Wednesday August 24th, 8 pm
Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Part of the MASSART FILM SOCIETY screening series
http://massartfilmsociety.
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http://massartfilmsociety.blogspot.com/>
These rarely screened works will be screened in 16mm. Don't miss this show!
CURATED BY MIKE PISO AND TARA NELSON
Five Bad Elements
Mark Lapore / 1997
"A dark and astringent film that allows the filmmaker's personal
subconscious drives and the equivocal bad conscience of ethnography to bleed
through into overall content. ... The hand held camerawork and the
particular leverage of THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS both pushes and works against
LaPore's previous tendencies in order to create compound fractures of potent
abbreviations and overextended unexpurgated scenes in which sight is caught
actively probing or transfixed in seeming paralysis. By interrupting already
truncated and mysterious unmoored images with sections prolonging the
durations and decay time of images normally torn from our sight, LaPore
offers not provocation or obsession as much as permission to travel deeper
into the image. The image as it pertains to actual experience - not only a
filmic event or an approximate residue. That stands in for something else as
all images do. Refusing to satisfy curiosity with information, LaPore
frustrates the usual complicities between image and documentary fact by
dealing with representation as an execution of likeness, while still
reckoning with the standard exchange rate of the image in its metaphoric
fidelity to the real, the elusive and the tangible aspects to the image.
LaPore's audacities are almost camouflaged by his refined sense of
restraint, his austerity and lyrical contemplativenes. ... By building the
film on normally inadmissable evidence, telegraphed inferences, metaphoric
leaps and omissions, damaged testimonies and scattered remains, the film
fabricates an impeccable and elegant architecture from a materially
incomplete and unsound body. In the fragmented corpus of human beings and
continents which is THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS, LaPore has created a film which
itself acts as an absorbent object, a kind a metastatic sin eater that aims
at expiation through its own contamination, redistributing poisons into a
netherworld that still clearly resides at the core of its own physical and
visible existence." - Mark McElhatten
Lightning Over Braddock | Tony Buba / 80 min., 1988
Lightning Over Braddock is as eccentric a picture of America as has emerged
in the last two decades. Like Buba's earlier short films, it chronicles the
decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a hard-luck town which once flourished as
"Pittsburgh's shopping center." It concerns a director (Buba, playing
himself) trying, without much success, to make a movie with a crazy street
hustler named Sal, who considers himself responsible for Buba's (modest)
success. Like Errol Morris, Buba has a fascination with the idiocyncratic
details of daily life, and uses his formidable sense of humor to document
the decay of industrial America. Lightning Over Braddock, Buba's magnum
opus, might have its tongue in its cheek but its heart is always firmly in
the right place.
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Received on Tue Aug 09 2011 - 11:02:09 CDT
