From: Scott MacDonald (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Sep 26 2008 - 05:45:07 PDT
FRAMEWORKERS!
It's not part of "THE WALKING PICTURE PALACE," but
it WILL be a fun show, and an opportunity to see some
rarely-screened films, at MoMA, Monday evening, October
6th, at 7:00.
In conjunction with my recent book, CANYON CINEMA:
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN INDEPENDENT FILM DISTRIBUTOR
(University of California Press, 2008), I'll be showing a
set of films by makers who were crucial in the development
of Canyon Cinema.
Here's the program:
TUNG. 1966. Bruce Baillie. 5 min.
WATERFALL. 1967. Chick Strand. 3 min.
OH DEM WATERMELONS. 1965. Robert Nelson. 11 min.
VALENTINE DE LAS SIERRAS. 1968. Bruce Baillie 10 min.
KIRSA NICHOLINA. 1969. Gunvor Nelson. 16 min.
RIVERBODY. 1970. Anne Severson. 7 min.
TAKE OFF. 1972. Gunvor Nelson. 10 min.
KRISTALLNACHT. 1979. Chick Strand. 7 min.
tribute finale: Bruce Conner
COSMIC RAY. 1962. 5 min.
VALSE TRISTE. 1977. 5 min.
Hope to see you!
Scott MacDonald
On Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:15:19 -0400
Mark McElhatten <email suppressed> wrote:
> THE WALKING PICTURE PALACE
> Curated by Mark McElhatten.
>
> October 2, 6,, 8 & 9 at ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES - 2nd
>Avenue and Second Street
> October 7 at Light Industry
>http://www.lightindustry.org/
> Sunset Park Brooklyn at 55 33rd Street (between 2nd and
>3rd Avenue), 3rd Floor
>
> THREE PROGRAMS WITH NICK DORSKY
> A SOLO PROGRAM OF WORK BY PAOLO GIOLI INCLUDING TWO
>WORLD PREMIERES FROM 2008
> THREE GROUP PROGRAMS WITH MANY PREMIERES AND SURPRISES
>NY AND WORLD PREMIERES BY JULIE MURRAY SCOTT STARK
>MIRANDA RAIMONDI KERRY LAITALA JESSIE STEAD DAVID
>GATTEN
> CHRIS GEHMAN DANIEL RICUITTO BRUCE CHECEFSKY KEN JACOBS
>LUTHER PRICE STOM SOGO
>
>
> NATHANIEL DORSKY – SELECTED FILMS 1964 TO 2006 THREE
>PROGRAMS
> Consummate filmmaker and author of DEVOTIONAL CINEMA,
>Dorsky returns to the New York Film Festival this year
>on Saturday October 4th at Views from the Avant – Garde
>http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/program/
>avantgarde/avantgarde.html
> with the premieres of two new films, WINTER (2007) and
>SARABANDE (2008). On the occasion of his return and his
>visiting semester at Princeton, we present this
>selection from his oeuvre.
> Dorsky will be here in person to present all three
>programs on October 2, 6 and 9
>
> NATHANIEL DORSKY – PROGRAM 1:
> INGREEN (1964, 12 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
> “The first of three films depicting the emergence from
>adolescence.” – N.D.
>
> PNEUMA (1977-1983, 28 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
> “In Stoic philosophy ‘pneuma’ is the ‘soul’ or fiery
>wind permeating the body, and at death survives the body
>but as impersonal energy…. The images in this film come
>from an extensive collection of out- dated raw stock that
>has been processed without being exposed, and sometimes
>rephotographed in closer format.” –N.D.
>
> TRISTE (1974-1996, 18.5 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
> “TRISTE is an indication of the level of cinema language
>that I have been working towards…. The images are as
>much pure-energy objects as representation of verbal
>understanding and the screen itself is transformed into
>a ‘speaking’ character.” –N.D.
> Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.
> –Thursday, October 2 at 8:00.
