The Complete Films of Fred Camper
March 4 & April 16, 2011, 20h
Fred Camper in Person at Both Screenings
The Nightingale, 1084 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL 60642

White Light Cinema is extremely pleased to present these very rare public screenings of the complete films of Fred Camper. Camper has been a thoughtful and articulate writer on film for over forty years (much of his writing is available on his website) and, more recently, has been producing an astonishing body of digital artworks. His earlier filmmaking practice, however, is little known. Long out of distribution (some never in distribution), his short 16mm and Super-8mm films have not been publicly screened for decades. And this presentation of his stunning feature-length Super-8mm film SN is only its third-ever public showing. These films may not be screened again for many years, due to their irreplaceability.

Program One:
A Sense of the Past: Short Films by Fred Camper (1967-1976)
Friday, March 4, 2011, 20h

- Joan Goes to Misery (1967, 8 minutes, 16mm, sound)
- A Sense of the Past (1967, 4 minutes, 16mm, silent)
- Dan Potter (1968, 39 minutes, 16mm, silent)
- Welcome to Come (1968, 3 minutes, 16mm, sound)
- Bathroom (1969, 25 minutes, 16mm, silent)
- Ghost (1976, 1 minute, super-8, silent)

“My five early 16mm films were made in a two year period when I was between 19 and 21, after I had been interested in cinema for only a few years. Each of my early films is somewhat different. Joan Goes to Misery was actually commissioned by a television show that wanted an "underground" film. It's my only film with a narrative, one with psychological overtones, and, like the others, shows influences from both classical Hollywood and avant-garde filmmaking. A Sense of the Past was shot without pre-planning during a long weekend reading Henry James, and I would like to think that its form was somewhat influenced by his passive descriptions that seem to both evoke and conceal great, not fully articulated, traumas. Dan Potter, showing a young man in the woods, was shot over many months as the landscape changes from summer to winter. Though not a portrait, it was inspired by the way Gregory J. Markopoulos's portraits in Galaxie intermingle the identities of his figures with objects around them; less obvious influences are F.W. Murnau's Tabu and the relationships between figures and backgrounds in the films of Howard Hawks. Welcome to Come, which depicts a somewhat mysterious transformation of the image in the course of a single zoom, was my only film to achieve a small measure of "popularity," with a short write up in Variety and prints purchased by several film teachers who still show it today. Bathroom shows a somewhat seedy bathroom, beginning with a stab at seeing it "objectively" that soon fails; the forms descend into what I hope is a terrifying, even self-destroying irrationality. One inspiration was the long take depiction of madness at the end of Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour; another, the two out-of-focus shots of the altar near the end of Douglas Sirk's The First Legion. The program ends with my less-than-one-minute long super-8 film Ghost, which leads to a fleeting final image I hope worthy of its title, and which will be screened twice in a row, my usual practice with this film.” (Fred Camper)

Program Two:
Fred Camper’s SN
Saturday, April 16, 2011, 20h

- SN (1984, c. 110 minutes, super-8, silent)

“SN was born out of an intense personal despair, and a desire to depict a failure of the self, coincident with my discovery of super-8 as a medium completely different from 16mm, well suited to a kind of analog for the written diary. Its images' natural lack of illusionistic presence and authority contributes to the failure theme. The original plan for the film would have required perhaps twenty years of full time work and a great deal of money, leading to a very long film only a small part of which would have been screened each time, selections made with a controlled use of random numbers. What I show now is in ten sections, and in the eighth, on three short reels, a tiny piece of the original plan survives: sixteen shorts serve as the source for this section, and which three are screened and the order in which they are screened at each showing is determined randomly. I have no final prints of any of SN; most sections are edited workprint or edited original, and are thus not exactly as they were intended to look. Still, I believe in it as a film. In part a portrait of Manhattan's constricted spaces, and more generally of the way humans occupy space, it also presents the failed journey of a self to organize, or become present in, the world. The film has only been screened publicly twice before, and will likely only be screened rarely in its original format in the future.” (Fred Camper)