From: Chris Lynn (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Feb 18 2010 - 17:10:53 PST
Hello everyone,
I was asked to curate this year's Experimental Film Festival in Silver Spring/Takoma Park-I am pretty excited about this. I have been putting together the Utopia Urban/Rural Landscapes program in Greenbelt, but this is much larger in scale-The entry form is here-http://www.pyramidatlanticartcenter.org/art_gallery/events.html-
There is no fee and it is a 3 day festival! I look forward to seeing your work.
All the best-
Chris
ps
if you have any questions you can email me at email suppressed
--- On Thu, 2/18/10, Fred Camper <email suppressed> wrote:
> From: Fred Camper <email suppressed>
> Subject: Re: Frampton's "Hapax Legomena" [Was: Frampton, Brakhage, RE:VOIR]
> To: email suppressed
> Date: Thursday, February 18, 2010, 4:27 PM
> I appreciate Mark's and David's well
> considered responses on Frampton.
>
> I don't ever recall the text in "Poetic Justice" being
> ultra sharp, but on film I've always found it readable if my
> eyeglass prescription was up to date.
>
> David, your distinction between Mark's and my posts is not
> wrong, but I do consider my approach "auteurist." I love all
> the early films Mark cites. In fact, I think just about
> every Frampton film I have seen I would call "great." There
> might be a few exceptions, about which I would say, I like
> this film a whole lot. More to the point, my approach to
> cinema in general has always been, if you find a great film,
> see every film by that filmmaker, or every film you can
> possibly see by that filmmaker, and, wherever possible, on
> film. Each great filmmaker establishes a unique cinematic
> language, and seeing every film helps you understand all the
> others.
>
> About accessibility and generosity toward the audience and
> so on: For me, like so many other qualities that can be used
> to describe art works, even when the quality is accurately
> attributed to a film, it no more to do with aesthetic merit
> than if a film's dominant color were blue rather than red
> (with a nod to Komar and Melamid's great projects on taste
> in painting). My own personal corpus of great films includes
> the accessible and relatively inaccessible, sound and
> silent, narrative and nonnarrative, and so on. It does,
> however, often seem that an artist's very greatest works are
> not necessarily his most popular, even when the artist is
> well regarded: thus Beethoven's string quartet Op. 131 is to
> my mind much greater than his Fifth Symphony, Bach's
> "Canonic Variations" much much greater than the
> Brandenburgs, Bruce Baillie's "Quick Billy" much greater
> than "Castro Street" and "All My Life," and, to choose an
> obscure favorite of mine, Brakhage's "Naughts" much much
> greater than his "Anticipation of the Night." And I think of
> "Anticipation of the Night" as an incredibly great film. I
> have seen it dozens of times on film, and it had a deep
> personal meaning for me in my early years. And all the other
> "lesser" works named above are quite great too. I don't
> think works of art are necessarily greater for being so
> complex that they are harder to access easily, but it often
> seems to work out that way.
>
> While I suppose I prefer "formally precise" to "deeply
> human and moving," I have to acknowledge that, like
> accessibility versus difficulty, to me these cannot be
> evaluative. I've seen absolutely horrible and artless films
> that I in fact was somehow moved by on a "human" level,
> though perhaps not quite in the way that David means, and at
> the same time I'd guess we could all agree that there are
> sterile and basically worthless "formally precise" films,
> even as we might disagree on which films among the corpus of
> the "formally precise" works the worthless ones are.
>
> I haven't written on "Hapax Legomena," and don't know of
> any writing that endorses my view, but I do hope to write
> something, and if I do, I'll post a link to it here. The
> story about the guy who couldn't even endure "Critical Mass"
> made me smile, because to me that film is highly
> entertaining, an easy pleasure to view again and again, and
> it makes me think in a directly human way of the horrible
> repetitive cycles of such arguments that most all of us have
> been in at one time or another, and is thus, certainly very
> moving on a "human" level, whatever its other qualities
> might be.
>
> I might also allow that the last four films of "Hapax" work
> less well as separate films than do the first three. But
> I'll still insist that in a single screening without a
> break, they are the greater of the seven, or perhaps I
> should say, the greater parts of the seven parts of the
> whole. In fact, each part of the series seems to me arguably
> a bit greater than the last.
>
> Here's one way to reconsider "Hapax." Think of,
> acknowledging Frampton's root in Ezra Pound's poetics and
> Edward Weston's photography, each of the seven films as a
> single "image." Then think of those seven "images" as making
> a single poem, almost like a haiku, though admittedly one
> that takes quite a while to unfold. Consider the various
> relationships among all seven. Of course this all works best
> after a single screening without a break, and is
> something I'll try to elaborate on when I finally write
> something.
>
> In a larger sense, I do want to reflect, too, on how our
> culture tends to rip things from their contexts and present
> them as isolated objects of pleasure. Mark or David were not
> doing this, as evidenced for example by Mark's reference to
> other Frampton films, and "(nostalgia)" is hardly an easy
> pleasure, but still, it is an easy film for academics to
> talk about, and, to be honest, I've only ever heard the same
> things said about it again and again. Our whole culture
> tends to reduce each of its parts to objects, and to
> discourage us from using those objects to seek out the ever
> broadening contexts that lead to deeper understandings,
> which is, by the way, precisely the lesson of "Hapax
> Legomena": its parts have one set of meanings seen
> separately, and a wider set as seen in the larger whole.
> Instead we repeat things again and again and again, as in,
> classroom showings of "(nostalgia)." The grand, hard, and
> long attempts at "absolute film" (a phrase from Sitney,
> preceded by the word "myth") that have characterized so much
> of North American greatest avant-garde filmmaking for me
> ("The Art of Vision," the "Arabics," "Quick Billy," "Hapax
> Legomena," "La Region Centrale," "Rameau's Nephew," "The
> Hart of London," "Sleep," "La Raison Avant La Passion," to
> name some) tend to get less attention than more easily
> digestible tidbits. Of course length and rental costs are
> understandable factors there. But there is more to be
> learned, I think, from the most immersive experiences, those
> that challenge our preconceptions rather than plug into our
> pleasure receptors and reward our expectations. This is the
> lesson, for me, of considering the parts of "Hapax Legomena"
> separately and then within the whole.
>
> Fred Camper
> Chicago
>
> http://www.fredcamper.com/
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.