Balagan and Magic Lantern Cinema Present:
Ship to Shore
Experimental land- and seascape documentaries by Peter Hutton and James Benning
Two outdoor film events:
Friday, August 24th, 20h
Norman B. Leventhal Park, Post Office Square, Downtown Boston
Saturday, August 25th, 20h
Grant’s Block, 260 Westminster St., Downtown Providence

Balagan and Magic Lantern Cinema have collaborated to present a pair of outdoor film events on consecutive nights in Boston and Providence under the banner “Ship to Shore,” evoking the seafaring histories of their respective cities. Each screening will present one feature film and one short film by acclaimed experimental filmmakers Peter Hutton and James Benning – two artists who share a similarly contemplative approach to place-based documentary film practice while still retaining strikingly original styles of filmic analysis and expression. A former merchant seaman, Hutton has documented four decades of voyages through such places as the Yangtze River, the coastline of northern Iceland, and the Hudson River Valley in his majestically photographed films, which merge observational and diaristic modes of narration, and whose reverent depictions of landscape have been compared to the work of Thomas Cole and the nineteenth-century Luminist painters. Benning has been producing meditative portraits of the American landscape for as many years, creating works that blend rigorous formal concerns with a deep investment in national politics, local histories, and the environment. Along with receiving a host of awards and critical accolades, Hutton’s and Benning’s films have screened at highly prestigious festivals and institutions throughout the world, such as the Vienna International Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London.

Ivan Ladislav Galeta retrospective
As part of the K3 Short Film Festival
August, 23rd, 21h, Visionario, Udine
with the presence of the author

Ivan Ladislav Galeta’s small cinematic universe is indefinite but not infinite; sometimes he lets you see the edges. By Vassily Bourikas, curator of the Experimental Forum - Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The author will be present and explain the concept of his films with his famous flipchart-drawings.

Ivan Ladislav Galeta was born in the Kraj Gornji village, near Zagreb. He graduated from the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb (1967), followed by a degree in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Teacher Training (1969) and Pedagogy from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb (1981). From 1977 to 1990, he was the manager of the University of Zagreb Students Multimedia Centre (MM), the first systematic venue for the screening of national and international experimental film and video art in Croatia. He was the founder and manager of the art cinema Filmoteka 16 (1991-1994). He initiated the introduction of animation (2000) and new media studies (2004) at the same Academy. In 1993 he became an associate media lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and since 2007 he has been a full-time professor. He has been making films since 1969 and videos since 1975. From 1973 he has been exhibiting objects-installations, photographs-installations, expanded cinema presentations, video and TV works, texts, sound installations, spatial interventions, environmental projects and actions. In the mid 1990s he adopted an environmental approach to art with references to Henry David Thoreau, Karel Capek, Masanobu Fukuoka, Bill Mollison, James Joyce, Bela Hamvas, Claude Monet and others. His works are kept at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Centre Georges Pompidou, Oberhausen, Croatian Film Clubs’ Association… He has won numerous awards, including a medal of honour by the Ministry of Culture and Communications of the French Republic in 1999.

Breaking Ground: 60 Years of Austrian Experimental Cinema
August 17 - September 22, 2012
UCLA Film & Television Archive - Billy Wilder Theater
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024

Austria’s avant-garde film tradition, arising at mid-century (and thus, relatively later than those of other Western nations) has been among the most sustained and radical of such traditions. As with other Austrian arts, it is a response (in part) to past national decadence and entrenched conservatism; its repository of cutting-edge experimental film and video works is uniquely impressive and progressive, fracturing into ever-newer distinctions.

The programs in this series have been constructed from avant-garde films and videos produced between 1955 and 2010 in which virtually every technique and genre imaginable is employed, from formalist and structuralist works by such globally renowned figures as Peter Kubelka, Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold, to the radical work by performance-based artists such as VALIE EXPORT, Mara Mattuschka, Kurt Kren and the Viennese actionists, as well as the boundary-breaking contemporary output of artists including Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Johann Lurf and Virgil Widrich.