From: Adam Savje (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Sep 22 2006 - 07:24:18 PDT
Retrospective of Available Work by Mark Lapore
Mass Art Film Society
Two Repeat Screenings
October 3rd and 4th 2006, 8pm
Free to all
Donations to buy prints of Mark Lapore's Work for the
Mass Art Library will be appreciated
Massachusetts College of Art, East Building, Screening
Room 1
621 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
617.879.7446
Mass Art Film Society will present two retrospective
screenings of available work by beloved filmmaker and
Massachusetts College of Art Professor, Mark Lapore
(1952-2005) on October 3rd and 4th 2006. The two
repeat screenings will include the following works:
The Sleepers, The Glass System, Depression in the Bay
of Bengal, The Five Bad Elements, Kolkata, Untitled
(for David Gatten) and possibly more. The screenings
are free to all and will begin at 8pm in the East
Building of Massachusetts College of Art, Screening
Room 1.
While this is a free event, it is also a fundraiser
for the acquisition of Mark Lapore's work for the Mass
Art Film Library. Donations will be gratefully
appreciated. To give a donation please write checks
to Mass Art Foundation and clarify on the memo of the
check "Mark Lapore Film Fund".
Checks may be delivered in person at the screening or
mailed to:
Film/Video Department, Film Area
Massachusetts College of Art
621 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
For more information please contact Adam Savje, Studio
Manager, Film Department, Massachusetts College of Art
at 617.879.7446 or by email at (address suppressed)
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"Mark LaPore - though deeply influenced by the
practices of the Lumière brothers, Andy Warhol, and
Robert Bresson - expanded a tradition of experimental
documentary filmmaking practiced by Cavalcanti,
Wright, Rouch, Gardener, the MacDougals, Hutton and
Gehr, conducting profoundly cinematic,
highly-distilled personal investigations into
thenature of cultural flux and reverie. He shot
extensively in rural Sudan, Sri Lanka, New York,
Myanmar, India and Idaho." - Mark McElhatten
"Lapore's exquisite films straddle the avant-garde and
ethnography. He was concerned with looking at other
cultures and also with what it means to make images in
another culture. His observational images are often
camera-roll in length. Within the fixed frame, minute
gestures become riveting. The duration of our gaze,
the duration of the everyday activities depicted
emphasize the act of looking: are these films about
the other, ourselves or the maker - Pacific Film
Archive
"Mark Lapore, a visually accomplished filmmaker, has
often taken on in his films ethnographic subjects that
he manages to treat with great awareness and subtlety.
In his carefully designed but spontaneous synch sound
takes, the exoticism of the places and people going
about their business is matched by his own
extraordinary sense of composition and spectacle.
Adding to this mix the richness of the sound, the
length of the shots and the deliberate selection of
the activities being filmed, what is conveyed is both
a sense of the ordinary as well as of the
otherworldly." -SUNY/Binghamton Film/Video
Mark Lapore's films have been shown at the The New
York Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The
Bankok International Film Festival, The Hong Kong
Experimental Film Festival, The San Francisco
Cinematheque, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney
Museum, Georges Pompido Museum of Modern Art, Tate
Gallery, London and The Museum of Art Vienna. He was a
was supported in his artistic endeavors by the Jerome
Foundation Grant, two Fulbright Fellowships, a
Guggenheim Fellowship and a LEF Foundation Grant. He
was recognized and awarded by the Black Maria Film
Festival and Parabola Film Arts.