>
> NATHANIEL DORSKY – PROGRAM 2:
> A FALL TRIP HOME (1964, 11 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
> “The second in the trilogy, it is less a psychodrama and
>more a sad sweet song of youth and death, of boyhood and
>manhood and our tender earth.” –N.D.
>
> ALAYA (1976-1987, 28 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
> “Sand, wind, and light intermingle with the emulsions.
>The viewer is the star.” –N.D.
>
> SONG AND SOLITUDE (2005/2006, 21 minutes, 16mm, color,
>silent)
> “Conceived and photographed with the loving
>collaboration of Susan Vigil during the last year of her
>life. Its balance is more toward an expression of inner
>landscape, or what it feels like to be, rather than an
>exploration of the external visual world as such.” –N.D.
> Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.
> –Monday, October 6 at 7:00.
>
>
> YESTERDAY AND “TODAY!”
> All the artists are expected to be present.
>
> Ken Jacobs BINGHAMTON, MY INDIA (ca. 1971-72, 25
>minutes, 16mm, silent)
> “This unreleased film has not been seen in New York for
>nearly twenty years. For many, Binghamton was an
>eye-opening experience that brought cinema to life. For
>Jacobs it was an intrepid new beginning, pioneering a
>new cinema department in a time and place far from the
> here and now. This unlikely town became a mecca of
>experimental cinema. But on most days it was an overcast
>twilight zone of collapsed industry, where the trains
>didn’t stop anymore. This modest and beautiful film
>features both constructed and spontaneous play caught by
>Jacobs’s inimitable camera eye.” –M.M.
>
>
> Ken Jacobs DEATH OF P’TOWN (1961, 7 minutes, 16mm,
>color, sound. Starring Jack Smith.)
> “After years of shooting my raging epic STAR SPANGLED TO
>DEATH, starring Jack Smith, and after a few months of
>being on the outs with each other, we got together for
>one last stab at friendship and the making of a film in
>Provincetown, Summer of ’61.” –K.J.
>
> Scott Stark HOTEL CARTOGRAPH (1983, 11 minutes, 16mm,
>color, sound)
> A camera mounted on a movable cart, pointing down at the
>floor, passes over a seemingly endless succession of
>gaudy carpets and surfaces in a single shot through a
>major hotel.
>
> Jessie Stead & David Gatten TODAY! (2007/2008, ca.
>35-40 minutes,
> digital video, color sound)
> “Part transmutable daydream, part pseudo-haiku
>playground, part epic prop comedy and maybe more. Please
>note TODAY! is a sun-lighted, purposefully unfinished
>motion picture (an excerpted excerpt from an episodic
>episode). All resulting ambiguities and continuity errors
> represent the potential joys of misunderstanding and
>should not be mistaken for irresponsible filmmaking.”
>–J.S.
> Total running time: ca. 90 minutes.
> –Monday, October 6 at 9:00.
>
>
> COME SOFTLY -"BE CONTINUOUS OFTEN"
>
> A Tenderfoot Walking Picture Palace AT LIGHT
>INDUSTRY
>
> 55 33rd Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), 3rd Floor
>Brooklyn http://www.lightindustry.org/
>
>Films by Stom Sogo Luther Price Miranda Raimondi Julie
>Murray Scott Stark Phil Solomon with several World
>Premieres and surprises.
>
> Including a new 3D Chromavision piece by a surprise
>artist. Glasses will be available at cost for the first
>fifty people.
>
> “ I take my oath and I make my vow/For the tender things
>are upon me now.”
> from the song 1880 or so – Tom Verlaine
>
> A quincunx of succulents
> Subtle colors and forms
> Succinct in dust.
>
> Appropriate the pot
> Assigned set each
>For spill into Other
>
> Always my core dream
> Winding a garden
> Secret in every sense.
>
> from The Shrubberies – Ronald Johnson
>
> So the tune which is there has a little piece to play.
>And the exercise is all there is of a fast. The tender
>and true that makes no width to hew is the time that
>there is question to adopt.
