From: Thomas Beard (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Apr 14 2008 - 15:31:00 PDT
Light Industry
We Melt Away (A Walking Picture Palace of Ice)
Curated by Mark McElhatten
April 15, 2008 at 8pm
55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY
http://www.lightindustry.org/
Thirty years ago as part of a series of film projection pieces called
Trespass I projected uninvited images through windows of selected houses and
onto rooftops covered with freshly fallen snow. In the case of the interiors
the images ran away before they could be apprehended, the duration of the
piece lasting until someone walked into the room. The snow images endured
for longer periods of time on sparkling feathery screens. Uneven
accumulation creating illusions of depth and variable focus. My first
cinematic vision was a hallucination that came after three days on a
houseboat on the Hudson without food reading Brothers Karamazov when I was
barely in my teens. A vision like a Jan Toorop symbolist painting of virgin
deities encased in ice, a young boy skating on the frozen surface inches
from their linked naked bodies. All of this revealed with a soaring crane
shot.
This program takes us into the glacial territory of The Snow Queen where
love is mocked and infinity triumphs over eternity while Cyndi Lauper gives
us useless hope. A child of snow shivers and smiles as time moves in reverse
and snow ascends skyward. Houses collapse haunted and infirm echoing Poe and
Gorey. A hypnotized subject half-woman half-cat suspends in memory spirals,
one claw stuck in the scratching post of repressed sexuality. Seances and
hymns telepathic communications between the species.
Richard Pryor does stand up from beyond the grave. Transparent images lie
down and give up the ghost. We see through a glass darkly. Finally we shed
our body and move across the surface of the known world, revisiting the
scenes of a life brought to an early stillness splashing down in oceanic
oblivion... MM
Lunatic Princess, Mark LaPore, video, 2005, 4 mins
A magical loop of transfigured time with a daughter of snow, an orphan of
the storm. With the slightest nod towards Hans Christian Anderson via Jang
Sun-woo's melodramatic prelude to The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl.
MM
House, Ben Rivers, 16mm, 2007, 6 mins
Haunted by the house that wasn't there, it sheds its skin showing the steps
to be taken. MM
Another old dark house, where only fragments remain of a once animated
domestic history, reoccupied by a history of horror films. Crumbling
interiors. Stained, peeling walls and forgotten furniture. Dust sheets on
rotting floorboards. Shattered windows. The unfolding process of
abandonment, decay and renewal. BR
Singing Biscotts, Luther Price, 2007, 16mm, 6 mins
Not a gospel vamp, not quite ostinato catatonia but a lost and found of
looks that sound and return to look again, a searching and sincere choral
interlude from the continuing Biscuits/Biscotts series. MM
A Hallow Kiss for Mark LaPore, Luther Price, 16mm, 2008, 4 mins
The haunted heart is like a honeycomb, a catacomb, unlocked by a stuttering
silence a song of light sung in a skeletal key. MM
The Mongrel Sister, Luther Price, 16mm, 2007, 7 mins
Parallel worlds uncoil and ensnare with twisted logic and a terrazzo of dark
magic, diamonds and snakes. MM
Black and White Trypps Number Four, Ben Russell, video, 2008, 12 mins
"Jesus Christ, look at the white people, rushing back. White people don't
care, Jack..." Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the
recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach
assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible
film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible racial
stereotypes. BR
All Through the Night, Michael Robinson, video, 2007, 4 mins
A charred visitation with an icy language of control. There is no room for
love. MR
Zelienople, Darcy Shreve, video, 2007, 4 mins
Though there is a town along the Connoquenessing Creek in Pennsylvania and
named after a daughter of a German Baron of the 1800's, a place known to me
in passing as a child, the setting of this piece does not correspond to the
actual town or any one geographical location. What is seen is an unreachable
heartland, of this earth, but nowhere to be found. Holy zeal of spinster
twins,old recipes and afflictions, rheumatic organs, spurned advances,
forgotten colors singing in the blood. The title was chosen for it's
sonorous associations. (My grandmother wore opal rings.) The setting is a
brook of glass where images lay upon each other in coital confusion where
distant light misspells, embedded in frozen friction. DS
Phantom, Luke Sieczek, video, 2007, 7 mins
An incantation from the valley of sleep. Uncaged ancestral memory and
psychic unease prowl like fog on little cat feet. MM
Rehearsals for Retirement: In Memoriam Mark LaPore, Philip Solomon, video,
2007, 11 mins
Darkness at the edge of town, light at the end of the tunnel, a stalled
hearse and fires on the plain.
A souvenir from a dream. We walk in our sleep and fire walks with us. By
fire we are consumed. Rehearsing for eternity for retirement. Life a sum of
stolen moments stolen away by the Grand Theft. Next stop the twilight plane,
as an essence scattered, haunting all we ever knew. MM
The days grow longer for smaller prizes/I feel a stranger to all surprises
You can have them I don't want them/I wear a different kind of garment
In my rehearsals for retirement/The lights are cold again they dance below
me
I turn to old friends they do not know me/All but the beggar he remembers
I put a penny down for payment/In my rehearsals for retirement
Had I known the end would end in laughter /I tell my daughter it doesn't
matter...
Phil Ochs, "Rehearsals for Retirement"
Ticket Price - $6
About Mark McElhatten
Mark McElhatten has been a curator of film and video since 1977. He is
co-founder and co-curator of the annual "Views From the Avant-Garde"
programs at the New York Film Festival, now in its 12th year, and has been
the film archivist for Martin Scorsese since 1998. He has programmed "House
of Instants" "Films That Can't Be Told" and other experimental programs at
the International Film Festival Rotterdam for the last 11 years and
presented a 10-part exhibition of the films of Stan Brakhage at IFFR in
2001, which was reprised at the National Gallery in Washington. McElhatten
also programmed for the Torino Film Festival in Italy as well as other
festivals around the world. McElhatten continues to present The Walking
Picture Palace, a "nomadic" and expanding series of programs that began in
1994. McElhatten programmed close to one hundred programs for the Whitney
Museum of American Art's "The American Century Part II' and has been a film
consultant for the Whitney Biennial. He has held key curatorial positions at
New York's Collective for Living Cinema, The American Museum of the Moving
Image and Boston's Brattle Theater. He was the acting program director of
the San Francisco Cinematheque for several calendars in 1986. One of his
most characteristic programs, "God Doesn't Care What Movies I Watch," was a
seven hour film, video and performance marathon presented at the San
Francisco Cinematheque in 1991 consisting of films of all genres and
improvised selections. He has held guest teaching positions at Bard College
and taught film history, theory and production at the State University of
New York for four and half years. As a film student he studied with Ken
Jacobs, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Tom Gunning, P. Adams Sitney, Fred
Camper and Larry Gottheim. He has contributed cinematography for many
experimental films and some films from his selected filmography include
Specialities of a Residency Above the Clouds, Ember, Passing Resemblance,
and Submersion of the Temple. He has written for magazines in the US such as
Film Comment, and for European publications on Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs and
Lewis Klahr, amongst others. Since 2005 he has been touring the country with
the works of Mark LaPore and is currently working on a chapter of a book
about foreign filmmakers who have worked in India. And after presenting a
four-part series on the films of Paolo Gioli at the Hong Kong Film Festival,
McElhatten will be organizing a new touring program of Gioli's work in
2008/9.
About Light Industry
Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New
York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project will
begin as a series of weekly events in Sunset Park this spring and summer,
each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually,
Light Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative
art spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and
other intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings,
performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the
presentation of time-based media and foster a complex dialogue amongst a
wide range of artists and audiences within the city.
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.