PROGRAM NOTES
1988
San Francisco Cinematheque
480 Potrero Avenue
San Francisco CA 941 10
(415)558-8129
A Project of the
Foundation tor Art in Cinema
1
fioartf o/ Directors
Scolt Slark
President
Lon Argabrighl
Lynn Kirby
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzin
Start
Steve Anker
Program Director
David Gerstein
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
Operations Coordinator
The Foundation for Art in Cinema
is supported in part with lunrjs horn:
National Endowment lor the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants lor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
From the collection of the
n m
PreTinger
v Jjibrary
t p
San Francisco, California
2007
NEW VOICES, NEW FILMS
September 22, 1988
I Can Never Be You, You Can Never Be Me by Cindy Greenhalgh, 1988, 8^5 min., 16mm, sound,
"A collage (patchwork) film which considers subject/object duality, the politics
of speech and gesture, and the refefinition of the space which sits between us.
The film was made by carving out individual frames of film with an exacto knife,
and rephotographing 2 lacy strips of positive/negative (foreground/background)
together." - Cindy Greenhalgh
Turner by Mary Serra, 1987, 3 min., 16mm, sound.
"The film Turner was shot in Los Angeles and uses that city's urbanscape to
emphasize the timelessness, fluidity and ethereal qualities of a sensual
dreamscape." - Mary Serra
Chromesthetic Response by Scott Stark, 1988, 9 min., 16mm, sound.
"The film was created by putting 16mm movie film into a still camera and shot
as if 35mm still photographs. When projected, portions of each image flicker by
in a rapid, mesmerizing rhythm. The sound is created by the nuances of visual
imagery: due to the unusual technique, the picture also overlaps the optical
soundtrack area of the film, so that as the images pass through the projector
they actually generate their own peculiar sound.
" 'Chromesthesia' is a condition whereby a person sees a color and imagines he
or she hears a sound associated with the image. The technique described above
is a metaphor for that condition, and is an exploration of a sensory response
that is beyond the realm of human intellect and emotion." - Scott Stark
The Poet's Veil by Peter Herwitz, 1987-88, 13 min., 16mm blown up from Super-8, silent.
"I'm fascinated by veils, surfaces, anything that obstructs a clear view.
These veils, of color, distance, detached symbols, are both painterly in form
and related to the acts of reading and writing seen throughout the film. The
obscuring of the word represents my struggle to create an unnameable world
of poetic mystery and nuance." - Peter Herwitz
-INTERMISSION-
End Over End by Konrad Steiner, 1988, 12 min., 16mm, silent.
"End Over End is a tumbling, falling, ecstatic movement you might experience
as delight on a ride at an amusement park or as terror during an earthquake.
Some of the kinetic effects were produced by rapid montage and low quality
home-processing of the film. The film is basically a sequence of shots, like
any other film, and is motivated, like many other films, by a desire to fly
-OVER-
7
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' ' '
SECOND SIGHTS - Highlights of the Year III
Sunday, June 19, 1988
1) Field Study by Gunvor Nelson, 1988, 16mm, 10 min.
2) Slant or Slumber by Chika Ogura, 1987, 16mm, 8 min.
3) Untoward Ends (Observing Religion) , Parts 1 & 2 by Daniel Barnett, 1970-73,
16mm, 20 min.
4) The Mysterious Barricades by Peter Herwitz, 1987, Super-Smm, 8 min.
5) 17 Reasons Why by Nathaniel Dorsky, 1985-87, 16mm, 20 min.
San Francisco Cinematheque
480 Potrero Avenue
San Francisco. C A 94110
(415)558-8129
A Protect ot the
Foundation lor Art in Cinema
Boartl ot Directors
Scott Stark
President
Lon Argabnght
Lynn Kirby
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzin
Staff
S'eve Anker
Program Director
David Gerstein
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
Operations Coordinator
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with lunds from:
National Endowment lor the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants lor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
3) Medical Research/Special Report (1987) by Robert Fox. 16mm/color/sound/30min.
Thrown inlo thf mi I ion, "s tarv i m-, , hysterical, naked." Illness as
metaphor, reflections on life /death and the creative process. Sound arid
image stitched together to form a I'romethean vision.
Robert Fox
4) The Secret Garden by 1'hil Solomon, Color/Silent, 23 minutes. 1986 - 87.
"a. When I was young, my older sister invented games of imagination in
order to assert and enforce her sibling authority. One of these was a
trance game in which she would induce me to stare into the textured
window in our bathroom and move ray head slowly from side to side so as to
create moving patterns from the light refractions. She would call this
space the entrance to the 'Magical World of Paloopa 1 .
b. I used to have a recurring nightmare of running on a beach as a
tidal wave was about to overwhelm me as it blackened the sky.
c. I always thought the WIZARD OF OZ was a terrifying expose revealing
God the Father to be a phony from Kansas.
The Secret Garden is an attempt at a child's fever dream, within the
dark walls of a radiating 'nuclear 1 family. Its theme: Trouble in 1'aradise."
SECOND SIGHTS - Highlights of the Year
II_ - Eye Gallery, June 18, 1988
1) Coming Up For Air (1986) by Chick Strand, 26% min. , color, sound.
One year I had a show in New York and a friend in Vermont who suggested
that I visit her as long as I was coning East. I had wanted to make a
film with her for years because she had been part of my Mexican life
before her move to Vermont. So, I brought along my camera with no idea
of what I wanted to do except that I had seen a film called "THE SON OF
AMIR IS DEAD," a French/Algerian feature which I liked a lot. I really
couldn't figure out much about avant garde film, or even if I wanted to
go on pretending that that's what I did, so I was thinking about some
sort of narrative thing back there in 1976 when I started shooting it.
Well, the show was in Rochester and I was beginning to think that I was
having some flashbadcks from the days in the 60 's when you could order
pure LSD from the Light Company in England, because there was something
wrong with the trees. By the time I got to Vermont in my rented car, I
felt that maybe I was really on a trip to Disneyland, because the trees
all looked fake... the fall color was absolutely staggering. Well, I
could hardly think very much about this narrative thing... the only
thing I wanted to do was to get all of that color onto film.... Mean-
while, for years I'd been collecting bits and pieces of prose and
poetry that I like.... a sentence or two from a novel, maybe, and stuff
that I'd written. So, I patched it all together and made some kind of a
narrative.... For a long time, I'd been interested in having a prose
track, which might or might not relate to the visuals, so I played with
that idea, too. I haven't the least idea what this film is arxxat ex-
cept perhaps it has to do with loss of identity, horror, and dreams, or
maybe it has to do with some sort of giant memory bank and we are all
clients. We deposit and withdraw, maybe at random, but with some sort
of feeling of deja vu. I'm sure that by the time you see this film, my
ideas about what it is will have changed, or maybe I won't have thought
about it at all. Chick Strand
2) MAYHEM (1987) by Abigail Child, 20 min., b&w, sound.
Perversely and equally inspired by de Sade's Justine and Vertov's sentences
about the satirical detective advertisement, MAYHEM is my attempt to
create a film in which Sound is the Character and to do so focussing
on sexuality and the erotic. Not so much to undo the entrapment (we
fear what we desire; we desire what we fear) , but to frame fate, show
up the rotation, upset the common, and incline our contradictions towards
satisfaction, albeit conscious. Abigail Child
INTERMISSION
(over)
life by depicting higher orders of experience. We find such an
archaically ordained healing process lodged in the viewing of
this film as well. This is an age which is starved for imagina-
tions, which can be realized now only in the fenced-off world of
art, a realm quite separate from the one we customarily inhabit.
"THE LIGHTED FIELD" shows us to what extent it is critical to
allow one's verbal left brain to go into retirement so that the
imaginative right brain might seek and help us to experience
ecstasies that can be savored and shared, here brought to fulfill-
ment in a chosen medium. That this medium is cinema reminds us
that we far too rarely encounter true embodiments of light and
shadow dramas. '.7e need bring to every viewing situation a will-
ingness to forego demands for slick products and instead reflect
on whether a genuine poetic case is being generated for life-
sustaining, faith-sustaining resolutions. Our need for new
sustaining myths has never been more acute.
At the forefront of dualities and even new triplicities of
living, the artist has lived postmodeafnly and has brought back
from our fractured- seeming world a cloth describing brand-new
transmutative dreams for us to gratefully inhabit. "THE LIGHTED
FIELD" is the human retina, the screen, a chosen state of mind.
6
Other boundlessly energetic declarations in this film move
fast or slow, describing light and shadow dramas in humming
fractured recollections of various events which join each other
in non-linear, non-"sensical" turns. We find that our perceptual
entrapments bacome shattered in this viewing and we are cleansed,
at least for this brief time, of world-weariness and ennui.
Pixilated definitions of "realistic" passages continue to
inhabit our film watching, and when this work begins to turn a
corner towards completion-resolution/character resurrection, we
come to meet again, along with other now-familiar borrowed
characters, the image of the man formerly placed inside a coffin
of ice, now being withdrawn from his cold encumbrance gleefully
alive. Other images descending toward this film's end include
views of the film-maker's own projected shadow-shapes traversing
the exterior of his house, spiralling, it is felt, in wide return-
ing movements down toward physical "reality." Noted also in this
wind-down of inspired moving pictures are several outdoor laundry-
lined white towels, fine metaphors for the process of viewing
shadow dramas on the screen pictures within^ pictures --
encapsulating the sub-theme "THE LIGHTED FIELD" contains on how
nearly everything occupying physical existence is eligible actor
as walking, moving screen for light and shadow plays. In this
soliloguy concerning true home-coming, matter lyrically vibrates
and declares the "atomic" energies that make for physical existence.
One is led to reflect on the original healing purposes of art.
Most art-making efforts have evolved down from church-ordained
imaginings originally designed to heal the viewer in body,
mind and spirit, wresting attention from trials of everyday
Now rushing round, light beams dance off mundane wicker chairs
in what seems to be a sitting room, as the sun pours in. Divine
light energy suffuses a kaleidoscopic havoc with a furied dynamism
evoked previously elsewhere during ancient mysteries of worship
of the sun. Shattering, resounding, mincingf of the element of
time occur in these electrifying moments of veritable fire-
frenzy. The levels of mastery of the hand-held camera revealed
here and in this entire work surpass any expectations of the
most demanding critics. Life-notations pause to offer invent-
ories and worshipful encounters, often with vibratory passages
that infuse wonder in the viewer and breathe life into even
the tawdriest corners of existence. Wine drinking glasses
resting in a dishdrain now become, through inspired rhapsodic
pixilations, a stage for silent symphonies in shades of greys
that wax profoundly sounding, sweeping in Baroque and then
Rococco lines of light-rays to the audience's eyes.
Interspersed with the artist's notations on the seasons and
the persons in the life as shared, are a number of stunningly
slow passages that wax refreshing in that although they picture
daily duties of the multitudes, they impart renewed life to
dreary frames of passage. Approximately one-fourth through the
film we find a truly therapeutic dissertation on subways and
commutership. A velvet train pulls into an outdoor platform
station and passengers alight. Resilient film greys promise
heaven as passengers approach and then slowly pass the camera,
each imbued with a personalized lightness that renders walking
nearly weightless. The sun's light falling on each passenger
is met and matched with celestial inner peace and mildest
sparkle of individuated personality as each commuter manifests
a special quality of grace.
at home. Now the camera immediately annexes another season,
that of winter with its snow-covered roofs as a direct joining
to this brief summer fare. Increasingly, geographic and domestic
loci are enunciated, but these evolve for the viewer more by
way of accrued image associations than a direct filmmaking
address of the question. This section, as with this entire
film, enjoys highly varied pacings ranging from frenetic
pixilations to events slowly taking place in "normal" sense-
bound time.
Noren's wife Rise is seen while seated at a desk, alighting
from a bed, in a host of close-up interactions, and at home
hanging curtains against a double window where a formal multi-
plicity of layers reveal the sun as that great plasticizing
light-source in the sky. The sun here is a veritable shining
being who hones in on the realms of human shapes and shadows
in spaces that form the geometric matrix of a room.
Framing this work's pattern -forming observations, Noren
includes images of himself as cameraman also in frequent shadow-
language, pixilating into a kaleidoscopic bounty of reverberating
shapes his own projected shadows as they traverse a variety of
surfaces: indoor walls, areas of grassy land, floors, pavement,
stoops, doorways, even gravestones. A walking itinerary is
rendered via this logo-image as it repeatedly weaves its ways
elliptically into the work's very fiber, rarely overstaying its
visual welcome. These self-portraits, as well as several not
filmed by the filmmaker, offer themselves into an ongoing dialogue
with all environmental-interpersonal encounters and impart a
reciprocity to other observation modes.
Other introductory borrowed images introduce themselves
and hint at limitless story possibilities inherent in a life
of dream and in the medium of film. An affectionate and some-
what Dadaesque montage prevails when we view a man blindfolded
prior to being hanged in a naval military episode, followed by
an ascending answer of two German shepherds shown in reverse
motion leaping upwards from the sea, to a woman in her 1940s
bedroom sadly allowing her sick dog to listen to the telephone
receiver, and finally to a solar-mirror man who tests objects
against the sun's channeled rays of light. This man is an
empowered wizard beaming at us furied sparks and flames, and
then peacefully, as a microcosmic paean, Noren cuts to an image
of a human eye lit on a diagonal by an opthalmic laser beam.
This beam of light reveals the illuminative structure of the
eye, expressing slow and careful worship of its findings. From
here we go to sight of a bespectacled man being laterally placed
into a cube of ice by a team of laboratory men. These playful
narrative borrowings wax enigmatic and discursive, and we come
to meet a number of them for a second time towards the film's
end as farewell markers in this dream of magically-permeated
thrashings in the possibilities of everyday.
A brief transition image of a light-transmitting, pixilated
window highlighting smoke appearing as a fractured substance,
fuses these initial borrowed images with Nor en's own photography.
We traverse into a time-lapse view of the sun coursing over a
landscape viewed from a window, and then slower episodes unfold
with use of a more restrained mode of camera work. From a
rear-view angle we regard a woman walking down a pleasant tree-
lined street with a boy around age 10, in summer. Later we will
meet these two full-face in more intimate situations photographed
2
ness, including life and death. As a note suggesting his own
beginnings in this life and in this filmic dream, Nor en also
places near the work's inception a posed still photo portrait
image of himself as a small child together with his mother.
What soon follows is inspired appropriation that transfigures
"here and now" into eternity. After an abbreviated sequence
picturing a man dressed in clinical attire who adjusts some
arcane dials and pulls levers on a scientific- loo king apparatus,
we observe a closeup of a woman donning lipstick. This woman
is instantly transformed into an x-ray image of herself, so
that what we see is no less than a suddenly-delivered human
skull with manifest neck vertebrae supporting it, as she-it
goes through further mundane motions of lipstick application.
The viewer is siezed with naked awe by this invasion of the
moment with the forms of the eternal. As now the moments pass,
we observe further, in like x-ray form, a hand picking up a
telephone receiver. This woman, or another person, is observed
a telephone'
skeletally, also, holding/iconversation in everyday reality as
we simultaneously view her skeletal "remains." Then two skulls
are speaking to each other in an x-ray double portrait. Reactive
viewer awe joins with instant gratitude for this unexpected
cleansing of our ordinary perceptions. The magically pried
opening in time continues, giving way to momentary sadness with
a sequential image of an academic classroom, revealing that
these joinings of eternity with passing forms of matter have
been our privilege only courtesy a "science film." No time
for reflection, though, as we are instantly shuttled onto NYC
streets with images of hurried crowds of people finding breathless
pixilation with their flat-form pavement shadows. For several
moments we watch shadow-beings brought to life.
Lights on the Path; Andrew Noren 's "THE LIGHTED FIELD"
by Gail Camhi
Andrew Noren continues to mine light and wonder where
previously these could not be seen, stirred from the modalities
surrounding his biography and his environment. There is now an
'
added chapter to the ongoing silent epic work, "ADVENTURES OF
THE EXQUISITE CORPSE," Part V, "THE LIGHTED FIELD."
With the making of Part IV, "CHARMED PARTICLES," Noren had
abandoned use of color film, opting for a hard-edged universe
of black and white with use of extremely high-contrast camera
stock. This newest chapter, also speaking black and white,
fathoms and explores as well the in-between worlds of greys.
Noren follows through with pixilated light and shadow happenings
that illuminate and often compress in time his visually demon-
strable ability to extract poetry as working truth from familiar
situations.
In this film the viewer is initiated with an image of a pool
of water seen in closeup, catching heavy downpour of more rain.
We next see feather-textured dueling shafts of light, followed
by the artist's first self-portrait reference, here a view of
the film-maker asleep in high-key contrast tones. One surmises
as the thread that binds an ongoing dream motif, given the body
of non-linear joinings and purposefully placed images that
articulate spatially, each joined image eluding
"common" sense.
As in at least one prior chapter in "THE EXQUISITE CORPSE"
series, there are various beginning images that use found or
"rescued" film scenes to delineate many beginning/ending points,
affirming for us understandings of different forms of conscious-
MOTORUM
I N T E R N A T I N A 1
Minn, Ik* L%M< FtaM, 1M7, stills Iron) D4ck-nO-whii film In 16 mm. 61
SAN FRANCISCO !
Andrew Noren,
rlie Lighted Field
SAN FRANCISCO CINEMATHEQUE
For all of its intoxicated virtuosity, or
maybe because of it, Andrew Noren's
The Lighted Field, 1987, strikes the
eye as a latter-day "early" film. Its sur-
face energies are sparked from a
retrenchment in cinematic self-
consciousness; it has the novelty of a
quasi-primal proposition about film's
transforming capabilities and reflex-
iveness. Since transformation is
Noren's theme, to watch him fire up
those capabilities and mobilize them
is to be transfixed by a magic-lantern
display of recorded light and shadow
outstripping solid matter in a rapture
of shared deliquescence.
The Lighted Field is a silent, tightly
built, 61-minute crescendo arrange-
ment of accumulated black-and-white
footage, some of it personal, some
retrieved from the newsreel archive
where Noren works. Although there is
no plot (and no titles or credits either),
the elements of a story line an im-
provised parable or thesis are strung
together and suspended in a choppy
succession of frame-to-frame phenom-
ena.
The film begins with a close-up
play of light on water. From there, it
charges through variations on ephem-
eral motifs: a gauze curtain shunting
daylight at diverse angles around an
open window, a sleeping man and col-
lie on a bed, train shadows across an
elevated transit platform, an incandes-
cent array of glassware stacked in a
dish drainer, a pair of vintage 1940s
fluoroscopic skeletons in motion, a
woman whispering a secret in a boy's
ear. One cut goes from a military ex-
ecution by hanging to a couple of div-
ing German shepherds in reverse mo-
tion above a stream, and another from
a graveyard to a vegetable patch.
Diagrammatically, the succession is
symmetrical and centrifugal: the rush
of mostly single-frame images and
spondaic cuts pivots on an episode of
silhouetted self-portraiture in an
angular double mirror, a black-hole-
cum-Ttorschach" scheme that divides
both the film loop and its main charac-
ter, the filmmaker's shadow, in two.
That shadow self is also the film's
regulating conceit; it's cast at other
times on walls and gravestones, and in
the final shot it melds with the dark
side of a tree, one arm raised in tri-
umph. Like much of what goes before,
the upbeat ending has a chill factor.
The film's sluicelike dispersal grid
abstracts, even as it triggers, the view-
er's wonder. In this collision course of
sights, the montage catches every im-
age just ahead of, or behind, meaning.
It leans stressfully on the metaphorical
proclivity of film to become a memen-
to mori each frame closer to the last.
The image world is a still life paradox-
ically animated by the shutter's brief
click and then again kineticized by
discrete frames falling against a beam
of light. The ultimate agent of Noren's
"field" is the projection screen from
which high-contrast lights and darks re-
bound with intermittent slices, flares,
and thuds. Thus, everything reflects its
own existence as a haunted celluloid
fiction, by turns melancholic and
clinical: the drawer opening and clos-
ing with a cat in it is a kind of camera;
people mounting the train platform are
forms of footage; the entire film is a
grave/garden. Noren himself says that
The Lighted Field is "an alchemical
fable," which rings true enough, given
that alchemy's long-range goal is to
memorize the cosmos while finalizing
in spirit its present tense.
Reviewed by Bill Berkson.
June 16, 1988
SECOND SIGHTS:!
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE YEAR'S PREMIERES
PROGRAM
diary of an autistic child/part Ill/hard core holy family by Edwin Cariati
16mm/ silent/ 9 minutes.
"A devolutionary trek from the scintillation of single-frame to the
rote recording of a pedestrian event." Edwin Cariati
Dante Quartet by Stan Brakhage. 1987. 16mm/ silent/ 7 minutes.
"This hand-painted work, 6 years in the making (37 years in the
studying of the Divine Comedy) , demonstrates the earthly conditions of
'Hell' , 'Purgatory 1 , (or Transition) and 'Heaven 1 (or 'existence is
song' which is the closest I presume a Heaven from my experience)
as well as the mainspring of /from 'Hell 1 ('Hell spit flexion') in 4
parts which are inspired by the closed eye or hypnogogic vision created
by those emotional states. Originally painted IMAX and Cinemascope,
70mm and 35mm. The paint-ladened rolls have been carefully
rephotographed and translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan
Yanosky of Western Cine." Stan Brakhage
The Lighted Field: The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse, Part V by
Andrew Noren. 1987. 16mm/silent/61 minutes.
See attached articles by Bill Berkson and Gail Camhi. Camhi's
article will be published in the forthcoming Cinematograph III.
"From Romance to Ritual, the title, was lifted from an anthropological text
called From Ritual to Romance. Both anthropology and film are notorious for
creating categories, or genres if you will, by which to represent human be-
havior, and the two together have created their own particular monster,
ethnographic film. Peggy's films refer constantly to the traditions, or
rituals you could say, of field research in anthropology, documentary and
Super-8 as home movie.
"Like the premises of ethnographic film, Peggy goes out into the field to
study (as opposed to staying home and recreating) the behavior patterns of
the Other. She (and the ethnographer) do this by planting themselves in
the midst of the field, engaging with the individual members of the culture
they are studying, instead of maintaining a voyeuristic distance. Peggy's
films are also referent to the rituals of Super-8 as home movie, rituals so
codified that even now it is slightly mutinous and titillating to make or see
a Super-8 film that exists for purposes other than the archives of the nuclear
family..." - Jennifer Montgomery, Cinematograph Vol . 3 (in production)
7
Film in the Arena of Art
June 13, 1988
Film Presentation:
1) Dante Quartet by Stan Brakhage, 1987, 7 minutes, 16mm.
"This hand-painted work, 6 years in the making (37 years in the studying of
the Divine Comedy), demonstrates the earthly conditions of 'Hell', 'Purgatory',
(or Transition) and 'Heaven' (or 'existence is song' which is the closest I
presume a Heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of /from 'Hell'
('Hell spit flexion') in 4 parts which are inspired by the closed eye or
hypnogogic vision created by those emotional states. Originally painted IMAX
and Cinemascope, 70mm and 35mm. The paint-ladened rolls have been carefully
rephotographed and translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan Yanosky of
Western Cine." - Stan Brakhage
2) Department of the Interior by Nina Fonoroff , 1986, 9 minutes, 16mm.
"As a working principle, I had been thinking about the nature of 'echo', both
as an acoustical and visual phenomenon. I had shot a small amount of footage
in the suburban environment of upstate New York, and generated twice the amount
on the optical printer. The soundtrack consists primarily of a recording of
the opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, 'Amahl and the Night Visitors," frequently
recorded backwards. I hoped to rupture the attack/sustain/decay configuration
of most sounds as we hear them; to defamiliarize material which seemed to
adhere tenaciously to the demand for wholeness. My aim was not to 'represent'
or 'express' a particular state of mind or emotion, but to endeavor (with no
guarantee of success) to generate a set of possibilities for new connections
between sensory experience and the experience of meaning." - Nina Fonoroff
"Department of the Interior is full of repetitions, reinterpretations of the
same shot of a building, a parking lot, a female mannequin sometimes a
realistic blakc and white positive image and sometimes a stark, artificial
negative. The film reflects that all too human tendency to re-evaluate a
moment, a place or a person from the past with a different point of view each
time it is remembered." - Lyrme Sachs, Cinematograph Vol. 3 (in production)
3) From Romance to Ritual by Peggy Ahwesh, 1985, 21 minutes (10 minute excerpt),
Super-8 mm.
"An ordering of documentary style footage that I have shot over the past year
with family and friends. The film is organized around the interlocking themes
of women's sexuality, memory, growing up and personal storytelling and how
they are at odds with the dominant history. Through my camera style I hope to
maintain the privileged intimacy of home movies but with me behind the camera
instead of 'daddy'." - Peggy Ahwesh.
San Francisco Cinematheque
~30 Pctrero Avenue
San Francisco. CA 941 10
415)558-8129
A Project ol the
Foundation lor Art in Cinema
-OVER-
Boarti ol Directors
Scott Stark
President
Lon Argabnght
Lynn Kirby
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzin
Staff
Sieve Anker
Program Direc;? r
David Gerstem
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
Operations Coordinator
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with lunds from:
National Endowment tor the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants tor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
BAY AREA CONSORTIUM FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
presents
RRTIST TO RRTISTSEMINRR #4
"FILM INTHE flRENfl OF flRT"
a symposium to examine the role O 1 prospects
of personally made, non-commercial film
in the contemporary art world
with
Edith Kramer. Director, Pacific Film Archive
Dob Riley, Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Mark Durant, artist and critic
Micheie Ellis, Director, ProArts
moderated by
Steve Anker, Program Director, San Francisco Cinematheque
Audience participation encouraged
The symposium will be prefaced bv a brief screening of
significant films of the 1980's
- r
Monday, June 13, 1988
8:00 PM
ADMISSION FREE
(seating is limited]
Eye Gallery
1 151 Mission St. (between 7th & 8th Streets)
San Francisco
For further information call BACVA: 415/981-3980
HOLLYWOOD'S GREAT ROMANTIC; 2 BY FRANK BORZAGE
.. .. June 12,1988
A Man's Castle (1933) Direction: Frank Borzage. Script: Jo Swerling.
Photography: Joseph August. Editing: Viola Lawrence. Music: Frank Harling and
Bakaleinikoff . With Spencer Tracy (Bill), Loretta Young (Trina), Glenda Farrel
(Fay la Rue), Walter Connolly (Ira), Arthur Hohl 9Bragg) , Marjorie Rambeau
(Flossie, Dickie Moore ( Crippled boy). 75 min.
Moonrise (1949) Direction: Frank Borzage. Script: Charle Haas ( from
the novel by Theodore Straus). Photography: John L. Russel. Art direction:
John McCarthy Jr. and George Sawley. Editing: Harry Keller. Music:
William Lava ( "The Moonrise Song" by Harry Tobias and William Lava.
With Dane Clark (Danny Hawkins), Gail Russel (Gilly Johnson), Ethel
Barrymore (Grandma), Allyn Joslyn (Clem Otis), Rex Ingram (Mose),
Henry Morgan ( Billy Scripture), David Street (Ken Williams), Selena
Royle (Aunt Jessie). 90 min.
"One imagines that Frank Borzage has earned the title of "romantic"
because so many of his best films (A Man's Castle; Little Man What New;
History is Made at Night; I've Always Loved You) are about the triumph
of a specific love relationship over a hostile world, or the apparent
indifference of one of the individuals, or physical separation. At
the end of His Butler's Sister, his heroine seems able to cross the
separating space with such ease that it would appear that her love
has compressed that separation into nothing. But in many of Borzage 's
other, and equally great films (Green Light, Strange Cargo, Moonrise,
and Disputed Passage ) the love relationship is not as necessary.
The salvation of the characters in Green Light, Moonrise, or Disputed
Passage is not specifically through love, but rather through the
characters' conversion to, and belief in, an entire spiritual system...
If , despite the inexactness of the distinction, we were to compare
Borzage 's "love" films with his "religious films", we might say
that the religious films reveal that for him love, if it is a totally
committed love, is implicitly, itself, a representation of spiritual
transcendence.... In A Man's Castle Borzage develops many of the themes
that occupy him in his other films individual pride and ego, its
inherent limifetions, and the necessity for the individual to go
beyond it, often in order to enter into a love relationship."
(excerpts from 2 articles on Borzage by Fred Camper)
' Moonrise is probably Borzage 's best known and most universally
admired sound film. In many ways it is unlike any of his earlier works.
