From: DOMINIC ANGERAME (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Aug 27 2007 - 14:35:59 PDT
Below are the new releases to be posted on the Canyon Website soon. For information on order contact (address suppressed) or call 415-626-2255
Thanks Dominic Angerame
PS if you wish a formatted copy, please email and I will send an attachment
NEW RELEASES
Engel, Jules
JULES ENGEL's work speaks for itself. Direct and lucid, it requires no paraphrase. The language, which is universal-Clarte, vivezza, elegance, ubereinstim mung, monumentality, calm--- comes from the center of his being.
Architectonic, congruous and genuinely contemporary, his larger pieces relate to modern edifices and open space in the same way that grouped statuary and the horses of Neptune fit in the piazze and against the rusticated walls of Florence.
Like Mies van der Rohe and Mondrian, with whom he shares a mutual pact to express the essential, his presence is unambiguous and emotionally affective without excess.
Distinguished as a painter, lithographer and filmmaker, as well as a sculptor, Jules Engel's work is relevant to all that has become in the past few decades quintessentially American in the arts. Of this place and time, sensitive to a rapidly advancing future, his roots are nonetheless firmly planted on personal territory: his own past, which embraces many media and many continents.
His work is never approximate. It is, rather, a summation and deftly summons the inner as well as the outer eye.
-Lucretia Cole
March/67
FILMS OF JULES ENGEL
“What I found so wonderfully compelling about your work was how it captured the best of what choreography can accomplish, but generally fails to when performed live in the theater. Not only is your work constructed to direct the audience's eye to a subtle, minute and particular gesture or shape, but in a manner which can be achieved in a fleeting instant. With just a few images a rhythm is generated that elaborates upon itself; five images, which began moving in unison, subsequently break Ho a canon and then a fugue. These images, while still retaining their initial quality, permutate, providing 1 2 5 variations on a theme, each compelling and mesmerizing. This use of repetition and the subtle variations that naturally arise, embodies choreography at its most successful.”
-Janice Margolis
Dancer/Choreographer
In 1939 he created choreography and color for Fantasia and, after serving in the Army Air Force Motion Picture Unit in World War 11, was one of the original members of U PA Studios-bringing Mr. Magoo, Gerald McBoing, Madeline, Icarus Montgolfier Wright Iscripte d by Ray Bradbury; Oscar nomination for Engel and other notable characters to the screen. Simultaneously he painted, printed, constructed, traveled and taught. This exhibition of his work opens with drawings of 1939 and extends through films of the 1990s.
He has received many awards-most recently the Norman McLaren Heritage Award in 1992 and a 'Lifetime Achievement' Award at the Cardiff International Film
Festival in Wales, 1994. From February to April 1997, The Donnell Media Center, New York celebrates the art of Jules Engel and the CalArts Film/Video Departments with a series "The Animated Film: A tribute to Jules Engel and CalArts Animation."
JULES ENGEL was founding director of the Experimental Animation Department at California Institute of the Arts in 1971.
Rumble
1977, 16mm b/w sound, 4 min. Rental $25
Silence
"In Silence, Engel mixes delicate black-and-white patterns which subtly
flicker to produce brief sparkly afterimages (rather
like the patterns generated when you close your eyes and press against the lids) with the written word 'silence', suggesting an analogy between Cage's advanced
music and a possible kind of optical silence." - Dr. William Moritz
1968, 16mm, color/silent, 3min. Rental $25
Train Landscape
Music by Stan Levine "Black and white forms, 'lights,' signs flickering,
introduction of blue, tan, brown, increasing effect of shimmer."
- Christopher Mulrooney
1974, 16mm, color/sound, 3min. Rental $25
Shapes & Gestures
Music by Steve Goldman
"If you recognize a masterpiece, here is one. Fischinger's Radio
Dynamics is the basis by a distant kinship. If Frank O. Gehry were a
genius, his buildings would look like this, and same goes coincidentally for Richard Meier. Albers' visual conundrums, a dash of Synchronism, to an inspired score by one Steve Goldman."
