the early French New Wave” (The Village Voice).

Hot-tempered Echo Park slacker Rodolfo Cano (Jacobs) enlists in the army to escape a meaningless existence with his free-spirited girlfriend Diaz (Diaz). When his call-for-service letter somehow winds up in the hands of another Rodolfo Cano (Gerardo Naranjo, director of Drama/Mex and I’m Gonna Explode), a quietly dignified loner who lives on a sailboat, their three lives intersect in odd and beautifully unexpected ways. Evoking the inventive gags of Chaplin and Jacques Tati, plus the deadpan minimalism of Kaurismäki and Jarmusch, The GoodTimesKid “finds poetry in wordless scenes of observation” (The New York Times).

“”Evoking Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria, Chaplin’s dinner roll dance <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoKbDNY0Zwg>  in The Gold Rush, and that staple of nouvelle vague coolness, The Madison <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6pOXjQLh7Y>  from Godard’s Band of Outsiders, Diaz’s whimsical solo in a chocolate-stained dress and black Converse is one of those rare moments of fleeting joy whose ephemerality is only enhanced by its capture on film.” – Cullen Gallagher, L MAGAZINE

“The GoodTimesKid has a whimsy, a passion, a sophistication and, above all, a vigor that’s mostly drained out of Amerindie cinema over the last decade or so. ” — Andrew O’Hehir, SALON
“Descended from a long line of minimalist filmmakers, from Jacques Tati up through Jim Jarmusch, The GoodTimesKid dances in its own sweet style. Beguiling!” — Matt Zoller Seitz, THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Every moment consequently is a sheer delight, doing its best to shake up all those depresso filmmakers who have done it all before and all you depresso cinemagoers out there who have seen it all before, and maybe remind you what the joy of making films and the joy of watching films is all about.” DVD Times

“A film like 500 Days of Summer bends over backwards to convince you it takes place in a world where cultural totems of disaffection still mean something. The GoodTimesKid actually creates and takes place in such a world, without strain.” Karina Longworth, SPOUT.com

“Before there was Momma’s Man there was The GoodTimesKid. In Azazel Jacobs’s second feature you can see his style beginning to take form, meshing a punk-rock attitude with cinema influences as wide ranging from Chaplin to Jarmusch.” Jason Guerrasio, Filmaker Magazine

More on it: http://www.goodtimeskid.com

Now available on DVD as well: Benten Films <http://www.bentenfilms.com/

Also this week:

Monday October 12, 2009, 8:30 pm – REDCAT

Ken Jacobs: Towards The Depths of The Even Greater Depression

A Nervous Magic Lantern Performance

West Coast premiere

“Makes Monsters vs. Aliens in 3-D look as flat as an episode of South Park.” The New York Times

http://www.redcat.org/event/ken-jacobs

Thursday October 15 2009, 7:30PM – UCLA Film & Television Archive

Ken Jacobs in Person with some of Jacobs’ most recent work

http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/public/calendar/calendar_f.html

Sunday October 18, 2009, 7:30 pm

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom with Puffy Cheeks) by Ken Jacobs

Anaglyph Tom

Los Angeles Premiere!  Ken Jacobs in Person! 3-D!

Filmforum at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas, Los Angeles CA 90028

Ken Jacobs 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.

Curated by Steve Anker. This screening concludes a weeklong residency by Jacobs at CalArts, REDCAT, UCLA and Los Angeles Filmforum

ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom With Puffy Cheeks) (2008, 118 minutes, DV-Cam)
In 3-D!

The real subject of ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom With Puffy Cheeks) is depth-perception itself.  Our beloved performers from the 1905 TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON again encapsulate human absurdity for our amusement but this time in entirely illusionary 3-D.  They step from -and back into- the screen surface.  This is cosmic play with all strings pulled.    – Ken Jacobs

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.

