Nature as Performer in the Films and Installations of Chris Welsby
Cinéma Action Christine
4, rue Christine
75006 Paris
FRANCE
Tuesday 21 April 2009 at 20h30 - 6 €

Chris Welsby has been making and exhibiting work since 1969. His films and film/video installations have been exhibited internationally, at major galleries and museums. In April 2009, he will be presenting at SCRATCH some 16mm films from the 70’s and some recent works.

"In my single screen films and single channel videos the mechanics of film and video interact with the landscape in such a way that elemental processes - such as changes in light, the rise and fall of the tide or changes in wind direction - are given the space and time to participate in the process of representation. The resulting sequences of images make it possible to envisage a relationship between technology and nature based on principles other than exploitation and domination.” - Chris Welsby

- Shore line (1975)
- Shore line 2 (1975)
- Sky light (1986)
- Lost lake (1998)
- At sea (2003)
- Lost lake #2 (2005)
- Waterfall (2004)
- Trees in winter (2006)
- Tree studies (2006)
- Taking time (2008)
- Heavens breath (2009)
- Seven days (1974)
- Stream line (1976)
- Colour separation (1974-76)

Experimental Cinema
April 22-24, 2009
Austrian Film Museum

In contrast to their canonized predecessors like Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol and Michael Snow, the younger generations of American experimental cinema are virtually unknown in Europe. Yet this independent film movement continues unabated. Notwithstanding the current “digital standard”, innovative work with film is undergoing a renaissance in North and South America.

This revival manifests itself not only in the captivating works of new artists who have broken onto the scene, but also in new festivals and film-cultural initiatives, in critical reception (particularly among young online writers) and in the art world, where film projections are again playing a paradoxical "avant-garde role" vis-à-vis the omnipresence of video installation, new media exhibitions and ubiquitous video game art.

Founded ten years ago, Christopher May's TIE - The International Experimental Cinema Exposition has been an ideal platform for these new generations of filmmakers (as well as for rediscoveries from previous decades). After several enthusiastically received events in North and South America, TIE is making its first guest appearance in Europe, at the invitation of the Film Museum. Christopher May will personally introduce four curated programs with a total of 45 works. These include films by several important artists who have yet to be discovered in Europe.

Program 1:
- Powerman (Lenny Lipton, 1966, 5 min)
- Shudder (top and bottom) (Michael Gitlin, 2001, 3 min)
- Transaension (Dan Baker, 2006, 7 min)
- Metaphysical Education (Thad Povey, 2003, 4 min)
- dippingSause (Luther Price, 2005, 10 min)
- Film Dzama (Deco Dawson, 2001, 23 min)
- And We All Shine On (Michael Robinson, 2006, 7 min)
- Observando el Cielo (Jeanne Liotta, 2007, 19 min)
- The Crossing (Timoleon Wilkins, 2007, 6 min)
- Black and White Trypps Number Three (Ben Russell, 2007, 12 min)

Program 2:
- NYC Flower Film (Sandra Gibson, 2003, 3 min)
- Parallax (Christopher Becks, 2008, 6 min)
- Ecstatic Vessels (Diane Kitchen, 2007, 21 min)
- You Don't Bring Me Flowers (Michael Robinson, 2005, 8 min)
- To Be Regained (Zach Iannazzi, 2008, 10 min)
- Angel Beach (Scott Stark, 2001, 10 min)
- A Fall Trip Home (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 11 min)
- July Fix (Jason Livingston, 2006, 3 min)
- The Parable of the Tulip Painter and the Fly (Charlotte Pryce, 2008, 4 min)
- Ingreen (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 12 min)
- Bellagio Roll (Sandra Gibson, 2003, 3 min)

Program 3:
- Blocking (Pablo Marin, 2005, 2 min)
- Progetti (Paul Bartel, 1962, 17 min)
- Mylar Balloon Rip-off (Jason Halprin, 2007, 3 min)
- Whirl (Scott Banning, 2007, 8 min)
- While Revolved (Vincent Grenier, 1976, 10 min)
- [Various 8mm Works] (Frank Biesendorfer, 2000-2009, 17 min.total)
- Space (Luis Recoder, 2001, 14 min)
- My Mess (Jesse Kennedy, 2007, 4 min)
- 1/48 (Jorge Lorenzo, 2008, 1 sec.)
- Clip from Colorado Springs Home of Champions (Jim Prange, 1968, 4 min)
- Double Your Pleasure (M.M. Serra, 2002, 4 min)
- 90 Years (Jonathan Schwartz, 2008, 3 min)
- Across the Rappahannock (Brian Frye, 2003, 11 min)

Program 4:
- What the Water Said, nos. 4-6 (David Gatten, 2007, 17 min)
- In a Year with 13 Deaths (Jonathan Schwartz, 2008, 3 min)
- Oblivion (Tom Chomont, 1969, 4 min)
- Black and White Trypps Number Two (Ben Russell, 2006, 8 min)
- The Fourth Watch (Janie Geiser, 2000, 9 min)
- Spirit House (Robert Todd, 2008, 11 min)
- Artifices #1 (Alexandre Larose, 2008, 4 min)
- Sin título (Focus) (Pablo Marin, 2008, 4 min)
- Film (Parkour) (Cine Parkour, 2008, 20 min)
- Nothing Is Over Nothing (Jonathan Schwartz, 2008, 16 min)
- Sacred Space (David Chaim Cohen, 2007, 14 min)

The MFA Computer Art Department at School of Visual Arts, the New York Digital Salon and the Department of Music and Multimedia Studies at Northeastern University present the New York premiere of the Visual Music Marathon , a 12-hour festival showcasing 120 works by contemporary digital artists and composers from around the world. The event offers an encyclopedic look into the burgeoning practice of visual music, which combines animation and musical composition. The roots of the genre date back more than two hundred years to the ocular harpsichords and color-music scales of the 18th century; the current art form came to fruition following the emergence of film and video in the 20th century.