- Christopher Mulrooney
1976, 16mm, color/ sound, 7min Rental $30
Dance/Lines in Space
Music by Elisabeth Bartfai
1987, 16mm, color/sound, 3min. Rental $25
Gallery 3
1987, color, sound, 6min.
Music by Barry Schrader
1987, 16mm, color/sound, 6min. Rental $30
Villa Rospigliosi
Music by Elisabeth Bartfai
"No less complex are referential films like Villa Rospigliosi and
Gallery 3, which consciously evoke the ironic antithesis of exhibition
in a museum/gallery and exhibition in a movie theater. The outline of
Villa Rospigliosi (a fictional Italian museum) remains on screen
throughout the film, reminding us (like the mirrors in representational
paintings, or like the serial imagery of 'Black Windows' in Engel's own
paintings of the 1960s) continually of the viewing space (as a doubly-coded self-reference, or displacement) which can show equally the ascetic calligraphy of Cy Twombly, the naïve 'magical' charm of the bird trapped in an illusory Thaumatrope cage (or is it a real pigeon whose liveliness outside the gallery window distracts from the 'nature morte' paintings inside?), and dazzling Post-Modern collages (simultaneously referencing painters Rosenquist and Rauschenberg as well as filmmaker Pat O'Neill) in which repetitive cycles of representational figures brush shoulders with non-objective forms. Elizabeth Bartfai's ravishing and clever collage of moments from Respighi's 'Botticelli Pictures' brilliantly reinforces this meditation about Art and how we see it." - Dr. William Moritz
1988, 16mm, color/sound, 4min. Rental $25
Sakle, Albert
"Von Innen, von Aussen is a wonderfully unnerving,
scrutinized, study of the human body within the context of its environment. The film opens with an empty apartment set in motion, revolving around a fixed point. This introduces the kinetic fixation that Sackl explores thoroughly within the film, the revolution. Implications of the revolution within man's own self-image and man's
historic worldview seems to be the larger conceptual concerns of the work.
"The revolution is then applied to man, himself, where Sackl plays out in a score of variations on the theme. At first, we see an unidentified nude male subject revolving clockwise on his central axis in front of a black background. It is evident that the backdrop is part of the apartment, but it clear that Sackl intends it to be an empirical environment for one portion of his study. Sackl then sets the revolving man in motion back and forth across the face of the backdrop. Sackl continues his formal investigation sending the revolving man back and forth in space. The next major development is that the image splits and we view the man in stereo. The two men's revolutions are synchronized at first, then each takes on his own timing and direction.
"At this point the viewer could easily define the film as simply a visual analysis of the male figure in highly ordered motion, but then Sackl presents the environment as variable. Suddenly, the black background is lifted and anonymous natural background is presented. The landscape is initially vacant, but the spinning man soon enters stage right and makes his way back and forth, revolving all the while. The film soon cuts back to the black background where more variations are played out, the most noteworthy being the superimposition of the man's front and back. The visual biomorphism is totally bizarre. Throughout the remainder of the film, the environment continues to shift between the apartment, natural landscapes and the black backdrop. In the end, the empiricism of the blackened space is beautifully tainted by rays of sunlight that are projected onto the scene from a window behind the camera.
"Ultimately, the film has a truly meditative quality, a meditation that encompasses our notions about our bodies and the rules that govern it, both environmental and self-imposed. The precision of the filmmaking is overwhelming, in a way that is echoed in the movements of the male model. Something within the tight order applied to the man's body brings to mind the iconic work of Leonardo de Vinci, which imposes perfect geometries atop the human form."
-Noah Manos, TIE
Vom Innen; von aussen
2006, 16mm color/silent, 20 min. Rental $60
Davis, Sandra
Ignorance Before Malice
A true story – and the aesthetic sequelae of the filmmaker’s recovery process following a 1993 auto accident. Parallel voices of narrativized testimony describing a woman’s struggle to heal within the American medical system, and a personal rumination on the journey through a sudden rupture of health into disability. Feeling my brain in the act of consciousness in viewing the MRI cells, images from art history, personal history and fantasy exploded. As did the elements of the soundtrack. Filmed entirely on the animation stand.
