Events

  • Animated Art

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    Animated Art
    Northwest Film Forum
    Thursday, Jan 07 at 07:00PM
    1515 12th Avenue, Seattle, Wyoming, USA

    Rethinking the boundaries of animation, visual art and experimental filmmaking, this program of films by mostly local talent brings together artists working in different disciplines that are rarely shown together.

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    Thursday, January 7, 2010 - 19:00 to Friday, January 8, 2010 - 18:55

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  • Close-up: Histories of the Avant-Garde Part III

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    Close-up: Histories of the Avant-Garde Part III
    January 26th 2009, 20h
    The Working Men’s Club, 44-46 Pollard Row, E2 6NB, London. Ticket: £5/£3 Close-Up members
    Doors open at 7.45 pm
    Presented by Close-Up and The Dog Movement

    PASSAGE THROUGH: A RITUAL by Stan Brakhage + MUSICAL STAIRS by Guy Sherwin

    A chance to see one of Brakhage’s most important sound films for the first time in London alongside Guy Sherwin’s Optical Sound film Musical Stairs.

    Parts 1 and 2 of Histories of the Avant-Garde looked at the resolutely, intensely silent Brakhage film Riddle of Lumen and Guy Sherwin’s Short Film Series. Part 3 enters the world of sound with these two filmmkakers and also looks forward to Part 4 in February, which will be examining music’s manifold relationship to Film with five American masters.

    Brakhage’s relationship to sound was complex. It took an almost indirect collaboration with the composer Phillip Corner to fulfill Brakhage’s desire for a way of giving equal importance to music and image whilst keeping them parallel, distinct experiences. Long passages of black with Corner’s music are cut with silent flashes of colour photography culled from Brakhage’s ‘rejected’ footage. Meditative and demanding but ultimately one of Brakhage’s most rewarding films.
    Sherwin’s Musical Stairs has a method of production and structure that could be seen in opposition to Passage. Image is physically printed on to the optical sound track to create an seemingly absolute synthesis of sound and image.

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  • Close-up: Michael Robinson - 8 Films

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    Close-up: Michael Robinson - 8 Films
    January 19th 2009, 20h
    The Working Men’s Club, 44-46 Pollard Row, E2 6NB, London. Ticket: £5/£3 Close-Up members
    Doors open at 7.45 pm

    Light Is Waiting (Michael Robinson, 2007)

    This programme features 8 films by experimental filmmaker Michael Robinson followed by a Q&A with the artist. Since 2000, Michael Robinson has created a body of film, video and photography work exploring the poetics of loss and the dangers of mediated experience. His work has screened in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, cinematheques and galleries including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, The London Film Festival & Anthology Film Archives.

    “Robinson’s collaged films thus do double duty: while pointing to the mechanisms of mediation and manufactured sentiment, he unlocks the power popular images exercise over our psychological and emotional makeup, reconfiguring them in a way that is funny but not ironic, sincere but not naïve, heartfelt but not sentimental.” - Henriette Huldisch, Aurora 2008: The Infinite Measure

     

    - And We All Shine On (2006, 7 mins, 16mm, Colour)
    An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, spreading deception and myth along its murky path, singing the dangers of the mediated spirit.

    - If There Be Thorns (2009, 13 mins, 16mm & DV)
    A dark wave of exile, incest, and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole. Three star-crossed siblings wander in search of one another as a storm of purple prose and easy listening slowly engulfs them.

    - Hold Me Now (2008, 5 mins,, DV)
    Plagued by blindness, sloth, and operatic devotion, a troubled scene from Little House on the Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism.

    - You Don’t Bring Me Flowers (2005, 8 mins, 16mm, Colour)
    Viewed at its seams, a slideshow of National Geographic landscapes from the 1960’s and 70’s deforms into a bright white distress signal.

    - Light Is Waiting (2007, 11 mins, DV)
    A very special episode of television’s Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.

    - The General Returns From One Place To Another (2006, 11 mins, 16mm & DV)
    Shaping a concurrently indulgent and skeptical experience of the beautiful, the film draws an uneasy balance between the romantic and the horrid. A Frank O’Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.

    - All Through The Night (2008, 4 mins, DV)
    A charred visitation with an icy language of control: “there is no room for love”. Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a shimmering prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.

    - Victory Over The Sun (2007, 13 mins, 16mm, Colour)
    Dormant sites of past World’s Fairs breed an eruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever even cold November rain.