>
> {… }
>
> Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet
>color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts
>and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should
>there be a call there would be a voice.
>
> From Tender Buttons- Gertrude Stein
>
> Whittle me, I will shave down and husk,
> I will rustle and snare
> like a blind
> rabbit twists eyeing Eden.
>
> I will glisten.
>
> I will clasp.
>
> Tarpaper – huckleberry- turpentine and tin.
> Radiant shimmers and razor straps
> Look at where you are.
> In there.
>
> In there where I used to think nothing should ever be.
> Where you should be, taking my pulse and bright honor
>
> (seizures start…)
> rifleshots and bleating lambs
>
> sound of lambs
> where there are no lambs.
>
>
> The Undertaker’s Pillow Book (excerpt) – Darcy Shreve
>
> for images and text for Scott Stark’s Speechless :
>http://hi-beam.net/ speechless
>
>
> The hallucinated childhood, the painted veil (described
>by Shelley,) the natural world the mirage ahead,
>underfoot and beneath the skin. What are we made of?
>Sugar and snails hammers and nails, bliss and rue, ten
>thousand layers of the onion. Wandering the earth from
>the dustbowl to the marble index, from stardust to dust
>we shall become.
>
> Presenting work old and new: World premieres :
>Speechless by Scott Stark fearless symmetries of labia
>and landscape, YSBRYD by Julie Murray a liebestod from
>the secret life of slugs. New epistles and remixes from
>afar by Stom Sogo, mosaic musicals and indelible ink
> from Luther Price, immersive blues from Miranda
>Raimondi, Confectionary archeology and slices of Permian
>strata from Lewis Klahr, outtakes and clips from unnamed
>sources, intakes from the ghostlands from Phil Solomon,
>twice told fragments and hushed surprises. – M.M.
> –Tuesday October 7 at 8:00. Light Industry
>
>
> PAOLO GIOLI
> Often referred to as The Man Without A Movie Camera due
>to his pinhole wizardry and lens-less camera work. A
>quiet force in the art world since the 1960s, Gioli’s
>photographs and silkscreens are in the collection of
>many international museums. A rediscovery of his
> extraordinary film work was initiated by the double-DVD
>release from Raro Video and a one-person show at the
>NYFF two years ago. Tonight we will present two world
>premieres, CHILDREN and INTERLINEA, both completed in
>2008, along with other works in 16mm, 35mm, and digital
> video, many of which are being seen in NY for the first
>time.
>
> Children 2008, 7’, 16 mm B&W silent
>
> I have always been interested in the sequencing of
>images in books, where the possibility exists of
>imposing movement onto still images. Even this brief
>film takes its departure from the sequencing of a book
>that is animated but ends with inanimate images. A
>reflection on a daughter of the assassinated President
>of the United States and on another little girl: naked
>and dead, on a heap of peasants murdered on a country
>road. On the one hand, a life of privilege in a great
> mansion taken by a great photographer, on the other,
>death in the dust, taken by a war photographer.
>
> INTERLINEA
>Frameline 2008, 5’, 16mm color, silent 24fps
>
> Made from fragments of a found porno film, where the
>frameline, which divides the images, becomes a
>mysterious plastic form, waggling(?) in the center of
>the screen, vertically and horizontally. The blade of
>the shutter sections the bodies of eros, realizing the
>desires of the film image and its frame.
>
> VOLTO SORPRESSO AL BUIO 16MM SILENT 18 FPS
>
> "Volto sorpreso al buio" 1995
>Film 16 mm bianco e nero, muto, 18 ftg/s, 6'
> [Face Caught in the Dark] From old plates of an
>anonymous photographer who worked in the 50s, I
>extracted this impossible film (plates that had
>contributed to the composition of one of my little books
>with the title Sconosciuti [Persons Unknown].