"Mark was a great source of inspiration and support to
the students, staff and faculty here at the Mass Art
Film/Video Department. He helped to shape this program
into what it is today and his input, creativity and
sense of humor will be deeply missed. Mark was a
gifted teacher and you always felt he really gave you
and your work his full attention. He was a mentor, a
friend and a great filmmaker." - Adam Savje
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The following films will be screened
THE SLEEPERS 1989, 16 minutes, 16mm, color, sound
THE SLEEPERS is a film about how notions of culture
are often defined by information received indirectly -
information which frequently violates the particulars
of people and place and makes questionable one's
ability to portray specific individuals as
representatives of culture. - Mark LaPore
-- THE GLASS SYSTEM 2000, 20 minutes, 16mm, color, sound "A portrait primarily of Calcutta but by inclusion and inference some personal notion of 'lost' New York - 'a place which exiss in a dream where life in the streets was both complicated and fleeting.' The name derives from a private anecdote but it conjures up associations with Duchamp's The Large Glass in illustrating the complexities of competing or unseen gazes as they ricochet, superimpose and compress on a single vitreous, photochemical or temporal plane And as with Walter Ruttman (BERLIN SYMPHONY OF A CITY) and Fritz Lang (M) the reflective store window and its contents represent the convergence of unconscious desire, phantasmagoria and capital. With an insight that is courageous yet respectfully detached (moving in its austerity) LaPore also explores some selective, inevitable trajectories of young girls within this Indian urban society and their vulnerability, composure, aptitudes and perils." - Mark McElhatten -- A DEPRESSION IN THE BAY OF BENGAL 1996, 28 minutes, 16mm, color, sound "A DEPRESSION IN THE BAY OF BENGAL is a 28-minute color film shot while on a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship to Sri Lanka in 1993-1994. I went to Sri Lanka with the idea that I would remake Basil Wright's and John Grierson's 1934 documentary Song of Ceylon. After spending three months there I realized just how impossible that would be. Wright's film was formally innovative and visually brilliant but his experience was not to be revisited. Each of the places he filmed still exist, but thirteen years of ethnic war have colored the way in which those places can be portrayed. I have made a film about travelling and living in a distant place which looks at aspects of daily life and where the war shadows the quotidian with a dark and rumbling step. This film is both diaristic and metaphorical, both on account of my observations of everyday life as well as an indirect record of the war and of the tense atmosphere which permeates life there. The overwhelming sensation in the film is that of both physical and metaphorical distance: the distance between the traveler and Sri Lankans, the miles traveled as indicated by the persistent sound of trains, the distance between the camera and the subject, time as distance as evoked both by the historical footage and the notion of trains as a nineteenth century mode of transport, and by the black leader at the close of the film over which an article about an explosion in Sri Lanka is read. Past experience, whether local or far away, exists only in the mind and for the duration of the last three minutes of the film, mental images are the ones that play on the screen." - Mark LaPore -- THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS 1997, 32 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound "A dark and astringent film that allows the filmmaker's personal subconscious drives and the equivocal bad conscience of ethnography to bleed through into overall content. ... The hand held camerawork and the particular leverage of THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS both pushes and works against LaPore's previous tendencies in order to create compound fractures of potent abbreviations and overextended unexpurgated scenes in which sight is caught actively probing or transfixed in seeming paralysis. By interrupting already truncated and mysterious unmoored images with sections prolonging the durations and decay time of images normally torn from our sight, LaPore offers not provocation or obsession as much as permission to travel deeper into the image. The image as it pertains to actual experience - not only a filmic event or an approximate residue. That stands in for something else as all images do. Refusing to satisfy curiosity with information, LaPore frustrates the usual complicities between image and documentary fact by dealing with representation as an execution of likeness, while still reckoning with the standard exchange rate of the image in its metaphoric fidelity to the real, the elusive and the tangible aspects to the image. LaPore's audacities are almost camouflaged by his refined sense of restraint, his austerity and lyrical contemplativenes. ... By building the film on normally inadmissable evidence, telegraphed inferences, metaphoric leaps and omissions, damaged testimonies and scattered remains, the film fabricates an impeccable and elegant architecture from a materially incomplete and unsound body. In the fragmented corpus of human beings and continents which is THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS, LaPore has created a film which itself acts as an absorbent object, a kind a metastatic sin eater that aims at expiation through its own contamination, redistributing poisons into a netherworld that still clearly resides at the core of its own physical and visible existence." - Mark McElhatten -- KOLKATA 2005, 35 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound "A portrait of North Kolkata (Calcutta), this film searches the streets for the ebb and flow of humanity and reflects the changing landscape of a city at once medieval and modern." - Mark LaPore "Bodies emerge from vaporous passageways, figures traverse flooded streets. Silver packets dance as if sentient, humans linger somnolent or at the average tempo required by their trades. Calcutta, an actual city like all cities nested on the meridian between the imaginary and the mundane is here immersed in a pandemonium of sonic distortion, the cawing of scavenger crows the mad repetitions of competing pitches and a toxic reduction of Beethoven fit for the realms of merger between capital and carrion. In time the observer is observed as openly as those who he portrays, at a reflective standstill or at a stately yet exhilarating pace transported through the arteries of the main printing district. LaPore revisits and rephrases some of the elements presented in The Glass System adding a new dimension to his explorations of shots of extended duration (in the spirit of both Warhol and the Lumières) in one of his most spare and eloquent films. - Mark McElhatten -- UNTITLED (FOR DAVID GATTEN) By Mark LaPore and Phil Solomon 2005, 5 minutes, color, sound, digital video "Mark and I made this for our friend David Gatten, as a prayer, an offering, a 'get well soon' card... for all three of us. It was made on the last night that I saw Mark, my best friend of 32 years." - Phil Solomon -- END __________________________________________________________________ For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.