From: TIE (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2006 - 18:40:10 PDT
Hello Frameworks. Sorry if this cross-posted with some of you. Below the Beach Beast Reviewc is info on TIE's extended deadline. Please note that FILMS FROM ANY PERIOD ARE CONSIDERED.
Best,
Chris
I programmed a 2-hour Super-8 epic film, entitled Beach Beach, by Bill Storz in 2000/Telluride at The International Experimental Cinema Exposition. Bill Storz was there to project the piece himself. The film had also been programmed by Brian Frye as well as through Bruce Posner at Harvard. Yet, the 1991 epic film has rarely been seen beyond these screenings. Writer and friend, Jesse Kennedy, just penned this long overdue essay:
Beach Beast
The film, Beach Beast, effortlessly manages to be sincere and beautiful in its humorous disrespect for the traditions of the avant-garde. In its obsession with lineage, theory and truth the avant-garde (in al it’s forms) has a tendency to neglect or remain hostile to the silent portion of its products. The silence and beauty inherent in its most interesting articles and remnants is made to speak, to talk in cliché’s and stereotypes. The babble of explanation, meaning and intention moves detached across a surface of images and events as they actually were in their in (in)significance.
With Beach Beast the stereotypes are stretched thin, the avant-garde is enacted through scenes that reference experimental film, making it seem always arbitrary and forgetful in its self-involvement. It is more generally irreverent in its use of dialogue; nearly everything said comes across as a clichéd line from a bad movie. This humorous device of stereotypes, parallel to the exaggeration in certain gestures, keeps dialogue and meaning suspended as artifice, while the images of what is being filmed remain beautiful and transient beneath.
Beach Beast recalls the efforts of children in their imitation of the perceived adult world. Language in their mouths is always too big, it doesn’t fit them anymore then their parents shoes, they use it like costume jewelry, creatively and not in search of truth. In Beach Beast language is as much an object as what is being filmed. Out of place with what is happening and insincere (as a ray of light or a laugh), it remains a part of the film (alongside any other) rather than a narrative over it or about it. The result is a kind of constellation of unfamiliar faces, places, phrases and scenarios that in it’s silliness and tenderness manages to be less linear (in the sense that it captures the beauty of a moment, qualities of light, the strangeness of words) than many attempts at non-narrative film.
NOTES:
--Like a first date, the words are arbitrary and beautiful. A game played to facilitate the connection of different bodies, affects, shared ice cream.
--A waitress dressed as a lobster, a bad joke, a bend at the waist…homemade pie, the off-putting out-moded remnants of marketing. The recovery of capitalism's lost articles. Like Walter Benjamin’s dialectical images: things out of time reveal their beauty and materiality after the ideal that worked in them has collapsed or mutated into something bigger, brighter and more blinding. --Pleasure in talking, as if we were in a movie. To hear ourselves speak the lines of b-movie stars and know it’s a joke.
--Above all transience and the moment, in a world that sees and thinks in television. To know that what is given is an arbitrary fantasy; a bad dream every one’s convinced is real or necessary. To not escape the dream but dream lucidly and out of synch- always a step ahead of belief. Generating images and not being generated by them, or at least taking part in their generation.
-Jesse Kennedy
{A Super-8 print of Beach Beast is available through Canyon Cinema.}
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Call for Entries Extended:
TIE - The International Experimental Cinema Exposition invites submissions for the autumnal 2006 festival. Since the festival's inception in Telluride, TIE has screened over 600 innovative historic and contemporary films and joined over 150 of the world's most influential avant-garde filmmakers. TIE has also become home for ground-breaking world premiers, from legends such as Stan Brakhage to a new generation of leading experimentalists.
TIE seeks films that challenge popular and conventional modes of cinema. From difficult and hand-made films to extraordinarily radical and obscure compositions, TIE selects only outstanding celluloid cinema from the outerspaces of contemporary screen-culture.
If a submitted film is selected, the exhibition print must be film (8mm, Super-8, 16mm, 35mm). All lengths are considered. A nominal entry fee is required. Films are considered on a rolling basis. Therefore, filmmakers are encouraged to submit as soon as possible. The extended submission deadline is July 15, 2006. Festival dates are October 11-15, 2006. The International Experimental Cinema Exposition - 2006 is co-sponsored by the Denver Film Society. The film screenings are held at the state-of-the-art Starz FilmCenter at the Tivoli.
TIE 2006 films, selected thus far, include new and historic work of three generations of avant-garde, underground and experimental filmmakers. FILMS FROM ANY PERIOD ARE CONSIDERED.
Submission Form:
http://www.experimentalcinema.com/subform.htm
TIE, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition
849 Humboldt Street, #2
Denver, CO 80218
USA
-- Phone: 303.832.2387 Website: http://www.experimentalcinema.org __________________________________________________________________ For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.