>Frame by frame, plate by plate, with strips of reflected
>light and strips of tens of faces, I tried to bring them
>into a single cinematic stream, thinking about a
>solitary, single face emerging from the darkness.
>
> TRACCE DI TRACCE
>
> Traces of Traces] Executed and printed with two hands,
>that
> is to say, made using all possible means of imprinting
>the right
> hand and arm on freshly applied ink, sand paper, stamps,
>etc.
> Everything was done on non-emulsion clear leader.
>
> COMMUNZIONE CON MUTAZONIE 16MM
> 1969
>Film 16 mm bianco e nero, muto, 18 ftg/s, 7'
>
> [Commutations with Mutations] Is composed using three
>different formats, that have been made to co-exist:
>super-8, 16mm, and 35mm on a single 16mm support, clear
>leader. The variations in size caused the original
>framelines to overlap, subjecting them —and with them
> their images—to a singular diabolical rhythm.
> The abovementioned formats were glued together, one at a
>time, fragment on top of fragment, using transparent
>adhesive tape.
>
>
>FARFALIO
> 1993
>Film 16 mm bianco e nero/colore, muto, 18 ftg/s, 10'
>
> [Flicker] Cinematic flicker: flicker is introduced into
>the flutter of butterflies shot from small books. My
>intention was, here as elsewhere, to animate what is
>inexorably locked up in the fixity of typographic ink in
>a book. in this attempt, I brought into play the rhythm
>of some erotic film images, making butterflies and eros
> pulsate together. As for the extraordinarily beautiful
>five minutes of moth wings by the great Stan Brakhage: I
>would never have used wings ripped from butterflies,
>even if they were… nocturnal.
>
>
> SECOMDO IL MIO OCCHIO Di VETRO 35MM
> 1972
>Film 16 mm bianco e nero, sonoro, 10'
> (di questo film esiste una versione in 35 mm)
> Vampa Productions
>
> [According to my glass eye] The semi-scientific
>character of this work is in some degree due to the
>stereo-stroboscopic visual mechanism employed in its
>making. The careful and paradoxical loading up of
>profiles alternating between negative and positive is
>aligned along the axis of a soundtrack of
>super-synchronized percussions, giving rise to a
>complexity which can be deciphered only by an
> attentiveness of the degree required for a visual
>psychological test.
>
> DEL TUFFARSI E Dell’ ANNEGARSIi 35MM
> 1972
>Film 16 mm bianco e nero, sonoro, 11'
> (di questo film esiste una versione in 35 mm)
> Vampa Productions
>
> [On Diving in and Drowning] The film relates the beliefs
>the author held for a certain time concerning water and
>diving into it. It all begins with a dive and with a
>whirlpool that never existed; two visual prototypes on
>the basis of which the mischievous view of the author
>created a filmic inversion of water and its flow, of the
>diver and of the imaginary whirlpools. This expansion,
>unforeseen in spontaneous natural phenomena is, however,
>foreseen by the very little spontaneous nature of the
>diver, who, after repeated
> efforts, ends by realizing a plunge which is at once
>fatal and desired.
>
> ANONIMATAGRAFO
>
> "Anonimatografo" 1972
> (dedicato ad Alberto Farassino)
>Film 16 mm bianco e nero, sonoro, 30'
>
> [Anonimatograph] This film was shot a frame at the time
>using laborious extreme optical close-ups.