Return to LH6
Curated by Ken Jacobs

Light Industry
220 36th Street, 5th Floor
Brooklyn, New York
http://www.lightindustry.org

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 7:30pm

"Binghamton, 1969 to 2002. I started in LH1, a much larger room than LH6, hundreds of students but most expected to see only popular movies and a reflection of their own casual and superior attitudes. They weren't the only defiantly stupid ones (seeing that nothing is more worth critical attention than the phenomena of cinema). Established teachers had railed against a Cinema Department before I arrived as a further appeasement of spoiled and rebellious students and a desecration of the discipline of teaching. They had gone off-campus to complain to the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, turds that supported the slaughter of Vietnamese and decried the influx of NewYorkCommieFagNiggerlovingJews, and allies in the protection of students from persons arrested for the screening of Flaming Creatures.

"I then believed that anyone could become a real student (wrong!), just as I was an anyone that had become a teacher. I had prepared by attending The Laff Movie on 42nd Street. It had first influenced my making of Star Spangled to Death and now my teaching. I can't recall the advertising of specific films on the marquee. It was a place for poor men to sleep off a drunk while old comedies were screened, sometimes entire films and sometimes comic sections of films. Film clips! This was indeed revolutionary thinking. One standard applied: whatever was selected had been thoroughly dismissed from public memory, certainly from the few film-history books that then
existed. The great nameless and unthanked anti-snob curator of The Laff Movie, my mystery Professor! Thou scummy and dreary University, where hot dogs and candy bars and drinks were hawked up and down the aisles during screenings, only you, for a quarter, showed me the pre-code Thirties, introducing me to the real Eddy Cantor and Jimmy Durante and Busby Berkeley
in their pre-code prime, when they were forces.

"I expanded on the Laff Movie selections so one never knew what to expect and I disapproved of introductions: students were expected to grapple, and then there'd be talk, lots of it. Assuming I still have something of my teaching chops, you're welcome to sit in on a re-creation of cinema studies
in LH6. (I would sometimes screen some of my own stuff so there just might be samplings and discussion of recent Ken Jacobs work.)" - KJ

Followed by a conversation between Jacobs and Amy Taubin.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Ken Jacobs, was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1933. He studied painting with one of the prime creators of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, in the mid-fifties. It was then that he also began filmmaking (Star Spangled To Death). His personal star rose, to just about knee high, with the sixties advent of Underground Film. In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic -rather than demagogic- cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. A nonprofit filmmaker's co-operative open to all, it made available film equipment, workspace, screenings and classes at
little or no cost. Later he found himself teaching large classes of painfully docile students at St. John's University in Jamaica, Queens.

In 1969, after a week's guest seminar at Harpur College (now, Binghamton University), students petitioned the Administration to hire Ken Jacobs. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, the Administration -during that special period of anguish and possibility- decided that, as a teacher, he
was "a natural." Together with Larry Gottheim he organized the SUNY system's first Department of Cinema, teaching thoughtful consideration of every kind of film but specializing in avant garde cinema appreciation and production. (Department graduates are world-recognized as having an exceptional presence in this field.) His own early studies under Hofmann would increasingly figure in his filmwork, making for an Abstract Expressionist cinema, clearly evident in his avant garde classic Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son (1969) and increasingly so in his subsequent devising of the unique Nervous System series of live film-projection performances. The American Museum Of The
Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, hosted a full retrospective of his work in 1989, The New York Museum Of Modern Art held a partial retrospective in 1996, as did The American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin in 1986 (during his 6 month stay as guest-recipient of Berlin's DAAD award). He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty
Center in Los Angeles, etc. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant. A 1999 interview with Ken Jacobs can be seen on the Net as part of The University Of California at Berkeley's series of Conversations With History.

Tickets - $7, available at door.

About Light Industry

Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project has begun as a series of events at Industry City in Sunset Park, each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually, Light Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings, performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the presentation of
time-based media and foster an ongoing dialogue amongst a wide range of artists and audiences within the city.

About Industry City

Industry City, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is home to a cross-section of manufacturing, warehousing and light industry. As part of a regeneration program intended to diversify the use of its 6 million square feet of space to better reflect 21st century production, Industry City now includes workspace for artists. In addition to offering studios at competitive rates, Industry City also provides a limited number of low-cost studios for artists in need of reasonably priced space. This program was conceived in response to the lack of affordable workspace for artists in New York City and aims to establish a new paradigm for industrial
redevelopment--one that does not displace artists, workers, local residents or industry but instead builds a sustainable community in a context that integrates cultural and industrial production. For more information:
http://www.industrycityartproject.org