In 1969, after a week’s guest seminar at Harpur College (now, Binghamton University), students petitioned the Administration to hire Ken Jacobs. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, the Administration -during that special period of anguish and possibility- decided that, as a teacher, he was “a natural.” Together with Larry Gottheim he organized the SUNY system’s first Department of Cinema, teaching thoughtful consideration of every kind of film but specializing in avant garde cinema appreciation and production. (Department graduates are world-recognized as having an exceptional presence in this field.) His own early studies under Hofmann would increasingly figure in his filmwork, making for an Abstract Expressionist cinema, clearly evident in his avant garde classic Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1969) and increasingly so in his subsequent devising of the unique Nervous System series of live film-projection performances. The American Museum Of The Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, hosted a full retrospective of his work in 1989, The New York Museum Of Modern Art held a partial retrospective in 1996, as did The American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin in 1986 (during his 6 month stay as guest-recipient of Berlin’s DAAD award). He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, etc. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant. A 1999 interview with Ken Jacobs can be seen on the Net as part of The University Of California at Berkeley’s series of Conversations With History: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/

http://www2.binghamton.edu/cinema/faculty.html

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.  Additional support generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Anaglyph Tom

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

The Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour – Program 1

47th AAFF Tour

At the Echo Park Film Center

1200 N. Alvarado Street (@ Sunset Blvd)

Los Angeles, CA 90026

213-484-8846

For reservations, email lafilmforum@yahoo.com

Note change in location!

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the original and longest running independent film festival in the United States, recognized as a premiere showcase for risk-taking, pioneering and art driven cinema. The AAFF pioneered the touring film festival concept in 1964 and each year brings a selection of favorite and award-winning short films to more than 25 galleries, universities, art house theaters and cinematheques throughout the world. This program explores themes of life and death within the geography of our surroundings, and includes films from Detroit, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin, Toronto and Tokyo.

This exciting show mixes new experimental, animation, and documentary work – a great way to catch up on what is happening in film & video art!

The festival: http://www.aafilmfest.org

Trailer: http://www.vimeo.com/5419558

Dahlia – Michael Langan | San Francisco, CA | 5 minutes

http://aaff.bside.com/2009/films/dahlia_aaff2009

Dahlia

An animated, fast-motion portrait that explores the bustle and permanence of a city: San Francisco. Set to a driving score of vocal percussion, this film is a high-velocity contrast of stable forms and the dynamic patterns of life.

Studies in Transfalumination – Peter Rose | Philadelphia, PA | 5 minutes [winner the Transfalumination Jury Award 47th AAFF]

http://aaff.bside.com/2009/films/studiesintransfalumination_aaff2009

The visual complexities of the ordinary world – a tunnel, a clump of grass, a discarded table, a piece of rock – are examined with modified flashlights and stripped down video projectors in this otherworldly exploration of place and perception.

Passages

Passages – Marie-Josee Saint-Pierre | Montreal, Canada | 24.5 minutes

http://aaff.bside.com/2009/films/passages_aaff2009

An exquisitely drawn animation that tells the dramatic story of a mother giving birth to a child. Her enthusiastically awaited delivery day is turned on its head as systems go awry, jeopardizing the lives of both mother and baby.

Reincarnation – Takeshi Kushida | Tokyo, Japan | 5 minutes

Reincarnation

http://aaff.bside.com/2009/films/reincarnation_aaff2009

An otherworldly and poetic portrayal of one man’s journey between lives, expressed through movement, flesh and color.

Six Apartments – Reynold Reynolds | Berlin, Germany | 12.5 minutes

http://aaff.bside.com/2009/films/sixapartments_aaff2009

Six isolated occupants of six different apartments live their lives unaware of each other. Without drama they eat food, wander between rooms, bathe, watch television, and sleep. For them, this is life; for the viewer this is a contemplation of worlds in constant activity and decay.

Video Terraform Dance Party – Jeremy Bailey | Toronto, Canada | 12 minutes  [winner Funniest Film Award 47th AAFF]

http://aaff.bside.com/2009/films/videoterraformdanceparty_aaff2009;jsessionid=C82137156768C2F723157F0B7B288F82

Based on his live performances, Bailey shows off his latest software program that allows the user to design a better world. Combining improv monologue, social commentary, and interactive software, Bailey provides a platform to laugh and dance in our seats while contemplating the ways we live together.

A City to Yourself – Nicole Macdonald | Detroit, MI | 24 minutes [winner Best Michigan Film Award 47th AAFF]

http://aaff.bside.com/2009/films/acitytoyourself_aaff2009

In 1950, Detroit’s population reached 1,849,568 people in the city; today there are fewer than half remaining. We hear a lot of negativity about the crumbling infrastructure of a shrinking, post-industrial city like Detroit, but what about the pluses of having a city to yourself?

91 minutes total run-time

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Bodies, Objects, Films: An Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (Part 1 of 8 ) – Yvonne Rainer in person!