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  • Scratch Projection: Telemach Wiesinger

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    scratch_100112Scratch Projection: Telemach Wiesinger
    Tuesday 12 January 2010 at 20.30h, 6€

    Born in Germany, Telemach Wiesinger is a filmmaker who bases most of his work on the idea of travel. Entered in the collection of Light Cone in 2009, this artist, also photographer, collects images of his "film-poems" during his travels using his 16mm camera with short sequences of a few minutes. At the border of the documentary, his films in black and white have a plastic breathtaking beauty, sometimes accompanied by soundtracks, fruit of his collaboration with composers and musicians.

     

    - Meer (Wolfgang Lehmann & Telemach Wiesinger, 2004, 16mm, B&W, sound, 15')
    - 3 X 1 (Telemach Wiesinger, 2007, 16mm, B&W, sound, 10')
    - Passage...s (Telemach Wiesinger, 2007, 16mm, B&W, silent, 30')

     

    Cinéma Action Christine
    4, rue Christine
    75006 Paris
    FRANCE

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  • Pip Chodorov: Pastrami Recordings & Film Surprises

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    Pip Chodorov: Pastrami Recordings & Film Surprises
    Friday, January 8 - 7:30pm
    UnionDocs
    322 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA
    Suggested donation $7

    - PASTRAMI RECORDINGS Pip Chodorov USA, 2009, 31 minutes, 16mm
    In June 2009, Pip Chodorov and Charlemagne Palestine were invited to the Côté Court festival in Pantin, France to make a filmo-musical performance about their home town, New York City. The film was cut together from images Chodorov filmed on 16mm over a 15-year period, and projected with live music by Palestine from recordings made in New York, and with participation by Chodorov and Benn Northover. This screening will be an attempt to recreate that performance from the film and the music recorded that night.

    - FAUX MOUVEMENTS (WRONG MOVES) Pip Chodorov USA, 2007, 12 minutes, 16mm
    Specific neurons in the brain are responsible for perceiving motion. This film acts directly on those neurons, to create novel motion effects, not on the screen but directly in the brain. Made by bipacking 16mm loops of trains and spirals on the contact printer.

    - ON BEEING AND NOTHINGNESS Emilija Skarnulyte 2009, 3 minutes, Super8
    The Lithuanian language has several words for “death,” one of which is used for bees and people, the other for all other beings. This film was shot time-lapse over a four-day period.

    Pip Chodorov. Born April 13, 1965 in New York. Filmmaking and music composition since 1972. Studied cognitive science at the University of Rochester, NY and film semiotics at the University of Paris, France. Work in film distribution – previously Orion Classics, NYC; UGC, Paris; Light Cone, Paris; and, currently, Re:Voir Video, Paris, which he founded in 1994 and The Film Gallery, the first art gallery devoted excusively to experimental film. He is also co-founder of L’Abominable, a cooperative do-it-yourself film lab in Paris, and the moderator of the internet-based forum on experimental film, FrameWorks.

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  • Xcèntric: January-February 2010 screenings

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    Xcentric December 09Xcèntric: January-February 2010 screenings
    Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
    Montalegre, 5 - Barcelona, Spain

    Anne Charlotte Robertson, Birgit Hein, Nelson Sullivan, Fred Worden, Isabelle Prim, Takashi ITO, Mara Mattushka y Chris Haring, Josef Dabernig, Stan Brakhage, Ming-Yuen S. Ma., Matthias Müller, Marie Losier, Sadie Benning, Virginia Villaplana, Hans Scheirl y Ursula Pürrer, David Domingo, David Gatten, Nanathiel Dorsky, Paul Sharits, Greg Pope, Claudio Caldini, Karen Johannesen, Guy Sherwin, Jim Jennings, Nick Hamlyn, Andrew Noren, Jane Aaron, Leighton Pierce, Louise Bourque, Sara MacLean, Ben Russell, Lewis Klahr, Peggy Ahwesh, Christian MarClay, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, hermanos Lumière, Sharon Lockhart, Ken Jacobs, Sam Taylor-Wood, Hollis Frampton, Emily Richardson, Jean Epstein, F.J.Ossang, Jean-Gabriel Périot, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Maya Deren, Apichatpong Weerasetakhul, Robert Frank, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Eija-Liisa Athila, Dan Graham, John Latham, David Lamelas, Hugo Santiago, Kaucyila Brooke i Jane Cottis, Jennifer Montgomery, Filipa César, Deimantas Narkevicius, Jonas Mekas, Chris Marker, Sergio Belinchón, John Burgan, A.S.M Kobayashi, Kalup Linzy.