2006, 16mm, color/sound, 30 min. Rental $75.00
SALE of film prints and DVD's: Inquire filmmaker
This print includes visual text (intertitles) and audio vocal text in English
CREPESCULE Pond & Chair
My brother was disabled by muscular dystrophy and used a wheelchair for most of his life. Despite the long, gradual degeneration of his physical condition, he lived with great spirit and heart, married, raised two children, volunteered for his church and was still working at his profession and building his fish pond on his land, when he died suddenly of complications of MD at age 52. In an irony of life, a little Christmas message from him arrived two days after his sudden death. This event impelled me to respond with a film. The chair was his mobility in life; the pond he created was his dream. He was my only brother and when I myself was disabled 10 years ago in an auto accident, his attitude of practical adaptations to physical impairments was one that made it easier for me. This film is a little elegy song to him, simultaneously celebrating his life and mourning his family’s personal loss.
2001, 16mm color/sound, 6.5 min. Rental $25
SALE of film prints and DVD's: Inquire filmmaker
Chodorov, Pip
Faux Mouvements
Produced by: Les Productions Aléatoires and CNC.
Assistants: Nicolas Rey, Marie-Odile Sambourg.
Music: Gerard Pape.
Cinema is about the illusion of movement. The filmstrip is made up of individual pictures in succession. The phi phenomenon explains how the brain creates bridges from frame to frame, filling in the gaps, creating the illusion of smooth movement during the black intervals between frames. The perception of movement is processed in areas 17 and 18 of the visual cortex. Neurons in V1 and V2 are responsible for identifying objects in motion, their speed and direction, and global motion across the visual field. This information is processed and passed down to V5/MT where all
stimuli are integrated, specific neurons determining specific perceptions, such as upward motion or forward motion. These perceptions can be tricked - cells adapt to motion stumuli and in the absence of that stimuli, produce the opposite perception. Staring into the center of the turning spiral causes forward motion detectors to
adapt to that stimulus; the still picture of the train then appears to swell out. This film follows research started in "Charlemagne 2: Piltzer" which concentrated on the perception of color and the creation of phantom colors not present on the film strip
through flickering. In "Faux Mouvements", forward and backward motions occur together, movement in different directions are combined. We perceive motion in
images that are in fact still. We can also see references to the spiral of the film reel, and the negative and positive of the film process.
2007, 16mm color/sound, 12 min. Rental $35
Vanderborght, Karen
www.fatalimagefatale.org
Images Fatales
What’s the relation between punks and the Flemish Primitives? Is electronic music as dangerous as conducting chemical experiments? Can queer feminists make music videos? Are angels anarchists or sponsored UFO’s? How much DIY can be found in fairy tales? Do people dream of Cinema or does Cinema dream for people? How trashy can digital love be? Find answers on these and other relevant questions on the DVD “Images Fatales”, a collection of film- and video works by Karen Vanderborght. Includes also: Exclusive Soundtracks by Thomas Köner and Köhn. Rare music video’s for Porter Ricks and Kiila.
90 min. of images in colour and B&W
DVD, NTSC, stereo, all zones.
Produced by FatalimageFatale vzw.
DVD home use price: $20
DVD Institutional price: $150
Viva
An ode to the free fall. A mortuary cinematic card made by Vanderborght, for a friend who jumped from his balcony in the village where he was born. So the memory of this village, this paradisiacal holiday resort of the filmmakers' childhood, became more vacant than ever.
1994-6, S8mm, color/b&w, magnetic striped, 10 min. Rental $30
What does she see when she shuts her eyes
A surrealistic whim, an experimentally shot initiation into life's' imagination. Moa, a home-sitter, kills the “whys" in people’s lives. From a filmmaker who destroys films she receives a camera to record her many experiences. She meets different people like a cashier, a soldier, the former projectionist of the Belgian king Leopold III and.... Henna who breeds chicks.