Its plot, dealing with murder and guilt, departs dramatically from the
simple love stories the director usually tells, and its heavily
psychological approach to action and characterization seems unusual for
a director who concerns himself more with the soul and heart than
with the mind. Stylistically, Moonrise marks a visual revolution of
sorts for Borzage, with its tremendously dynamic compositions, tight
framing, and low key lighting.. Yet even though Moonrise looks
different from Borzage 's other work, git reveals as deep a commitment
as ever to the concerns that occupy his other films.... in its
movement from self imposed isolation to a timeless, weightless romantic
union. "
(from Hawks, Borzage, Ulmer by John Belton)
Films by Andre Zdravic
Sunhopsoon. 1976. color/sound/8min.
"Sunhopsoon was shot by the side of a railroad track. The light
from a setting sun lurks between the cars of moving trains and hits
the surrounding ground and vegetation as countless time-lapse rays.
An incredible inventory of light sweeps take place. The light searching
its way through panes of intertwined twigs, jumps and contorts itself
into many unsuspected areas of the screen; successive lines of light
ride on the ground toward the camera, or else it is a furtive image:
a branch takes on the aspect of lightning. The rhythms and movements
of the light.... are mesmerizing."
Vincent Grenier, Idiolects
Vesuvio . 1981. color/silent/ lOmin.
"...quietly steaming, one feels the awesome underground forces
within this slumbering giant." Carmen Vigil
New York Studies. 1977. (Parts II&V) . silent/7min.
Phenix. 1975. color/sound on cassette/14min.
"Andre Zdravic brings to his work in film a rare sensitivity to
visual and aural phenomena. Phenix , a film which graphically depicts
the process of plastic surgery... is a disquietening work which places
both the filmmaker and viewer face to face with the limits of
physical existence... But, as the title suggests, Phenix expresses
a commitment to life, to a reborn physicality. Zdravic engages the viewer
of Phenix in a transcendant journey from the physical to the
metaphysical, from the horrific to the sublime."
Bruce Jenkins , Beau Fleuve Journal
Kres. 1987. color/sound/5min.
"What is most striking about Zdravic 's work ...is a vivid
sense of how the frame of the screen traps- and thus compresses
and heightens- the energy of movement. And there's a
converse awareness of the ephemerality of his image-subjects
which are destroyed and remade in movement."
Amy Taubin, Soho Weekly News
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777-77
DANA PLAYS /ANDRE ZDRAVIC June 9. 1988
Films by Dana Plays
Arrow Creek 1978 16mm color/sound 6 minutes
Filmed on the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana, during the
annual Crow Fair, Arrow Creek leaves the smell of fry bread and temperatures
of 105 in the shade to your imagination. -DP
Across the Border 1982 16mm color/sound 8 minutes
In Across the Border, filmmaker Dana Plays expresses her commitment to
the culture of Latin America. More specifically, her film offers the
viewer an unusual insight into the complex relationship between the people
of El Salvador and the United States government. Completed in 1982, during
a period in which many American artists were trying to convey their anger
with their own country's politics, Across the Border transcends the
conventions of social documentary as we have come to know it through public
television. Instead, Plays manipulates visual elements that compose the
image through coloring and fragmentation. She uses this process of decon-
struction to lead to a greater understanding of those "man-made" constructs
that are responsible for the oppression she has witnessed. But Plays'
message is hardly dogmatic. The subtlety of her collage-like style suggests
a very open message, giving the viewer the opportunity to enter the work as
a thinking human being rather than a receptacle for one person's point of
view. Dana Plays follows in the tradition of a cross cultural awareness
expressed by other women filmmakers such as Maya Deren (Haiti) , Margaret
Mead (Bali, New Guinea) and Chick Strand (Mexico) . - Lynn Sachs
Don' t Means Do 1983 16mm color/sound 9 minutes
Part dramatic narrative, part improvisation, Don't Means Do explores the
personalities and relationships of two young girls (Niessa Ferriolo and
Brettaunia Park) and someone they meet while out walking. It is a picture
of a simple and genuine encounter, in the light of a gentle summer
afternoon, between the moods of child and adult. - David Heintz
Via Rio 1985 16mm color/sound 7 minutes
Via Rio is an ode to our human desire for relationship. The film tumbles
through a series of relationships woven around one woman's narration of her
parents' marriage. This woman (played by Lilian Mafra) is a fresh and fecund
personality who relates the story of her mother's infidelities while sitting
naked and pregnant in a garden.
Interspersed around this narrative are a number of other scenes which feed
the complex nature of human interaction. Interaction that is sometimes comic,
sometimes lonely, but as the very pregnant Mafra indicates - inevitably part
of life.
Dana Plays' film seems to stem from contemporary feminist philosophy. This
point of view theorizes that while men may experience relationships as a
tension between unification and/or annihilation of the self with others -
women, by virtue of their ability to bear children, experience relationships
as an outgrowth of being connected with others from the onset. Yet Via Rio
is far from didactic. Like the garden itself, relationships are seen as both
full of flowers and weeds. -Frances De Vuono
Shards 1988 16mm color/sound 5 minutes
Exploring formal concepts of filmmaking by examining the film frame,
broken sequences and excerpts of filmed realities, Shards questions
ideas of wholeness and reconstruction in the film form. -DP
(over)
Films available at Canyon Cinema.
' v'- - * ..
' ' ' '
.'. June 4, 1988
COLD EYE AND A HARD LOOK
Super 8 frou Boston
Tonight's program features mostly new super 8 films selected by
Boston filmmaker Saul Levine, whose influence has helped make that
city one of the most productive arenas for super 8 filmmaking in
the country. "Current in screening rooms, lofts and cellars, these
works turn a cold eye at super 8 and a hard look at the representation
of intimacy, sexuality, and privacy in a world of escalating
surveillance management. Though presenting bleak vistas, these
films are filled with wit, laughter, and music,"
Saul Levine
PROGRAM
Red Rooster by Tom Rhoads, 18fps, sound, 6 min.
Going to the Dogs by Joe Gibbons. 18fps, sound, 19 min.
Scrape by Saul Levine. 18fps, sound, 3 min.
Schmateh IV by Saul Levine. 18fps, sound, 3 min.
Elvis Unchained by Grace by Dana Moser. 24fps, sound, 4 min.
Crime Home Movie by Dana Moser. 18fps, sound, 7 min.
Spying by Joe Gibbons. 18fps, sound, 25 min.
,nor >y Pelle Lowe. 18fps, sound, 7 min.
Rah Rah Rah by Tom Rhoads. 18fps, silent, 20 min.
Talking To Myself by Anne Robertson. 18fps, sound, 5 min.
The Original Sin/Reproduction by Silvia Gruner. 18fps, silent, 3 min.
Nancy and Baby Al by Ann Steurnagle. 18fps, silent, 2% min.
May 29, 1988
SEXISM, COLONIALISM, MISREPRESENTATION II
Curated by Berenice Reynaud and Yvonne Rainer
The series, "Sexism, Colonialism, Misrepresentation," curated by
filmmaker Yvonne Rainer and critic Berenice Reynaud, took place at the
Collective for Living Cinema from April 25 to May 8, 1988. It was
designed to present "the voices of those - women, people of color,
Third World filmmakers - who have been constructed as 'the Other' in
mainstream culture. This second adaptation of that program presents
two films which "depict how social practices construct women as
'foreigners' in a patriarchical world "(Berenice Reynaud) and was
selected by Reynaud.
PROGRAM
A Girl's Own Story by Jane Campion. (Australia, 1984, 27min.)
This is a unique inpressionistic rendering of the life of an
Australian teenager: Beatles, convent school, and incest.
Jane Campion was born in New Zealand. She first studied anthropology
in Wellington, then Fine-Arts in London and Sydney, before enrolling
in the Australian School of Film and Television from 1981 to 1984.
During that time, she directed a video piece, Peel(1981) and three
shorts: Passionless Moments ( 1983-84) , A Girl's Own Story(1983-84)
and Mishaps of Seduction and Conquest (1984) . In 1985, she directed
a documentary, After Hours and one episode of a T.V. series, Dancing
Daze. In 1986, she directed her first feature, Two Friends.
Sea of Roses by Ana Carolina. (Brazil, 1977, 90min.)
Starring famous Brazilian actress and filmmaker Norma Benguel.
"A major new talent in Latin America cinema. Her films combine
the wild extravagent exuberance of Brazilian cinema with questions
surrounding the feminine in her culture. 1 '. ,- .
Piers Handling
"Sea of Roses is the funniest movie ever directed by a woman."
Paula Jacques
Ana Carolina Teixeira first studied medicine, then began her directing
career in documentaries. She later realized five feature-length fiction
films, including: Getulio Vargas ( 1975) . Nelson Pereira tins Sanrns
pede Passagem(1976) , Mar de Roses (Sea of Roses. 1977) . Das Tripas
Coracao (Heart and Guts, 1981) and Sonho de Valsa (Dream Waltz, 1987.)
FIRST EXPOSURES: NEW FILMS & VIDEOTAPES
May 28, 1988
Curated by Jeanne Finley & Lynn Kirby
PROGRAM
Magnum Mysterium by Dewayne Lumpkin, mixed-media installation.
Last Saturday Night by Dewayne Lumpkin, mixed-media installation.
Night for Night by Dewayne Lumpkin, mixed-media installation.
An I for an I by Larry Andrews, videotape, 18 min.
Mirror, Mirror by Paula Levine, videotape, 3 min.
She Was Looking for the Perfect Relationship by Victoria Beardon, videotape, 9 min.
Coming Soon by Jason Simon, videotape, 5 min.
My Old Friend by Phil Elie, videotape, 4 min.
Laundromatte by Paul McLeod, videotape, 5 min.
When I Was Twelve by Lily Hotchkiss, 16mm film, 7 min.
The Not-Self on Easy Street by Laurie Bernard, 16mm, 3 min.
Heart Like a Little Fist by Ted White, 16mm, 6 min.
Soft Chains by Leslie Alperin, 16mm, 5 min.
Untitled by Zoe Vivino & Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdattir, l6nnn, 10 min.
There will be a wine reception for the artists following
the program.
Pauline by Sharon Couzin. (1985,16mm, b&w, sound, 22min.)
"Pauline is a film which explores the friendship of two artists,
obliquely, through the exploration of a house, a garden and a painting.
The qualities of light and time are used to heighten the properties
simple acts and objects may take on, when mediated by these two elements.
The primary subject of the film, then, is not an event, nor a story,
but a sense of an artist's process and her relation to the world. The
film was shot in black and white and altered rhythmically through
simple optical printing. The sound includes excerpts from George Crumb's
The Voices of Ancient Children and Morton Subotnick's Prelude No. 4
for Piano and Electronic Tape.
Sharon Couzin
May 26, 1988
PORTRAITS AND REMINISCENCES
BY LARRY GOTTHEIM, SHARON COUZIN, VINCENT GRENIER & PHIL WEISMAN
PROGRAM
t. and the small picture frame by Phil Weisman. (1986, 16mm, b&w, sound, 12min. )
"This film is similar to a slide 'home movie picture show', it being
more in the tradition of amateur portrait presentation than anything
else. It is, of course, a loving portrait of my family, however tinged
beneath a veil of youthful ambivalence.'',
Phil Weisman
I.D. Part 3 (Milton) by Vincent Grenier. (1988, 16mm, b&w, sound, 17min.)
I.D. was filmed in Binghamton, N.Y. and is composed of 4 parts.
Part 3 was produced with the help of the Canada Council and features
Milton Kessler.
"In I.D. I tried to find a symbiosis to many different ideas and concerns
I have been entertaining for a number of years. A driving interest in
this film has been the raw material of conflicts between persona and the
individual qualities of a person. Also an interest in superimposition
partly as a disruptive device equally metaphorical of conflicts between
interior and exterior spaces. The use of synch-sound 'reality' with an
eye on tension between offscreen and screen spaces. Lip-synch is used
in counterpoint mostly. The procedure for the film involved interviewing
people with relatively uninhibited and expressive personalities. I
asked them about events which made them feel estranged and alienated
from things or people around them. Most talked about traumatic events
although it was not necessarily what I was seeking. From these
conversations, physical contexts were sought for their interactive
possibilities. The participants were exposed to situations that were
partly uncomfortable. The camera does not simply prod but is also an
active participant; not so much to render meaning full but to
appreciate and transpose."
Vincent Grenier
The Red Thread by Larry Gottheim. (1987, 16mm, color, sound, 17min. .)
"Mostly shot in San Francisco and Northern California, material
filmed (using the camera almost as a p(r/a) inter, a means of shaping
the visual world as film, but without reflection) in response to what
that world was opening in me. 'Material r ! . . . . analogies between weaving
and spinning thread and images already a pattern within film history
(e.g. in Deren) is here carried into further ramifications of unravelling
and patterning in fabric - and cinema-making, as well as in personal
and mythic dimensions. The open unfolding structure, which pulls
away from the balanced design of much of my work, gives equal weight
to the sound composition. Involves r opening' with its perils and
ambiguities."
Larry Gottheim
(over)
A Song of Ceylon by Laleen Jayamanne. (Australia, 1986, 51min.)
Laleen Jayamanne is a Sri-Lanka born academic and filmmaker living in
Sidney, Australia. She is currently at work on a new film, Rehearsing, conceived
as a sequel to A Song of Ceylon.
About A Song of Ceylon: "This process is also that of conjuring up the
Other. Male artists and philosophers have gained much mileage through the
tabulation of Women as Other. Women working in processes of symbolization
can learn a thing or two from this, not however by simply reversing that very
same logic of opposition. Rather, what is sought after is something partial,
fragmented, in order to arouse interest. It may not be such a bad idea to try
and make man strange and unfamiliar (defaniliarise) in much the same way that
Russian Formalists conceived of the poetic function of language. Those women
who may have various complicated investments in male sexuality may profitably
redirect their energies from only parodying sexist behaviour in men to something
that produces male bodies and voices in surprising configuration. Not all
filmmakers would be interested in this kind of work, nor is this a plea against
parody. It is more a question of preference, for it is a pity not to use
the possibilities of cinema for producing ambivalent representations of bodies."
Nami Schor
in The Female Body in Western Culture, Susan Suleiman, ed.
Quoted by Laleen Jayamanne, Screen
May 22,1988
SEXISM, COLONIALISM MISREPRESENTATION I
Guest curators: Berenice Reynaud and Yvonne Rainer
This series, curated by Berenice Reynaud and Yvonne Rainer, took place
at the Collective for Living Cinema in New York from April 25 to May 8, 1988.
It was designed .to present "the voices of those - women, people of color,
Third World filmmakers - who have been constructed as 'the Other' in
mainstream culture. Tonight's program is the first of two adapted from this
series (the second will be screened on May 29) and focusses on the cinematic
gaze as a -.tool of sexist and colonialist oppression." Berenice Reynaud
PROGRAM
Nice Colored Girls by Tracy Moffatt. (Australia, 1986. 13min.)
Tracy Moffatt is an Aboriginal photographer and filmmaker. She
studied Visual Communication at Queensland College of the Arts, majoring in
Film and Video Production. Based in Sydney for the last 4 years, she has worked
in many Aboriginal communities around Australia as an independent film and video
maker and photographer. Arrested for taking part in a demonstration protesting
the "celebration" of the Australian Bicentenary in Portsmouth, England, she
said "Why ahould we Aboriginals be there to celebrate the arrival of backward
Englishmen into our traditional land 200 years ago?... The settlers wiped out
whole races of Aborigines, yet here in Portsmouth it is being glorified. It
makes me particularly angry when at home my people are struggling for just
compensation in the form of land rights for the theft of their land; when our
infant mortality rate is the highest in the world; when currently, according
to the police, Black youths are mysteriously hanging themselves in the jails
of the red-neck territories of North Queensland."
Nice Colored Girls "explores attitudes between European men and Aboriginal
women in an historical and contemporary context, in doing so attempts to
question the seemingly established structures of previous Aboriginal films."
Similola Coker
Special thanks to Barbara Edols, Lisa Taylor and Victoria Treole.
**************
Phoelix by Anna Ambrose. (England, 1979, 47min.)
An elegant fantasy from director Anna Ambrose, who tragically died at
the age of 40, Phoelix is an inventive and intricate drama exploring the
relationship between a young actress and an elderly neighbour. An adult fairy
tale, carefully weaving daydream and reality in and out of each other.
Director /Writer Anna Ambrose
Production Margaret Williams
Photography Peter Harvey, Steve Dwoskin
Sound Mick Audsley
Editing Charles Rees , Anna Ambrose
Special Thanks to Nigel Algar.
May 19, 1988
THE MAGIC AND ALCHEMY OF
HARRY SMITH
"His works to date form an even more complete paradigm than Maya Deren's
for the historical evolution of the American avant-garde film. . .Smith's
earliest films (made throughout the 1940 's) arise from the Bauhaus
tradition of formal composition and illusory depth through color and
shape. Smith's work is vitalized by a serious commitment to the
textural surface of the film material itself (he paints, glues, scratches
the raw material) for which his ability to invent and master graphic
techniques distinguish him.
Between 1950 and 1960, Smith worked on a long animated film, literally
a surrealistic cartoon of epic proportions. He has given us in this
film a twentieth century inflection of "The Immortal Journey" - in the
tradition of Dante, Milton, and Blake. By the time he finished the
film, which is sometimes called Heaven and Earth Magic or The Magic
Feature, the New American Cinema had entered into its mythopoeic stage.
His latest film, Late Superimopsitions(1964) , an autobiographical
fragment, brings us to the diary form which has been a major
development of the late 60 's." Jonas Mekas
"My cinematic excreta is of four varieties: - batiked abstractions made
directly on film between 1939 and 1946; optically printed non-objective
studies composed around 1950; semi-realistic animated collages made as
part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962; and chronologically
superimposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year.
All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the
interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEC Alpha
component and should be observed together in order ..for they are
valuable works, works that will live forever - they made me gray."
comments by Harry Smith
PROGRAM
Early Abstractions ( 2 3min/ silent)
Late Superimpositions (SlmirL.)
Heaven and Earth Magic (66min.)
rfv
BETZY BROMBERG
Saturday, May 14, 1988
Ciao Bella, 1978, 13 min.
A personal film about love and mortality.
(B.B.) "Ciao Bella is a summer-in-
the-city travelogue that mixes verite of Lower East Side bikers, Times Square
topless dancers, and Coney Island crowds to achieve a highly charged atmosphere
of manic exhibitionism and sexual raunch." - J. Hoberman, American Film.
Marasmus , 1981, 24 min.; made in collaboration with Laura Ewig.
A woman's response to technology/the jet-lag of birth. (B.B.) "Although the
title refers to a condition of acute malnutrition in which a child is unable
to assimilate food, the film is a robust and sumptuous offering. This is no
rough-edged, craft-resistant effort. Rather it is infused with a seductive
glamour." - Janis Crystal Lipzin, Artweek.
Body Politic (god melts bad meat) , 1988, 39 min.
Body Politic (god melts bad meat) travels through a realm of modern moral
dilemma as it examines the relationship between high-technology medicine,
religion, politics and the American family. (B.B.) "With her typical serious-
humor, Bromberg explores both the claims of science (we can improve human
life) and the claims of religion (God made perfect beings) and implicitly
asks the question, 'How do we know when we've gone too far? '.. .There's no
voice-over and the argument is made by an athletic juxtaposition of imagery
and testimony." - Helen Knode, L.A. Weekly
A wine reception for the artist will follow the screening.
San Francisco Cinematheque
480 Potrero Avenue
San Francisco CA 94110
f415) 558-8129
A Protect ol the
Foundation for Art in Cinema
Board ol Directors
Scott S;a"<
President
Lon Argaonght
Lynn Kirov
Diane Kitchen
Jams Cr/stat Lipzin
Stan
Steve A nker
Program Director
Davic Gerstem
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
Operations Coordinator
The Foundation tor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with lunds Irom:
National Endowment for the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants lor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
'UNSPOKEN' D J/Jc4*e/ A/M*/er* 19*7
"An intimate portrait of looks and moments, a diary of gestures." The image as the
example for the obsessive is the thing itself. The lover is thus an artist; and his world
is in fact a world reversed, since each image is it's own end (nothing beyond the
image). Fragments of 'Lovers Discourse', Poland Earth es.
THE DESCENT OF THE SEDUCTRICE' D Jena M*Utee 1987
The films of Jean MaSAet? address particularly the notion of identification, the
impossibility of fantasy and the failure of the image. In her work she uses images of
femme fatale* or 'seductress' from Hollywood cinema, manipulates them and
transforms them to emphasize "the word and law which relies on the predominantly
masculine structure of the look."
'SWIMMER' D Afjchacl Maziere 1987
"A beautiful photographic quality characterised Michael Maziere's 'SWIMMER'
which used freeze frame and repeat shots of a swimmer in what could be descibed as
Mediterranean sea and light. With a fractured 'found' soundtrack, what it lacked in
depth it made up for in its surface tension. Art Monthly
'MYTHS AND LEGENDS' D Pier Willie 1987
"Two images: one from the past, creating a nostalgia which affects our present, the
other a modern image reclaiming a hidden perspective on the same past and
present...." The film does not resolve the political and historical situation, but instead
places us in a difficult and unreconciled position as both images confront each other
with their own mythologies.
'SERMON' D Ni* Gordon Smith 1987
The scent of apples-the laden vines-the flowing milk-the brimming honey-the
Yucca forest filled with predators- saturated in colour.
programme notes written and complied by MICHAEL MAZIERE
San Francisco Cinematheque May 12, 1988
NEW UNDERGROUND FILMS
FROM
ON D N
Introduced and selected by MICHAEL MAZIERE
A programme of new British avant-garde film which focuses on
contemporary concerns with image, aesthetics and questions of
identity. The films use a number of experimental techniques
manipulating the images through colouring, degradation, video
effects and lighting to create a rich and intense visual event.
From exploration into narrative and allegory, subjectivity and
fantasy the films represent the imagist tendency in British avant
garde film.
DoQonononononononoQoQoDononoDoQoQoDoDon
*OM' D John Smith 1986
A new piece by leading humorist of the British avant-garde with a surprise ending.
'BEHIND CLOSED DOORS' D Anna Thew 1986
In 'Behind Closed Doors' the subject of death is dealt with in a personal and
metaphorical way mixing images inspired by Dante's 'Inferno' with recollections and
dreams to provide an abstract collage of associations. The voice over reads from a
number of texts (Dante, the film-maker's note books and others), whilst the sound
creates a disturbing vocabulary of nostalgia alluding to a variety of spaces and
moments which remain fleeting, tentative and uncohesive.
'MESSAGE FROM BUDAPEST' D Michael Maziere & Moira Sweeney
1987
A poetic and ironic tribute to the city of Budapest, using footage filmed on the
Mayday workers festival and archival photographs from the turn of the century A
celebration of the city akin to the 'City Symphonies' of the '20's and 30's with the
iconography of Eastern Europe, it's architecture, trams, and people; set in a series of
fleeting glimpses and rhythmical paces. The fragmented voice track was written and
spoken by Nick Thorpe, friend and foreign correspondent in Budapest.
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RECENT HUNGARIAN FILMS
Antal Istvan in person
1) Finger Wave (1986) by Gyula Nagy, 6 min., 16mm, color, sound.
2) Ethnogenesis (1987) by Third Line Manu Factory, 3 min., 16mm, b&w, sound.
3) Inauguration of Young Pioneers (1987) by Gyorgy Arvay, 15 min., super-8, color,
sound .
4) Piramidas (1984) by Ivan Ladislav Galeta, 12 min., 16mm, color, sound.
/
i ,
5) Clay (1972-87) by Agi Hay, 2 min., 16mm, b&w, sound.
6) Tweedle (1987) by Laszlo Revesz and Janos Sugar, 5 min., 16mm, b&w, sound.
7) Bolsevita (1988) by Dr. P. Horvath, 5 min., 16mm, b&w sound.
8) The Black Cat (1987) by Antal Istvan, 11 min., 16mm, b&w, sound.
San Francisco Cinematheque A Project ol the
J?0 Porrero Avenue Foundation lor Art in Cinema
San Franasco. CA 9411C
'415)553-3*29
Board of Directors
Scolt Stark
Presiaent
Lon ArgaOright
Lynn KirOy
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzin
Stan
Steve A iker
Program Director
Davia Gerstem
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with funds from:
National Endowment lor the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants lor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
Operations Coordinator William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
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BEFORE WE KNEW NOTHING
....
By Diane Kitchen
Thursday, April 21, 1988
Before We Knew Nothing by Diane Kitchen, 1988, 62 minutes; World Premiere.
"In filming Before We Knew Nothing Diane Kitchen spent 7 months in the jungles
of Peru sharing in the life of the Ashaninka Indians. The film has an obvious
interest for the anthropologist, however it is important to grasp that this is
not an anthropological film but rather a film that uses the medium to raise
questions about the nature of anthropological understanding. The anthropolo-
gist who makes use of film and a filmmaker like Diane Kitchen approach their
tasks in ways that are necessarily different. As used by the anthropologist,
the camera is an instrument for recording data which then becomes processed
and ordered and then fed back into an anthropological discourse that has its
own separate order of priorities. By contrast, a filmmaker like Ms. Kitchen
uses the camera to present and introduce images; moreover, images which have
their own order of understanding and which she does not presume to have com-
pletely understood. In her film, the presence of the camera is neither hidden
nor flaunted; rather the camera is placed in such a way that its field of vision
does not become hegemonic. This gives her images a very distinctive quality:
they give us not a clinical visual 'record' of the life of the Ashaninka but
an involved interrogation of that life. Thus, on the one hand her images have
a speculative fugitive feel to them: the stills of faces that stare out at us,
the shots of immobile forests or fast-flowing streams, the scenes of daily
activity or of childbirth: all these images which produce in the viewer alter-
nating responses of insight or puzzlement, or both at the same time; how much
of the meaning of these images has the viewer actually absorbed? On the other
hand her images are scrupulously matter-of-fact, devoid of "poeticisms ' . They
make us see what is in front of us as if for the first time. In this way, the
filmic images become, for the filmmaker and the viewer, the means by which a
non-reductive and non-ethnocentric understanding of others may be constructed."
Ackbar Abbas
San Francisco Cinematheque
-V-*0 Potrero Avenue
San Francisco. CA 941 10
415)558-8129
A Project at the
Foundation lor Art in Cinema
Board ot Directors
Scott Stark
President
Lon Argabright
Lynn Kirby
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzin
Stall
S'eve Anker
Program Director
David Gerstein
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
Operations Coordinator
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with lunds from:
National Endowment 'or the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants lor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
I
of a world twisting to see itself in so many deceiving mirrors, so Lewis is 3*
adman's man, a robot degenerate over-programmed by the conflicting gods of
Americana, made schizoid by the clash of material luxuries and abstract ideals.'
- David Thomson.
"I don't want to sound pontifical, but I guess I talk about the nonsense of
what we call civilization. This utter nonsense about leisure. I think we're
the only country that takes good wheat and refines it down into white flour,
taking all the nourishment out of it , and then adds Vitamin B to make it good
for you." - Frank Tashlin, interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich.
Idiot Savants programmed and program notes provided by Peter Herwitz.
' "
. :' : - : ' ' : .- .
..' - '
IDIOT SAVANTS: PASOLINI'S HAWKS AND SPARROWS &
TASHLIN'S WHO'S MINDING THE STORE?
Hawks and Sparrows (Uccellacci e Uccellini) , 1966, written and directed by Pier
Paolo Pasolini, photographed by Mario Bernardo and Tonino Belli Colli, edited
by Nino Baragli, music by Ennio Morricone, costumes by Danilo Donati, 86 min.
Featuring Toto (Innocenti Toto and Brother Ciccillo) , Ninetto Davoli (Innocenti
Ninetto and Brother Ninetto), Femi Benussi (luna) , Rossana Di Rocco (friend of
Ninetto) , Lena Lin Solaro (Uganda La Sconosciuta) .
"In 1965 Pasolini had the idea for a film which he described as being 'in prose 1 :
Hawks and Sparrows. The comic spirit transmuted the prose into poetry... The
theme of the film is classical, among the most classical in literature - the
theme of the quest. Toto and Ninetto set out on the highroads of the world
and of history in search of material and moral nourishment. They are Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza, but of course, since this is a film, they are also Charlie
Chaplin. . .The two characters travel thorugh 'the crisis of ideologies' seeking
through the words of their author a possible continuity with the world of fine
hopes of the Resistance.