>Anonimatograph: the reanimated image of an unknown
>amateur at the beginning of the century who becomes
>middle class as he focuses on friends, movie camera in
>hand, indoors and outdoors surrounded by war and by his
>sisters. I have tried to reconstruct an extravagant film
>diary from which I have painstakingly torn out little
>pages of frames. These frames were exposed and abandoned
>on negative on a
> number of photographic reels, cut together at random in
>two sixty- meter reels in 35mm and acquired by me for 500
>Lire from a flea- market vendor.Many frames were shot
>vertically, others only partially exposed, sometimes
>properly developed, sometimes not. I tried to animate
>these little reels using a flicker technique with light
> stroboscopic touches; in short, a film that could
> not be recommended to anyone. [I wanted] to create the
>possibility of there being born from a non-film, a kind
>of pre-film: a little story of an innocent anonymous
>filmmaker a bit like me. In this way, superimposing my
>imagination directly onto layers of negative,
> syncopating the frames in a sort of manipulated
>notebook—electrifying them—in this cinematic mosaic of
>comings and goings,
> I encountered Him, the involuntary author of my
>experimentations, an insane cataloguer of images,
>divided between locomotives and ladies, film and
>orphaned children, informal excursions and soldiers. In
>the theatre, in the audience,some gentleman might
>realize he is watching his own stolen images and kill
>me.
>
> CINEFORON
> 1972
>Film 16 mm bianco e nero, sonoro, 10'
> [Cinephoron] A filmic homage to the German mime Helfrid
>Foron,
> a student of Etienne Decroux who worked with acrobats
>and
> tight-rope walkers. He frequently collaborated with
>contemporary
> musicians, among them Mauricio Kagel.
> My intention was to displace his gestures using a form
>of filmic doubling employing the technique of creating
>bispecular-asynchronous loops which mime—with extreme
>visual results—the actions and the objects on stage to
>make them stand out and to distance them from the
> action.
>
> –Wednesday, October 8 at 7:00.
>
>
> STILL LIGHT OUT
>
> “I went to New York to leave your flowers of blood and
>light
> In the Picture Shows I dreamed
> of your birthmark in the shape of a pistol.” –Frank
>Stanford, “Blue Yodel of the Desperado, after Pier Paolo
>Pasolini”
>
>
> “Trying to whisper life came back, light came back.”
>–Jorie Graham, “Spelled from the Shadows Aubade”
>
>
>
> • Suspension
> 10 minutes, 16mm Double Projection, color and black &
>white, silent, 2008
>
> At once distant and immersive, the horizon hovers,
>recedes and emerges. Concerned with ideas of mutability
>and impermanence, "Suspension" investigates
>possibilities of expansion, the dissolution of
>ground/water/air, and relationships of proximity and
>distance.
>
>
> Bruce Checefsky Pharmacy 4min 38 sec. 35 mm black
>and white 2001
>
> “ Simply beautiful” – Guy Maddin
>
> Pharmacy is based on Stefan and Franciszka Thermson’s
>influential
> 1930 abstract photogram film APTEKA. The Thermsons are
>considered the most important filmmakers of the Polish
>avant- garde of pre WWII Europe.Pharmacy is a chaotic
>anarchic assemblage of chemistry lab measuring cups and
>spoons various size test tubes, tweezers, eyeglass
> lenses, and a cornucopia f of translucent pharmaceutical
>equipment seen as shadows in black and white reverse
>images.
>
>
>
> Daniel Riccuito Greenwood Cemetery video 3D with
>Pulfrich filter 10 min.
>
> In the warm light of late summer, just before dusk, I
>walked around GREENWOOD CEMETERY with my wife. The iron
>fence separating us from the cemetery grounds began to
>shimmer, alternately resisting and focusing the deeper
>vistas beyond. Rebounding space - "Pulfrich!" My idea
>here was to reverse depth. What I discovered, quite
>happily, was that shocks and anomalies are to be
>expected - subjectivity rules! - D.R.
>
>
>
> Bruce Checefsky- Taureg 2008 7:30 sec. silent
>version 16mm black and white photogram film.
>
> A dramatic black and white abstract film, TUAREG is a
>melodious assemblage of Alencon, Venetian, and Point
>D'espirit lace; artificial silk flowers, plants and
>trees seen as shadows cast by pocket, tube, and LED
>flashlights. Beautifully photographed in black-and-white
>on outdated twenty-five year old direct positive film,
>the resulting dense grain images evoke a veil of secrecy
>and tension surrounding the film’s meaning. The visible
>division of the screen in half, several simultaneous
>images, ruptures the illusion that the screen's frame is
>a seamless view of reality.