1995-6, 16mm, color/ b&w / sound, 14 min. Rental $45
Iimura, Takahiko
http://www.takaiimura.com/
Experiments in New York
Three short films all shot in New York were compiled.
The first, "New York Scenes," 1967, is sketches of certain scenes and portraits of the filmmaker's friends and other people. It is divided into five "chapters" including, a famous filmmaker, Jack Smith with his film "Flaming Creatures." The film is made with one scene per chapter, and the chapters are "Linda with a lens," "Jack Smith with his film "Flaming Creatures," "Fire hydrants on Broadway," "Akiko on the roof," and "A Hippy in the Central Park."
The second film, "New York Hot Springs," 1984, was made with the steam coming out of manholes, a typical scene in the winter on the streets of New York, which reminded him of the Japanese hot springs in volcanic mountains. Consisting of shots of various steams at 10 locations in the city, the film is edited with each shot (5 seconds) in successive order and is rotated 10 times. A kind of Structural Film you might say. Since the form of the steam changes every moment, you are looking at new steam even at the same location.
The third film, "Talking in New York," 1981, is a kind of first person cinema where Iimura is the cameraman as well as the actor. Acting like a total stranger in the city who does not speak or hear the language, he walks with a camera to such sight-seeing spots as Times Square, and the top of the Empire State building, etc., only listening to himself speaking the words: "I hear myself at the same time that I speak" in two languages: Japanese and English. The words are a quotation from the book by Jacques Derrida, French philosopher, which he calls "phenomenological essence." (T.I)
DVD, 1967-1984, total 29min.
(Region Free DVD)
DVD Sale prices: $80 for home use, $160 institutional
Fluxus Replayed
Destroying a violin by Nam June Paik, and rolling up with bandage all over the body of the players in a concert by Yoko Ono, with such radical actions Fluxus (an art group organized by George Maciunas) shocked not only art world, but also a society at large. A historical document of international avant-garde group, Fluxus performances in New York, 1991, which reproduced the performances in early 1960s, an origin of art-performance, with the works of the main artists: Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Allison Knowles, Ben Patterson, Jackson Mac Low and Emmett Williams. --T. I.
" Taka Iimura is a senior figure among contemporary Japanese artists and has been working with film, sound and video since the 1960s. He was one of several Japanese who, coming from a 20th Century tradition of avant-garde intervention,1 contributed to the Fluxus group in the 60s. Like many media artists, Iimura made recordings of contemporaries and their work. Alongside his film and video artworks, (the video Observer/Observed reviewed in Leonardo 35.1), portable video enabled documentation, (and general note making), more economically than film. As the cycle of experimentation moves through another generation, glimpses of precursors through archive recordings of this kind help ground artists surviving words and artworks".
-Mike Leggett, Leonardo Digital Reviews, MIT Press
DVD, 1991, b/w, 30min.
(Region Free DVD)
DVD Sale prices: $100 for home use, $200 institutional use
The Collected Writings of Takahiko Iimura
To order, please visit:
https://wildsidebooks.3dcartstores.com/IIMURA-Takahiko_c_621.html
Includes essays, papers, and scripts with many photos and diagrams written between 1974 -1999, on Experimental film, Video art, Installation, Performance, and Multimedia of the artist.
Paperback, 200 pages. Sale price: $19.95
If you have any questions feel free to contact:
Wildside Press
9710 Traville Gateway Dr. #234
Rockville, MD. 20850, USA
Phone: 301-762-1305
Wildside Press © 2004. All rights reserved.
"Taka Iimura has been making films since the early 1960s. His work has
gone through a series of relatively clear, consistent developments:
from 1962 to 1968, Iimura was largely involved with surreal imagery, with
eroticism, and with social criticism; from 1968 through 1971, he
continued to use photographic imagery, but worked with it in increasingly
formal ways; from 1972 until 1978, he devoted himself very largely to a
series of minimalist explorations of time and space. During the years
since, Iimura has been more fully involved with video than with film."