"Is the journey therefore 'elegaic' and 'nostalgic'? Yes, in the sense that
this elegy was the measure of Pasolini 's smile. In the fable the rawness of
Pasolini 's despair found a moment of repose, if not of resolution." - Enzo
Siciliano, Pasolini.
"The poignant expression of an author who good-naturedly peers at the vast ranges
of an horizon stretching above and beyond incidental, shifting, and transitory
events, in the hopes of finding, as a man, intelligent bearings in the immensity
of time and history." - Roberto Rossellini.
Who's Minding the Store?, 1963, directed by Frank Tashlin, written by Tashlin and
Harry Tugend, photographed by Wallace Kelly, music by Joseph J. Lilley, 90 min.
Featuring Jerry Lewis (Norman Phiffier and T.V. Doctor), Jill St. John (Barbara
Tuttle alias Fullero) , Agnes Moorehead (Phoebe Tuttle) , John McGiver (Mr.
Tuttle), Ray Walston (Mr. Quimby) .
"Jerry Lewis has maintained the American comic preoccupation with the little
man beset by an incomprehensible, heartless or intractible world. Keaton re-
sponds with disdain, Harry Langdon day-dreams, Stan Laurel muddles through while
Chaplin practices all the guile and simpering of a waiter who plans to whip away
the fat man's chair. Jerry Lewis's response is as novel as it is alarming: he
becomes demented. . .no other performer has gone so far in suggesting a man
animated by machinery or by the processing of human instincts implicit in
advertising. Lewis' period with Tashlin was instrumental in drawing out this
gibbering, spastic automaton. . .Just as Tashlin's movies are cartoon distortions
San Francisco Cinematheque
480 Potrero Avenue
San Francisco CA 94t'.C
(415)558-8129
A Project ol the
foundation lor Art in Cinema
-OVER-
Board ol Directors
Scott Slark
President
Lon Argabright
Lynn Kirby
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzin
Staff
Steve Anker
Program Director
David Ger stein
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
Operations Coordinator
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with tunds from:
National Endowment for the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants tor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
who might one day steal them away. On a night in 1981, the "enemy" struck in
a blaze of white light and the Guardians were defeated. . .Only two of them sur-
vived in their hilltop hut, thinking back to their training, their graduation,
and the night the "enemy" struck.
Seeming (Mistula) , 1987, 15 mins., 16mm.
"The Story is about an artist in search of his audience..." - Raymond Red.
The film is about a young violinist who tries to reach out of his private
world by playing spontaneous, improvisational music. But his father is irri-
tated by the "noise" he creates all day and nags him to stop. Driven out of
his home by his father's incessant scolding, the young violinist walks
through the busy and noisy city to a dense forest of towering trees. In the
calmness of a small clearing, 'his violin playing leads him into a private world.
At the end he is ambiguously left standing in a theatre to the sound of applause
created by the rain.
Raymond Red was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1965. He attended the National Art
Center on Mount Makiling from 1978 to 1982, and majored in Visual Arts. He went
on to study film at the University of the Philippines Film Center from 1982 to
1983. He continued studying film at workshops organized by the independent
Mowelfund Film Institute where he has also worked as a film production instructor.
His films have been shown and praised extensively in numerous Short Film and
Independent Film Festivals in Manila; Hong Kong International Film Festival; Berlin,
Hawaii and Edinburgh International Film Festivals; Institute of Contemporary Arts,
London; Torino Film Festival, Torino, Italy; Bruxelles Super-8 Film Festival; Pia
Film Festival, Tokyo; and on tour in West Germany.
Red is currently working on two new films - a feature film in Super-8mm set in
contemporary Manila, and The Skies (Ang Himpawid) , a 16mm feature film about flying
in turn-of-the-century Philippines.
Raymond Red will also present his films at the Pacific Film Archive on Tuesday,
March 29th at 7:30 p.m.
' .'
. '"'.-.*
.... .. . . _^
'
RAYMOND RED - SUPER-8 FILMS
Sunday, March 27, 1988
A Special Collaboration of the San Francisco International Film Festival and
the San Francisco Cinematheque.
Filmmaker Raymond Red from The Philippines in Person.
"Raymond Red, a 23 year-old Filipino, works in Super-8, and achieves a level
of technical sophistication that you would not have believed possible. The
Enemy (Kabaka, 1983, 23 mins.) is something like an autobiography transmuted
into elegiac science-fiction. The Yawn (Ang Hikab, 1984, 15 mins.) is a vignette
about sleep, dreams, and > insomnia that would make Beckett proud. Kind (Kamada ,
1984, 25 mins.) is a naturalistic drama about a student, a sick man, and a rented
room, with disturbing and seemingly boundless undertones. There is something rare
and wonderful about Raymond Red's movies, all the more piercing because it is
so unexpected. The sheer beauty of these films moves me to tears." - Tony Rayns,
Edinburgh Film Festival.
Sketches, 1987, 12 mins., Super-8mm.
A film in three short parts that takes a humorous look at the filmmaker's
experience of Filipino life. "Sardinas" is a sketch on the unique mode of
transport found throughout the Philippines, the Jeepney; "Paper" tells of one
man's extraordinary encounter with a sheet of paper; "Balot" is a satirical
account of one evening in the life of a vendor of a Filipino street delicacy,
the Balot - a duck egg that is eaten whole.
Kind (Kamada) , 1984, 25 mins., Super-Smm.
A seemingly naturalistic drama set in a magically conjured 1950s that takes
on increasingly disturbing undertones as it moves to its climax. Music student
Julian, in search of a quiet lodging where he can write and practice the violin,
rents a room from Mrs. Silling. But the room already has an occupant: a man
whose name may be Pedro, who never speaks, but has an ominous cough...
The Yawn (Ang Hikab) , 1984, 15 mins., Super-Smm.
An astonishing vignette about a sleeper and an insomniac, which manages to
evoke both Beckett and Borges in the space of only 15 minutes. In a research
study done by psychologists, a.number of subjects disclosed that they spend more
time asleep than awake, simply because they seem to live happier lives in their
dreams . . .
The Enemy (Kabaka) , 1983, 23 mins., Super-Smm
An elegaic science-fiction fable: Years ago, a school was established atop
a mountain to train dedicated young men to become Guardians of the Stars of the
Eastern Skies. The Stars were believed to be in danger from an unknown "enemy",
San Francisco Cinematheque
-80 Polrero Avenue
San Francisco. CA 94110
'415)558-8129
-OVER-
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supportea in part with funds trom:
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The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
Gutman notes (cont.
Clarke. It's hard to put a tag on it in a scholarly moment it
might be called in the tradition of the Picaresque; maybe it's
somewhat punk; Whitehall wrote: "The only way I can convey
something of the film's quality is to say that it is a 'Finnegan's
Wake 1 of the movies." (LA Free Press) "Its improbable humor will
probably establish it as an underground classic .. .The illustrated
stream-of consciousness narrative with Gutman droning on, rumbling
off into 180-degree tangents is often soporific, but more often
very funny, both intentionally and unintentionally, and surpris-
ingly philosophic and perceptive." (Variety) Finally, Vincent
Canby in the NY Times: "The climactic scene of the film is a
grape-filled orgy in which Gutman and his leading lady strip
(she completely, he at first only to his blue cotton Bloomingdale ' s
boxer shorts) and rub grapes over their bodies. The movie, funny
in a mock-horrible way, is another example of the underground
movie-as-exorciser of reality."
Notes by Michael Wallin
Walter Gutman in NYC in 1983 with blow-up from film of womftn friend
;.- S3,*
/; -.'*?>
Program Notes: March 24, 1988
FILMS BY WALTER GUTMAN
Tonight's program of films is dedicated to the memory of
Walter Gutman, who was 83 when he died last April in New York
City. Before he turned filmmaker at age 65, he had already
had careers as an art critic (for The Nation and New Republic),
Wall Street commentator (The Gutman Letter combined tips on
the market with philosophical, witty commentary on the arts,
history, women, poetry, politics), philanthropist, art collector,
and film producer (Robert Frank's PULL MY DAISY and SIN OF JESUS,
George Kuchar's UNSTRAP ME, in which he also acted). As a film-
maker, Gutman made eighteen 16mm films, eight of them feature-
length, between 1968 and 1981. He was director, producer, some-
time actor, always soundtrack commentator. Gutman dealt with his
favorite personal obsessions in his work. Historical figures
(Martha Washington, Benedict Arnold, Sappho) and events (the
American Revolution, WWI ) ; female bodybuilders, acrobats, and
circus performers. But these are not objective documentaries.
They are glimpses into the private world of a very singular
individual a very warm, honest, and witty man.
HANDS DOWN (1983), 6 min. /silent
The heroine in Mary Lou Harmel who is the dominatrix in CLOTHED
IN MUSCLE. . .Also featured is a rag doll and my forearm which
Mary Lou in a hand wrestling match puts down. . .Everyone is amused
by it. It's quite erotic but also quiet. WG
IT HAPPENED IN SARASOTA (1980), 18 min. /sound
...Filmed about six or seven years ago but edited and given a
narration and music in 1979. As the voice over explains it is a
film showing friends of mine practicing some acts at their home
in Sarasota. The Chapmans Sarah and Danny were with the Ringling
show when I met them Danny's daughter by his first wife, also a
circus acrobat was a glowering sub-teenager but developed in that
startling way that women do, from a rat to a gorgeous, mysterious
female. I guess that's what happened in Sarasota. WG
THE GRAPE DEALER'S DAUGHTER (1968), 72 min. /sound
Gutman wrote the story at the suggestion of the late Louis Brigante
Gutman and Brigante shared the filming; Brigante edited. Gutman
narrated. Originally over 90 minutes, it was re-edited by Shirley
over
San Francisco Cinematheque
-IS? P-:.."?.'o Avenue
San Fr^^C'SCO CA 941 10
[4 <5' 553-3 < 29
A Project ol the
Foundation for Art in Cinema
Board ol Directors
Scon Stark
President
Lon Argabright
Lynn Kirby
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzin
Staff
Steve Anker
Program Director
David Gerstem
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
Ooerations Coordinator
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with funds from:
National Endowment for the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants lor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
The Children's Party. 1940 's. Finished by Larry Jordan in 1968. Silent.
One of trilogy of films edited in different ways but drawn from the sane
material. Central to the film is the image of a girl with long hair
riding a horse. The image is both erotic and innocent.
Jack's Dream. 1940's. Finished by Larry Jordan. Silent.
Puppet animation into which Cornell has inserted a few shots - just
enough to throw it into the sphere of artful fantasy. - Larry Jordan.
Rose Hobart. 1936. Sound. Re-editing of George Melford's 1931 film,
East of Borneo.
Cornell thought that Melford's sound film contained "passages to remind
one of the suggestive power of the silent film to evoke an ideal
world of beauty." Cornell produced a startingly original montage not
unlike a labyrinth. He described the film as conspiring " to produce
an effect such as seizes one with disturbing emotions." He juxtaposed
the mismatched shots, the suddenly shifting locations, the eerily tinted
material to two themes from Holiday in Brazil, played by Nestor Amaral
and his Orchestra. The film is a remarkable foreshadowing of films made
by avant-garde filmmakers in the years after 1936.
1. From an essay by P. Adams Sitney in Joseph Cornell, published by
M.O.M.A, 1980
...
.
March 19, 1988
San Francisco Art Institute
JOSEPH CORNELL'S FOUND FOOTAGE FILMS
In the 1930's, Joseph Cornell (190 3-19 72) began making his found footage
films. He was a maker of enigmatic and eccentric shadow boxes and a lover
of cinema. As he collected artifacts and images for his boxes so he collected
films for his cinematic endeavors. Frcm these films, he fashioned a remarkable
collection of films that are still being restored. Several films, viewed as
broken and fragmentary pieces, were discovered to be clearly albeit crudely
constructed montages and have been restored according to Cornell's instructions.
The films from that collection shown tonight reveal Cornell's "passion for
cinema that stubbornly persists in undermining our expectations and challenges
our certitudes, by hinting that the very experience of cinema might have a
dimension we would rather overlook."
PROGRAM
Vaudeville De Luxe. 12 min. Restored in 1978. Silent.
Animal and acrobatic acts with a jolting insert frcm East of Borneo and
steel refinery images frcm By Night With Torch and Spear.
Bookstalls. 11 min. Restored in 1978. Silent.
One of Cornell's most elegant and meticulously constructed films. A
young boy in Paris in the 20 's leafs through a book which takes him on
a series of imaginary journeys around the world to return to the book-
stall still holding the book. He wanders off, presumably yo find
another book at another bookstall.
By Night With Torch and Spear. 9 min. Restored in 1979. Silent.
Composed by intercutting tinted film stocks, upsidedown and backward
images, negative shots, normal shots, and flashing titles. Ends with
the words of the title prceding a shot of aborigines night fishing.
The film can be projected again without rewinding to create a wonderful
palindrome.
Thimble-Theater . 1940's. Finished by Larry Jordan. Silent.
Cornell pays homage to the 19th century film illusion machine, the
praxinoscope. The viewer peeks through slots in a drum at images
reflected in a circle of tiny mirrors, in this case - thimbles on
needles.
- OVER -
THE CONFESSIONS OF WINIFRED WAGNER
by HANS JURGEN SYBERBERG
San Francisco Art Institute Thursday, March 17, 1988
Hans Jurgen Syberberg, known for his searing and unusual portraits of
German culture in the films Our Hitler, Parsifal, Ihe Night, Ludwig, Karl May,
has made a film that records the 60 year recollections of Winifred Wagner,
Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law. These are not simply revelations and
reminiscences about German-European culture between 1914-1974 but contain
Wagner's own account of her relationship with Adolf Hitler who shared her admiration
and love of Richard Wagner. Hitler was (in her words) " the shining champion of
Bayreuth..", still the most important festival devoted to Richard Wagner's
works. She also states, "I shall always remember him with gratitude because he
literally prepared the ground for me in Bayreuth. . (and) if Hitler walked through
that door today, I should be just as pleased and happy to see him here as ever
I was. As for his darker side, I know it exists but not for me because it
is beyond my understanding."
This remarkable film (on videotape) is presented in complete and
chronological order of camera takes with virtually no editing and contains
almost all medium close-up and head shots . Wagner confronts Syberberg and the
camera directly and unselfconsciously, needing few prompts to recount her life
story.
PROGRAM
The Confessions of Winifred Wagner. 1975. Film on videotape.
Director: Hans Jurgen Syberberg
Producer: Hans Jurgen Syberberg
Photography: Dietrich Lohmann
Editing: Agape Dorstewitz
Cast: Herself - Winifred Wagner
Part I: 2 hours and 24 minutes
Break
Part 11:2 hours and 15 minutes: we will run this as long as viewers stay
in attendance; otherwise it will be available for individuals as follows:
The Goethe Institute has kindly agreed to make the entire 5% hours
of Confessions available to individual public viewing during normal
Goethe Library hours, M-W 12-6, Th. 12-7:30, and Fri.12-5.
Phone 391-0370 to assure space availability.
BARBARA HAMMER - NEW FILMS AND OLD
6) Parisian Blinds. 1984. 16mm/Color & B&W/Silent/6min.
"Parisian Blinds and Tourist investigate the nature of spectator perception
in an unfamiliar environment. Manipulating the movement of the film direction
on the screen much like a camera shutter and the motion of Venetian blinds
that open and close, Hammer questions the perceptual experience of mass
tourism as the Bateau Mouche endlessly circles the Ille de la Cite. The
content is the perpetual forestalling of experience embedded in the form of the
abbreviated glance the film editing allows."
Kathleen Hulsen, Centre Pompidou Brochure, 1985.
7) Optic Nerve. 1985. 16mm/Color 7 B&W/Sound/16min. Sound score by Helen Thorington.
"Barbara Hammer's Optic Nerve is a powerful personal reflection on family and
aging. Hammer employs filmed footage which, through optical printing and
editing, is layered and manipulated to create a compelling meditation on her visit
to her grandmother in a nursing home. The sense of sight becomes a constantly
evolving process of reseeing images retrieved from the past and fused into the
eternal present of the projected image. Hammer has lent a new voice to the
long tradition of personal meditation in the avant-garde of the American
independent cinema. ..."
John Hanhardt, Biennial Exhibition Catalog, Whitney Museum
of American Art, N.Y. 1987.
8) Snow Job - The Media Hysteria of AIDS. 1986-87. Film and Video.
Deconstructs the representation of Aids in the popular press where distortion
and misrepresentation amount to a "snow job" promoting increased homophobia,
sexual discrimination and repression of gays. - B.H.
There will be a wine reception following the show.
BARBARA HAMMER - NEW FILMS AND OLD
San Francisco Art Institute March 13, 1988
PROGRAM
.
1) I Was/I Am. 1973. 16mm/B&W/Sound/7.5min.
A first film, (said by some to contain all the seeds of all films that
follow) , about the filmmaker who faces her imaginary death after really
being shot by a sniper. The sniper is bagged and rolled away. - B.H.
2) Psychosynthesis . 1975. 16mm/Color/Sound/8min.
The subpersonalities of me, my baby, athlete, witch and artist are synthesized
in this film of unpositions, intensities and color layers coming quietly
together through the healing powers of natural touchstone. - B.H.
"I would gladly go out of my way to see it again and would travel some distance
to see a retrospective of its author's work." Tom Bowling, Washington Star.
3) Double Strength. 1978. 16mm/Color/Sound/20min.
A poetic study of the stages of a lesbian relationship by two women
performance artists from honeymoon, through struggle, to break-up,
to enduring friendship. Starring Terry Sendgraff on trapeze. - B.H.
4) Pond and Waterfall. 1982. 16mm/Color /Silent. Production assistance by
Dorothy Weicker.
Rephotography of all underwater footage of a spring pond and waterfall,
provoking an experimental film of exploration of the verdant pond growth
as well as the dynamic light and water reflections before the camera
floats into the sea. - B.H.
5) Doll House. 1984. 16mm/Color & B&W/ Sound /3min.
"Rapid montage shows a plethora of objects all arranged in, or reference
to, the central prop of a dollhouse. We see whimsical references to
domesticity (kitchen implements, clothing, shoes), the housing situation
(want ads), feminist film(Annette Kuhn's book Women's Pictures),
relationships, claustrophobia. The final shots show the dollhouse outside,
up in the branches of a tree... by the effort of cinema, the dollhouse
has become a treehouse. This thematic movement mirrors the movement of
Barbara Hammer's films in the last few years: from preoccupation with
inside/the body, to a claiming of outside/the landscape "
Claudia Gorbman, "Body Displaced, Places Discovered,"
Jump Cut. No. 32, 1987.
and more
DUSAN MAKEVEJEV'S INNOCENCE UNPROTECTED PLUS 5 FILMS 3Y HEATHER Me ADAMS
February 28, 1988
Innocence Unprotected. 1968. Black & white and color, 75 minutes.
"Innocence Unprotected was a film made by and starring a Serbian
acrobat named Dragoljub Aleksic. That film has been re-prepared, ornamented,
annotated, and lengthened by Makevejev, creating a peculiar cinematic time
machine." Uth Chicago International Film Festival Notes
"Makevejev' s method is to take big sections of the old film, variously
tint them (and hand color some details), and intercut them with newsreels
of the German occupation, Nazi propaganda films, and interviews with the
crew, the cast and especially with Aleksic still triumphant.
"The original... was the first Serbian talking picture, filmed in
Belgrade in 19^2, under the noses of the Nazis, and for the absolutely
non-political purpose of making money. After the war, the film suffered
a certain eclipse, at least partly because it pushed the Yugoslav talkie
back into a pre-history when nothing like that was supposed to have
happened." Howard Thompson
With a nod to Eisenstein, Makevejev calls his film "an amusing mon-
tage of attractions," and describes the work as "the art of a metropolitan
hal f -world. .. on the margins of an industrial culture and morality, some-
where between cafes and circus entertainment, cheap literature, and
melodramatic trash."
7 minutes
h minutes
5*5 minutes
Better Be Careful U% minutes
Pinball Laffs 6 minutes
Holiday Magic
Black Coffee
Fake Previews
Black & white and color, 1985-86.
"The films of Heather McAdams... combine the collage finesse of a
Bruce Conner with the crude campiness of the Kuchar brothers."
Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader
San Francisco Cinematheque
-80 Potrero Avenue
San Francisco. CA94t10
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The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with lands from;
National Endowment for the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants tor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
.
LYNN KIRBY: FILMS & INSTALLATIONS
Eye Gallery, Saturday, Feb. 27, 1988
PROGRAM
1) July 25th; Ode to Ms. Bradix and Ms. Brooks Multi-media installation.
With the generous help of:
Paula Alexander
Leslie Alperin
Laurie Bernard
Kimberely Disney
Barney Haynes
Karen Holmes
Kimberely Jennings
Toney Merritt
Stephen Rogers
Glenn Spearman
Dawn Yamada
2) Three Voices (1983), 16mm, 4.5 minutes, color/sound "Part of a series of films
shot from my apartment windows. As the windows are washed and people return
from work, three facets of the same personality explore daily life and the
threat of war." (L.K.)
3) Across the Street (1982), 16mm, 3 min., color/sound "I witness shocking events
which remain unresolved. This film was made for therapeutic reasons; it is
a story which takes place in an empty apartment across from my bedroom window."
4) Sharon and the Birds on the Way to the Wedding (1987), 16mm, 28 min., color/sound
"A film about conflicting perceptions of love, romance and marriage: the romantic
and the pragmatic, the subjective experience and : the cultural description, the
fictional and the real. The character, Sharon, is narrator and the character
of her own dramas."
There -will be a wine and cheese recetion following the screening.
"For Filippo, it is the newsreel and black and white's fetishizing
allure that can make for real-life bad habits. No one else has
dealt with the powerful mimicry that comes out of watching too many
old movies."
Katherine Dieckmann, The Village Voice
Medical Research/Special Report. 1987 by Robert Fox. 16mm/color/sound/30min.
Thrown into the milieu, "starving, hysterical, naked." Illness as
metaphor, reflections on life /death and the creative process. Sound and
image stitched together to form a Promethean vision.
Robert Fox
..
PROGRAM NOTES February 25, 1988
INTROSPECTION: THE OBJECTIVE SELF
Films bv Danny Lyon, Mary Filippo, Robert Fox and Ricardo Block
In tonight's, program, we present 4 self-portraits by 4 filmmakers.
Although the genre is the same, the approaches are distinctive to each artist
and we see work using a wide range of material, from early home-movies to found
footage.
Persistence of Memory. 1984 by Ricardo Block. 16mm/color/sound/17min.
This is an autobiographical film in collage form about a childhood
lived in different cultures and languages. Block was born and raised
in Mexico by French- Jewish parents and has re-collected visual fragments -
found footage and home movies - to create a personal mythology.
"He evokes in the viewer the universal desire to examine one's
own place in a particular family, place and time."
Melinda Ward, Executive Producer, Alive From Off Center
Born To Film. 1982 by Danny Lyon. 16mm/b&w/sound/33min.
A young boy emerges from the filmic history of his past. Made from
family photo album, footage from the 1940 's and the present.
"The decade of the 1960 's had values that redeemed and have survived
it, and these are summarized perhaps most eloquently in the art of
Danny Lyon. . .Indeed the most recent film, Born to Film, is among
other things, intimately autobiographical, interspersing footage of
Lyon's own young son with film shot in the 1930 's by Lyon's father,
doctor who immigrated from Germany, of Lyon when he was the same
age... Lyon's passionate vision has deepened and grown in resonance
and the film is not just family or even social history, is about
human continuity, the power of instinct to survive, the grace that
love and play bring to it, the wonder of being alive."
Thomas Albright, S.F. Chronicle
Who Do You Think You Are? 1983 by Mary Filippo. 16mm/b&w/sound/10min.
In Who Do You Think You Are?, I talk about wanting to be a hero and
show myself passive and inactive. I've use cigarette smoking and the
"heroes" presented in cigarette commercials to suggest that advertising
has transformed my desire to act heroically in to cigarette consumption.
That this particular consumption is self -destructive and addictive is
important since I want to suggest a link between self -destructive behavior
and my inability to "be a hero." The film is a collage of my own footage,
"found" cigarette commercials and images filmed from television.
(over)
PROGRAM III - 9:15 P.M.
Wait by Ernie Gehr, 1968, 7 minutes.
"...we are following completely something else, something that cannot be told in
words but can be revealed only through certain rhythms of light-emphases, and
events of light..." - Jonas Mekas, Village Voice, 8/2/68.
Window by Ken Jacobs, 1964, 12 minutes.
"About 4 years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual
shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it
came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice." - Ken
Jacobs
Water Sark by Joyce Wieland, 1964-65, 14 minutes.
"I decided to make a film at my kitchen table, there is nothing like knowing my
table. The high art of the housewife. You take prisms, glass, lights and myself
to it... a film sculpture, drawing being made while you wait." - Joyce Wieland
Standard Time by Michael Snow, 1967, 8 minutes.
"This is my home, wife, camera, radio, turtle movie. Circular and arc saccades
and glances. Spacial, parallel sound." - Michael Snow.
Ornamentals by Abigail Child, 1979, 10 minutes.
"NOT TO HOLD ON TO THE IMAGE. As one might xist on a line edging chaos + this
without dissolution. What might be the most distant possible pattern, understood
unity oversold. And is resistance to such then engagement?" - Abigail Child
Gulls and Buoys by Robert Breer, 1972, 7% minutes.
"A large number of Breer 's ideas are compressed and crystallized into a short
statement of great richness. It could function excellently as an introduction to
the remarkable range of pleasures available from the films of Robert Breer." -
Scott Hammen, Afterimage
To Die Dreaming by Steve Weisberg, 1983, 7 minutes.
"Nicaragua, besieged by the CIA, finds equanimity in everyday life. A North
American view." - Steve Weisberg. Snapshots of a country on the third anniversary
of its revolution against oligarchy.
FILM-MAKERS' COOPERATIVE BENEFIT
PROGRAMS II & III - Saturday, February 20, 1988
PROGRAM II - 7:30 P.M.
Cassis by Jonas Mekas, 1966, 4% minutes.
" 'Portrait' of the port of Cassis (South France) Seurat and Churchill used to
come and paint here... One day shooting, single frame, from just before sunrise
until just after the sunset." - Jonas Mekas
Arabesque for Kenneth Anger by Marie Menken, 1961, 4 minutes, score by Teiji Ito.
"These animated observations of tiles and Moorish architecture were made as a
thank-you to Kenneth for helping me shoot on another film in Spain" - Marie Menken
Ritual in Transfigured Time by Maya Deren, 1946, 15 minutes.
A poetic psychological study relating of unrelated gestures, repetition of complex
patterns unrealizable in actuality.
The Man Who Invented Gold by Christopher MacLaine, 1953, 14 minutes.
Five episodes dealing with five different people, all seen on the last day of their
existence, linked by the sound-only sections and capped by a lyrical coda. An
extraordinary film from the pre-Beat era that was years ahead of its time.
But No One by Su Friedrich, 1982, 9 minutes.
"In the dream, I was unable to act according to my good conscience. . .On a walk
through the city, I saw the men tearing down and building up the world. Meanwhile
fish were being killed for my evening meal." - Su Friedrich
Surface Tension by Hollis Frampton, 1968, 10 minutes.
"The film itself has 3 parts: a comic static shot emphasizing the passage of time;
a fast motion tour through a city with fractured German commentary; and a slow
seascape with fish floating in mid-screen." - P. Adams Sitney
8/64: ANA- Act ion Gunther Brus by Kurt Kren, 1964, 24 minutes.
"...und sind dort am besten, wo sie bis zur Unkenntlichkeit rasch montiert sind.
Ubrigens sind sie schon so aufgenommen, die Montage fand gewissermaszen in der
Kamera statt." - Ernst Schmidt in film, 12/66
Schwechater by Peter Kubekla, 1957-58, 1 minute (with repeat).
The perfect film as beer commercial. 1,440 frames arranged in a precise spiral
into the eternal red zone.
Kino Da! by Henry Hills, 1981, 4 minutes.
"Portrait of North Beach Communist cafe poet & gentle comrade, Jack Hirschman.
Shot in sync with wind-up Bo lex. Sound recording: Mark McGowan." - Henry Hills.
San Francisco Cinematheque
180 Polrero Avenue
San Francisco. CA 94110
415) 558-8129
Over for Program III
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with tunas from:
National Endowment tor the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants lor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
my partner filmed by myself. There was no additional cameraperson. The cat.
