Saturday, January 31, 2004
Jon's listings:
lehn/schmickler at EI on march 25th
rowe/fennesz at tonic on may 27th
lehn/schmickler/prins/pita at bard on march 24th,
lehn/schmickler at EI on march 25th
rowe/fennesz at tonic on may 27th
lehn/schmickler/prins/pita at bard on march 24th,
Friday, January 30, 2004
Anthology Films, February - March
Sat, Jan 31
5:30ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage PASHT (1965) 5 minutes. BLUEWHITE (1965) 8 minutes. BLOOD’S TONE (1965) 8 minutes. VEIN (1965) 8 minutes. FIRE OF WATERS (1965) 7 minutes. THE HORSEMAN, THE WOMAN AND THE MOTH (1968) 19 minutes. Total running time: 55 minutes. In this group of film poems Brakhage sings of death, childbirth, life and love. THE HORSEMAN, THE WOMAN AND THE MOTH is a tour-de-force of drawing directly onto the film’s surface, which is painted, dyed and treated so that it grows controlled crystals and mold as textures of the figures and forms of the drama.
Friday Feb 6 - Thurs 12:
8:00 PREMIERE THEATRICAL RUN
Stan Brakhage
A CHILD'S GARDEN AND THE SERIOUS SEA
1991, 80 minutes, 16mm, color, silent. Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, NYC.
In poet Ronald Johnson's great epic Ark, in the first book Foundations, the poem “Beam 29” has this passage: “The seed is disseminated at the gated mosaic a hundred feet/below, above/long windrows of motion/connecting dilated arches undergoing transamplification:/'seen in the water so clear as christiall'/(prairie tremblante)” which breaks into musical notation that, “presto,” becomes a design of spatial tilts: This is where the film began; and I carried a xerox of the still unpublished ARC 50 through 66 all that trip with Marilyn and Anton around Vancouver Island. As I wrote him, “The pun 'out on a limn' kept ringing through my mind as I caught the hairs of side-light off ephemera of objects tangent to Marilyn's childhood: She grew up in Victoria; and there I was in her childhood backyard ...”: and then there was The Sea – not as counter-balance but as hidden generator of it all, of the The World to be discovered by the/any child ... as poet Charles Olson has it: “Vast earth rejoices,/deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things,/everything issues from the one, the soul is led from drunkenness/to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead,/the man awake lights up from the sleeping.” (Maximus, from “Dogtown - I”) – S.B.
“A seriously beautiful film which defies verbal commentary.” – Adrian Martin
“A lifetime of polished techniques–prisms, diffusion lenses, sudden camera movements, percussive shifts in exposure, oversaturated colours, tricks of scale.” – J. Hoberman
NOTE: Princeton University professor and Anthology co-founder P. Adams Sitney will be present to discuss the film on Saturday, February 7.
Sat. Feb 7th
6:00ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage
SONGS 1-14
1964-65, 55 minutes.
SONG 1: Portrait of a lady. SONGS 2 & 3: Fire and a mind’s movement in remembering. SONG 4: Three girls playing with a ball. SONG 5: A childbirth song. SONG 6: The painted veil via moth-death. SONG 7: San Francisco. SONG 8: Sea creatures. SONG 9: Wedding source and substance. SONG 10: Sitting around. SONG 11: Fires, windows, an insect, a lyre of rain scratches. SONG 12: Verticals and shadows caught in glass traps. SONG 13: A travel song of scenes and horizontals. SONG 14: Molds, paints and crystals.
Sun Feb 8
5:45 ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage
SONGS 15-22
1965-66, 75 minutes.
SONG 15: A series of individual portraits of friends and family – Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Ed Dorn, Jonas Mekas, others. SONG 16: A flowering of sex in the mind’s eye, a joy. SONGS 17 & 18: The movie house cathedral and a singular room. SONGS 19 & 20: Women dancing and a light. SONGS 21 & 22: Two views of closed-eye vision.
Sat Feb 14
5:30 ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage
ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT (1958); CAT’S CRADLE (1959); SIRIUS REMEMBERED (1959); THE DEAD (1960); THIGH LINE LYRE TRIANGULAR (1961); MOTHLIGHT (1963); BLUE MOSES (1963).
Total running time: 90 minutes.
With ANTICIPATION Brakhage leaves psychodrama and enters the “closed eye” vision period. The program contains a unique example of a film made without a camera, MOTHLIGHT, and one of Brakhage’s few sound films, BLUE MOSES.
8:00 HAPTIC REFRACTIONS: A CAMERALESS EVENING
Curated by Irina Leimbacher and Steve Polta
A cinema based on touch, gestures of contact between the surface of film and the world, is the basis of tonight's screening. Emulsive transformations, both human and the earth's, palimpsests of paint and scratchings, or traces left by light and life transform the site of film into a new experience of sight. Films include: silt's performance of their triptych UNTITLED (excerpted from ALL PIECES OF A RIVER SHORE), a continuation of their investigations of film emulsion as a microcosmic peering into the earth's crust, Fred Worden's AUTOMATIC WRITING 2, Rock Ross' PSYCHO PORPOISE, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof's LIGHT MAGIC, Saul Levine's LIGHT LICK: ONLY SUNSHINE, Karen Johannesen's UNTITLED, Alexis Bravos' THE WORLD'S DRY LEVER, Luis Recoder's SILVER RECOVERY, Steve Polta's A GLIMPSE OF SOVIET SCIENCE and Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage's CONCRESCENCE. –Irina Leimbacher and Steve Polta
(silt, Luis Recoder, Fred Worden, Solomon+Brakhage, Saul Livine? how could this not be crucial?)
