Events

  • Directors Lounge: Alina Skrzeszewska - Songs from the Nickel

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    Directors Lounge: Alina Skrzeszewska - Songs from the NickelDirectors Lounge screening:
    Alina Skrzeszewska: Songs from the Nickel
    Thursday, April 28th, 21h
    Z-Bar, Bergstr. 2, D-10115 Berlin-Mitte

    Alina Skrzeszewska created a colorful, sad and thoughtful film about the shadow sides of downtown Los Angeles, not without showing strains of hope. And there is music, songs by the protagonists starring in the film.

    The Nickel, the Eastern part of downtown used to be an isolated island in the urban grid of L.A.: historic but sordid former grand hotels; the number of homeless people surpasses the number of inhabitants multiple times; a network of christian missions and charity organisations are entangled in what is called the Skid Row; from 10 pm through 6:30 am you are allowed to sleep in the street (but then you have to move); there is a lack of over 12,000 beds for homeless shelter; on the other hand, a massive police presence and the reign of crack makes life in the street like a trip to hell. In this strange otherworldly urban zone, the old hotels seem to be islands in the stormy waters, and they are the cheapest places to live in town. Here, the artist Skrzeszewska rented a room for over one and half a year while shooting for her film. Those who live here, and whom we get to know in the film, have at least some kind of steady income, a job in the hotel, a veteran pension, or social welfare for the disabled. They were able to leave the state of homelessness or the circle of jail and drugs.

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  • Xcèntric: At Sea

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    Blue Mantle (Rebecca Meyers, 2010)Xcèntric: At Sea
    Thursday April 28th, 20h
    CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona, Spain

    The sea has always been present on screen as a backdrop to stories of journeys, battles, adventures and scientific expeditions to explore its depths. But more than just a location, the sea is the star of the films in this session, which evoke the centrality of this “place” and maritime motifs, ships and seamen, in their representational strategies, a phenomenon prefigured in painting and literature. The films of Rosalind Nashashibi, Rebecca Meyers and Peter Hutton are nautical incursions, shipboard projects splashed with literary citations and pictorial references. [16-mm screening]

    Programme:
    - Bachelor Machines (Part 1) (Rosalind Nashashibi, United Kingdom, 2007, 31 min.)
    - Blue Mantle (Rebecca Meyers, USA, 2010, 34 min.)
    - At Sea (Peter Hutton, USA, 2004-2007, silent, 60 min.)

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  • The Urban Landscape in Cinematic Transformation

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    Bridges-go-round (Shirley Clarke, 1958)The Urban Landscape in Cinematic Transformation
    New American Cinema Group, Inc. and The Film-Makers' Cooperative
    May 7th & 8th
    Millennium Film Workshop
    66 East 4th Street, (betwween 2nd Ave. and Bowery) New York, NY

    In conjunction with The New Museum’s ambitious five day Festival of Ideas for the New City, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative (FMC) will present The Urban Landscape in Cinematic Transformation, a two day program of four unique screenings of historic and new films from their collection. An avant-garde film series interweaves three threads pertinent to the East Village, Chinatown, and Lower East Side: the urban landscape, subcultures that inhabit them, and changes over time. The screenings will take place at The Millennium Film Workshop (66 East 4th St.).

    Featuring works by: Rachel Amodeo, Rudolph Burckhardt, Bill Brand, Donna Cameron, Shirley Clarke, Peter Cramer, Coleen Fitzgibbons, Henry Hills, Philip Hartman and Doris Kornish, Ken Jacobs, Oona Mekas, Marie Menken, Lynne Sachs, Joel Schlemowitz, MM Serra and Jennifer Reeves, and Mark Street

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  • Memory Work: The films of Cecilia Araneda

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    Memory Work: The films of Cecilia AranedaMemory Work: The films of Cecilia Araneda
    Thursday, April 29th, 19:30h
    Cafe Ex, Club Saw
    67, rue Nicholas Street, Ottawa, Canada

    “The first thing I remember was the step between.”  Chilean-born, Winnipeg-based filmmaker Cecilia Araneda has been working with images since at least 1998, when her first documentary, CHILE: A HISTORY IN EXILE, was released.  She’s been living with images for even longer.  As the title of her first film makes clear, the experience of exile and the absent presence of Chile form a background for much of Araneda’s exploration of memory.  Araneda works in video and film, in fiction, documentary and experimental modes, testing the image for what it tells us about ourselves – our past and how we imagine it in pieces and textures.  Often in Araneda’s work, a fragment of a word or an image or a colour – red, for example - triggers an associational process of remembrance.  To live with images which linger after the moment has passed: the signs of a presence and an absence.  How we remember, how we forget, and the role of the image in stasis and unpredictable movement – these are the motors and the enduring questions of Cecilia Araneda’s memory work in film.

    Cecilia Araneda will be in attendance to introduce and discuss her work.

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  • MassArt Film Society: Maya Deren & Stan Brakhage

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    Meditation on violence (Maya Deren, 1948)MassArt Film Society: Maya Deren & Stan Brakhage
    Wednesday April 20th 2011, 20h
    Massachusetts College of Art, Film Department
    Screening room 1. 621 Huntington Ave. Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA

    Meditation on violence by Maya Deren & Song 23 The 23rd Psalm Branch by Stan Brackhage

    Meditation on violence (Maya Deren, 1948)
    With Chao Li Chi and music by Teiji Ito
    As the movements of Chinese boxing is "forward" some metaphysical concepts of physical, MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE film is, in cinematic terms, a discussion of these concepts using physical movement as a visual means among others. The film begins and ends in the middle of a movement to make it as a visual slice of life, whereas it was and will be at infinity. Respiratory rate, alternating negative / positive, is maintained during approaches and withdrawals from the boxer facing the camera

    23rd Psalm Branch (Stan Brakhage, 1966-78)
    One of experimental great Stan Brakhage's best known but least seen films, 23rd Psalm Branch is a feature-length entry in his Songs series. It is both a beautiful, lyrical work and perhaps his most political film.
    Brakhage combines his own images of Colorado, found footage of war, and some of his earliest hand-painting on film to create a work that is rich with meaning and a key artistic milestone for him. Shot in 8mm and later blown up to 16mm, Song 23 is an extended meditation on war in society, made in response to the war in Vietnam. It is a haunting work, still relevant in it theme and one of Brakhages masterworks. Author P. Adams Sitney wrote that "it is an apocalypse of imagination".

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