Fugal structure: gesture, color sequences, collage, montage, superimposition,
painting frame-by-frame, breaking the frame." - Carolee Schneemann
Spiral by Emily Breer, 1987, 12 minutes.
"The earlier films Chicken, Stork and Fluke play with a wonderful wacky abandon
and hearty sense of humor that permeate much of Breer 's film, painting and
sculpture. . .Spiral continues this powerful but easy sense of collage, the
layering of ambient sound vs. image... but hits one with a more introspective
and personal projection. Engaging on a more visceral level, it results in a
film that is, in fact, a 'spiralling in," a microscopic view, a peering inside." -
Robin Dickie, from Canyon Cinema catalog No. 6, 1988
Big Brother by Caroline Avery, 1983, 7 minutes.
"An avalanche of images that cascade at the viewer, Big Brother never falters
in its compulsive energy. Avery physically attacks the frame, inserting a
collage of images into the photographed surface. The result is a complex swirl
of pictorial verbiage that conjugates her rage against the paternalism of American
culture." - David Gerstein, 2/18/88
Descriptions are from the Film-Makers' Cooperative Catalogue No. 6, 1975, unless
otherwise noted.
FILM-MAKERS' COOPERATIVE BENEFIT
PROGRAM I - February 18, 1988
Ghosts Before Breakfast by Hans Richter, 1927-28, 6.25 minutes.
Photography by Reimar Kuntze, Music by Paul Hindemith, with Darius Milaud,
Jean Oser, Walter Gronostay, Werner Graeff , Paul Hindemith and Hans Richter.
"Pure vintage Dada. A humorous, delightful grotesque in which ordinary objects
rebel against their daily routine and, for a brief period of liberation, follow
their own laws. . .Ghosts Before Breakfast represents one of the earliest
collaborations between avant-garde film-maker and composer: Paul Hindemith 's
score accompanied the film when it was first shown at an avant-garde music
festival in Baden-Baden in 1928." - Standish D. Lawder
Adventures of Jimmy by James Broughton, 1950, 11 minutes.
"A satiric vision of the Hero Quest, about a naive country boy's search for his
ideal love in the big city (San Francisco) , with crazy frustrations at every
turn. Broughton himself enacts bewildered Jimmy. Jazz score by Weldon Kees;
photography by Frank Stauf facher." - James Broughton
Mosholu Holiday by George Kuchar, 1966, 9% minutes.
A documentary- like movie about the Bronx and its hell spawn filmed in hot weather
and on location. Edited during the hot weather. A funny film that was com-
missioned by a big industry for a lot of money. The film reveals the senselessness
of filming in hot weather for a lot of money. Big people are manipulated like
aimless puppets on a merry-go-round of hilarious idleness. A special guest
appearance by Canadian TV star Bill Roland along with the massive presence of
'Mrs. Bronx' herself, Frances Leibowitz, and her girlfriend Iris." - George Kuchar
Centuries of June by Joseph Cornell, photography by Stan Brakhage, 1955, 10 minutes.
INTERMISSION
The Web by Marjorie Keller, 1977, 10 minutes, 8mm.
"One of three early 8mm films in which women and children appear. In The Web
I delved for 'the first and only time into film as mischief-making; wicked,
like a child." - Marjorie Keller, program notes at S.F. Cinematheque, 12/8/85
Fuses by Carolee Schneemann, 1964-67, 23 minutes.
"Integral and whole - imagery compounded in emotion. We are equally, inter-
changeably subject and object. As woman (image) and as image-maker I reclaim,
establish and free my image and my will. Using borrowed Bolex's (wind-up by
hand), natural light, the seasons over three years. Movement of myself and
San Francisco Cinematheque
480 Polrero Avenue
San Francisco. CA 94110
(115)558-8129
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with luntis from:
National EnOowr-ent tor the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants tor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
FILMS BY NATHANIEL DORSKY
Saturday, February 13, 1988,
at the EYE Gallery.
PROGRAM:
1) HOURS FOR JEROME (1965-70/82), Part Tvo, 28 min, silent, 24 f.p.s., color
"This footage was shot from 1966 to 1970 and edited over a two year period
ending in July 1982. HOURS FOR JEROME (as in a Book of Hours) is an
arrangement of images, energies, and illuminations from daily life.
These fragments of light revolve around the four seasons . Part One is
spring through summer; Part Two is fall and winter." (N.D.)
2) 17 REASONS WHY (1985-87), 20 min., silent, 18 f.p.s., color
"17 REASONS WHY was photographed with a variety of semi-ancient regular
8mm cameras and is projected unslit as 16mm. These pocket-sized relics
enabled me to walk around virtually "unseen", exploring and improvising
with the immediacy of a more spontaneous medium. The four image format
has built-in contrapuntal resonances, ironies, and beauty, and in each
case gives us an unpretentious look at the film frame itself... the simple
and primordial delite of luminous Kodachrome and rich black and white
chugging thru these time worn gates." (N.D.)
3) ALAYA (1976-87), 28 min., silent, 18 f.p.s., color
"A film about light, a parade of forms as in RIDDLE OF LUMEN, but the
latter 's curious wonder becomes more fully wonder for Dorsky. From
PNEUMA the particles are still there, and the light is still there,
bnt now there is the distinct impression of watching air blowing sand
yet the air is as transparent as the mind." (Konrad Steiner)
There will be a wine and cheese reception following the screening.
- 2 -
Waterfall (1984, 18 mins., 3-color separation) Waterfall begins
with the notion that in certain 19th c. landscape photography
particularly that of Muybridge images of waterfalls were stud-
ies in time. The slow shutter speed ensured that the photograph
did not record the water, but its passage in time, or more accu-
rately, the volume of space it occupied during the exposure.
In this 3-color separation film the 3 superimposed images of
the moving water combined into a solid, white, undif f erentiated
volume, surrounded by color activity caused by variations in the
flow patterns. To enhance the effect, we slowed the shutter
speed to about 1 second exposure per framej the water became a
vaguely delineated rush of material which appeared to be rising
as much as falling. The references to photographic tradition
continue in the color of the surrounding landscape i it is suffused
with washes of color caused by cloud zhadows moving variously on
the separations, evoking early attempts at color photography and
the results of tinting and toning. Color expands and contracts
round the masses of water as the focus is adjusted separately on
the three layers of film.
The soundtrack is a mix of three different waterfall effects,
variously modified by a graphic egualizer, with slow changes in
the frequency spectrum, anticipating changes in the image. It
was composed in one take, in real time, to the film. Filming was
done at MacKenzie's Waterfall, in The Grampians, Western Victoria.
Floterian - Hand Printing from a Film History (1981, 35mm & 16mm,
14 mins., color, silent) An overview of 20 years of our film work;
not systematic, the selection of material was done rather arbi-
trarily. Four-ft. lengths of 16mm, standard 8mm and Super-8 film
were hand-contact -printed onto 35mm Eastmancolor negative, using
a home-made printing rig of cardboard, velvet and glass, in a dark-
room. The light source was a low-level flood of light and also a
beam from a pencil torch, moved along the film. . . A fluttering ef-
fect was caused by the printed frames relocating differently on
alternate 355m frames... The fluttering was accepted as a metaphor
for the ephemerality of memory. . .
Two Women [Part of Grain of the Voice series] (1980, 32 mins.,
b&w and color) Three older Pit jant jat jara songwomen sing a legend-
ary story about the travels of 2 ancestral women through the Mac-
donnell Ranges from East to West. The shape of this film of the
Central Australian landscape has been determined by the recording
we made of the songwomen at Areyonga. . .As we did not know the mean-
ings of the words, no literal interpretation of them was possible,.,
...in the manner of the travels of the Aboriginal mythical
ancestors, who effortlessly travelled great distances, stopping
and resting, as recounted in the great myths of creation... Can
we understand something of the Society through the pitch of the
voice, the nature of the inflections, the softness or harshness
of tone, the flowingness or the precision of speech, the selection
of certain predominant sounds and patterns, and the lack of others?
The absence of a translation of the song cycles enables clos-
er concentration on the music >and voice qualities.
This program was assisted by the Australian Film Commission.
..''.- '.' ' '.'.' .'.'' : '
International Filmmakers: Australia
Sunday, February 7, 1988
LANDFORMS/FILMFORMS: THE WORK OF ARTHUR & CORINNE CANTRILL
"Trompe-l'oeil is a basic fact and effect of film, and as descend-
ants and exponents of the early film avant-garde's legacy, the
Cantrills enjoy it and have employed it variously. The Cantrills'
films are the issue of a freedom incarnate as film, that is, film
as the freedom to transform and metamorphose, to dissect and recon-
struct conventional appearances; film as the body of given and
graven form. . . "
from the essay, "Landforms/Filmforms:
The Work of Arthur & Corinne Cantrill"
by Kris Hemensley
Interior/Exterior (1978, 3 mins., color, 2-screen, silent)
Subtitled "...to explore a difference between camera and human
vision. . ."
Studies in Image De/Generation (1975, 10 mins., B&W, 2-screen,
silent) Fragments of 1901 film images by pioneer anthropologist
Walder Baldwin Spencer are repeated and reprinted through several
generations on high-contrast film. The two screens compare the
second and fourth generations of the film.
Corporeal (1983, 18 mins., color, 2-screen, stereo sound)
The aim was to use the camera as an extension of the body, respond-
ing to the rhythm of the breath - the camera rising and falling
with the in- and out-take of the breath. Lenses of different focal
lengths were used to modify the extent and pace of the movements.
Sequences in the film were done by the body itself: lying down
with the camera moving on the belly, others holding the camera
in the hands, but still allowing the breathing movement to con*-
trol the camera (as against the usual practice of suppressing
body movement while hand-holding a cine camera). Part of the ma-
terial filmed is of reflection dm a rock pool and part of it is
of an overhanging Angophora trunk and limbs. It was filmed at
the aame location as Warrah.
Camerawork was by Corinne Cantrill and sound, a stereo re-
cording of the bush insects at daybreak, also rising and falling
in counterpoint with the image by Arthur Cantrill.
San Francisco Cinematheque
480 Potrero Avenue
San Francisco. CA 94110
(415) 558-8129
A Project of the
Foundation for Art In Cinema
Board of Directors
Scott Slark
President
Lon Argabright
Steve Fagin
Done Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzin
Staff
Steve Anker
Program Director
David Gerstein
Administrative Director
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is support fa in fart with funds from:
National Endowment lor tne Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund
San Francisco Foundation
FIRST EXPOSURES: NEW WORK IN
MULTIPLE MEDIA
February 6, 1988
PROGRAM;
r==
SUPER-8 - Binh by Melissa Bertolino, 3 min., silent.
Happy Birthday by Olivia Harding, 4 min., silent.
Un Film Terible by Al Alvarez, 4 min., silent.
"
St. Vincent de Paul by Alvaro Munoz, 7 min., sound.
16 MM - Fragments by Diana Lobdell, 3 min., silent.
June July August by Kenny Krause, 5 min., sound.
Chingando Jets by Rick Humphrey, 5 min., sound.
In This Picture by Heather Jansen, 15 min., sound.
INTERMISSION
VIDEO - Offspin, High Fidelity, & Brentaske by Ivar Smedstad, 15 min. total, all sound,
PERFORMANCE - Thought Crimes in the Satiation Pool by Barry Schwartz and Barney Haynes,
length varies, sound with video imagery.
A wine reception will follow the program.
FILMS BY CARL DREYER & DANIEL BARNETT
' -..--.- . i .... ...I
JANUARY 31, 1988
GERTRUD. 1964. Script and Direction: Carl Dreyer. Based on the play by
Hjalmar Soderberg. Photography: Henning Bendtsen. Art Director: Kai Rasch.
Music: Jorgen Jersild. Editor: Edith Schussel. Players: Nina Pens
Rode (Gertrud) , Bendt Rothe (Gustav Kanning) , Ebbe Rode (Gabriel Lidman) ,
Baard Owe (Erland Janson) , Axel Strobye (Axel Nygren) .
"Dreyer 's work is always based on the beauty of the image, which in
turn is a record of the luminous conviction and independence of human
beings. .. .All his works are passions in the sense of being like
musical celebrations of feelings. . .Gertrud is the story of a forty year
old woman unhappy with her husband, who loves a younger man but is
loved insufficiently in return, and who decides to go to Paris and live
alone. The conclusion of insistent independence is kept within a frame
of calm beauty. And yet beneath the order of the film there is, stronger
than ever, the exultant sense of passion. When it was made, the
reserve and slowness of GERTRUD were so out of fashion that its emotion
was missed. But it awaits the world's discovery, Dreyer 's finest film
and the vindication of his method: 'What interests me and this comes
before technique- is reproducing the feelings of the characters in
my films... The important thing... is not only to catch hold of the words
they say, but also the thoughts behind the words. What I seek in my
films, what I want to obtain, is a penetration to my actors' profound
thoughts by means of their most subtle expressions. For these are the
expressions. .. that lie in the depths of the soul. This is what interests
me above all, not the technique of cinema. GERTRUD is a film that I made
with my heart . ' " (David Thomson)
"Like THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, GERTRUD becomes a film of memory, whose
plot forces characters to spend most of their time recalling and
reinterpreting story events. In harmony with the intimacy of the
conversations, GERTRUD constructs the closed world of the chamber piece
(kammerspiel) . . . The film returns more explicitly to the tableau
style reminiscent of Hammershoi, the Danish painter of the interior as
still life... The sets were built as closed rooms and echo Strindberg's
justification of the chamber theater as a place in which one can hear
a whisper... all the music in GERTRUD is literally chamber music, for
solo violin, string quartet or piano." David Bordwell
UNTOWARD ENDS (OBSERVING RELIGION)by Daniel Barnett. 1970-73. Silent/24fps.
In three parts. With Ellen Saslaw, Paul Balmuth and Leah Siegel.
SOUND AND IMAGE WORKS
January 30, 1988 EYE Gallery
8 p.m.
FROGS, FIREWORKS AND FROZEN CREAM Roy Ramsing & Jacalyn (Jac) White
V8mm, 8 minutes, 1987.
IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN; PART 1, THE DAUGHTERS Jac White
S8mm, 10 minutes, 1985.
IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN; PART 2, THE MOTHERS Jac White
S8mm, 15 minutes, 1986.
break
SISTER PAT Jeff Rosenstock V8mm, 4 minutes, 1988.
REPEATS Jac White V8mm, 6 minutes, 1987.
STORY BY FX Roy Ramsing 6.3mm, 10 minutes, 1988.
IF A TREE FALLS SECTION I, 24x360 Roy Ramsing 24 hours, 1987.
An environmental sound station at the front of the
room before and after the program.
Please join us for a celebration of the Cinematheque's new site
at the EYE Gallery following the program.
'y-yfi:.*- ?-;,- ' 'f&$yri';$?&'
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'
GOLDEN SILENCE: NEW FILMS
January 18, 1988
PROGRAM:
1) How Have You Been by Chika Ogura. Color/Silent, 5 minutes. 1987.
2) The Age of Consent by Carmen Vigil. B&W/Silent, 20 minutes. 1987.
A work exploring my Catholic shadow world. It began with my
obsession with two drawbridges at China Basin here in San Francisco
during the time when the relationship with my life partner was most
hopeless. A dark romance with three women and two bridges."
3) Dante Quartet by Stan Brakhage. Color/Silent 10.5 minutes. 1987.
"This hand-painted work, 6 years in the making (37 years in the studying
of the Divine Comedy), demonstrates the earthly conditions of "Hell",
"Purgatory" (or Transition) and "Heaven" (or 'existence is song' which is
the closest I presume a Heaven from my experience) as well as the
mainspring of /from "Hell" ('Hell spit flexion') in 4 parts which are
inspired by the closed eye or hypnogogic vision created by those
emotional states. Originally painted IMAX and Cinemascope, 70mm and
35mm. The paint-ladened rolls have been carefully rephotographed and
translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan Yanosky of Western Cine."
4) Landscape (For Manon) by Peter Button. B&W/Silent, 14 minutes. 1986-87.
"Part one of a series of Landscape portraits from the region of the
Hudson River Valley near the filmmakers' home in Annandale, N.Y."
5) The Secret Garden by Phil Solomon. Color/Silent, 23 minutes. 1986 - 87.
"a. When I was young, my older sister invented games of imagination in
order to assert and enforce her sibling authority. One of these was a
trance game in which she would induce me to stare into the textured
window in our bathroom and move my head slowly from side to side so as to
create moving patterns from the light refractions. She would call this
space the entrance to the 'Magical World of Paloopa'.
b. I used to have a recurring nightmare of running on a beach as a
tidal wave was about to overwhelm me as it blackened the sky.
c. I always thought the WIZARD OF OZ was a terrifying expose revealing
God the Father to be a phony from Kansas.
The Secret Garden is an attempt at a child's fever dream, within the
dark walls of a radiating 'nuclear' family. Its theme: Trouble in Paradise. 1
All quotes are by the filmmakers.
San Francisco Cinematheque
480 Potrero Avenue
San Francisco. CA 94110
(415) 558-8129
A Project of the
Foundation for Art In Cinema
Board of Directors
Scon Stark
President
Lon Argabngnt
Steve Fagin
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Upzin
Ellen Zweig
Staff
Steve Anker
Program Director
David Gerstein
Administrative Director
The Foundation for Art In Cinema
is supported In part with funds from:
National Endowment for the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund
San Francisco Foundation
away to a better situation. If this can happen, however temporarily, some
slight magic has been performed." - Konrad Steiner
Boy Town by Jeff Preiss, 1987, 13 min., 16mm, silent.
"Day after day being drawn to the same corner in Chinatown. Erotic movie
posters, red newsstand, vegetable market, bank, buildings and boy." - Jeff
Preiss. Shot in Regular-8mm and rephotographed in 16mm.
Lived in Quotes by Laurie Dunphy, 1987, 21 min., 16mm, sound
"Shot in South Africa during the 1986 state of emergency. The film attempts
to construct an artistic vision of 'everyday apartheid;' of blacks in South
Africa as neither simply victims nor simply revolutionaries, but as members of
a distinct culture who survive the demands of a society not their own. Lived
in Quotes rejects the methods of touristic, home movie propaganda, which uses
anecdotal representations of South Africa to verify experience and 'last-word'
the political, social and economic life there. Language reconsidered and
conventional editing strategies shelved, the film thinks itself poetic
ethnography." - Laurie Dunphy.
Laurie Dunphy will appear at the Cinematheque on October 20th showing Lived in
Quotes and A Western, as part of a two-person show with Toney Merritt.
I
' . : ''....*
MEDIA MIGRATION: VIDEOTAPES BY FILMMAKERS
Eye Gallery, Sept. 24, 1988
1) PROTECTIVE COLORATION (1979) by Morgan Fisher, 3/4" video, 13 min.
"Protective Coloration offers a critique of sensitivity, a faculty
even less useful today than when the tape was made. The tape
proposes some crude remedies at the level of the material to help
break the habit. The tape's resemblance to a medical or psycho-
logical experiment is no less important than its readily available
implements and its sometimes cheerful colors." (M.F.)
2) RAPTURE (1987) by Paul Sharits, 3/4" video, 13 min.
3) REDRESSING DOWN (1988) by Tony Conrad, NTSC, sound on "Mix", 18 min.
"The sexual economy of television space. In the body of television,
the audience is objectified as furnishings for architectural and
social spaces of the protagonist. The commodif ication of television
space inverts the sexual distance between the violated (consumed)
body of the subject and the (nonpresent) viewer." (T.C.)
INTERMISSION
4) PEGGY AND FRED IN KANSAS (1988) by Leslie Thornton, filmed in 16mm,
edited and released on videotape, 11 min.
5) MIAMI MAN IN LANDSCAPE LOOP (1983) by Ken Kobland with The Wooster Group,
starring Ron Vawter, filmed in super-Smm, edited and released on video-
tape, 17 min. "I shot in Miami Beach for a few days with actor Ron
Vawter, using Super-Smm film and then transferring, through Brodsky
and Treadway in Boston, to 3/4" in which the piece was mastered.
The idea was to play around with various typical 'icons', cliches,
whatever, of 'secret agent', detective, the sense of the covert, of
waiting around, of 'clues', of routines, repetitions, and little
'breaks', variations. The piece was intended to serve as well within
a performance context, and it appears in the 3rd section of LSD;
Just the High Points created and performed by the New York experi-
mental theater company, The Wooster Group. As always with my stuff,
the soundtrack is a critical player here, the wind bumps and crankiness
(over)
(2)
of super-8 sound, the faint 'music' from somewhere, a bit sinister,
a bit over-heated." (K.K.)
6) TWO BAD DAUGHTERS (1988) by Barbara Hammer & Paula Levine, 3/4" videotape,
8 min. "Two Bad Daughters posits play as subversive activity, a sabotage
of the patriarchal institutions of psychoanalysis and sado-masochism
through video image processing, changing the subject/object relation-
ship in psychoanalysis, and interrupting and reconstruing the paraphenalia
of S/M practice. Two Bad Daughters takes post-modernism and challenges
it through an anti-narrative, non-dramatic collage of equally important
text and image fragments. Ultimately, the tape reconstructs possibilities
for meaning read between the lines, without hierarchical construction
and through layering, density and intensity." (B.H. & P.L.)
.
STAN BRAKHAGE
Sunday, September 25, 1988
MY MOUNTAIN, SONG XXVII (1968/1988); 26 minutes. Color. 8mm blown up to 16mm.
A study of Arapahoe Peak in all the seasons of two years' photography. . .the
clouds and weathers that shape its place in landscape much of the photog-
raphy a-frame-at-a-time.
RIVERS (1968/1988); 36 minutes. Color. 8mm blown up to 16mm.
A series of eight films intended to echo the themes of MY MOUNTAIN, SONG XXVII.
The entire series of SONGS was originally shot on standard 8mm film.
Tonight's screening of MY MOUNTAIN and RIVERS is the artist's own "translation."
"After much technical difficulty and elaborate color RE-creation, I've managed
to enlarge the REGULAR 8mm... into 16mm films, which saves them from extinction...
AND permits them a larger public life... 'Go little naked and impudent songs'...
into the auditoriums of the world and live. . .awhile longer." S.B., 1980
Since the 1950' s, Stan Brakhage has been one of the most original, authentic,
and influential film artists of the American independent cinema. His genius lies
in his consistently developed, yet ultimately impossible, struggle to rediscover,
through film, the lost innocent vision of childhood:
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made rules of perspective,
an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which
does not respond to the name of everything but which must
know each object encountered in life through an adventure
of perception.... Imagine a world alive with incomprehen-
sible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of
movement and innumberable gradations of color. Imagine a
world before the "beginning was the word."
From Metaphors on Vision by Stan Brakhage
On film this concern manifests itself in three areas: his explicitly personal
approach and subject matter, his adherence to the pure film art form, and his
exploration of the medium of film itself. The resulting aesthetic is a modified
revival of the old Romantic opposition between sight and imagination, the physical
world and the poetic consciousness:
The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster;
it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from
which and through which, and into which ideas are constantly
rushing .
From Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir by Ezra Pound
- OVER -
"The entire act of motion picture making can be considered as an EXTERIORIZATION
of the process of MEMORY." S.B., 1966
One of the most interesting and, for young filmmakers, encouraging, aspects of
SONGS is that they were shot on 8mm film. Brakhage explains how this came about:
Just before we left New York, some of my 16mm equipment
had been stolen. ... I went into town and found that I
could buy... all the 8mm equipment that I needed....
The poetic idea that meant something to me was the
word "song." It really rang to me and made association.
But it really bothered me that the art of film was always
leaning to some extent on these previous arts; so I needed
a base, a source of inspiration, a form that had run through
film from its very beginning, that was clear of these other
older arts. That's where the home movie is an inspiring
thing, because a man... when he's working with his 8mm movie
camera is usually trying to make a record of what he cares
about. . . .
So these things, home movies and song, involve me very
much with 8mm, and I knew that through them I could restore
the film form to what it was at source.
From Newsletter of 8mm Education. S.B., Spring 1966
The result of this restoration is the thirty part SONGS cycle from which this
evening's screenings are taken.
I want to minimize thought,
concentrate on it
till I shrink,
dematerialise
and am drawn into it .
From Tribute to the Angels by H.D.
Original 8mm projections:
SONG IV (1964); 4 minutes. Color. A round-about three girls playing with a
ball. . .handpainted over photo image.
SONG XIII (1965); 6 minutes. Color. A travel song of scenes and horizontals.
SONG XIV (1965); 3 minutes. Color. A "closed-eye" vision song composed of molds,
paints, and crystals.
SUBSTITUTION
September 25, 1988: BRAKHAGE SONGS
Due to shipping miscalculations on the part of My Mountain and Rivers' only
current distributors (Filmmakers Cooperative) , these prints are not available
for tonight's screening.
Instead, we have substituted the Bay Area premiere showing of an earlier work
from the Song cycle, Fifteen Song Traits (Song # XV) , in its recently blown-
up ("translated") 16mm version.
An early note Brakhage wrote upon the film's release (1965):
"A series of individual portraits of friends and family, all interrelated
in what might be called a branch growing directly from the trunks of
Songs I-XIV. In order of appearance: Robert Kelly, Jane and our dog
Durin, our boys Bearthm and Rare, daughter Crystal and the canary Cheep
Donkey, Robert Creeley and Michael McClure, the rest of our girls
Myrrena & Neowyn, Angelo di Benedetto, Rare, Ed Dorn and his family,
Myrrena, Neowyn, and Jonas Mekas (to whom the whole of the XVth Song is
dedicated), as well as some few strangers, were the source of these
TRAITS coming into being my thanks to all... and to all who see them
clearly." (S.B.)
Fifteen Song Traits (Song //XV) (1967-1986) by Stan Brakhage, 16mm from
original regular 8mm, color/silent, 47 minutes.
OF HISTORY AND IDENTITY:
THE FILMS OF DAN EISENBERG - FILMMAKER IN PERSON
Thursday, September 29, 1988
Our eyes see very poorly and very little - and so man
conceived of the microscope in order to see invisible
phenomena; and they discovered the telescope in order
to see and explore distant, unknown worlds. The movie
camera was invented in order to penetrate deeper into
the visible world, to explore and record visual phenom-
ena, so that we do not forget what happens and what the
future must take into account .
Dziga Vertov. 1926
COOPERATION OF PARTS (1987); 42 minutes. Color and B/W. 16mm.
The film is a journey through the landscapes of France, Germany and Poland;
through the lagers of Dachau and Auschweitz; and also a journey through the
language and possibilities of film. Dan Eisenberg., 1987
I sometimes stop on the road to the sorces and question the
signs, the world of my ancestors.
From The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabes.
Using lists, descriptions of photographs, a catalogue of proverbs, images of
streets and trains, ruins and riots, the film explores the territory of the
recent past with a second generation perspective, distanced through time and
reflection.
The images to the film were shot with a hand cranked 16mm silent camera
and collected on a trip to Europe in the spring of 1983. Without any pre-
scribed plan for shooting, I tried to use the camera not only to record what
I was seeins but also to register my physical response to what was being seen.
The camera is truly a medium here a giving back takes place; automatic,
unrehearsed, irregular, a hyper-verite so to speak.
In contrast to this image layer is a highly articulated sound track
complete with written text, musical fragments and sound effects.
"Listen, just listen to yourself. This is not what you
want to be hearing." Quoted from the film.
The text that is spoken by myself developed out of written materials generated
on an almost daily basis from the spring of 1984 through though the winter of
1985. Aside from my own words are those of Edmond Jabes, Roland Barthes, Theodor
Adorno, Franz Kafka, and paraphrases of material from JohnAshbury and Paul
Valery.
- OVER -
The proverbs in the film have numerous sources: most are researched
from Champion's Racial Proverbs. Others I made up myself using the general
form of the proverb as a guide. Still others are from my memory or from
Poor Richard ' s Almanac by Ben Franklin, and aphorisms from as far afield
as the gates of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. D.E., 1987
"If I left to invent myself I could wind up with a clear
case of mistaken identity." Quoted from the film.
With the visual field as a touchstone for a complex set of narrative asso-
ciations, the film spins a tight web of memory, history, and experience.
And it is in this web that the film finds it's wider significance: as a
model for how daily life, history, first hand and second hand experience
bind, through purpose or chance, to form identity itself. D.E., 1987
DISPLACED PERSON (1981); 11 minutes., B/W, 16mm.