At the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas, Los Angeles

Yvonne Rainer, photo by Stefan RomerTonight’s interlocutor is Lynette Kessler, Executive Director of Dance Camera West

Over the course of our 2009-2010 seasons, Filmforum is proud to present a full retrospective of the media works of Yvonne Rainer.  One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, Rainer now calls Southern California home for much of the year, so we will be honored to have her in person at several of the screenings.  To make it more interesting, each appearance by Rainer will feature a Q&A led by a different interlocutor, to discuss with her varying aspects of her approaches to her art and life.  We’ll start with her earliest and latest works, all connected to various performances.  Tonight’s Q&A will be led by Lynette Kessler, director of Dance Camera West, to help bring it the relationship between these works and Rainer’s dance performances.

“I love the duality of props, or objects: their usefulness and obstructiveness in relation to the human body. Also the duality of the body: the body as a moving, thinking, decision-making entity and the body as an inert entity, object-like… oddly, the body can become object-like; the human being can be treated as an object, dealt with as an entity without feeling or desire. The body itself can be handled and manipulated as though lacking in the capacity for self-propulsion.” (Rainer, Works 1961-73, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, New York, New York University Press, 1974, p. 134)

On Yvonne Rainer:

When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often controversial subject matter, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “The most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.”

Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.

In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO… (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).

Rainer’s films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F.; NuArt-L.A; Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney.

A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO… was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994.

In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

In 2006 MIT Press published Yvonne Rainer’s memoir, Feelings Are Facts: A Life. She most recently presented new dance works at REDCAT in June 2009.   Source: http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/director.php?director_id=8

Two extended articles on Yvonne Rainer on Senses of Cinema

“Yvonne Rainer” by Erin Brannigan http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/rainer.html

“From Objecthood to Subject Matter: Yvonne Rainer’s Transition from Dance to Film” by Jonathan Walley http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/18/rainer.html

Another biography of Rainer:

http://people.wcsu.edu/mccarneyh/fva/R/YRainer_bio.html

October 4:

Five Easy Pieces: A compilation of five early short films made between 1966 to 1969:

Hand Movie

Hand Movie (1966, 5:00, b&w, silent, 8mm to video)

Close-up of a hand, the fingers of which enact a sensuous dance.  Camerawork by William Davis.

Volleyball (Foot Film) (1967, 10:00 b&w, silent, 16mm to video)

A volleyball is rolled into the frame and comes to rest. Two legs in sneakers, seen from the knees down, enter the frame and stand beside it. Cut to new angle, same characters and actions.  Camerawork by Bud Wirtschafter.

Rhode Island Red (1968, 10:00, b&w, silent, 16mm to video)

Ten minutes in an enormous chicken coop.  Camerawork by Roy Levin.

Trio Film

Trio Film (1968, 13:00, b&w, silent, 16mm to video)

Two nudes, a man and a woman, interact with each other and a large balloon in a white living room. Performed by Steve Paxton and Becky Arnold.  Camerawork by Phill Niblock.

Line (1969, 10:00, b&w, silent, 16mm to video)

A blond woman (Susan Marshall) in white pants and shirt interacts with a moving round object and the camera.  Camerawork by Phill Niblock.

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid (2002, 31 min, video)

After Many a Summer

Yvonne Rainer combines a dance performance she choreographed for Mikhail Barryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in 2000 with texts by Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein—four of the most radical innovators in painting, architecture, music, and philosophy to emerge from fin-de-siècle Vienna. Charles Atlas and Natsuko Inue videotaped the rehearsals of the dance. The idea for integrating some of this footage with the Vienna material came partly from the title, which both elegaically and ironically invokes a passage through time and the end of a way of life, or, more to the point, aristocratic life. Thus the passage of Baryshnikov himself is also implicated—from danseur noble roles in classical ballet to his current interests in postmodern dance.

“Beyond the resonance of the title, however, the 21st century dance footage (itself containing 40-year-old instances of my 20th century choreography) can be read multifariously—and paradoxically—as both the beneficiary of a cultural and economic elite and as an extension of an avant-garde tradition that revels in attacking that elite and its illusions of order and permanency. Or, finally, each dance image can be taken simply as a graphic or mimetic correlation with its simultaneous text.

“Some may say the avant-garde has long been over. Be that as it may, the idea of it continues to inspire and motivate many of us with its inducement—in the words of playwright/director Richard Foreman—to “resist the present.’”  —Yvonne Rainer

Upcoming in the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective:

November 8– TRIO A/ LIVES OF PERFORMERS (Rainer not present)
December 6 – THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN with Rainer in person

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.  Additional support generously provided by the American Cinematheque.