From: ADAM ABRAMS (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Jul 25 2006 - 09:56:43 PDT
Jefferson Presents ... NEXT SCREENING:
WHEN: Saturday, July 29, 2006, 9PM
WHERE: Garfield Artworks 4931 Penn Ave.
HOW MUCH: $5/$4 students, seniors
JEFFERSON PRESENTS
JULY 29 PROGRAM
While it can be said that all of our programs present
Pittsburghers with a unique opportunity to see forms
of cinema that can't be seen elsewhere, this program
promises to be truly stunning. Read on for complete
descriptions.
All films will be projected in 16mm film.
Gunvor Nelson - Kirsa Nicholina (1969, 16mm, color/so,
16min.)
"That Gunvor Nelson is indeed one of the most gifted
of our poetic film humanists is revealed in KIRSA
NICHOLINA, her masterpiece. This deceptively simple
film of a child being born to a couple in their home
is an almost classic manifesto of the new sensibility,
a proud affirmation of man amidst technology,
genocide, and ecological destruction. Birth is
presented not as an antiseptic, 'medical' experience
(the usual birth film focuses on an anonymous vagina
appropriately surrounded by a white shroud) but as a
living-through of a primitive mystery, a spiritual
celebration, a rite of passage. True to the newest
sensibility, it does not aggressively proselytize but
conveys its ideology by force of example. With husband
and friends quietly present, the strikingly pretty
young woman, in fetching terrycloth and red socks, is
practically nude throughout; her whole body is seen at
times, and for once the continuity between lovepartner
and birth-giver is maintained; she remains 'erotic.'
We never once forget that she is a woman and that the
new life came from sexual desire ...." - Amos Vogel,
The Village Voice
Award: Diplomate, Oberhausen Film Festival
John Smith - Girl Chewing Gum (1976, 16mm black and
white/sound 12 min.)
"In 'The Girl Chewing Gum' a commanding voice over
appears to direct the action in a busy London street.
As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized,
we realize that the supposed director (not the shot)
is fictional; he only describes - not prescribes - the
events that take place before him. Smith embraced the
'spectra of narrative' (suppressed by structural
film), to play word against picture and chance against
order. Sharp and direct, the film anticipates the more
elaborate scenarios to come; witty, many-layered,
punning, but also seriously and poetically haunted by
drama's ineradicable ghost."
-A.L. Rees, A Directory of British Film & Video
Artists
Rose Lowder - Scènes de la vie française: Paris (1986,
16mm, color/si, 26min.)
This film is one of a series of films: Arles, Paris,
La Ciotat, Avignon. All four films share a similar
organizational procedure in that their material is
woven together on an ordinary printer according to a
certain pattern. The problems that arise are tackled,
however, in a slightly different way in the case of
each film. In SCÈNES DE LA VIE FRANÇAISE: PARIS,
several Parisian landmarks - Jardin du Luxembourg,
Place de la Republique, Rue St. Antoine, Canal St.
Martin, Place de la Bastille - are presented by means
of a composition of frames recorded at various times
from a similar viewpoint.
Matthias Müller - The Memo Book (Aus Der Ferne) (1989,
16mm, color/so, 28min.)
Originally Super 8. "Müller's virtuosic rephotography,
editing and hand processing techniques are hurled into
an erotic maelstrom, remaking the divisions of the
Word in a continual flux of inside and out, container
and contained. Learned in the tradition of Eisenstein,
Genet, Anger and Jarman, THE MEMO BOOK seeks to remake
the male body in a celebratory flow of communion and
despair, mythos and logos. One of the great erotic
works of German cinema." - Mike Hoolboom, Independent
Eye
Matthias Müller - Home Stories (1991, 16mm, color/so,
6 min.)
"She screams. She falls silent. The expectation of
terror makes her terror. But what she faces is nothing
but the observer's view. She is the observed. Cliches
of melodrama unite into a drama of stereotypes. The
brilliant montage of cases in point reveals the
mechanism of voyeurism in HOME STORIES by Matthias
Müller." - German Association of Film Critics
Award: Best German Short Film, German Film Critics
Association, 1991
James Otis - Upper Blue Lake (1996, 16mm, color/si,
12min.)
Coming to grips with landscape via
pseudo-hyper-stereoscopy. Your eyes are two-and-a-half
inches apart, giving viscerally felt depth to 25 feet.
If your eyes were 400 feet apart, you'd see solid
forms three miles distant and think your grasp
extended a mile. I established pairs of viewpoints up
to hundreds of feet apart and jogged between, at each
shooting a few frames. Since usual depth perception is
only to 25 feet, we see anything in stereo as within
that distance; mountains are seen as close and, hence,
small. Filming took days and days: time, too, is
miniaturized; shadows creep and clouds boil.
Experience land as diorama and time as summary. UPPER
BLUE LAKE, although not the most successfully
pseudo-stereoscopic of several such wide-eyed studies,
so enthralled me with its various qualities of light
and atmosphere, I persevered, for five years jogging
whenever I could, 12,000 feet high in the Colorado
Rockies.
All descriptions courtesy of Canyon Cinema
Jefferson Presents...
Movies for YOU
http://www.geocities.com/jeffersonpresents
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.