An examination of "...issues around the Holocaust through historical infor-
mation and cultural artifacts that are available and given to all of us as
readers of history. Circling from the exterior in a highly individualistic
way, Displaced Person works with a carefully chosen set of particular ele-
ments in order to explore the larger questions within the historical field.
Mark McElhatten in Visions Fall, 1987.
BREAKING APPLES (Jacob's Ladder) (1981); 3 minutes., B/W. 16mm.
A study investigating the exploration of all the biological rhythms of camera
movement .
JIKKEN EIGA
NEW JAPANESE SUPER-8 MM FILMS
CURATED BY TATSU AOKI
Saturday, October 1, 1988
Cinema has been put to diverse uses over the years. But something has
been happening in Japan that seems so fundamentally different from
(previous) possibilities as to call them into question. Each year a Chicago
based group called Innocent Eyes and Lenses presents group shows of recent
Japanese work. This year's program offers an excellent introduction to the
unique direction some Japanese filmmakers are taking. For most of them,
film is first of all a machine. One makes a film much as one would construct
a mechanical apparatus. In the best of films, technique becomes a series of
metaphors within metaphors for both the film medium and, more generally,
our machine age. In the Japanese films, the notion of autonomous self,
which in one way or another haunts virtually every American avant-garde
film, hardly ever arises. One is born inside a grand mechanism, and one's
existence consists of the variety of smaller mechanisms found along life's
journey. While the dialectic between man and nature and machine and
nature provides much of the content of American avant-garde film, nature is
rarely an autonomous entity in these Japanese films.
Fred Camper, excerpted from an article in The Chicago Reader, 5/6/88
TRANSFORMATION PIECE NO. 3 - MIX TUICE (1985); Keita Kurosaka, 16
minutes.
HE WAS HERE. AND YOU ARE HERE (1985); Haruka Doi, 8 minutes.
OHME FRONT (1984); Kazuko Kinoshita, 13 minutes.
AGA (1986); Kazuhiro Sekiguchi, 3 minutes.
CONTINUOUS QUADRILATERAL (1987); Ippei Harada, 13 minutes.
PERPETUAL LINE (1984); Yukio Hiruma, 20 minutes.
RADICAL BLACK CINEMA:
FILMS OF SANKOFA & BLACK AUDIO FILM COLLECTIVES
Sunday, October 2, 1988
The existence of these two Black British workshops and the nature of
their production are due to the 1981 Brixton race riots and the institutional
responses that gave the filmmakers access to funding. The newly established
workshops provided the infrastructure that, combined with racially sensitive
cultural policies, created conditions for them to explore and question related
theoretical issues.
Sankofa and Black Audio's intervention in British media institutions
seems to have touched several raw nerves. Their insistence on shifting the
terms of avant-garde film theory and practice to include an ongoing engagement
with politics of race sets them apart from the longstanding traditions of
documentary realism in British and Black film cultures.
As filmmakers and media activists, Sankofa and Black Audio question the
representation of Blacks in British media, from mainstream television to
such bastions of liberal enlightenment as the British Film Institute and
academic film journals like Screen and Framework. They are interrogating
"radical" film theory's cursory treatment of race related issues and sub-
verting the all-too-familiar division of independent film labor between
first-world avant-garde and third-world activism.
From A Black Avant-Garde? by Coco Fusco. 1988
DREAMING RIVERS (1988); Martina Attile, director. 35 minutes. 16mm. Color.
From the Sankofa Film/Video Collective.
The work is about Miss T., a black, dark-skinned woman from the Caribbean, a
colonial subject relocated physically, but physically connected to that past
homeland. She is caught between both directions really, leaving the Caribbean
to come to England for dreams, for hope, for love. And then not realizing
some of those ambitions, she is caught in the stormy sea, in the Atlantic, on
the way back to a place of security, past happiness of youth. Miss T. is a
subject in the process of migration, in the midst of the joorney. And the
imagery for that is like death, which promises new life. The journey hasn't
ended it's represented by her childern who have to lay her down. They
represent differences one person split in three which fractures into
even more again. I wanted to deal with the postcolonial situation and the
experience of migration. I would date one point of our modernity from the
stage of migration, and the complex processes by which we constantly interact
with and change our environment with our histories.
Martina Attile
- OVER -
HANDSWORTH SONGS (1986); John Afromfrah, director. 60 minutes. 16mm. Color.
From the Black Audio Film Collective.
Handsworth Songs has been described by its makers as a "film essay," and its
structure is lyrical rather than didactic. It weaves intricately and poetically
between different places and times, re-working old newsreel and recent televi-
sion images with vox-pop interviews, family photographs, a street mural and a
number of powerful and moving "moments." Against this, the intermittent voice-
over warns against easy analyses which treat either the dominant media's version
of events or the testimonies of the Black communities as "truth" or "evidence."
Alison Butler, International Documentary, Winter/Spring, 1988
The question of paternity and transgression was very important. One of
the things people would say to us was, "Isn't Handsworth Songs too avant-garde?"
Quite simply, the problems we faced in making Handsworth were very practical
ones to do with melodrama orchestrating means of identification, rather
than distancing people and dazzling them with techniques. The editing might
be considered unconventional, but the techniques are very straightforward. So
it's not avant-garde in that sense. My mistake was in assuming people wouldn't
see it as a transgressive text.
John Afromfrah
GODARD AND MIEVILLE'S
France/tour /d ' etour/deux/enf ants
Monday, October 3, 1988
Program 1: Tapes 1-4
France/tour /d ' etour/deux/enf ants is the second long series of
programmes made for television by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville
exploring the process of communication and understanding. Production took
place in the south of France, in Genoble, under the banner of Sonimage, the
filmmakers' newly formed workshop for the making of television:
Principles of reflection
A. in a cinema
people are many (together)
to be alone in front of the screen.
B. in an apartment linked to a TV aerial
people are alone to be many (together)
in front of the screen
that's to say:
set A: many to be (become) alone (cinema)
set B: alone to be (become) many (TV)
Godard quoted by Colin MacCabe in GODARD; Images, Sounds, Politics.
TV is not communication. There is not communication until there is a
disturbance. This is why Godard rejects a communications model that has a
sender conveying a message along a channel to a receiver. Communication is
what appears around this model, or when the model is upset. It is when one
of the parties does not know what she is saying or hearing. A subject does
not exist until there is some resistance, some doubt, a question.
David Levi Strauss, "Oh, Socrates" 1986
I need to talk and to show me talking, to show and to show me showing.
And when I've done that I need to talk about it technically and philosoph-
ically. I need to have a philosophical talk on the technical aspect and a
technical talk on the philosophical aspect. It's like Socrates, who was
just trying to talk to people... He was just trying to say 'Are you sure?' -
which was his way. They should have talked to him for a bit instead of doing
what they did. But it was too strong. I don't know why. All he was saying
to people was 'Are you sure you're right? 1 'Is your hair well-cut?' 'Do you
think that's the right way to cut it? 1 And they said 'Oh Socrates. What are
you doing? What are you driving at? 1 And he said 'I'm not driving at anything
- OVER -
but are you sure your hair is right? 1
God.ard quoted by Colin MacCabe in GODARD: Images, Sounds, Politics.
I dream sometimes of the kind of society in which people,
meeting a television reporter, would question him. They
would go into details. It would take time they would
dare to take time and the reporter would answer quickly,
I mean without delay. Because in this society television
would already have done it's homework. Instead of questioning
the workers, they would have worked on the questions, as they
say. So - to come to the point - the little girl, to whom no
one says hello, except when her mother says goodbye, this little
girl wouldn't take up too much time - any more than she does now.
From France/ tour /d ' et our /deux/enf ants 1
In France/tour /d ' etour /deux/enf ants , Godard is the quotidian inquisitor,
appearing to the children every time they turn round. Sometimes they are
tired, sometimes out of breath. Godard is always off -camera, in our place.
His questions are always academic but never rhetorical. . .Godard is relentless,
the questions keep coming, one after another, more often decomposing already
rigid assumptions (linguistic, perceptual, social), than building up to make
a point. There is a certain pedagogical intent, but it is more accurate to say
that Godard is enacting an inquiry. Though the children are not exactly young
Socratics, neither are they blank slates. Godard does not control them. They
respond to his questions with curiosity, confusion, disinterest, laughter,
boredom, occasionally embarassment, very seldom suprise. But it is not to their
answers that drive the inquiry, it is the questions themselves.
David Levi Strauss, "Oh, Socrates" 1986
'
.
TWO BY JOYCE WIELAND
Thursday, October 6, 1988
Between 1966 and 1973, during a time when the esthetic boundaries of film
were being expanded in a number of directions, Joyce Wieland established a
distinctive style and voice through her wit, intelligence and well developed
sense of craft. Coming to film from a background of painting, drawing, construc-
tion and textiles, Wieland used images to create a moving tapestry of landscape,
color and texture.
I was on inyway to becoming an artist 's-wife type artist. . .until I got
into looking around in history for female lines of influence. I read the lives
and works of many many women; salonists, diarists, revolutionaries, etc. I
started to invent myself as an artist. . .Eventually women's concerns, and my own
femininity became my artist's territory...! think of Canada as female. All the
work I've been doing or will be doing is about Canada.
Joyce Wieland, Take One, Vol.3, no. 2
HAND TINTING (1967); 4 minutes, b/w stock, hand-tinted. 16mm.
The film came about as the result of a documentary Wieland shot with another
Canadian, Sylvia Davern, at a retraining centre in West Virginia. Wieland took
some of her own "outs" from the film and began to make Hand Tinting. The warmth
generated by the repeated images partly arises from the artist's close involve-
ment with her subject:
I hardly Know whether to laugh or cry about those girls. The centre was
about 80% black kids who had come from everywhere. They were lonely, rebellious,
funny, restless and hopelessly poor. Most of them wanted to make movies when they
met us. It was a corporate pacification programme. I wanted to do my own film
about them.
When I first did it, I thought it might not be useful to anyone. It was a
poem. There's nothing out of the way in it, it has mystery and rhythm and some
repetitive portraits of some beautiful faces. The editing and the girls are the
subject of Hand Tinting. The editing and the so-called subject matter are egual.
You can look at the editing or you can look at the girls. Just as in La Raison
Avant La Passion you can look at the permutations, the images, listen to the beeps,
or count on the flag inserts-or, just let it happen.
Joyce Wieland, Take One, Vol.3, no. 2
LA RAISON AVANT LA PASSION (1968-69); 90 minutes. Color. 16mm.
The film takes as its subject the entire geography of Canada, accepting the
impossibility of ever truly capturing such a concept as an entire country, yet
placing the images of the artist's homeland under the scrutiny of her own con-
ceptual rigor. La Raison Avant La Passion is the film in which Wieland gives
unbridled rein to her love for her native land.
- OVER -
...in making this film and particularly while editing I had the fantasy
that I was a government propagandist, churning out the government line. But I
put Trudeau in the middle of my film almost as an exercise similar in a way
to male artists always having had their odalisgue, throughout the history of
art and in their films, as stars.
I guess what I'm doing to Tradeau is putting him on for his statement
"Reason over passion-that is the theme of all my writings". Taking the words
"Reason Over Passion" in the beginning of the film, treating them as propaganda
slogan, and through permutation, turning them into visual poetry, into a new
language .
In La Raison Avant La Passion the self-portrait says I predict, I make
the film, I am a character in the film- The whole film is a bit of a primer
on Canada and my singing lends a quality of a dutiful school child flogging
the anthem. And as I carefully sing the words, my camera is beneath my chin
photographing, mostly the lower part of my face and especially my lips. This
soundless singing is the overture to the film. Almost announcing the death of
the country, which is what this film is partly about-a last look at Canada.
Joyce Wieland, Take One, Vol.3, no. 2
;''' ; /'. '. .- .
MADNESS AS PSYCHODRAMA
Sunday, October 9, 1988
Initially drawing on the work of Buftuel, Watson, Weber and Cocteau, psycho-
drama emerged as an underground genre in the 1940s and ' 50s dealing directly
with the unconscious state in which filmmakers explored the emotional and
psychological turmoil involved in the quest for sexual identity. Tonight's films
are a small selection of the "closet dramas" that challenged and outraged American
audiences .
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943) by Maya Deren and Alexandra Hammid; 13 minutes.
B/W. 16mm.
Maya Deren, one of the earliest prophetic voices in cinema, in 1943 made Meshes
Of The Afternoon, a landmark work marking the beginning of a personal emotional
approach to inner and outer experience; the making of art as a ritual and a as
movement towards self -discovery, Deren 's films have left an indelible influence
on artists in the United States and Europe.
Pacific Film Archive Film Notes, 5/14/82
This film is concerned with the exterior experiences of an individual. It
does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it
reproduces the way in which the sub-conscious of an individual will develop,
interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and causal incident into a critical
emotional experience.
Maya Deren in Film Culture, Winter 1965
FRAGMENT OF SEEKING (1946) by Curtis Harrington; 15 minutes. B/W. 16mm.
This film presents a climactic, revolutionary episode in the existence of an
adolescent Narcissus, in which he discovers the true nature of his desire. The
world of the mind and that of the exterior reality are combined so that they be-
come indistinguishable from each other: the result is a film which presents the
psychological essence of a moving personal experience.
Lewis Jacobs in The Rise of the American Film
THE LEAD SHOES (1949) by Sidney Peterson; 15 minutes. B/W. 16mm.
The narration, such as it is, suggests eternally fixed cycles of behavior; it is
aligned with ritual and myth. The vital clues to the visual action are buried
in the soundtrack; Peterson put together a jazz band, made up of the faculty of
the art school were he taught. His students sing, howl, and chant with the repet-
itiousness of a broken phonograph, phrases from two ballads.
P. Adams Sitney in The American Avant -Garde 1943-1978
...the best introduction to the extravagances of experimental cinema are not
the works of Ford, Eisenstein or de Mille. They are those silent comedies, first
French, then American, in which people used to experience, until their ribs ached,
- OVER -
the ferocity and heartiness of the farcical view of things.
Sidney Peterson in A Note On Comedy in the Experimental Film
DESISTFILM (1954) by Stan Brakhage; 7 minutes. B/W. 16mm.
Internationally acclaimed as the classic of its genre. The camera joins in a
drunken adolescent party and participates in the expression of desire and frus-
tration.
Canyon Cinema Catalog.
a biting satire on what we used jokingly to call "desistentialism"
Long before the Beats, this film prophesied the whole concept of the Beat
generation. I used jokingly to say "We've got beyond the stage of existential-
ism, we've got to the stage of desistentialism." So I made this satire on that
form of life which is destructive to the self.
Stan Brakhage in Collected Writings
IMAGE IN THE SNOW (1950's) by Willard Maas; 30 minutes. B/W. 16mm.
The action of Maas' heroes are searches; quests for Truth and Beauty which end
in Death. The search is conducted quite at random. The hero wanders the streets
finding whatever symbolic objects Maas places in his path. The rather obvious
nature of the symbols themselves is compounded by the schematic method in which
they are introduced.
Crucial in the film is the value of streets. The street of classic German
"street films," and of Italian neorealism, is the great arena and analogy for
what Kracauer calls "the flow of life." It is this traditionally cluttered and
pedestrian entity which Maas employs, treated with naturalistic detail, as a
contrast to his protagonists' dream lives. So he uses neighborhoods in worst
shape than Rome after the bombs fell as an environment in which "real" existence
may seem as sordid and dingy as possible. Such is the filmmaker's view of life,
as most unbeautiful, and absolutely distinct from the "ideal." And the dream of
perfection, of sculpture as opposed to the tawdry architecture of life, that dream
is only achieved in death. In death, the hero hardens to a statue. The ideal is
rigor mortis.
Ken Kelman in Film Wise 5-6.
:
GODARD AND MIEVILLE'S
FRANCE/TOUR/D ' ETOUR/DEUX/ENFANTS
Program 2: Tapes 5-8
Monday, October 10, 1988
In 1971 Michael Shamberg published Guerilla Television, a manifesto which
called for the decentralization of commercial television. According to Shamberg,
alternative video produced by and for the people should take the place of one-way
broadcasts. With TVTV, a collective that he helped to found, Shamberg covered the
Republican Convention in 1972, using inexpensive eguipment and an improvisational
shooting style.
Although Godard and Mieville also polemicize about the need for decentralizing
television and providing the public with access to the airwaves, their experimental
methods for achieving these aims provide an interesting contrast to the American
models .
Christine Tamblyn in Video Networks, March 1986
In a way, it's all about stuttering: not the literal speech impediment, but
that halting use of language itself. Generally speaking, you can only be a for-
eigner in a language other than your own. Here it's a case of being a foreigner
in your own language. Proust once said that all fine books were necessarily writ-
ten in a kind of foreign language. The same goes for Godard 's television programmes
Gilles Deleuze in Afterimage, 1978
NARRATOR (female)
INTERVIEWER
NARRATOR (male)
NARRATOR (female)
Caption: TRUTH
Silence. There's never silence on television.
It's never live anymore. Management and the
unions have banned live TV. Everything is
pre-recorded: happiness, unhappiness, problems.
Because life is put off like this, people come
to see it as different. Different from what
they dreamed.
Well, I think I'll hand over to you. WE can't
do very much more.
Caption: TELEVISION
It's no reason for moving all the time.
Haven't we got anyone for the camera today? There
are dozens of cameramen out of work in the cinema
just now. He could have focused on this problem.
Well? If he talked to someone, had a
relationship with the images you film, the
hands with the eyes . . .
Quoted from FRANCE/TOUR/D ' ETOUR/DEUX/ENFANTS 5
(over)
France/Tour /D ' etour/Deux/Enf ants grants a new primacy to the image. What
we see is that in our accorded places we are not visible. Unable to follow
visually the conversational logic that her family is engaging in, we are forced
to concentrate on Camille, on her invisibility within the family, on the fact
that nobody but us is looking at her. If we see Camille reacting to the conver-
sation - to her father's questions about school or her parent's laughter at her
younger brother's pronouncement that he doesn't want to sleep with the ladies
(dames) but only with fathers - we are also aware that these reactions are not
registered by the family, caught up in the routine of a family supper.
Colin MacCabe in Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, 1980
we are presented with language as essentially informative and information
as essentially an exchange. Information, too, is measured, in abstract units. But
it is doubtful whether the schoolmistress, explaining some operation or teaching
children to write, is really transmitting information. What she is doing is issu-
ing orders, establishing a set of cues. Children are provided with syntax in the
way that workers are provided with tools, in order to produce utterances which
conform to dominant meanings. Godard should be taken quite seriously when he says
that children are political prisoners. Language is a system of commands, not of
information. And television gives us: "Now a little entertainment. . .followed
shortly by the news . "
Gilles Deleuze in Afterimage, 1978
DECODINGS and Other Films by MICHAEL WALLIN
Thursday, October 13, 1988
[filmmaker in person]
TALL GRASS (1968/80) 12 min. color/silent
The material for this film was shot in regular-8mm in 1968,
during a summer spent in Mendocino, and blown up and edited in
16mm in 1980. It consists of fragments I was always fond of that
never made it into my two first films, shot that summer. There
are two reasons I am beginning the program with TALL GRASS.
First, it represents some of my first, tentative forays into
motion picture making, some twenty years ago, and evolved out of
a great deal of excitement with the possibilities of the medium.
Second, much of the impetus for this collection of vignettes came
from my association with Bruce Baillie, who I studied with and
became a kind of apprentice to that summer. Bruce was a terrific
teacher (mostly by example) and I still feel that he has been my
primary influence and source of inspiration.
SLEEPWALK (1973) 12 min. color/sound
At the time I made this film, I was very interested in the ideas
of G.I. Gurdjieff, a Russian mystic/philosopher, and P.O.
Ouspensky, his student, both of whom were fascinated by the
juncture between spirituality and psychology. The notion of
"personality", and its expression in characteristic gestures and
speech patterns, fascinated me, as did the degree of
unconsciousness displayed by most people regarding the expression
of their own identities. Using three good friends as subject
matter, and through manipulation of both image and sound, I
attempted to bring to consciousness these idiosyncratic traits,
and break the cycle of waking sleep.
MONITORING THE UNSTABLE EARTH (1980) 20 min. color/sound
Landscape (and cityscape) have always exerted a compelling
attraction for me as a collector of images. Powerfully evocative
in a way that can generate a profound feeling of peace, a
disturbing sense of unease, a tug of nostalgia, or whatever,
these sorts of primal images fascinate me. In MONITORING... (shot
primarily in California, Nevada, and Colorado), my interest was
in presenting a sort of "topological revue" which could possibly
generate a sort of visual de-attachment, suppress habitual
response patterns (naming, judging, etc.), and enable the viewer
to really SEE. Human beings appear in this film as a sort of
counterpoint (as expressed in their art, work, and rituals), yet
really are just part of the landscape.
ALONG THE WAY (1983) 20 min. color/sound
This film is a visual journal, a personal travelogue, a filmic
diary. Formal camera and editing strategies that I had been
developing and perfecting for several years are brought to bear
over
on people and events. Nonetheless, the overriding interest in
landscape persists, so the result is an interesting tension
between the formal and the personal, the offhand gesture and the
deliberate visual tactic. Friends who populate the images provide
personal anecdotes for the soundtrack. ALONG THE WAY is both a
reminiscence and an on-going investigation into the nature of
"place". Powerful (and painful) events in my life during the
period of the film's completion certainly influenced its final
emotional tone; it seems at times an elegy to my relationship
with a lover.
DECODINGS (1988) 15 min. b&w/sound
Human behavior, rituals and customs, and learning processes are
encoded in it's media records, film among them. Isolating images
from their original context, then re-combining them in new
relationships intrigued me as a way of stripping the images of
their rigidly processed messages, of decoding them. This
"collage" or "found footage" film draws from educational and
scientific films, newsreels and documentaries primarily from the
late forties through the early sixties. Guided by certain
thematic and formal strategies as the film was being constructed,
very personal concerns clearly began to emerge, of a nearly
"autobiographical" nature. My choice of imagery seemed to be
motivated by an unconscious search for elements that related to
my own past, for clues to a sel f -d iscovery . I enlisted the
collaboration of a life-long friend (a doctor and writer) who I
presented with a written piece, autobiographical in nature, that
was simply too naked and clinical to be used for the film. I
suggested he develop a text for a spoken narration, including
characters and vignettes, that would incorporate the ideas I had
given him. My concerns had to do with, for example, the kind of
relationships possible between men, the possibilities for and
barriers to intimacy, control and release, the ability to love
and be loved. DECODINGS is an emotional, psycho-sexual self-
portrait told in the third person and filtered through anecdote
and parable.
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VIDEO REFUSES FESTIVAL AT THE CINEMATHEQUE
~ Saturday, October 15, 19S8, 8:00 P.M.
Eye Gallery, 1151 Mission Street.
PROGRAM
1) Values In A Near Perfect World by M.J. Wilson, 5:00.
2) Dear Cassandra by Aline Mare & Bradley Eros, 6:00.
3) Too Far Gone by J. Garellick, 3:00.
4) Kathy by Cecilia Dougherty, 11:50.
5) Cocksplatter Blues by Leslie Singer, 12:00.
INTERMISSION
6) Two by Graham Dent & Thea Other: 2:40.
Dressing for Success
Dickie's Dead (Age of Consent)
7) Second SsIiGtHeT by Michael J. Collins, 9:00.
8) The Gift by Maggie Sherman, 16:00.
9) Come Home Now by Susan Kuchinskas, 11:00.
10) This Town Will Tear You Apart by W. Reynolds & B. Levy, 24:30.
Total running time is 101 minutes.
Coffee and wine will be available free of charge,
BIOGRAPH NIGHT AT .THE 'NICKELODEON -- FILMS FROM CA. 1910
. Film Historian Tom Gunning in person.
Sunday, October 16, 1988; S.F. Art Institute.
PROGRAM:
Those Awful Hats shot, Jan. 11,12, 1909 14th St.
FYora Finch, Arthur Johnson, Mack Sennett. (version
Eileen Bowser) Available from MoMA
Down the Hudson Biograph, 1903 Scene jrorn the Elevator Ascending
1900 Paper print~ collection Library of
Studio with
restored by
t"he Eiffel Tower Edison
and animated by Windsor McCay,
Blackton (with McCay and John
Congress
Little Nemo Vitagraph 1911 drawn
Live action directed by J. Stuart
Bunny) Available from MoMA
The Lady and the Mouse March, 1913 California, Script: D.W.
Griffith" with Lillian Gish, Lional Barrymore, Dorthy Gish, Harry
Hyde, Kate Toncray, Bobby Harron, Adolph Lestina. Available from
MoMA
Almost
a Wild Man directed by Dell Henderson, script by William
April 10, 1913 California with Charles Murray,
Pixley, Dorthy Gish.
(finished April 5, 1913) California with
Beaudine finished
Eddie Dillon, Gus
Death's Marathon
Blanche Sweet,
Barrymore, Kate
Available from
Amor Pedestre
Fabre
The
L antre Infernal
with
Red Spectre
Henry B. Walthall, Walter Miller,
Bruce, Bobby Harron script: William E,
MoMa
Ambrosio Company (Italy) 1914 directed by Marcel
Tootsie and Futschen
(France) Pathe
Infernal
, 1906 Dir: Gaston
Cave, Magic Bottles
Lionel
Wing
Velle Also known as
The films selected for this program are designed to
demonstrate something ^of the variety of genres and experiences
offered as an evenrng's entertainment at a typical film theater
circa 1912. The short format of the one reel (or occasionally
split reel) length allowed exhibitors to follow the "variety
format" derived from contemporary vaudeville programs, which
intentionally moved the audience thorough a number of moods with
changing expectations, from the educational to the farcical, the
thrilling to the touching. Even when featuring the work of one
company (and a "Biograph Night" such as this one was not
infrequent in film theaters) a program could include comedies,
melodramas, scenics, westerns, sentimental love stories and trick
films as well as "Illustrated songs" which combined a live singer
with magic lantern projections.
Tonight's program stretches the years a bit and goes beyond
Biograph in order to include a few genres not exploited by
Biograph, such as the trick film and the emerging animated
cartoon. The Red Specter is a Pathe film from a slightly earlier
period when the trick film was at its height of inventiveness,
particularly at Pathe, where Gaston Velle and Segundo de Chomon
produced a number of films which go beyond Melies' repetoire of
tricks. The scenic film shown here, Down the Hudson is also from
a period before Griffith when a large part of Biograph 's output
COVER)
v .s still actuality films of sites of interest or newsworthy
vents. However, the line between actuality and trick films
hould not be drawn too firmly. A Manichaean division between
r.umiere and Melies distorts the nature of early films as this
film demonstrates. Although documentary in subject, the
cameraman varies the speed of his cranking so that sections "of
this Hudson voyage zip past the viewer at magical speed. scene
_from the Eljtyatoj; Ascending the Eiffel Tower is even earlier,
dating from" the "1900 Paris Exposition, but also presents a
"documentary" subject as a startling and transforming experience
of space, as the vista of a 19th Century city seen through the
the motion of 20th Century technology. Little Nemo/ an animation
of Windsor McCay's famous comic strip is an early example of a
genre 'just appearing. Its fascination with movement itself and
the stretching and transformation of images shows how the cartoon
first evolved from the trick film, rather than becoming simply
another way to make a comedy.
Soon after Griffith established himself at Biograph he
relegated the production of comic films to the studio's second
unit. Griffith had never shown a real talent for broad comedy
(as the "comic" sequences in his later features often show)
although comedy of manners and character is often beautifully
created in such films as The Lady and the Mcmsje. Those; Awful
Hats is a rare exception in Griffith 's oeuvre, a truly absurB
comic moment worthy of Mack Sennett (who is visible as one of the
nickelodeon patrons in the film). Although Griffith seems to
have overseen the later productions he assigned them to others to
direct, first Sennett and then, Dell Henderson who directed
Almost a Wild Man, which pays tribute to both the vaudeville
theater and the sideshow dime museum. I have also included an
Italian film here, the latest film in the program (although
essentiallly similar to Ambrosio's 1909 The Ta_le f Lulu a_s told
by her Feet) , to show the formal inventiveness of early Italian
comedy and to include another important filmmaking country of the
nickelodeon era.
