From: Pip Chodorov (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Jul 03 2009 - 09:09:45 PDT
Dear FrameWorks friends,
I have decided to make available a few homespun
DVD copies of my portraits of filmmakers,
originally made for French television. The
details are below. This is an all-region PAL DVD
in English and French with English subtitles.
These films were produced for ARTE between
December 2001 and June 2004. If you would like a
copy, please paypal me $30 to <pip at
re-voir.com> and note your address (the price
includes shipping from Paris).
- Pip Chodorov
NINE PORTRAITS
1. Anthology Film Archives - 2001, 7'
- A portrait of the film archive founded in New
York by Jonas Mekas and friends in 1970. Today
Anthology is an archive with two theatres, a
gallery and a library doing active preservation
and restoration of experimental and avant-garde
films. Features John Mhiripiri, Robert Haller,
Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Julius Ziz and Auguste
Varkalis.
2. Jonas Mekas - 2002, 10'
- Also titled "Jonas Keeps Shooting Around." The
interview was shot in France in April 2002 at the
Pantin film festival, Côté Court, which featured
a complete retrospective of his films. Jonas
details the history of his filmmaking, adding
that he is not known as a filmmaker in America
but rather as an organizer, publisher and
journalist. With clips from Walden, Lost Lost
Lost, Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol, and
Zefiro Torna.
3. Boris Lehman - 2002, 10
- "Boris in No Man's Land." Shot in Brussels,
late 2001. Boris shows us around his many spaces,
sits at his Steenbeck and explains his
philosophy: refusing screenplays, budgets, and
distributors, Boris travels the world, his film
reels under his arm, meeting his audience face to
face. At the junction of fiction, documentary and
experimental, Boris in fact walks alone with his
Arriflex, filming every aspect of his life.
4. Stan Brakhage - 2003, 15'
- "A Visit to Stan" in Victoria, Canada, January
2003. Reading the first few sentences of his 1963
book "Metaphors on VIsion," Brakhage is inspired
to describe his life's work and explain his
vision of cinema. One senses he is summing up how
best to look at his films - as music, as poetry -
in what was to be his last interview. He also
unrolls his 35mm film in progress "Chinese
Series" to describe his working process (spit and
fingernails).
5. Kenneth Anger - 2003, 15'
- "The Spells of Kenneth Anger" was shot in
Hollywood in July, 2003. Anger gives an overview
of his life and we see clips of his many films.
He touches on his run-in with Charles Manson,
being influenced by Alistair Crowley, working
with Marianne Faithful, and he shows us his
favorite place in LA: the Hollywood cemetary.
(This one found its way to youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTRFAJxCJwA)
6. Frédérique Devaux - 2003, 10'
- A contemporary member of the Lettrist movement,
Frédérique Devaux works with signs and symbols,
with found footage, scratching and painting on
film, making collages of scraps and shards of
film glued to other films, and rhythmically
optical printing the result. Her latest series of
short films, "K," speaks of her homeland of
Kabylie, Algeria. In this portrait she talks
about her work and demonstrates her tools. This
was shot in her home and at the L'Abominable
cooperative do-it-yourself film lab in Paris.
7. Maurice Lemaître - 2004, 13'
- A founding member of the Lettrist movement with
Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître describes here the
genesis of the movement, his friendship with
Isou, their discoveries in filmmaking and their
inventions of infinitesimal and supertemporal
art. Shot in his studio in Montmartre, we see him
at work and showing his paintings, sculptures and
films.
8. Robert Breer - 2004, 10'
- Filmed at his home in Tappan, New York, Breer
shows us his filmmaking equipment and his art
studio and explains how he started making
animated films that go fast, and animated
sculptures that go slow. He describes the Paris
art scene of the 1950s and his penchant for
making experimental films (they coined him a
snotty American radical and accused him of
ruining their eyesight). Now finally he allowed
to be both a filmmaker and an artist.
9. Jeff Scher - 2004, 10'
- "Romancing the rotoscope, Jeff Scher is top of
the world, mom" wrote Adolfas Mekas. Known for
his Animated Life series on the New York Times
website (http://scher.blogs.nytimes.com), Jeff is
in fact New York's most prolific experimental
filmmaker. This portrait shows Jeff at home,
using the rotoscope, painting animation cards,
demonstrating his optical toys, filming in the
streets and explaining his love of experimental
filmmaking as well as his optimistic embrace of
future technology.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.