    Thursday January 7, 20h Merciless diaries. The 90s: feminine. Anne Charlotte Robertson / Birgit Hein
    Sunday January 10, 18h Merciless Diaries. The ‘80s: Queer. Nelson Sullivan
    Thursday January 14, 20h Welcome to the Secret Society (I)
    Sunday January 17, 18.30h Queer Films. Feedback. Disintegration
    Thursday January 21, 20h Hyperbolas of the Grain
    Sunday January 24, 18.30h Ways of Living
    Thursday January 28, 20h Otherness and fiction
    Sunday January 31, 20h Tropical Modernity. The Cinema of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
    Sunday February 7, 18.30h Against Time I
    Thursday February 11, 20h Against Time II
    Sunday February 14, 18.30h Against Time III
    Thursday February 18, 18.30h Dry Kisses Only
    Sunday February 21, 18.30h The Dialectic of the Remake
    Thursday February 25, 20h Memory of Berlin
    Sunday February 28, 18.30h Benning, Kobayashi and Linzy

    All screenings will be in the original version with Catalan subtitles and film format (16/35 mm) unless indicated otherwise. The CCCB reserves the right to modify the programme for reasons of force majeure. Screenings in the Auditorium. Limited capacity. Punctuality is requested.

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  • Light Industry: Riddles of the Sphinx

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    Light Industry: Riddles of the Sphinx
    Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:30pm
    220 36th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), 5th floor
    11232, Brooklyn, NY, USA
    Introduced by Emma Hedditch

    Riddles of the Sphinx
    Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 16mm, 1977, 90 mins

    Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film addresses the position of women in patriarchy through the prism of psychoanalysis. Riddles of the Sphinx draws on the critical writings and investigations by both filmmakers into the codes of narrative cinema, and offers an alternative formal structure through which to consider the images and meanings of female representation in film.

    The film is constructed in three sections and 13 chapters, combining Mulvey's own to-camera readings around the myth of Oedipus's encounter with the Sphinx with a series of very slow 360 degree panning shots encompassing different environments, from the domestic to the professional. Louise, the narrative's female protagonist, is represented through a fragmented use of imagery and dialogue, in an attempt to break down the conventional narrative structures of framing and filming used to objectify and fetishise women in mainstream cinema. This could be seen as a formal development of the Lacanian analyses that Mulvey had applied to the female image in film in essays such as 1975's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (in Screen).

    Riddles of the Sphinx attempts to construct a new relationship between the viewer and the female subject, presenting her through multiple female voices and viewpoints. The dialogue, constructed from the different voices of Louise, her friends and fellow workers, brings a shifting and ambiguous range of meanings to the film, in contrast to the explanatory authority associated with a conventional voice-over. Other voices and images from outside the film's narrative world also question and disrupt pre-supposed meanings and symbols of the woman within and without the screen; from the mythical enigma of the Sphinx to the appearances of artist Mary Kelly and Mulvey herself.

    As Mulvey herself subsequently put it, "What recurs overall is a constant return to woman, not indeed as a visual image, but as a subject of inquiry, a content which cannot be considered within the aesthetic lines laid down by traditional cinematic practice." - Lucy Reynolds

    Tickets - $7, available at door.

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  • Light Industry: Five Films by Joyce Wieland

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    Light Industry: Five Films by Joyce Wieland
    Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 7:30pm
    220 36th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), 5th floor
    11232, Brooklyn, NY, USA
    Presented in collaboration with X-initiative
    Introduced by Emily Roysdon

    When she came to the US from Toronto in the early 1960s, Joyce Wieland was already known in Canada as a painter who explored themes of female existence in ways that were often controversially explicit, but once in New York she also began working in Super-8 and 16mm. Along with Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, and her husband Michael Snow, Wieland became one of the circle of artists who defined the first generation of structural film (she held the distinction of being the only woman mentioned in P. Adams Sitney's seminal essay which described that sensibility). Though as equally attuned as her peers to an advanced, expanded notion of how space and time might function in cinema, Wieland's work also evinces a sharp wit and inventive narrative sense that foreshadows the small-gauge filmmaking of the 1980s and 90s.

    - Handtinting, 16mm, 1967, 6 mins
    Handtinting is the apt title of a film made from outtakes from a Job Corps documentary which features hand-tinted sections. The film is full of small movements and actions, gestures begun and never completed. Repeated images, sometimes in colour, sometimes not. A beautifully realized type of chamber-music film whose sum-total feeling is ritualistic. - Bob Cowan

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