The dramas which make up the bulk of this program, and the
mainstay of Biograph production during these years, were all
directed by D.W. Griffith and shot by Billy Bitzer. Coming
mainly from the later Biograph years, they show Griffith at full
control of performance, composition and editing. They also show
the range of Griffith's narratives from intimate and gentle
family films like The Lady and the Mouse to last minute rescue
melodramas like DeaYh 's Marathon. The stark endings of this last
films should contradict the view of Griffith as a simple-minded
sentimentalist, while the delicate sentimentality of films like
The Lady and the Mouse show how freshly Griffith worked within
this tradition. The performances of the Gish sisters, the late
Blanche Sweet, Lionel Barrymore, Henry B. Walthall show the
spontaneity of Griffith's actors, but his editing schemes
dominate the films. Again a variety abounds. The 112 shots of
Death's Marathon show the rhythmic control of time and space
typical cT5 Griffith melodramas, while the cutting between
closeups in the central scene of The Lady and the Mouse shows
editing's role in the development of character. I believe it is
time to rediscover how extraordinary the output of the Biograph
company was, not simply for innovations in film language, but for
delicacy of performance, lyiricism in composition and suspense in
storytelling.
Tom Gunning
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GODARD AND MIEVILLE'S
FRANCE/TOUR/D ' ETOUR/DEUX/ENFANTS
Monday, October 17, 1988
f ,' r:
Program 3: Tapes 9-12
AMERICANS.
We like straight talk.
We want hard facts.
We demand the truth.
We know who we are.
And when it comes to news,
we know who we trust.
Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News
Weeknights on the CBS Television Network.
Quoted from Oh, Socrates, David Levi Strauss
Based on their original intentions, Godard and Mieville failed with
Six Fois deux and France/tour /detour /deux/enf ants , because the series was
never programmed as intended, in the context of regular television. France/
tour /detour /deux/enf ants was not given the regular half-hour spot for which
it was intended. Instead, it was scheduled into the late Friday night "art
cinema" spot, with three programs shown each Friday night.
In cinema, Godard was able to seize the means of production and enter
the conversation with a tremendously subversive force. Sonimage was unable
to get their counter-TV into the midst of broadcast television. Since it is
off the side, marginalized, it is not as subversive as it could have been.
From Oh, Socrates by David Levi Strauss
NARRATOR (male) Thank you, Robert Linard. And I think ... I
think it's time for a story- Not her story,
not a story coming from her. But her coming
from a story. And both. And both of them
before. Her before and the story after. The
story before and her after. Or superimposed.
The story of ... my pen.
A stylus: style, not decoration. Down with
the style Louis XVI th, XlVth, XI th etc. Not
decoration. A decor.
Quoted from France/tour /detour /deux/enf ants
- OVER -
Programs 9-1^; Camille listens to Mozart and discusses music, images
knowledge and power. Arnaud watches a James Bond movie on television and
talks about television, spectacle, boredom and solitude. The celebrated
penultimate episode finds Camille at the dinner table quietly eating while
her parents (off -screen) converse, and the final program has Arnaud prepar-
ing for bed and being questioned about sleep, dreaming, existence, life and
death.
I'm not trying to convince people. But people believe that when you
use a certain way of thinking that you are trying to convince them and
it's hard to explain that you're not. In France/tour /detour /deux/enf ants
what I say is that if you look you can see that it's not good but how can
you escape it? And it looks as though we're trying to have the last word.
But we're trying to have the first word.
Godard quoted by Colin MacCabe in Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics.
* '
LAURIE DUNPHY AND TONEY MERRITT
FILMMAKERS IN PERSON
Thursday, October 20, 1988
Laurie Dunphy
LIVED IN QUOTES (1987); 21 minutes. Color. 16mm
Rejecting the apparent naturalness of both language and politics, the film,
shot in South Africa during the 1986 state of emergency, uses repetition
of footage of "everyday apartheid" to produce a poetic rendition of a
distinct culture in an alien society.
How fortunate we were
not to have been exposed
to rhetoric
- it would have falsified
a simple experience;
living grimly,
grimly enduring
Oh, there was the occasional heroic posturing
mainly from the immature
- and a dash of demagogic bloodthirstiness
But generally
we were simply prisoners
of a system we had fought
and still opposed.
From LETTERS TO MARTHA by the South African poet Dennis Brutus
WEST GERMANY. U.S.A. (1988); 19 minutes. Color /B&W. 16mm
With help from the U.S. Army's radio station, "Armed Forces Network," the
film attempts to show what Frankfurt means to three American G.I.s stationed
there. Criteria for the relationship of picture to sound are not treated in
military fashion. - Laurie Dunphy
A WESTERN U987); 9 minutes. Color. 16mm
Connects the ideology of Hollywood westerns and the U.S. treatment of
Puerto Rico, emphasizing the sterilization programs designed to help
reduce the Puerto Rico population sufficiently that the island can be
overrun by industrial complexes and military bases by the year 2020.
Deconstructs found footage from family-planning trainers, game shows, and
other sources. - Laurie Dunphy
- OVER -
Toney Merritt
I'm a filmmaker who's Black but my being a Black filmmaker, to me,
has never been that important. I notice that in doing grant applications
and in seeing the results of grant applications, grants that are given to
Black filmmakers are always the same old crap. It's always "whitey did us
wrong and give me $20,000 to make a film about it." My viewpoint is that
the past is past and why fund the past and not stimulate things that are
changing. If I made a film along those lines I'd probably be in fat city
but I can't because of my own personal politics. People are people and
you like them or you don't. If you don't, you don't deal with them.
It's gotten too serious. Too serious on the narrative side, too
serious on the experimental side. Everybody is too serious and nobody is
having any fun. There's nothing spontaneous, everything is too rigid.
Toney Merritt interviewed in C i nema togr aph Volume 2
GAME (1973); 4 minutes. 16mm
A KISS OF DEATH (1974); 9 minutes. B&W. 16mm
LONESOME COWBOY (1979); 27 seconds. 16mm
AS I AM (1982); 6 minutes. B&W. 16mm
CONQUEST PIECE (1981-1982); 5. 5 minutes. B&W. 16mm
THE SHADOW LINE (1985); 13.5 minutes. B&W. 16mm
NOT A MUSIC VIDEO (1987); 7 minutes. B&W. 16mm
Me/rftt, Tbney
These films are representative of
work completed over me pa
years. I only wish to say that
they contain a measure of angst,
irony, and humor. Without the
latter, it would all be bullshit. I
hesitate to offer descriptive notes
on my films, as I nave always
fett that they only 'effected my
feelings about the Sims at the
moment of writing. Most of me
films are short, and I mistrust
films where trie iescnptions have
been longer than me films
themselves. Some onef notes,
however, have been provided.
Just A Thought
797ft 16mm, b&w/so,
1m, ""
A Kiss 01 Death
7974, 16mm, b&w/so,
9m.
Astern
A look at how I perceive people
sometimes see me. and I them.
Av/ard: Ann Arbor film Festival
1984.
7982, 16mm, b&w/si.
6m,
The Shadow Line
A film adaptation of a chapter
from a neve) by Wish scene*
fiction writer, Sianislaw Lem
(Solaris). A story of genius arid
frustration.
1985, 16mm, b&w/so,
13.5m,
Conquest Piece
I can only say that I set up the
situation for this, what I believe
is a very humorous film; but it
is Nancy that made this film.
"..plays alongside Toney Mer-
ritt's arch and elliptical humor,
(CONQUEST PIECE and ASIAM.
moving from enigma to im-
pishness to silent farce). i: -Carvin
Ahlgren, San Francisco Ex-
aminer
1981-1982, 76mm. o&w/so,
5.5m. ' '
Not A Music Video
A very playful, spontaneous film
made with and tor people tor
whom I have nigh regard.
7987 76mm, b&w/so,
7m,
EF
79791 76mm, color/si,
4m,
m
sews?
IIH1I
I
RE-VISIONARY FILM: Fantasy Scenarios
A Panel Discussion
Sunday, October 23, 1988
Tonight's panel discussion will celebrate the publication of Cinematograph , Vol.3.
Like this volume, the panel's theme will be an examination of the positive aspects
of marginality as applicable to experimental filmmaking. The panel will be mod-
erated by Christine Tamblyn, Volume 3's editor and the panelists will include:
filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Barbara Hammer, poet and critic David Levi Strauss,
and Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for the Chicago Reader. "Will the future
of experimental filmmaking be politically factionalized, sensually decadent,
commercially compromised or narcissistically onanistic?" The panelists will
address these questions, unleashing their imaginations to visualize future
Utopias in experimental filmmaking.
San Francisco Cinematheque
J.iO Pctrero A'/enue
San Francisco CA 94110
'415)558-8129
A Project of the
Foundation lor Art in Cinema
Boarti ol Directors
Scott Stark
President
Lon Argabnght
Lynn Kirby
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzm
Staff
Steve Anker
Program Director
David Gerstein
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
Operations Coordinator
The Foundation for Art in Cinema
is supported in part with funds from:
National Endowment for the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants lor the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
Will/am & Flora Hewlett Foundation
Experimental Film in the Year 2000: Four Fantasy Scenarios
I.The revolution occurs; the government is overthrown and the pig dog lackies
of the ruling class are demoted to assembling semi-conducters. There are
great ceremonial pageants and celebrations in the streets, all documented
by Peter Wollen and Jon Jost, who are appointed to the Cabinet for Aesthetic-
ized Agit-Prop by the newly elected President, Annette Michelson. Michelson
understandably views experimental film as a high priority budget item; all
filmmakers receive abundant lifetime pensions and unlimited access to mat-
erials, equipment and lab services. Unfortunately, there is a palace coup
and Ti-Grace Atkinson takes over, vowing to exterminate all men and establish
a parthogenetic lesbian utopia with Su Friedrich as the Ministress of the
Interior. However, a black messiah named Lizzie Borden proclaims her divin-
ity just in time to reconcile all the warring factions and silence the pro-
liferation of dialectical babel. A coalition government of rainbow-hued
androgynes is formed, who sponsor the production of blockbuster historical
epics by Keith Sanborn and Amy Taubin.
2. The Feelies described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are instituted:
environments of total sensory stimulation based on previous experimental
films. The dilemma of the audience's role is resolved, because every aud-
ience member experiences complete participatory involvement. The Feelies
render the concept of intermedia obsolete by extending it ad infinitum.
Thus, audience members are bathed in flickering washes of color frpm Paul
Sharits films until their bodies jerk into perfectly calibrated epileptic
fits. The long zoom that structures Michael Snow's Wavelength is viscerally
felt by audiences sequestered in cabinets capable of rotations of any con-
ceivable direction, duration and speed, in a conflation of every type of
amusement park ride. Designer drugs are also available to enhance the
post-filmic illusions. Bruce Conner's collage films are augmented by a refined
amphetamine; William Burroughs serves as a consultant in the synthesis of a
perfect opiate to supplement the viewing of Cocteau's Orpheus. A newly dis-
covered organic tropical hallucinogen adds nice flourishes to the films of
both Pat O'Neill and Robert Nelson.
3. The fusion of high art and popular culture is finally consummated when Stan
Brakhage signs a contract with Warner Brothers to make 35 millimeter narrative
films. Not to be outdone, Paramount Pictures promptly signs Kenneth Anger,
while Disney Productions employs the cryogenic techniques they developed to
resucitate freeze-dried Walt to bring Hollis Frampton back from the grave.
Brakhage is persuaded to let Sylvester Stallone replace himself in the title
role of a remake of Dog Star Man. Kenneth Anger is permitted to shoot and
insert gay love interests and ritual magic subplots into any classics of
the Hollywood cinema that he wishs. Frampton is given access to all of the
film that has ever been exposed in the history of the world, a gargantuan
image bank that he can spend all of eternity fathoming the meta-structure of
in preparation for constructing his magnum opus, a bead game (in Herman
Hesse's sense) for the amalgamation of all culture.
4. A new type of film is invented that replicates subjective experience with
f lav/less fidelity. On this film, any person can record any moment of their
life by a simple act of will. The technology is so lightweight that it's
invisible, and so inexpensive that it costs nothing. When these stored
personal histories are played back for another viewer, they simulate the
effect of ESP, only with a time delay. An underground movement of young
filmmakers led by Joe Gibbons and Scott and Beth B springs up to exploit
this new device. They obsessively document their perverted Warholian life-
styles in order to implement a new order of intersubjectivity that rele-
gates individual interiority and the burden of uniqueness to cultural ob-
solescence. __ Christine Tamblyn
.'' '''. . "''!'
WARREN SONBERT:
FILMS OF THREE DECADES - FILMMAKER IN PERSON
Thursday, October 27, 1988
These films are accumulations of evidence. The images must be read:
not only what narrative connotations are given off by representational
imagery as regards both language and figure-engaged activity, but also the
constructive signposts of point of view, exposure, composition, color,
directional pulls and the textual overlay. But in film the solo image is
akin to an isolated chord; the kinetic thrust emerges with montage. That
process expands, deflates, contradicts, reinforces or qualifies. It is this
specific and directed placement that provides film with both its structure
and its freedom.
Film can do flips, is acrobatic. A highly charged shot, though still
potentially balanced by a multitude of suggest ibles, may in turn, by
replacement by a more neutral image, shift into objectivity the initial
heightened response. This play with expectations, both frustrated and
enhanced, constitutes a reason to look at the screen. The variables of the
image, its visual qualities being punctuation, swell to a series of statements,
whose provocative strains demand a measured vigilance of the viewer, when
editing can either underline, comment upon or upset the fluctuating continuities.
This is not to say that the possible pleasure produced refuses rigor, but rather
that cerebral sleight-of-hand implies control. Warren Sonbert, 1983.
DIVIDED LOYALTIES (1978); 22 minutes. Color. 16mm.
What was once a minimal narrative has been replaced by visual puns, metaphors,
and associations of both form and content. The films are so dense it's
impossible to apprehend them at a single viewing. One may come away as from
a dream, aware of having seen much but remembering nothing. Yet Sonbert 's
detailed rational imagery is in no way oneiric. The title Divided Loyalties
refers literally to the stuff above and below the editing splice as well as to
its subject matter-which pulls between East and West coast, between America
and Europe, art and industry, sex and friendship. The link runs fore and aft
so that the connections are almost never dualistic.
Amy Taubin in Village Voice 1/27/87.
HALL OF MIRRORS (1966); 7 minutes. Color. 16mm.
"In the causal juxtaposition of three distinct sequences Sonbert nails the
psychological and historical connection between the solipsistic narcissism of
his own generation and the hysteria and despair of its parents at their
dawning recognition of the trap of the nuclear family.
The underpinnings of Sonbert 's vocabulary as a filmmaker are all here.
Combining dated with contemporary footage reflects his sense of film as a
historic artifact. The hall of mirrors suggests the regression of time - how
the immediacy of the recording process is distanced first by editing and
subsequently through successively removed screenings so that today Hall of Mirrors
- OVER -
is all of a piece, both prophecy and ancient history. ibid.
HONOR AND OBEY (1988); 22 minutes. Color. Silent. 16mm.
"Whose authority will you obey?" the film seems to ask, as it deftly avoids
simple-minded juxtapositions. Instead, we see a melange of images so full
of geography that the work mocks the idea of any specific setting. Sooner
or later, social and natural laws clash, Mr.Sonbert suggests, but in this
scenario of discrete images all is apparent harmony.
Carlyn James in The New York Times 10/1/88.
It's in time that the structure of Sonbert's "looking at things" begins
to appear. It's through time that the structure begins to work on our body,
mind, blood, heart, lungs. And then I walk the streets happy, smog or no
smog. A good movie, good art cleans out the smog of our minds. All the talk
today against art is nothing but a social smog, I don't want any part of it.
You can liberate your pot, if you wish; I get high on music; or on the clear,
unpretentious movies of Warren Sonbert; or by looking at a brown leaf falling
from a tree.
Jonas Mekas in Movie Journal November 19, 1970.
RIDDLES AND CONUNDRUMS
Saturday, October 29, 1988
Tonight's program presents several films and tapes formed as puzzles,
playing with narration, memory, and sound/word/image relationships.
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all
he said was "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"
"Come we shall have some fun now!" thought Alice. "I'm glad
they've begun asking riddles. - I believe I can guess that,"
she added aloud.
COUPLED ENTRIES (1988) by Michael Guccione; 32 minutes, B&W, 16mm.
A story, if one could only get the clues in the proper order.
Nosferatu, n: not dead, splashed with milk; also necurata: the devil,
unclean; also nosferat: plague carrier.
Coupled Entry, n: a two for one entry in horse racing.
Coupled Entries is a re-interpretation of the horror novel, Dracula ,
by Lyceum stage manager Bram Stoker. In my treatment previously unrendered
passages from Dracula are presented verbatum in the form of voice over in
the midst of a graphic which serves as a cue or mapping for the ensuing scene,
fangs, solar phobia, etc. are replaced with crackers, tea bag and more, un-
respectively. - Michael Guccione.
"Do you mean that you can find out the answer to it?" said
the March Hare.
"Exactly so," said Alice.
"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
SENSIBLE SHOES (1983) by John Adams; 11 minutes, Color, Video.
At the tone the time will be five twenty exactly.
The Weather. Bright but rather cold.
Flys, where do they come from and where do they go to, Steve Davis' bum,
Dynasty , 8 out of ten owners, Esso, the central heating, Everest (a tourist
trap with no toilets), Robert, chat shows - images, sound and words provide
an apparently unstraightforward straightforward narrative with more clues
than Columbo.
EQUAL TIME (1987) by Bill Chayes; 13 minutes, Color and B&W, Video.
TV adheres to an aesthetic that issues a reassuring world of unmodulated
texture. This world heightens its authority through seamless craft and
a hygienic approach to visual culture. To combat this authority, video
artists often assemble motley narratives, intentionally stressing defects
and difference in their imagery. This anti-aesthetic then becomes the
matrix for other strategies and thematic explorations.
Bill Chayes 1 Equal Time employs highly saturated color and low resolution
Black and White footage to question its own veracity. A mock "how to" tape,
this work delivers a payload of irony, declaring that control is the meaning
beneath emptied images. - Steve Seid, 1988.
"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least - at least I
mean what I say - that's the same thing, you know."
"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter.
SYNTAX (1974) by Martht\Haslanger; 13 minutes, Color, 16mm.
- One of the possible ways of taking it down and holding it there until
you are ready to let it go.
- A basic retainer -wall approach.
- A narration of the process of retaining a narration.
- "More about writing than what's written." - Martha Haslanger
"You might just as well say that 'I see what I eat 1 is the
same thing as ' I eat what I see ' ! "
NEW IMPROVED INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY (1976) by Owen Land; 11 minutes, Color, 16mm.
Land uses the stuff of education, including the arbitrary pleasures of
language's puns and sounds, to martial his attack on the lunacy of disciplines.
The pleasure and play of language place us within a joking mesh of word and
image. Sometimes we are the third person auditor of Freud's joking process.
Or we are the second person object. In either complex of the jokework, we
are part and parcel of the film's process. For Land, after meticulous artistry,
the joke is everything. - Patricia Mellencamp in Cinematograph Vol.1.
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning
to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied: "what's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
Extracts from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
s(r*!
November 10 1988
THE LIFE AND WORK OF JAMES BROUGHTON
AND JOEL SINGER
Tonight the Cinematheque honors the 75th birthday of poet filmmaker
James Broughton and the 40th birthday of his partner Joel Singer.
The program will be a selection from their collaborations of the past
twelve years, beginning with TOGETHER from 1976 and concluding with
SCATTERED REMAINS of 1988. Singer will also premiere part one of his
solo work-in-progress, EXPOSURES.
Herewith are some tributes to this occasion.
LIGHT UP THE CANDLES
When James Broughton was still a teen preening
the tragic comedians anointed his pate with myrrh
and rosemary when he asked for pedicure and foot
massage. He grew up to organize sand castle seminars,
to come under suspicion, to wriggle, and move east
looking for the true entrance to unused silence. Now
for this guy who squints and laughs, light 'em up!
Edward Mycue
James Broughton does everything from beyond wit's end,
turning all his difficulties into The Delightful. He has
hoisted a god ' s-eye-view of the world of human follies and
has developed a rhythmic complexity to sustain it. He is
the only filmmaker I know who has been equally true to
Poetry, Theater and Film, transforming all three into an
act of lifelong montage.
Stan Brakhage
It was always nice to know that James Broughton was around
to make movies and the year was not complete unless there
was something going on that James popped up in. Special
fun were his birthday celebrations. The world seemed okay
when James was up there trying to agitate the audience with
his visual contributions with Joel Singer. I hope he just
keeps on having birthdays and we can go and everything will
seem all right .
George Kuchar
San Francisco Cinematheque
~30 Potrero Avenue
San Francisco CA 94110
r d15) 558-8129
A Project ot the
Foundation lor Art in Cinema
Board ol Directors
Scott Stark
President
Lon Argabright
Lynn Kirby
Diane Kitchen
Jams Crystal Lipzin
Stall
Sieve Anker
Program Director
David Gerstem
Administrative Director
Caroline Savage Lee
Operations Coordinator
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with lunds from:
National Endowment lor the Arts
California Arts Council
San Francisco Grants for the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
DOUBLOONS
for James Broughton
THERE'S A PIRATE'S CHEST THAT'S FILLED
WITH WINGS OF MOTHS
and pink-green moss and eagle's thoughts
with knobby, dripping candles on the lid
in thickest darkness
just before the dawn.
The panther and the fawn
that gnaw and kiss
its cracking leather straps
and fumble at the clasp
will
spread
THE
THINGS
within
like golden coins
before the morning sun.
-- Michael McClure
POEM FOR JAMES BROUGHTON
On the Occasion of His 75th Birthday
Arise and celebrate the Day of the Broughton!
Bogeys high on champagne, crimson gods
brooding in opal,
the tiger's dream, the dwarf in love
all hail this Shaman Psalmer,
beloved James to the Broughton born.
If a ghost, sit him in good light.
If a ram, let him run like an omen.
And if some nights
are too damn dark,
set a candle burning for the myth.
Hooplas for the Day of the Broughton!
We extol this three-score-fifteen years
of Human Folly, this Hermes Bird
who carols The Singer,
who spawns Divine Madness,
who gallops across the spider's web
upon the True/False Unicorn.
Back to pivot, back to weaving words,
he grins and spins Ecstasies
of A Long Undressing. Creating hymns
and rhymes and schemes of joy,
swaying to mnemonic tangoes,
he arrows Life Lines to Orion's brain.
He is here, there, everywhere, nowhere,
now and then,
a waterbug skimming the surface of attention,
a black dot on a secret Scoreboard.
He is caught in the act, the ultimate Androgyne
at one with stump and tree.
As prayers and flairs salute him,
he watches final rushes of an age
focused and defined,
completing Water Circles, Seeing the Light
beyond the mink-soft hills,
Godbody of the Song.
Ruth Costello
10 November 1988
FOR HE'S A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW
James Broughton, the Godbody Godfather
less macho than Marlon Brando
and much nicer (kinder, gentler)
than all the bloodshed patriarchs
of history,
Oberon of all the Good (yet naughty) Fairies,
Fairy Godfather who waves away War
& all such nasty foolishness
with a phallic magic wand.
Pater Ecstaticus of non-prudish Paradises .
Elder yet still cherubic cupid.
Broughton proves ecstasy can belong
to old age as much as youth, that
age can be a blessing not a curse
(as in Whitman's "Youth, Day, Old Age,
and Night"), that our last years can
be ravished by joys rather than
ravaged by decrepitude.
Geronto Terrible as terrible as any enfant
terrible. Punster-Funster-Bunster
'terrible.
Broughton 1 s Ecstasies are invincible inspiring
testament to the rejuvenating powers
of Love, that the sincere devoted love
of a younger friend who believes in one
is medicine any aging person needs
more than any Geritol.
James Broughton and Joel Singer are cross-
generational astronaut explorers of
the universe of Love immortal camerados
in the tradition of all the immortal
camerados of male-to-male fame: noble
exemplars of the beauty and dignity
of male-to-male affection.
Androgyne Journal is a Walden of androgeny.
Hail the headfirst-heartfirst courage
of Broughton' s fearless beaming of
his unabashed being Who Him Am. "My
kundalini runneth over," indeed 1
Pulling our daisies and legs.
Making love spurt ecstasy through our hardon-
softon-hardon-softon hearts, thrilling
to the thrill of living-dying-living-dying
thrilling through our living-dying bods.
Hail the high priest of peter pantheism
hail James Broughton full of grace!
Pater Ecstaticus in Aeternam. Amen.
Antler and
Jeff Poniewaz,
July 198?
WOULD YOU LIKE TO DANCE?
James Broughton is a scary poet. Behind the word play, high
spirits, and doodles lurks an inescapable challenge from the
professor of pleasure. After all, "he offers you nothing less
than the risk of everything." Walt Whitman confronted anyone who
picked up Leaves of Grass in like manner:
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to
the lives around you would have to be abandon 'd,
Therefore release me now before troubling
yourself any further...
Consider what appears to be a mild invitation in "The
Gardener of Eden" :
Every day I grow a dream in my garden
where the beds are laid out for love
When will you come to embrace it
and join in the joy of the dance?
When the poem is experienced as the film The Gardener of Eden,
the "joy of the dance" is revealed as nothing less than the pulse
of the cosmos. A narcotic slow dance it is not. Images of lotus,
leaf, and lord time lapse, zoom out and in, flash from positive
to negative and back again. All that we are not will be consumed
in this intensity. As we are usually quite attached to that
preponderous baggage, to join in this searing joy is terrifying.
Yet what are the options?
Honor one another
or lose
Abandon your rivalries
or mourn
Value one another
or fall
Ripen one another
or rot
Love one another
or die
Where the stakes are high, the death/debt is great, as
Heraclitus would have it. Paralysis in the face of such a choice
is a peril but Broughton uses every means he can to propel the
reader across the threshold before he knows it. Metrical
miracles renew a childhood innocence out of adult malaise. Like
William Blake, Broughton makes his poems songs, then he sings
them. Or we do as the uncanny rhythms built into the poems
emerge. Like Blake would have if he could have, Broughton uses
film to create his visions. All for sweet liberty's sake.
'..- ' VJ
' ; ' ' " ' . > '[ * -
THE WORK OF VITO ACCONCI
Saturday, November 12, 1988
Since his earliest works as a visual artist during the late 1960's,
Vito Acconci has become one of the most influential artists of his gen-
eration. Acconci's work in performance, sculpture, body work, film and
video have defied taboos about institutional improprieties and sexuality.
For tonight's program a selection of super-Smm films and videotapes made
in the early 1970's will be presented. In all the works Acconci acts as
the principal performer in physical actions which confront the viewer.
IF ART IS A SIGN OF, OR COVER FOR, THE PERSON DOING IT, THEN I CAN CONCEN-
TRATE ON "INSTRUMENT" RATHER THAN "GROUND." I CAN MOVE MY MYSELF AS A
INSTRUMENT ONTO A GROUND BY TYING INTO IT, RECEIVING, A SITUATION OUTSIDE ME.
(BUT, THEN, IF I BECOME A VIEWER AND FOCUS ON A WORLD OUTSIDE, I MAKE MYSELF
PASSIVE, SEEN FROM A DISTANCE...). V.A.
Language is Vito Acconci's ubiquitous partner. Orignally a poet, he
then became a body, conceptual, video, performance and installation artist.
His early works tested his physical, sexual and political limits, and re-
petitious soliloquies, later transferred to tapes, seduced and assaulted the
viewer. Most of the earlier works needed few props; Acconci captured his
audience by confrontation or varieties of self-abuse. As the sets became
more elaborate, Acconci himself receeded, and enticed the spectators to rake
over his role. Janet Kardon, 1981
IF AN ART-WORK IS SEEN AS A TARGET FOR VIEWERS EXPERIENCING ART, ENTERING AN
EXHIBITION SPACE AND AIMING IN, THEN I CAN, BEFOREHAND, DOING ART, USE MYSELF
AS TARGET WITH THE TARGET-MAKING ACTIVITY MADE AVAILABLE TO THE VIEWERS.
(BUT, THEN, IF I FOCUS IN ON MYSELF, I CLOSE MYSELF UP IN MYSELF, PRESENTING
MYSELF NOT AS "PERSON" BUT AS "OBJECT". ..).: .--V.A.
IF ART IS THE PRESENTATION OF THE SELF BEHIND IT, AND A SELF BECOMES PERSON-
ALIZED BY INTERACTING WITH ANOTHER PERSON, THEN I CAN BRING IN ANOTHER AGENT:
WE MOVE TOWARD EACH OTHER, WORK OURSELVES INTO A WHOLE, IN FRONT OF THE VIEWERS.
