Compelling interviews with notables in avant-garde cinema offer insights into moving image art--its creative processes, formative influences, and hidden psychic effects. Through interviews with George Manupelli, Chick Strand, Tom Gunning, Lynne Sachs, Jay Rosenblatt, Martha Colburn, Evan Meaney, Mike Hoolboom, Robert Nelson, and Nina Menkes, Strange Questions links powerful personal stories with the contemporary media-scape.
Questions addressed in this collection include:
What role does the audience play in the creative process?
Kort Geknipt (“Cut Short) – later called De Andere Film (“The Other Film)– was a television programme on Belgian television from 1969 until 1976, which showed new, innovative, international, experimental and marginal productions in order to rebel against dominant mainstream narrative cinema. Art Cinema OFFoff revives this programme in honour of this idiosyncratic programme which never eschewed controversy.
Canyon Cinema has joined together with SFFILM to welcome renowned Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin to the Bay Area. As a part of the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival, Maddin will present a program of rarely seen works from Canyon’s collection of over 3,200 artist-made films.
For the second installment of Eye on a Director, MAD highlights the collection of the legendary film distributor and archive Canyon Cinema. In the late 1950s, Canyon Cinema brought together independent film artists whose work reflected a remarkable diversity in style and content. Variously called avant-garde, underground and experimental, these artists shared a vision of filmmaking as a form of personal expression, free from the demands and constraints of commercial conventions.
FICXLAB, the Gijón International Film Festival section devoted to experimental film & video returns next November 20-28 with a programme that combines both the work of audiovisual artists and filmmakers. Organized by LABoral, with the collaboration of Lumière Magazine this edition includes screenings of seminal works by R.Bruce Elder and Robert Nelson, as well as programmes dedicated to the work of Nathaniel Dorsky, Helga Fanderl, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva or José Val del Omar, among others.
Dates:
Friday, November 20, 2015 (All day) to Saturday, November 28, 2015 (All day)
Following the tradition of the west coast American independent filmmakers, Robert Nelson (1930-2012) has created a unique cinema profoundly marked by a corrosive humour and a subtle sense of self-mockery. Directed with his friend, the painter William Wiley, The Great Blondino (1967) pays an astonishing homage to the French tightrope walker Charles Blondin (XIX century) famous for having crossed the Niagara Falls on a wire. At the crossroads of European surrealism and popular American culture, the film of Robert Nelson is an invitation to a reverie with a tint of tragic absurdity. This portrayal of an uncertain universe - on the edge of consciousness and unconsciousness – is sharing with the enigmatic collage film by the American filmmaker Larry Jordan, Hamfat Asar (1965) a powerful poetry loaded with desires and death impulses.
Screening introduced by Jonathan Pouthier (Centre Pompidou)
Treasures IV presents works by 27 filmmakers, from Bruce Baillie to Andy Warhol, who changed cinema in the decades following World War II. The line-up reads like a who\'s who of the avant-garde world and includes films by luminaries such as Stan Brakhage
Critical Cinema provides a collection of in-depth interviews with some of the most accomplished "critical" filmmakers. INTERVIEWEES: Hollis Frampton, Larry Gottheim, Robert Huot, Taka Iimura, Carolee Schneeman, Tom Chomont, J.J. Murphy, Beth B and Scott B, John Waters, Vivienne Dick, Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Babette Mangolte, George Kuchar, Diana Barrie, Manuel DeLanda, Morgan Fisher.
