From: Caroline Koebel (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Feb 25 2008 - 08:25:38 PST
Dear Frameworkers:
If you can, come out tonight for Barbara Hammer and Lana Lin in person. --C
Jewels and Gems from the Film-Makersı Coop presents:
THE INVENTING SPACE OF CINEMA
Monday, February 25, 2008, 7:30PM, $5
Collective : Unconscious
279 Church St. (btw. Franklin & White) New York City
Subway: A, C, E to Canal St.
Tel: 212-254-5277
A screening of 16mm films by Lana Lin, Barbara Hammer & Barbara Klutinis,
Janie Geiser, Leslie Thornton, Joyce Wieland, Storm De Hirsch, Babette
Mangolte, Marie Menken, Marjorie Keller, Maya Deren
Curated by Caroline Koebel
Filmmakers Lana Lin and Barbara Hammer will be present to discuss their
work.
Maya Derenıs first film experiment Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) ignited
the American avant-garde film movement at mid-century, and for decades now
has been screened continuously in cinema studies classrooms. At one point
the filmıs protagonist (played by Deren) strides in a space that only cinema
makes possible: close-ups show the womanıs alternating feet against sand,
grass, pavement, and rug, creating the effect that she actually exists
simultaneously in these ordinarily disjointed environs. Of this sequence,
Deren has written, ³It was like a crack letting the light of another world
gleam through. I kept saying to myself, The walls of this room are solid
except right thereThereıs a door...Iıve got to get it open because through
there I can go to someplace instead of leaving here by the same way that I
came in.ı²
In a like-spirited displacement, The Inventing Space of Cinema re-posits
Meshes of the Afternoon within a frame of worksincluding live action,
animation, and re-purposed footagethat use experimental means and
investigatory techniques to pose questions about objective and subjective
space, gendered spatiality, and filmic architectonics. The frame is intended
to open a necessary entrance to Meshes, one enabling the pre-canon filmıs
flux and indeterminacy to sneak past into the present. Caroline Koebel
Total Running Time: Approx. 73 mins.
Titles and descriptions as they appear on the Film-Makersı Cooperative
website follow:
LANA LIN
Through the Door (1992) 16mm, color, sound, 3 min.
A mock travel film composed of archival footage that comments on narrative
conventions. A woman is heard, but not seen. Visual and aural narratives
unfold independently, reinforcing and countering each other.
BARBARA HAMMER & BARBARA KLUTINIS
Pools (1981) 16mm, color and b&w, sound, 6 min.
"POOLS is a pictorially and technically impressive sampling of spectacular
swimming pools at W.R. Hearst's San Simeon and manages to validate itself
from within, or at least within its own frame of identification." -- Richard
T. Jameson
My aesthetics in co-making POOLS with Barbara Klutinis was to bring an
experiential and physiological sense of the body to the members of the
audience watching the film in terms of the locations, the swimming pools
designed by the first woman architect to graduate from the School of Beaux
Arts in Paris, Julia Morgan. I want the viewers to have the experience of
swimming in architectural space for two reasons. First and foremost, I want
to activate my audience, I want them to come alive, not be passive through
watching cinema, and then to extend that "aliveness" into their lives
through conscious expansive living and responsible politics. The second
reason I swam and filmed in those pools was to break a taboo. No visitors
are allowed to swim in these gorgeous examples of Morgan's work. At least by
getting permission to swim there myself with an underwater camera I could
extend through vision this extraordinary physical experience.
JANIE GEISER
Terrace 49 (2004) 16mm, color, sound, 5 1/2min.
Images of impending disaster- slamming doors, a truck careening down a hill,
and a frayed, almost snapping, elevator rope collide with the repeated image
of a woman - body, cycling toward ephemerality as the woman disappears into
the texture of the film itself. In my recent films, I have been exploring
the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a lush,
disorienting, ambiguous film space, and an atmosphere a temporal suspension.
In Terrace 49, I further break up this space, dividing the film frame into
shards, as fractured as memory and as fragile as glass.
LESLIE THORNTON
Jennifer, Where are You? (1981) 16mm, color, sound, 10 min.
Young girls use lipstick over-liberally and thus block out unwanted noises.
JOYCE WIELAND
1933 (1967) 16mm, color, sound, 4 min.
"The repeated images are such that they appear to be different every time;
to be expanding. 1933 has a machine-mechanical-doll-rhythmic-like
structure." -- Robert Cowan, Take One
"1933. The year? The number? The title? Was it (the film) made then? It's a
memory! (i.e., a Film). No, it's many memories. It's so sad and funny: the
departed, departing people, cars, street! It hurries, it's gone, it's back!
It's the only glimpse we have but we can have it again. The film (of 1933?)
was made in 1967. You find out, if you didn't already know, how naming tints
pure vision." -- Michael Snow
STORM DE HIRSCH
Peyote Queen (1965) 16mm, color, sound, 9 min.
A further exploration into the color of ritual, the color of thought; a
journey through the underworld of sensory derangement.
"A very beautiful work! The abstractions drawn directly on film are like the
paintings of Miró moving at full speed to the rhythm of an African beat." --
D. Noguez, La Nouvelle Revue Française
"Among my favorites ... beauty and excitement." -- Jonas Mekas, The Village
Voice
BABETTE MANGOLTE
There? Where? (1979) 16mm, color, sound, 8-3/4 min.
An essay on the displacement and disjuncture of images of southern
California and the voice-over. The film is a point of interrogation. Where
are the voices, here or over there? And these faces, near or far? Are they a
commentary on the dialogue, or vice-versa? Illustrating the ambivalence of
perception without referent, the film is also a documentary on southern
California.
MARIE MENKEN
Moonplay (1962) 16mm, b&w, sound, 5 min.
Sound by Teiji Ito.
A lunar fantasy in animated stop-motion.
MARJORIE KELLER
Six Windows (1979) 16mm, color, sound, 6-1/2 min.
A pan and a dissolve make a window of a wall on film. A portrait of the
filmmaker in a luminous space, synthetically rendered via positive and
negative overlays.
... I lived in some rooms by the sea and watched the inside and the view as
well as the window panes that divided and joined them. I was often lost in
thought. The birds would come and make a racket, reminding me I shared that
space and sky with them. The film is a moody record of that place and my
peace of mind.
MAYA DEREN
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) 16mm, b&w, sound, 14 min.
This film is concerned with the inner realities of an individual and with
the way in which the sub-conscious will develop, interpret and elaborate an
apparently simple and casual occurrence into a critical emotional
experience. It is culminated by a double-ending in which it would seem that
the imagined achieved, for the protagonist, such force that it became
reality. Using cinematic techniques to achieve dislocations of inanimate
objects, unexpected simultaneities, etc., this film establishes a reality
which, although somewhat based on dramatic logic, can exist only on film.
(Note that this description comes not from the Coop site, but from a 1945
brochure written by Deren republished in Essential Deren).
³Your camera is not only a means, but also a muse and can lead you, like a
siren, into creative adventure in your medium.² Maya Deren
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