(BUT, THEN, IF WE CONCENTRATE SO HARD THAT WE ONLY FOCUS ON EACH OTHER, THEN
WE BUILD A WALL AROUND US THAT SHUTS THE VIEWER OUT...). V.A.
IF AN ART-PLACE IS A PLACE FOR VIEWERS, AND IF ART IS A GIFT FROM ARTIST TO
VIEWER, THEN I CAN JOIN MY SPACE WITH THE VIEWERS' SPACE, I CAN MEET A VIEWER
FACE TO FACE. (BUT, THEN, AS LONG AS I'M THERE IN PERSON, I PRESENT A PERSONALITY
- OVER -
TO BE FOCUSED ON, BY MYSELF AND BY VIEWERS, WE MAKE AN INTIMATE SPACE THAT
ESCAPES FROM THE WORLD OF CAUSES OUTSIDE...)- V.A.
IF ART MAKES AN ARCHITECTURAL SPACE, A MODEL-SPACE, THEN I CAN WITHDRAW MY
PRESENCE, LEAVING VIEWERS ROOM TO MOVE: THE VIEWERS BECOME PERFORMER, THE
VIEWERS TAKE MY PLACE. (BUT, THEN, IF THE SPACE IS A PROJECTION OF ME, THE
VIEWERS HAVE NO PLACE OF THEIR OWN, THEY INHABIT A NO-MAN'S LAND, WHILE I
FLOAT AWAY BEFORE-THE-FACT IN A SPACE NEITHER MINE NOR THEIRS...). V.A.
In the summer of 1979 Acconci converted a flat-bed truck into a People-
mobile, which toured Amsterdam broadcasting a message that alternately seemed
to advocate terrorism and antagonize terrorists. Acconci 's machine, then,
became an agent provocateur, though on which political side, no one could tell.
As a mobile self, it intruded itself into the political arena much as any
sophisticated demagogue might. One is never quite sure whether or. not Acconci
in his own mind is advocating violence, but clearly his central aim is to act
as if his work were propaganda. He avoids a clear statement of position in
order to stress the prepositional tone of his art. Kay Larson, Machineworks
IF ART CAN APPEAR IN DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATIONS, THEN A PIECE CAN DERIVE
FROM THE PLACE WHERE IT'S DONE; IF A PHYSICAL PLACE IS PART OF A CULTURAL SPACE,
THEN VIEWERS COME TO AN ART-PLACE WITH A HISTORY, IN THE NEWS; IF I DO ART FROM
PLACE TO PLACE, THEN I BRING MY OWN PLACE WHEREVER I GO; IF AN ART-PLACE IS A
PUBLIC PLACE, WE CAN HOLD A PUBLIC MEETING...). V.A.
(Vito Acconci quotes from Catalogue of Headlines and Image, 1978)
. .
.
THE MYTH OF THE MALE PROJECT:
HOLLYWOOD AND THE ATOM BOMB
Sunday, November 13, 1988
Tonight's feature length Hollywood films from the Cold War era's hey-day
depicting the development of the first atomic weapon, will be the focus of
visiting artist Ken Jacobs' lecture this Wednesday at the San Francisco Art
Institute at 7:30 pm. The following extracts come from reviews contemporary
to the film, and from written material from Jacobs' lecture.
THE BEGINNING OR THE END (1947)
From the brashly deceptive introduction, which pretends to be a newsreel report
showing a group of atomic scientists burying film records-and this film-in a
time capsule, it would seem that the Metro people actually think that they
have made history. And the commentary throughout supports this notion.
For the most part, the re-enactments are commendably graphic and tense,
and they are competently strung together in an impressive dramatic line.
Brian Donlevy makes a pretty snappy spark-plug out of dynamic General Groves,
and Godfrey Tearle puts authority and compassion into three brief scenes as
President Roosevelt.
Wisely the people at Metro have taken no sides in the current atomic
contentions. They've simply said that the development of the bomb and its use
were a necessary evil to finish a far more destructive war. And they've said
that this new and vast potential of atomic energy must be put to the betterment
of life for all peoples. To that we can say "Amen."
Bosley Crowther, New York Times, 2/21/1947
ABOVE AND BEYOND (1952)
For the purpose of strong dramatic interest, Metro has taken the tale of Colonel
Tibbetts' historic adventure and built it up as a poignant tale of the physical
and mental burdens imposed upon the man. Above and beyond the pressures of the
military responsibilities involved the studio has put particular emphasis upon
the grave domestic tensions that are said to have occurred when the colonel had
to conceal his assignment from his wife. And with Robert Taylor and Eleanor
Parker cast in the husband-wife roles, it has made its chief tug upon the heart-
strings with a detailed enactment of this strife.
This is one of those situations in which all the husband would have to
explain is "this thing is bigger than the both of us", and the air would be
cleared. However,; the two carry on fuming until the wife blows up.
Bosley Crowther, New York Times, 1/31/1953
- OVER -
Two instruments of social engineering, deep scoops, designed to turn minds
around (our entertainers know more about us than we do). Soggy sagas of male
birth; no mean and mundane female begetting but boundless fantasy of cosmic
convulsion: the sky is not the limit! And what do men deliver? Atom bombs for
starters. Pity the poor Japs, of course, but atombombing our prostrate enemy
(read Gar Alperowitz) was merely incidental to the release of energy itself.
That was the event , the rest was all in the game, in the necessary contesting that
elicts sublime accomplishment. Sublime, because a divine manifestation was invoked
by an exclusively male, techno-military, hierachial priesthood releasing into our
world a quality of energy unknown to it (America had made it into the big time,
had been chosen to fulfill history). A visitation from The Beyond seemingly
destructive (to those without vision) but,in fact, transformative, giving rise
out of the collapsing womb of this world to a new and better, less compromised,
maler phase of existence. Mission accomplished. The male group e-mission which
women play into, although not without a lot of movies and religion to confound
their realism (I'll also be referring to 2001 and the abominable Apocalypse Now) .
Ken Jacobs
San Francisco Cinematheque - Thursday. November 17, 1988
THE SKY SOCIALIST Regular Rmm. Kodachrome II, 1964-65;
16mm. blow-up 1986, with help from N.E.A.
and D.A.A.D.; about 90 minutes
The film is in sections to be shown separately; this is the
central, longest "panel", within which the story can be said to be
complete.
Characters in order of appearance:
Julie Motz as The Muse Of Cinema. The impossible is what she does best.
Florence Jacobs plays a miraculously spared Anne Frank.
Joyce Weiland, as Love's Labor, keeps The Roeblings' Bridge in
tip-,top shape.
Dave Leveson stands in for the obscure thirties author Isadore Lhevinne.
Bob Cowan: Maurice, a downer and a tricky fellow, weighs facts on us
in the midst of our golden movie. He is forever moving Isadore to
despair with reminders of history.
Mel Garfinkel plays Nazi Mentality. ,_, ^ > . a ro
rr *~> i o
Titles of some sequences are: w 3 o x
rr CJ ?r w
Love's Labor 2 ^ M
Bestowal Of The Material Goods H- ct o p
3 3" UO 3 .1
The Muse Of Cinema Flies To The Rescue JJl^J
Nazi Mentality Stabs At Microbes In The Air a crxj o>
3 W O (0 (0 ct .
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C/l O i) C 1
Isadore 's Transmogrification o o o> M
3" P) OQ C O
The Wedding (Witnessed By Bleeding Humanity) H. *" o
Shutting Up Maurice With A Myth Of His Own . of "?^ "'
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Brooklyn Connects With Manhattan o w M> w
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Divine Retribution Sequence "?
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fj) ji) ii
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JERRY TAKES A BACK SEAT. THEN STEPS OUT OF THE PICTURE, filmed 1975 |
16mm. blow-up 1987. With Nisi and Aza Jacobs, and Jerry Sims. 11 min. 1
In an earlier film, "Star Spangled To Death", I demonstrated how gj
the cosmos turns on the fact of Jerry Sims. I'd been attending his I
school-of-scuf fed-shoes majoring in Simsism. One day, scuffing mid-
town (or were we strolling on the capsizing Titanic?), the master was
pulling choice items from pockets stuffed with obituary pages when we
met his father. Popeye doesn't chance upon Pappy and let things pass.
Jerry began to flail and spit, disassociatively screaming small talk
at the old man, who, turning to politely aghast me, said, "Look at him,
He had the brains of an Einstein. He could draw all the funnies.
What happened?"
Olive Oyl might 've replied, "If we knew the answer to that, we'd
know the answer to everything!"
Later I'd veer off Just as the answer was coming to me. It'd
taken on the shape of The Black Hole. A Black Hole approaches in a
curious way, edges dropping away until it gets to you. I got the
idea and I graduated.
Filmmaker Ken Jacobs in person.
JE, TO, IL, ELLE by Chantal Akerman
with NEAR THE BIG CHAKRA by Anne Sever son
Sunday, November 20, 1988
Born in Brussels in 1950, Chantal Akerman discovered that film could
be more than just a"feeble minded art" on viewing Godard's Pierrot le Fou
for the first time. Traveling across to the United States she describes
as the "most determining factor on my cinematography", being impressed,
rather than influenced, by Stan Brakhage and, most importantly Michael Snow.
His work proved to her that in film anything had become possible. Yet she
is consistently labeled by critics as a feminist filmmaker:
I'm not making women's films, I'm making Chantal Akerman 's
films. I didn't decide to make films with feminist points or
to change social structures; I decide to make films, to work
in that medium, with that art... My film is an art work, not a
pamphlet. It gets to you, I think, and that's not a bad thing.
Chantal Akerman, Edinburgh Film Festival, 1979.
JE, TO, IL, ELLE (1974); 90 minutes. 16mm.
Made in little more than a week on a very low budget, the film, infused
with the filmmaker's comic yet tender sensibility, follows a young alien-
ated woman, played by Akerman, through solitary, casual, and finally, tender
encounters recorded with a dignified, stationary camera that avoids being
either voyeuristic, pornographic or lyrical.
I made a film in which one part, IL, was dedicated to a man.
Men thought I was making fun of the hero. Actually, .1 treated
him with a great deal of tenderness, but I did not adopt the
cinematographic language used by men for showing men.
Chantal Akerman, Le Monde, August 4, 1975.
JE, TO, IL, ELLE deals with the last throes of adolescence, the impossibilities
of communication, the difficulties everyone experiences in fitting the mold
that makes adults of us.
Chantal Akerman is not attached to telling a story, even though a sketch
of one can be found in JE, TU, IL, ELLE. But she excels in translating states
of being. - Francois Maupin, Revue du Cinema.
NEAR THE BIG CHAKRA (1972); 17 minutes. 16mm. Colon.
Neither clinical nor leering, a straight-forward presentation of thirty-seven
vaginas, ranging in age from three months to fifty-six years, a curiously
neutral depiction of sexuality that shows the universality of all women.
- OVER -
THE MACABRE VISION OF TOD BROWNING
Sunday, November 21, 1988
As a young man Tod Browning ran away from school to join a circus,
swiftly moving on to tour the world with various vaudville acts. In 1913
he became an actor with Biograph until Lon Chaney, in 1925, persuaded MGM
to let Browning direct him. Their obsessions dovetailed and the two worked
together as director and actor up until DRACULA in which Chaney was to have
starred. Tonight's three films belong to that silent era in which the two
men's partnership fused vaudville humor and bodily contortion with dark
imagination and soulful intensity. The films exemplify Lon Chaney 's remark
that "there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight."
THE UNKNOWN (1927); 50 minutes. B&W. /6mm.
...anything but a pleasant story. It is a gruesome and at times shocking film
and the principal character deteriorates from a more or less sympathetic
character into an arch fiend. A sort of mixture of Balzac and Guy de Maupasssant
with a faint suggestion of O.Henry plus Mr. Browning's colorful side-show
background. - Mordaunt Hall, New York Times, June 13, 1927.
Of the ten films that Chaney did with Tod Browning, The Unknown is probably
the definitive for it's absolutely captivating story, and for the bizarre
mood sustained throughout the entire picture.
The story is full of weight and fascinating touches, reminiscent of Browning's
Freaks that would come five years later. Chaney gives a magnificent, tortured
performance as the disturbed lover who will go through anything for the woman he
loves. - J.C.M. , Mill Valley Film Festival, 1983.
THE BLACKBIRD (1926); 71 minutes. B&W. /6mm.
a production which possesses a streak of Jekyll and Hyde, glimpses of
Limehouse Nights and incidents of Hornung's Raffles. - Mordaunt Hall, NYT, 1926.
...an unusual little Tod Browning crime drama in which Chaney stars as "The Bishop",
the crippled keeper of a rescue mission and his brother, "The Blackbird", a
Limehouse thief. The story is pretty inconsequential as The Blackbird and his rival
both go after a diamond owned by an aristocrat in an attempt to win the love of a
French girl... like his other gangland pictures, Browning throws an endless barrage
of bizarre and fascinating Limehouse characters at us. Although this is less
ambitious than some of the other Browning/Chaney films, it is an entertaining and
unpretentious little picture with a few fine performances and a weird twist ending.
- Jon Mirsalis, P/.F.A. Program Notes, 1983.
- OVER -
WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1928); 60 minutes. B&W. /^ mm.
...a drama of pagan superstition, heat and ivory. - Mordaunt Hall, NYT, 1928.
...a powerful tale of murder and revenge with Chaney as a witch-doctor who sets
up a jungle empire after Lionel Barrymore steals his wife and cripples him. He
keeps the natives under control with his voodoo while having his ex-wife's
daughter despoiled in a sleazy brothel and while plotting the murder of ivory-
trader Barrymore. The story is one of the weirdest of all the Browning/Chaney films,
and one of the best. Warner Baxter is particularly seedy as the drunk doctor who
Chaney holds power over and Mary Nolan is a fine fallen woman who gets caught in the
middle of it all. - Jon Mirsalis, P.P. A. Program Notes, 1983.
'.
by
JOHAN VAN DER KEUKEN
- >!*
Thursday, December 1, 1988
Born in Amsterdam in 1938, Van Der Keuken began his career as a photographer
back in high school, with the publication of We Are 17, a book of photographs
which met with instant acclaim. From 1956-1958, he studied film-making at the
IDHEC in Paris, and in 1960 his first short film, A Sunday, appeared. For a
while he wrote movie reviews, and in 1962, made 4 short movies for VPRO broad-
casting company about 4 Dutch artists. His real career began in 1964 with the
film Blind Child - a sharp and perceptive registration of the way blind children
in an institution build up their own relation to reality with the help of the
adults who care and teach them. His films take a radical esthetic perspective
while retaining a lyricism that comes from his personal commitment to his
subjects and resonate with social and emotional power.
In the tradition of Jean Vigo, Flaherty, Joris Ivens and Chris Marker, his
documentaries have "less to do with objective reportage on faraway realities than
with the invention of an esthetics of diversity, that is: the desire of an
'elsewhere 1 that is purely interior, and to which geographical travel would always
and necessarily be disappointing." (Dominique Paini, Cahiers du Cinema, 1986.) In
an interview with Cahiers ' in 1978, Van Der Keuken outlined one aspect of his
approach to the genre:
I try to stress the ambivalence of documentary: the material that has
been shot is always documentation of what happened on location. Not
only the physical description of the location, but also what happened
between us. My physical reaction to what was happening, people's reac-
tion to our presence etc. So there are certain things that no longer
fit within my esthetics of straight lines - lateral lines, lines in
depth, or vertical lines. There are things that occur instantly and
generate confusion. . .So, there are movements that do not fit into my
scheme, but I have to admit them because they are the true expressions
of what happened and must be kept in the film. - Van Der Keuken.
Tonight's film was first shown at the 1986 Rotterdam Film Festival where it
was chosen by critics as one of the festival's seven best films. After screenings
in Paris, Florence and New York, it received the 1986 Josef Von Sternberg prize at
the Mannheim Filmfestival for the most original film.
I y $ (1986); 147 mihutes. Color. 16mm.
The value of the film lies as much in the visual fascination that comes out of the
places in the world he has visited as in the mixture of linguistic sonorities that
are woven together without transition.
The many personages that are being encountered, filmed, interviewed generate
the elements of a fiction that's all fit for a certain type of international and
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with tunas tram:
National Endowment tor the Arts
OVER Calitorma Arts Council
San Francisco Grants for the Arts
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
americanized cinema that is aiming today at eliminating frontiers.
- Dominique Paini, Cahiers du Cinema, 1986.
When you are talking about money, you tend to think in terms of secrets and their
disclosure. But you also realize that the idea of the disclosure of secrets is a
deceptive one, for the speed at which the financial game travels over the world
creates a thousand new secrets for every one that is being unveiled. So in the
long run you can only aim for insight, for instance into the relationship that
exists between state deficit, interest rates, currency rates, menace of war, flight
of capital and the somewhat archaic spirit that welds these abstract notions into
very tangible weapons for the few in their struggle to stay ahead of the many.
- Johan van der Keuken, Skrien filmmagazine, 1986.
/
v^^*">]ro^^
Saturday, December 3, 1988
SCOTT STARK: Films & Multiple Projections
8/35 FILMS
This series of films explores what would happen if still photographs
moved. Looking at still photographs as "stills" is only one way to view
them, just as putting movie film in a movie projector is only one way to
look at a movie. These first films were made by putting regular-8mm
movie film into a 35mm still camera and shooting it as if it were a roll
of slide film. When projected in an 8mm movie projector, minute portions
of each "slide" flicker by the entire picture is never seen as a
whole. Films include:
The Politics of Identification. (Female) and (Male) . 1988, 5-8 mins.
Shot in the San Francisco Financial District, the film refers to the
point at which sexual differentiation begins. In the business world,
women are allowed to wear color and pattern anywhere on their bodies,
whereas in men's clothing expressions of color and pattern are confined
to a slender wedge below the chin. This codification reinforces a
perception of women as emotional and volatile, and of men as more con-
trolled and organized. These basic differences effect the structure and
progression of the film.
Corners. 1988, 4-6 mins. The camera assumes points of convergence of
lines of sight, above, below and upon the urban landscape. It is an
investigation of a traditional cinematic device which causes an abrupt
change in viewer perspective.
16/35 FILMS
Made exactly the same way as the 8/35 films, using the larger format 16mm
film. The chief difference is that in 16mm, the picture actually covers
the area on the film normally reserved for the soundtrack; therefore the
images actually generate their own peculiar sounds. You hear what you
see, after a one second delay. Films include:
Chromesthetic Response. 1987, 5 mins. A collage of human-created worldly
surfaces. "Chromesthesia" is a condition whereby one sees a color or
shape and experiences a sensation of taste, smell or hearing. You hear
what you see.
The Sound of His Face. 1988, 5 mins. A filmed biography of Kirk Douglas
literally. Pages of a book images and text are used to generate
a musical structure. It is an examination of the fabric of the super-
ficial, with Hollywood iconography as a metaphor for the superficial.
Satrapy. 1988, 13 mins. Simple musical tones are generated "visually" by
photographing different sized-black parallel lines. A 5-beat rhythm is
slowly intruded upon by the intervention of pornographic playing cards,
over
injecting a note of "negative sound" every third beat against the 5-beat
background. Eventually the rhythms change, developing contrapuntal
variations of 3, 4, 5 and 7 beat structures. The tone interruptions
caused by the toneless (but not noiseless) playing cards create more and
more complex rhythms.
As the rhythms reach an almost indiscernible complexity, the lined
background finally ruptures, physically tearing apart, and the sounds and
visuals become scattered and disordered. The pornographic playing cards
break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into
the real world, flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and
other surfaces.
The general intention is to create a rigid formal structure and have it
disrupted and torn apart both by a physical, sensual intrusion and
random, accidental forces acting upon it in the production of the film.
The formal and the abstract are ultimately connected to the real world.
The film could be seen as a metaphor for a strictly regimented environ-
ment, such as the business world (straight, even lines and rhythms) ,
which fosters a kind of repressed sexuality (pornography) that eventually
erupts, intruding upon and tearing apart the formal structure.
SUPER- 8. 3 PROJECTORS
W, 3 super-8 projectors, 25 mins. This work was made by shooting three
super-8 rolls of film concurrently in the same camera that is, shoot-
ing one roll for 10 seconds or so; removing it from the camera and
shooting a second roll for 10 seconds; removing the second roll and
shooting the third roll for 10 seconds; then going back to the first.
Each time the film cartridge is removed from the camera a portion of it
becomes "fogged" or exposed to light, which registers as a white "flash"
on the film.
Linear events (such as a piece of music, the reading of a story, etc.)
can be traced through all three rolls in a circular fashion. For ex-
ample, sentence 1 of a story might appear on roll 1, sentence 2 on roll
2, sentence 3 on 3, and then sentence 4 on roll 1 again (after sentence
1) . A map might look like this:
Roll #1 Roll #2 Roll #3
Scene 1 Scene 2 Scene 3
"4 "5 "6
ii 7 "8 "9
etc . etc . etc .
When all three rolls are projected side by side, however, this spiral
mapping is disrupted as the three successive sequences appear simul-
taneously, suggesting a concurrent progression of past, present and
future.
Imaging strategies attempt to create shapes and sounds that could not
exist in the physical world, but are formed by their proximity to the
adjacent frame, such as the letter "W" that appears both accidentally and
intentionally throughout the piece. A vocabulary of everyday objects and
environments is used to develop a visual language.
Assistance: K. Tyner / Voice: J. Jalbuena
<-'"i | ; / ' "'".
WERNER SCHROETER
and
ROGER JACOBY
Sunday, December 4, 1988
FLORIA (1974) by Roger Jacoby; 15 minutes. Color. 16mm.
Tosca as never before seen on the big screen. Features Ondine as the villain,
Madeline La Roux as the tortured heroine. In the Jacoby style, the hand-
processing produces unique and unforgettable effects as sound and color, image
and actor become one. - Canyon Cinema Catalog.
Roger Jacoby 's films are a breathtaking stream of seeming contradictions;
humor and melodrama, the homemade crudity yet beauty of his images; abstraction
and narrative, filmic illusion and the concrete presence of the film material,
the operatic and the mundane. These diverse threads, however, are woven together
into a cohesive personal vision. - Bill Judson, Field of Vision No. 2
EIKA KATAPPA (1969) by Werner Schroeter; 144 minutes. Color & B/W. 16mm.
Born in Thuringia in 1945, after studying psychology for three terms in Mannheim,
Schroeter passed the entrance examinations to the Hiqhschool for Television and
Film in Munich but left the school after only a few weeks. To date, he has
produced a dozen plays and two operas. His earliest films, - he possessed a
camera at the age of twelve, - are of a private nature; but he did travel to the
experimental-film festival in Knokke in 1968 with a number of 8mm films. The
coming together of experimental, avant-garde and alternative filmmakers in Knokke,
at which the impact of the "New American Cinema" of Anger, Makropoulos, Pennemakef,
etc. was felt for the first time in Europe, had a detonating effect on many Euro-
pean filmmakers, including Schroeter, who stood outside the film establishment.
Schroeter drew attention to himself as an avant-garde filmmaker with Neurasia
and Argil ia, finally achieving a breakthrough at the Mannheim Film Week in 1969
with Eika Katappa. The film-political situation, which did not support newcomers
and experimental author-directors, the crisis in German commercial cinema, in which
alternative films such as Schroeter 's non-narrative and, at least in the conventiona:
sense plotless works scarcely had any chance at all of reaching the cinema, forced
Schroeter to turn to television. There in ZDF, (the Second German Television
network), he was given the opportunity, in a late evening experimental film series,
to continue his work over the next few years.
What Schroeter has found painfully lacking in German high art or culture and
in German literature is that identity of emotion and expression, of the absoluteness
of the ego and its freedom from restraint that manifests itself in the language of
the body, in music, and above all in the realm that lies beyond conceptual language.
He regards it as a lack of life.
Eika Katappa unfolds its enigmatic, cryptically associative attractions with
the powerful fascination of the early films of Luis Bunuel. The relationships are,
however, far more complex than Bunuel 's surrealism. Schroeter embraces with equal
emphasis the Nibelung myth and Rigoletto, a. dramatic story of prostitution, or a
- OVER -
legend of the saints, a syrupy song sung by Caterina Valente from his youth, as well
as a passionate aria of Maria Callas from a Verdi opera. Thus woven together into a
musical tapestry of most heterogeneous sources, with balletic or highly pathetic
dramatic imitations, with ritual and dramatic gestures, with picture-postcard images
and documentary flashes, he creates a pandemonium of western culture, its forced
emotions, its transcending Utopias and fears, its myth and their reflection in kitsch.
- Wolfram Schutte, Goethe-Institute, Munchen, 1988.
Eika Katappa consists of 7 parts, which altogether confirm what each individual part
already represents independently by itself. With the alienation of Christian eschat-
ology, various opera reductions, a theatrical-dilletantish section and the infusion
of modernistic stereotypes of experience which can become transparent through the
extreme slowdown, an erotic relationship in exaggerated purism remains as the center
of things. The extreme static quality of this section dissolves the outwardly
dramatic value of the rest of the film, as well as the lack of imagination of the
specific text, and reshapes it to the exaggerated framework of the primitive yet
absolutely tragic torpidity of this human-aesthetic evolutionary tale. The follow-
ing final section of the film documents this with the assistance of a selected con-
crete possibility as human failure in the face of a challenge of total purity.
- Werner Schroeter.
Werner Schroeter
Retrospective
Goethe-lnstitut San Francisco
EIKA KATAPPA
The Pacific Film Archive, Frame Une/ Gay and Lesbian
Film Festival, the Cinematheque, and the Goethe-lnstftut
are presenting a series of films by the German director
Werner Schroeter.
***
At the Pacific Film Archive
2625 Durant Ave, Berkeley
Tuesday, Nov. 29, 7:00 pm -Kingdom of Naples
Thursday,
Thursday,
Tuesday.
Thursday,
Tuesday,
Thursday,
Dec. 1 , 7:30 pm -The Rose King
Dec. 1 , 9:30 pm -Lovers Council
Dec. 6, 9:00 pm -Day of *.h3 Idiots
Dec. 8, 7:30 pm -Palermo or Wolfsburg
Dec. 13, 9:00 pm -The Death of Maria Malibran
Dec. 15, 8:45 pm -Eika Katappa
*
At the San Francisco Art Institute
800 Chestnut Street
Sunday, Dec. 4, 8:00 pm
Sunday, Dec.11, 7:30 pm
-Eika Katappa
-Palermo or Wolfsburg
***
At the Roxie Theater
3117 - 16th Street (at Valencia), San Francisco
Monday, Dec. 12, 6:00 pm
8:00 pm
9:45 pm
-The Death of Maria Malibran
-The Rose King
-Dress Rehearsal
Tuesday, Dec. 13, 6:15 pm -Dress Rehearsal
8:00 pm -The Rose King
9:45 pm -Kingdom of Naples
***
At the Goethe-lnstitut
530 Bush Street, San Francisco
Thursday, Dec. 1 . 6:30 pm -The Day of the Idiots
Thursday, Dec. 8, 6:30 pm -Lovers Council
Thursday, Dec. 15, 6:30 pm -Willow Spr*ngs
1969, 144 minutes, no subtitles necessary
cast: Rosy-Rosy, Magdalena Montezuma
Proof of Schroeter's famous statement that 'There are only
high points in my films," is this opus of nine parts and
fifty-six scenes teeming with images of enigmatic beauty,
which catapulted Schroeter into the pantheon of
underground cinema at the 1970 Cannes festival. Moving
from the Nordic myths of the Nibelung saga to the
Rigoletto story set in a sky-blue Capri, the actors, in
unlikely locales and dress, mouth their lines with
calculated clumsiness while canned vocalists of
world-repute declaim Verdi, Puccini and Beethoven on the
sound track. Schroeter's accompanying program notes, in
English, are typical: "Mario sings on top of a mountain of
his comfortless agony." "Only Mozart can express the
pains of the now sonless father." 'Thinking of her sinful,
unnatural life, the fragile pop star must die on a lonesome
and dirty road, sighing helplessly: 'Life is very precious,
even now,' while her younger brother comes to close her
broken eyes forever."
THE DEATH OF MARIA MALIBRAN
(DER TOD DER MARIA MALIBRAN)
1972, 104 minutes, no subtitles necessary
cast: Candy Darling, Magdalena Montezuma
Widely considered Schroeter's masterpiece, this legendary
film embodies the "non plus ultra" of his aesthetics.
Warhol's superstar Candy Darling and Schroeter's own
diva Magdalena Montezuma join a cast of mock lesbians
and transvestites in a high-kitsch biography of Maria
Malibran, a 19th century opera star who literally sang
herself to death in an attempt to please her audience.