>
>Filmed in a private animation studio in Cleveland with
>experimental filmmaker Robert Banks Jr. and artist Tina
>Cassara. Directed by Bruce Checefsky.
> Paolo Gioli - "Finestra davanti ad un albero" 1989
> (dedicated to
>Fox Talbot) 16 mm black and white silent 13 min.
>
> [Window in front of a Tree] I have several English style
>windows and this and a tree in winter have caused me to
>think about Fox-Talbot’s window—his first image,
>perhaps. Carried out, as usual, with the technique—but
>perhapsit would be better to say the discipline—of the
> flicker, which is, “the undulation, trembling,
>quivering, flashing, sparkling weakly” of the
>dictionary, in short everything of the” cinèsi
>fosforescentica.” Drawn from a thin monograph (it’s worth
> saying from typographic ink where there had been silver
>salts) I tried to shake my window using his, where there
>had been a tree in winter. Cross-dissolving between real
>and not-real, between fixed and animated images of his
>lively works,seemed to me to reconstruct what would have
>perhaps happened to Fox-Talbot, filming my window in
> winter.- P.G.
>
> Ken Jacobs - ALONE AT LAST 2008 digital 2 min.
>
> Who wrote the Book of Love? A page torn from... the
>longed for moment clasped at last. Encircled, swelling
>in time and flying apart. For your eyes only. To be
>viewed with both eyes open in relative darkness. No one
>will be admitted after the first two minutes. Viewer
> discretion advised. Let no one tear asunder…
>
> Kerry Laitala – Phosphene Dreams 2008 digital
>
> a digital version working with the material basis for
>the film Phantogram shot as it awakened upon a flat bed
>of revolving mirrors and digital shuttering.
>
> Chris Gehman- Refraction Series Canada • 2008 •
>35mm (1:1.37)
> 5.5 min. • colour • silent
>
> Refraction Series offers an experimental approach to
>optics, using
> simple materials and techniques to generate a range of
>images of pure light and colour in motion. The film is
>inspired by the ideas of early scientists who
>investigated the nature of light and visual perception,
>particularly the experiments and writings of the tenth-
>century Arab mathematician/scientist Ibn al-Haytham and
>the English mathematician/scientist Isaac Newton.
>
> For Refraction Series, Chris Gehman worked in a
>darkened studio
> with a variety of small light sources, inexpensive
>optics and everyday objects that refract, diffract and
>otherwise alter the character of the light passing
>through them. Unmounted lenses and prisms, small
>apertures, bottles and drinking glasses, CDs and liquids
>were used in a series of experiments to generate images
>that were recorded on 16mm Kodachrome reversal stock –
>often with no lens attached to the camera itself – and
>optically printed to 35mm. The results of these
>experiments have been edited into a brief suite of
> “visual music.” Refraction Series finds moments of
>beauty and mystery in the movement of light itself,
>without reference to solid, recognizable objects. It
>invites us to seek out the subtle but rapturous effects
>of light that are all around us every day, and to
> consider how the treasure of colour
>
> Group show – Other artists and works to be announced.
> –Wednesday, October 8 at 9:00.
>
>
> NATHANIEL DORSKY – PROGRAM 3:
>
> SUMMERWIND (1965, 14 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
> Part three of this trilogy. The world is seen from a
>larger view. “A singularly direct and unpretentious
>evocation of summer life in Dorsky’s home town.” –Ken
>Kelman
>
> ARBOR VITAE (1999/2000, 28 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
> A gesture towards a cinema of pure being. Its atmosphere
>is haunted by the period in which it was shot, the year
>of 1999.
>
> THE VISITATION (2002, 18 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
> “A gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the
>necessity to describe an occurrence, not one
>specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in
>one’s own psyche.” –N.D.
> Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.
> –Thursday, October 9 at 7:00.
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
>For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at
><email suppressed>.
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.