--Scott MacDonald
"Although Taka was and continues to be an active part of the New York
avant-garde scene, he always remained an enigmatic, mysterious presence,
pursuing his own unique route through the very center of the
avant-garde cinema. While the intensity and the fire of the American avant-garde
film movement inspired him and attracted him, his Japanese origins
contributed decisively to his uncompromising explorations of cinema's
minimalist and conceptualist possibilities. He has explored this direction
of cinema in greater depth than anyone else."
-- Jonas Mekas
Levine, Saul
A legend of small gauge filmmaking, Saul Levine’s practice includes film, video, live performance, collage and installation. Included in the Museum of Modern Art ’s 1998 exhibition Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Films, Levine’s work is noted for its incorporation of splice marks, percussive editing, “unconstrained camera movements and spontaneous formal accidents” (Steve Anker). This distinctive style, informed by a background in the blues, poetry, and radical politics, produces “exquisitely kinetic,” and often very beautiful cinematic experiences. Levine’s influence extends beyond his film work: he has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art for over 25 years and programs the longstanding Mass Art Film Society. Since 1964, he has made over 80 films and videos, five of which we present in this program. "Saul Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America. With about 35 years of consistent production behind him, and no signs of fatigue, he can
show us the shape of a life passionately and uncompromisingly devoted to filmmaking. His works are high-energy messages of friendship, records of sexual love and political activism, radiated by humor, prophetic anger, loneliness and even though rarely, representing repose.” - P. Adams Sitney
New Left Note
As editor of New Left Notes, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. For this film, he employs a rapid fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the antiwar movement, women’s liberation and the Black Panthers. “New Left Note is a study of radical politics in radical film form." - Marjorie Keller
1968-82, 16mm, color/silent, 18fps. 26 min. Rental $100
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
Note to Pati
Note on snowstorms in February-March '69. The restoration of the landscape begun to show friends on west coast violent beauty of this period. Childhood memories, snowball fights, sledding, etc., and how I felt about Medford where I live kept entering into the film. The principal birds in the film are the blue jay and the crow, both beautiful, smart and ruthless." - S.L.
1969, 16mm, color/silent, 18fps. 8 min. Rental $25
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
The Big Stick / An Old Reel
Directed by Saul Levine US 1967-73, 16mm, silent, b/w, 17 min.
The Big Stick /An Old Reel “intercut[s] two Charlie Chaplin shorts centering on policemen with newsreel footage of police crowd control and street fighting. Levine questioned the social implications of media, not only by ma king temporal, aesthetic and contextual comparisons of his sources, but by presenting this discomforting ragout in a film gauge whose cost, availability and mobility ma k e simply working it an intrinsically political gesture... Levine's adroit use of graphic action from the newsreels and close-ups from the shorts change the rapid cuts from aw k ward stumbles to almost profound superimpositions."
- James Irwin, Artweek
1967-73, 16mm, color/silent, 18 fps. 17 min. Rental $65
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
LIGHT LICKS: BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON: IN THE HOUR OF THE ANGELS
Is part of a subseries within the LIGHT LICKS. This film was shot in Cambridge, MA and Jersey City, NJ. It was inspired by ancient apocalyptic poetry, the more recent poetry of Walt Whitman, Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Reznikoff. There are views of the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty in the hour of the Angels. Thanks to Nancy Golden.
2004, 16mm, color/silent, 18 fps. 23 min. Rental $90
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
LIGHT LICKS: BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON: JAMMING
LIGHT LICKS: BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON: JAMMING is another in the sub-series has footage of the 5,000,000 people demonstrating at the 2004 National Republican Convention in New York, a wedding in Salem, MA.
2004, 16mm, color/silent, 18fps. 21 min. Rental $82
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
Note to Colleen
Opens with a short portrait of Marjorie Keller that I made while she met Colleen Fitzgibbon and I on a corner in New York City. The rest of the film is a note to Colleen a continuation of conversations about portraiture, public and private art, love, friendship and loneliness.
1974, 16mm, color/silent, 18 fps. 5 min. Rental $20
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives and BB Optics.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at
.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.