Schroeter's stunning tableaux of surging passions and
lurid sunsets are matched by a soundtrack that combines
Tex-Mex, arias from German operas, Tin Pan Alley and
the classic 'The love of a boy can change a girl into a
woman." As Amos Vogel says: "... a creative perversity
that bespeaks the presence of genius."
WILLOW SPRINGS
1973, 78 minutes, German and English with subtitels
cast: Magdalena Montezuma, Christine Kaufmann
Schroeter set out to make a film about Marilyn Monroe ten
years after her death as a meditation on the new feminism
in America. The result was this bizarre chamber
melodrama about three women who turn an abandoned
shack in the Mojave Desert Into a kind of Charles Manson
commune. The three lure men to their lair, force them to
have sex, then rob and murder them. With a music track
that includes Bizet, Yugoslavian folk tunes, the Andrew
Sisters and the Blue Ridge Rangers, Schroeter fashions a
spectacle of female power which critics have compared to
Fassbinder' s The bitter tears of Petra von Kant' and
Altmann's Three Women.
DRESS REHEARSAL
(DIE GENERALPROBE)
1980, 90 minutes, French and German w/ English subtitles
One of the most daring and original documentaries ever
made, Schroeter 's account of the 1980 experimental
theater festival In Nancy is less straight documentary than
a personal, weirdly sweet vision of the human comedy" (J.
Hoberman, Village Voice). Incorporating a strange
meditation on Hitler and General Motors with acts by the
creme of the International performance circuit - the Pina
Bausch Ensemble, Sankal Juko, Japanese mime and
female impersonator Kazuo Onoo, New York wild woman
Pat Olezko and bad boys The Kipper Kids - Schroeter
overlays his extreme images with a music score that
alternates between French ballads and Maria Callas
singing Puccini. 'The most important, the most beautiful
and the most inspired film by a German director In 1980."
(Eckhart Schmidt)
THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES
(IL REGNO Dl NAPOLI)
1978. 125 minutes, multilingual with English subtitles
cusl: Romeo Giro, Antonio Orlando
Often compared to Bertolucci's epic 7900 and Visconti's
La Terra Trema, THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES has been
hailed as "a new beginning for Schroeter - his best film to
date" (Var/eryJ . Filtering classic Italian neoreallsm through
his operatic sensibility, Schroeter charts the contrasting
fates of a brother and his sister from 1944 to 1976 as they
struggle to survive in, and then escape from, Naples'
underground of black marketeers, prostitutes and
homosexuals.
PALERMO OR WOLFSBURG
1980, 175 minutes, Italian and German w/ English subtitles
cast: Nicolo Zarbo, Magdalena Montezuma
Winner of the top prize (The Golden Bear) at the Berlin
Film Festival. PALERMO OR WOLFSBURG Ironically
provoked criticism from some of Schroeter's fans, who
found it too linear, and praise from some of his detractors,
who found it extraordinarily stylish and engrossing. The
film tells the story of a young Italian Immigrant in three
acts, each with a different setting and distinct visual style,
his impoverished life In Sicily; his alienated existence In
Germany, where he works in the Volkswagen factory; and
his surreal trial for the murder of two men.
THE DAY OF THE IDIOTS _
(TAG DER IDIOTEN) ]
1982, 105 minutes, German with English subtitles
cast: Carole Bouquet, Ingrid Caven 1
Schroeter's most extreme film stars Carole Bouquet
(before her stints in James Bond films and as the "new
Chanel girl") as a schizophrenic from a wealthy family who I
ends up in an asylum where the doctors are as mad as the "
patients. The film scandalized the Cannes festival where it
replaced Fassbinder's Querelle, and sharply divided
critical opinion. David Overbey called It "One of the ten |
best of 1982... stylish and uncompromising." Variety
sniffed: "Practically all the taboos of erotic moviegoing are -
broken... at best this Is probing avant-garde theatre - at I
worst a thinly disguised exploitation film."
I
LOVERS COUNCIL
(UEBESKONZIL)
1981, 91 minutes, German with English subtitles
cast: Magdalena Montezuma, Kurt Raab
This wildly funny and inventive cautionary tale about
censorship, sex, religion, repression and desease,
features key members of both Fassbinder's and
Schroeter's troupes. Focusing on the trial of poet Oskar
Panizza, the film recreates his Infamous play, Lovers
Council, which is set in heaven in the 16th century. An
ailing God, upset about the sexual depravity of mankind,
sets up a council with Mary (a designing old lady) and
Jesus (a sickly youth with homosexual tendencies), to
develop a strategy to punish all fornicators. They
comission the devil to create a plague (syphilis) that will
spread across earth, a desease which emanates from the
Papal court. Ostensibly a satire on the viciousness of
moralists, LOVERS COUNCIL offers prescient parallels
with the religious hysteria surrounding AIDS.
THE ROSE KING
(DER ROSENKONIG)
1986, 103 minutes, multilingual with English subtitles
cast: Magdalena Montezuma. Antonio Orlando
Chosen as one of the ten best films of 1987 by the Village
Voice THE ROSE KING is the astonishing culmination of a
great career. An intoxicating Gothic tale of homosexual
and Oedipal fixation, the film features Magdalena
Montezuma, Schroeter's unforgettably striking superstar
diva, in her her last performance before her death as
Anna, the widowed owner of a seaside resort where her
beloved son nurtures his twin obsessions: a rose garden
and a stunning young Italian who is kept tied up in a barn.
A BRIEF PORTRAIT
Werner Schroeter was bom In Thuringia In 1945. After
having studied psychology In Mannheim he passed the
entrance examinations for the Academy of Film and
Television In Munich but left this school only a few weeks
later because what he really wanted was to direct operas.
At the age of 12 Schroeter already possessed a camera. In
1968 he travelled with a number of 8 mm films to the festival
of experimental films in Knokke where he made the
aqualntance of HoJger Mischwitzky, who, under the
pseudonym of Rosa von Praunheim, worked together with
Schroeter in 1968 and 1969. What the two filmmakers had in
common was an emphatic love for triviality, for imitating the
exalted things, and for the pathos of emotions. Von
Praunheim, however, derived his material more and more
unequivocally from the homosexual scene and eventually
became its most resolute public protagonist. Werner
Schroeter, on the other hand, was strongly influenced by
musical melodrama, by the great Italian operas of the 19th
century, the religious music of German and French Romantic
composers, and by popular hits.
In 1968 at the Mannhelmer Film Week Werner Schroeter
achieved a breakthrough with his film Eika Katappa, a
two-and-half-houNong tapestry of myth and melos. However,
as non-narrative and plotless works scarcely had any chance
In reaching the cinemas, Schroeter turned to television. The
ZOF (Second German Television network) gave him an
opportunity to show his work In a late evening series of
experimental films.
Schroeter's works remained beyond the German domestic
film and cinema discussion partly because of his use of
bizarre subjects, exotic locations, and foreign languages,
partly because of his aesthetics. In contrast to the separation
of high and low cultural forms, of art and kitsch, of the
artificial and the trivial, Werner Schroeter takes all signs of
emotions seriously, however distorted, diminished,
"degenerate" they may be. The underlying principle of his
films Is a radical unseriousness towards the communicative
forms of art.
On the other hand, Werner Schroeter takes seriously, indeec
literally" what is often subject to ridicule: the contents o
operas, Individual moments in them, the transcendental, the
absolute in melodrama, and the promise of happiness, the
experience of suffering to be found In everyday popular
songs and in folk culture.
Filmography
1967 Zwei Katzen, n-8 mm; running time unknown;
copy lost.
1968 Maria Callas singt 1957 Rezitativ und Me der
Elvira aus Emani 1844 von Giuseppe Verdi;
n-8 mm; 15 mins
Mona Lisa, n-8 mm, 35 mins
Maria Callas Portrat, n-8 mm, 3 mins
Ca//as Walking Lucia, n-8 mm, 3 mins
La Morte d'lsotta, n-8 mm, 50 mins
Paula - "Je reviens", n-8 mm, 35 mins (revised
1970)
Grotesk - burlesk - pittoresk, n-8 mm, approx.
40 mins; copy lost; (in collaboration with Rosa
von Praunheim)
Himmelhoch, n-8 mm, 12 mins
Argila, 16 mm, 41 mins
1969 Neurasia, 16 mm, 41 mins
Eika Katappa, 16 mm, 144 mins
Nicaragua, 16 mm, approx. 80 mins
1970 DerBomberpilot, 16 mm, 65 mins
Anglia, 16 mm, (not released)
1971 Salome, 16 mm. 81 mins
Macbeth, MAZ / video, 60 mins
Funkausstellung 1971 - Hitparade, MAZ /
video, (not aired)
The Death of Maria Malibran, 16 mm, 104 mins
1972/73 Willow Springs, 16 mm, 78 mins
1973/74 Black Angel, 16 mm, 71 mins
1975/76 Floconsd'OrlGoldflocken, 16 mm, 163 mins
1 978 The Kingdom of Naples, 1 25 mins
1979 Palermo or Wolfsburg, 35 mm, 177 mins,
"Goldener Bar" at the Beriinale 1980
1980 Dress Rehearsal, 16 mm, 88 mins
1982 Lovers Council , 35 mm, 95 mins
The Day of the Idiots, 35 mm, 110 mins
1983 The Laughing Star, 35 mm, 110 mins
1986 Argentina, for ex., 16 + 35 mm, 91 mins
The Rose King, 35 mm, 100 mins
RECENT FILMS BY VINCENT GRENIER
FILMMAKER IN PERSON
Thursday, December 8, 1988
I think of Grenier as a ... (watch out, here it comes, lacerated by
misuse, a limping hump of a word) as a 'poet.' By that I mean someone
who is not interested in "poetic 1 outcry, but in selection, composition,
and silence. Perhaps even a romantic poet in that, instead of letting us
pass through his images unscathed as a documentarian might, enabling us to
proceed directly to the object photographed, Grenier keeps us protectively
imprisoned in his images ... After giving assurance, after lulling us, he
plops us down.
Repeatedly, Grenier 's legerdemian brings us not to illusion, but out
of it to it s objects . . . And so arises the difficulty in writing about
Grenier 's work: there are no anecdotal justifications. In mid-sentence
you realize your words have become descriptions of themselves and of other
imagined words. - Martha Haslanger, The Downtown Review, Winter 1979/80
TIME'S WAKE (once removed) (1977-87); 12 minutes. B&W. 16mm.
This film, while containing some images from an earlier version, is a com-
pletly new work. It is a collection of 'windows' on a personal past; the
first and intimate effort at dwelling on various paradoxes as offered by
the pretence of the double image. - Vincent Grenier.
I.D. (1988); 60 minutes. B&W. 16mm.
Part 1, Prologue 11 minutes.
Part 2, (Joanne) 10 minutes.
Part 3, (Milton) 17 minutes.
Part 4, (Steve & Nadra) 22 minutes.
In I.D. I tried to find a symbosis to so many different ideas and con-
cerns I have been entertaining for a number of years. A driving interest
in this film has been the driving conflicts between the persona and the
individual qualities of a person. Also an interest in superimposition partly
as a disruptive device equally metaphorical of conflicts between interior and
exterior spaces. The use of synch-sound 'reality 1 with an eye on tension
between offscreen and onscreen spaces. Lip synch is used in counterpoint mostly.
The procedure for the film involved interviewing relatively uninhibited people
with expressive personalities. I asked them about events which made them feel
estranged and alienated from things or people around them. From these conver-
sations, physical contexts were sought for their interactive possibilities.
The participants were exposed to situations that were partly uncomfortable.
The camera does not simply prod but also is an active participant; not so much
to render meaninglal but to appreciate and transpose. - Vincent Grenier.
The Foundation lor Art in Cinema
is supported in part with lunds Irom:
National Endowment tor the Ans
California Ans Council
San Francisco Grams lor the Ans
The San Francisco Foundation
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
' , 'SQUEAKY WHEEL- VIDEO FROM ' BUFFALO
Julie Zando in person
Saturday, December 10, 1988
Buffalo has had a rich history of experimentation in experimental filmmaking. Lead
by such recognized figures as Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and Steina
and Woody Vasulka, the city was strong in minimalist and image-processing traditions.
Recently, there has been a resurgence of experimental activity, most notably in the
media arts. The locus of activity has been at Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Resource
Center, a small, funky storefront that collectively works to support media and film
productions. All of the work selected tonight are from members of this support group.
'Bella Donna Poisoning. . .Masculization of the Clitoris and other complaints,' Chris
Hill/Barbara Lattanzi: This is the first tape made collaboratively by these artists,
both are video curators at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center. It deals with medical
terminology and how medicine has historically defined female genitalia as symptomatic.
'Soma,' Barbara Lattanzi: This work-in-progress is a tongue and cheek exploration
of text and its role in joke-telling.
'Life,' Heather Connor/Armin Heurich: A humorous view of fundamental Christian ideology.
'Human Beat Box,' Armin Heurich: This tape was made from appropriated television imagery
of a mercenary training camp in the United States.
'Last Rites,' Armin Heurich: A compelling, expressionistic portrait of a son's
relationship to his father.
'Tan Can,' Cheryl Jackson: This tape was shot with a Fisher Price Pixelvision
camera- a children's toy. It is the first, to our knowlege, video art tape made
with this simple and inexpensive tool. The work is an ironic critique of the pursuit
of the 'perfect' tan.
'The Heimlich Maneuver(an excerpt) 1 & 'You are understood, 1 Kevin Fix/Richard Wicka:
These two works featuring performances by Kevin Fix operate as extraordinary critiques
of authority and consumerism.
'How to Get Rich While Sleeping' & 'The Lion and the Lips,' Brian Springer:
Springer has been actively involved in mass communications technologies- satellite
piracy, public access television, surveillance, phone communications. His 'How to
Get Rich' features a shockingly authentic audio tape recording from a real estate
sales department. 'The Lion and the Lips' is a 30 sec. excerpt from a % hr. program.
(The 30 sees, were looped 45 times) The people of Buffalo have struggled for years
to set up a successful public access channel. The franchised cable operator, TCI of
Buffalo, had stymied developments on the channel, and tried to create public fears
over the type of programming that would be made available. The director of TCI
publicly announced that he would never allow homosexual content on public access-
a clear violation of the F.C.C. code regulating free expression for the channel.
'The Lion and the Lips' refers to the animalistic businessmen who would prevent
'the lips' from meeting... it was submitted to the station as a challenge- Springer
assumed that it would be censored, and a possible" law suit would be initiated to
resolve the issue. To his surprise, TCI agreed to cablecast the program. They
had extensive publicity, the most ever for a public access program, prior to the
show. They hoped to 'prove' to the public that public access would bring sexual
and irresponsible programming. A live call-in response program
directly followed its cablecast, with the TCI director personally handling the calls.
Of 42 call-ins, 2 said that they were offended, and 40 said that they thought that it
was too boring and repetitive. The director was replaced 4 month after 'The Lion
and the Lips' cablecast.
'A History of Capitalism and Religion' & 'ACT UP at the FDA,' Ellen Spiro:
Spiro has had a large influence on her peers- her energy and skill for organizing
has helped to define the Buffalo media community as 'family.' A photographer as
well as a video artist, these two selections exhibit her varied interests and
styles. 'A History' is a short, humorous tape on capitalism. 'ACT UP' is a moving
documentary of the recent ACT UP demonstration at the FDA headquarters in Washington
B.C.
These tapes can be obtained from:
Squeaky Wheel
P.O. Box 251
Ellicott Square Station
Buffalo, N.Y. 14205
JULIE ZANDO
Program Notes
The A Ha! Experience, 1988, color, stereo, 4 minutes 32 seconds
The "Aha-erlebnis (experience)" is the moment when a child first
recognizes his own image in a mirror. It is an experience critical to the
development of intelligence and identity. It is also a moment when the 'self
is surrendered to the control of an external influence. (Described by Lacan
as the "assumption of the armour of an alienating identity.")
I interpret this broadly to suggest that the Mother acts as the
reflecting surface from which the child develops his/her sense of self.
Desire for the mother's body, and later for the lover's, mediates the
child/female's subjectivity. This is accomplished by controlling love. The
child accepts the power of the mother to confer or withold love; it is the
mother's power to fulfill desire that shapes a child's sense of identity.
Similarly, a camera controls love by directing, or not directing its attention
to the desiring subject.
The narration describes a scene in which a young woman, on the brink
of sexual awakening, is shocked by the presence of her mother in her bed.
This image haunts her, and the imagined presence of the mother's body
provides the backdrop for all further sexual encounters. All desire is
subsequently understood as a derivitive of this experience. It is the
mother's desire (her presence in the bed) that directs and controls the scene
of passion - she is the ultimate subject whose love confers sexual and
psychical identity. Likewise, the camera acts as a tool that directs and
controls desire. Its frame forever enslaves the 'self in a game of passion.
Let's Play Prisoners, 1988, b&w (color signal), stereo, 22 minutes
"Let's Play Prisoners" is about how power is exchanged between
females. It is based on a short story, in which a young girl is manipulative
and cruel towards her girlfriend. The girlfriend takes it - she loves
absolutely and indiscriminately because for her masochism is a source of
love.
The short story is read in three parts. Additionally, there are two
scenarios in which the story is reconstructed. In one, the author of the
story, Jo Anstcy, and the videomaker replace the roles of the young girls.
While Jo rereads the story of victimization, the director controls the scene.
In the other scenario, a young girl retells the story, this time with
prompting from her mother. In this scene, the girl's search for love and
approval is transferred from her friend to her mother. So then, the short
story operates as a model for power relations between mothers and lovers.
The tape examines the relationship between power and love. Power is
a substitute for love, or love is feigned when a subject feels that she has
lost power. Conversely, powerlessness is a strategy for attracting love (in
so far as love is defined as having control over another.)
"Let's Play Prisoners" suggests that any struggle over love is modeled
after the Mother/Child relationship. Their relations create a paradigm of
need and dependency versus power and control. The tape suggests that this
same power dynamic established between mother and child is transferred
onto friends and lovers.
Hey Bud, 1987, color, b&w, stereo, 10 minutes, 36 seconds
"Hey Bud" revolves around the suicide of Bud Dwyer, a government
official who killed himself before a television audience. I view the suicide
as pornographic. The suicide, exposed to a wide television audience,
becomes a kind of sex act that plays upon the tension created between
exhibitionist and voyeur. It forces viewers to take either an cmpathetic
position vis a vis the exhibitionist, or to act as voyeurs (who release their
repressed desire to see the forbidden face of Death).
My interest is to understand the power seated in the position of the
exhibitionist, and to explore that source of power for my own personal
drama. Bud Dwyer gained power by authoring his own death, but his power
is fatal: the instant power is taken via exhibitionism, it is lost through
death. This is the traditional power for women who must seek power via
exhibitionism and exploitation - they gain power only through death-of-self.
I Like Girls For Friends, 1987, color, b&w, stereo, 2 minutes 26 seconds
The tape is about seduction. The audience is seduced by the female
narrator, while at the same time repelled by the seductress* desperate need
for love and approval. The title is ironic although the narrator "likes
girls for friends better than boys," the attraction is masochistic and
destructive.
' . f .
PALERMO ODER WOLFSBURG by WERNER SCHROETER
Sunday, December 11, 1988
J
What seems to be new in Schroeter's films is the discovery-exploration
which the camera makes of the body. It is a matter of a meeting, at the
same time calculated and aleatory, between the body and the camera, discov-
ering something, changing an angle, a volume , a curve, following a trace, a
line, eventually a wrinkle. And then the body is abruptly dis-organized
becoming a landscape, a tempest, etc. What Schroeter's camera does is not cut
up the body for the purposes of desire. It treats the body like dough, making
it rise and creating images out of it for and of pleasure. From this always
unforseeable meeting point of the camera (and its pleasure) with the body (and
the pulsations of its own pleasure) are born these images, these pleasures with
multiple entries. - Michel Foucault, Cinematoqraphe , January 1975.
PALERMO ODER WOLFSBURG (1979); 175 minutes. Color. 16mm.
In the context of P.P.Pasolini's Scritta corsare, this is a film about the
'internal colonization of Europe', the destruction of a homogeneously evolved
living culture that, even in its native environment, is already in a state of
decay.
The first part, which is set in Nicola's village at home, has a semi-
documentary character about it and is dominated by the performances of the lay
actors, their dialect and folklore. The middle section alternates between real-
istic and stylized behavior. The film becomes bilingual. Its final part, the
court scenes, is satirically strident and grotesquely drawn. Here, Schroeter's
anti-realistic style takes over not merely the action, the composition of the
pictures, montage and editing, but sound as well, interwoven, like a melodic
arch in the ensembles at the climaxes of the great Verdi operas. Nicola's path
is continually interrupted by scenes from a Sicilian Passion he recalls. This
systematic paralleling of Christus and Nicola would seem to be related to Passo-
lini's Accattone , where the 'living out of life to death' of the title part, a
suburban pimp, is commented on by quotations from Bach's St. Matthew's Passion.
Schroeter's method is more organically developed. Through foreign eyes and
through alien sensibilities and experiences, with which he identifies himself
decidedly and in partisan fashion, Schroeter attempts in Palermo Oder Wolf sburg
to take a look at the Germany of today.
- Wolfram Schutte, Goethe-Institut , Munchen, 1988.
In juxtaposing and uniting myth and kitsch postcards, quotations, references,
travesties, rituals and gestures syncretically in his own aesthetic cosmos, the
'scandal' thus created does not exist in any reciprocal 'criticism 1 or 'irony'
between 'irreconcilable' elements; no, the outrage of Schroeterian poesy is the
passion, the empathy with which he dissolves, dithyrambically through all ages,
cultures and tastes, the separate and encapsulated witnesses of the dense layers
of life and sensibility. One might almost say he liberates and delivers them
from the petrification to which culture has subjected them and restores them to
the realm of sensory experience. - ibid.
EROTIC PSYCHE
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As technologists of the body focused on desire and its discontents. Erotic
Psyche, working in film, video, slides, performance, sound, and text,
separated after 51/2 years of intense collaboration (1983-88), going east
and west coast. This is a re-perspective of their modern mythic transmedia
works, incorporating industrial majestic music (SPK, Test Oepi., Psychic TV)
with live vocals and performance in the mix. "Erotic Psyche's richly layered
tapestries of hallucinatory images are riddled with provocative rituals, from
sex to science to surgery, that are guaranteed to produce frissons of
pleasure." Wooiter. Village Voice. "They fuse the dynamics of dream,
blood. Are * flesh." K.K. Wanglung, Berlin.
BRADLEY EROS AND A
Mutable Fire (1984 7 min)
Toteis of destruction & desire. Combustible urges in a junk black lass.
Psyche Psychosis (1984 7 min.)
Subversive blood languages
Cassandra; Seething at the Mouth (1985, 7 min.)
Revenge of the dirty words. Visions of the visionary denied.
Madness of the Day (1986-7, 9 min.)
A labyrinth of pure war: the city is a box full of speed
Collaboration with the Alchemical Theatre, texts by Blanchot & Virillio*
EEC of the REM (1988 performance)
These live wires fon a vortex
Pyrotechnics (1986, 10 min.)
The ecstasy of transiissions,
el-e-mental -body (1988 performance)
The pregnant Androgyne fires the birth
Electra-Morphic (1987 13 min.)
orl'd rather be a Lightning Rod than a Seisaoqraph
A science-friction of pyro-electric energy.
Proiethea's hoiage to Reich & Tesla & the Orgone of alternating current
Total time: Approximately 1 hour
All tech & text ( except * ) by Erotic Psyche
Musics used include Psychic TV, SPK, Test Dept., Diamanda Galas,
Tuxedo Moon, Klaus Nomi, Steve Jones, Nurse with Hound
Videotapes of all works to be released by Mystic Fire Video in 1989
This show is dedicated to Heidi House
Special thanks to Mia Houlberg, Michele Handlean, & Mark Durant
V
..-.,._ . . -
EROTIC PSYCHE; EXCESS and ECSTASY
Thursday, Dacember 15, 1988
Erotic Psyche, composed of Aline Mare and Bradley Eros, were one of
the most provocative performance duos on New York's Downtown scene. During
the pair's five and a half years of intense collaboration between 1983 and
1988 they used film, video, slides, performance, sound and text to create
spectacles of the body. Mare and Eros work in this multi-media form, more
akin to Happenings than anything that has happened since, as they fill the
space with an imagistic stream of slides, music, movies and live action in
an eloquent portrayal of the primal self that exists beneath the civilized
veneer of our culture.
In their 8mm footage, the use of superimposition and strategic over-
painting suggests this is a relic from some lost, decadent pre-Raphaelite,
avant-garde. They experiment with advanced technologies and ideas such as
psycho-generation, 'perceptual speed', and infrared as a means of penetrating
beyond visual light, in an effort to coax new imagery from unconscious sources.
In the work of Eros and Mare the movements of a personalized
psychic/aesthetic symbology is shown as indissociable from a
larger cultural context over-determined by media, politics,
art history and the necessities of street-level survival.
The basic color and texture of the photo image is used to
create photomasaics with a painter's subtlety and command of
composition; the approach is poetic and the effect is immediate |
and vivid. - Michael Carter, Exhibition in Japan and N.Y. 1987. '
Kith
- a kind of alchemical crucible, whose total effect was a dark I
but lucid primordial trance, where thinking and dreaming inter- I
sect. Their images juxtapose an active realm of prehistory
with a careful skimming of the flotsam and jetsam of modern j
culture. - VanVliet, Abrasion, Amsterdam, 1986. \
Using a myriad of original realizations from the unconscious, j
Erotic Psyche interprets images of sex and violence in search J
of the Utopian hermaphrodite. Only when you understand what
you want to destroy, can the image become reality and the
control process be short-circuited. j
- Fotografie Kutur Jeetzt, Berlin, 1985. I
Erotic Psyche has presented their psycho-sexual maelstrom throughout the f
United States and Europe, including stops in Berlin, Amsterdam, Turin, Buffalo j
and Chicago as well as their native New York City. This will be their only
presentation in the Bay Area, where Mare is currently in residence. J
LATE AUTUMN by YASUJIRO OZU
Sunday, December 18, 1988
I portray what should not be possible as if it should
be possible, but Ozu portrays what should be possible
as if it were possible, and that is much more difficult.
Kenji Mizoguchi, Kikan Film, 1969.
Yasujiro Ozu was born in 1903. At the age of twenty he joined Shochiku
where, four years later, he directed his first film. "If you really want to
know the truth, I didn't want to be a director as quickly as all that. If I
were an assistant I could spend my evenings drinking. A director has to
spend his time working on continuity." During his thirty-six years in the
industry, Ozu produced fifty-four films, but through 1935 he never experimen-
ted with sound. Most of his silent films disappeared during the war. Many
of his sound films, especially the ones made during the war, were never
released abroad. Unmarried, he lived with his mother the simple life cele-
brated in his films. He was awarded the Purple Ribbon Award, and the Art
Academy Award, the first member of the Japanese motion picture industry to
be so honoured. He died in 1963 on the evening of his sixtieth birthday.
LATE AUTUMN (1960); 127 minutes. Color. 16mm.
the struggles of self-definition, of individual freedom, of disappointed
expectations, of impossible communications, of separation and loss brought
about by the inevitable passages of marriage and death.
Just as the situations and the people themselves became archetypes, the
cinematic technique became a redirection to present, linear time, to sequences
based on a 'primitive cinema' format of long shot, medium shot, close-up and
back again, to camera and editing work that rejects movement and all that smacks
of virtuosity. What remains after all the pruning is an anti-dramatic, slow
paced and deeply moving revelation of direction that fulfills the Miles van der
Rohe maxim that less is more.
...Ozu's films are not for those seeking Utopian solutions. He never made
claims for the possibility of romantic love, worldly success, or even human
communication. Only acceptance, never happiness, was open to Ms characters,
no matter what social class they belonged to ... he went straight into the
irrationality of character and that terrible truth: Life is disappointing,
isn't it? - Audie Bock, Japanese Film Directors, 1978.
People sometimes complicate the simplest things. Life, which seems complex,
suddenly reveals itself as very simple - and I wanted to show that in this
film. It is easy to show drama on film; the actors laugh or cry, but this is
only explanation. A director can really show what he wants without resorting
to an appeal to the emotions. I want to make people feel without resorting to
drama. Here I think I was fairly successful, but still the results are far
from perfect. - Yasujiro Ozu writing on Late Autumn.