Sun Feb 15
5:00 ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage
23RD PSALM BRANCH
1966, 95 minutes.
“The furthest that Brakhage came in extending the language of 8mm cinema was his editing of 23RD PSALM BRANCH...the phenomenal and painstaking craftsmanship of this film reflects the intensity of the obsession with which its theme grasped his mind. In 1966, out of confusion about the Vietnam War and the American reaction to it, Brakhage began to meditate on the nature of war...the fruit of his studies and thoughts was the longest and most important of the songs...it is an apocalypse of imagination.”
–P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM
Sat Feb 21:
8:30 FILMS BY MICHELE SMITH
Michele Smith
LIKE ALL BAD MEN HE LOOKS ATTRACTIVE
(2003, 23 minutes)
THEY SAY
(2003, 49 minutes)
This new work consists of one film split into two parts. Two parts which can be seen in either order, or separately if one so chooses.
In LIKE ALL BAD MEN HE LOOKS ATTRACTIVE the mixed mediums are woven together on mini-DV. The materials are one reel of 35mm film, and two reels of 16mm film. Inset into the 35mm film are plastic shopping bags, translucent plastic folders and plates, mylar drafts used as blueprints for bridge construction, viewmaster slides, paparazzi slides found at a tourist memorabilia shop on Hollywood Boulevard (including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston and George Peppard with a big white rabbit), slides purchased in the gift shops at the Getty Museum and at the Hearst Castle, “sign here” tabs from my accountant, the wings of a dying butterfly that I tried to rescue from the hot pavement of a grocery store parking lot, Hollywood movie trailers, 8mm home movies and stag films, 16mm footage, including an episode of Green Acres, viewmaster stills from 1970s TV shows, etc. Some things were not inset into the reel but recorded in the same manner and later cut in digitally. Panels or film “carpets,” large mats made of 16mm film. Old magic lantern slides. The base film the elements are physically cut into is a workprint of raw footage of an unknown actor with a bandaged finger standing in front of the camera. He occasionally raises an envelope and reacts to a clapboard. I received this reel of film from a friend who's a bit of a packrat (like myself). Before I met him, his house had burned down and this reel was one of the few items which survived. The decayed parts are where the emulsion melted from the heat.
THEY SAY consists of two reels of heavily-edited (frame-by-frame) and overlaid 16mm film. It was then intercut with the grainy and scratchy melodrama rental tapes. I used a few 16mm found footage source reels as the main focus to play with narrative structure in a way related to but different than in my first work. I used a lot of footage from one narrative short film about a boy and a wild horse. When nearing the end I tired of editing it and decided to put it out into my garden and then dumped a few litter boxes on top. Contents– wood pellets and bunny poop. I forgot how long I left it outside–it rained a few times. Perhaps a week. It was later washed with laundry detergent and hot water.
I want my films to be open. The viewer creates the version of the film they will see by the way in which they view it. This is on a narrative/symbolic/metaphorical level as well as on a visual and structural level. The rapid intercutting and weaving of strands of different footage and elements creates a time space where one must mix what they are seeing for themselves. There is no one way to perceive the links of still images into an illusion of movement. One can, with a readjusting of their viewing, change their experience of the work throughout. –M.S.
(saw "Regarding Penelope's Wake", it's strong and worth seeing, and screening the day before this is)
Sat Feb 28
5:00 MUSIC AND SOUL IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
James Spooner
SANTO DOMINGO BLUES
2003, 73 minutes, USA, documentary. In English and Spanish with English subtitles.
Guitar-playing singer songwriter Luis Vargas takes us back to his own humble beginnings in the dusty little town of Santa Maria in the Dominican Republic, where his father still lives. Through performances, first-person accounts and vérité scenes involving Luis and other bachateros (as these musicians are known), as well as the fans and opponents of this music, the story of Bachata unfolds. It was called the “Song of Bitterness” and was infamous as the anthem of the hard-drinking, womanizing, down-on-his-luck man, vilified as the entertainment of the brothels and the cabarets, and worshipped by the down-trodden poor as the deepest expression of their feelings. In lyrics heavy with sexual innuendo, double entendres and outright bawdiness, bachateros address themes of the everyman, singing comically exaggerated tales of ruined romances and unrequited love, of barroom camaraderie and maudlin drunken escapades. The advent of massive Dominican immigration to New York and other American cities in the eighties and nineties created a new market for the bachateros. Luis and contemporaries come to play in New York and write songs with a hard urban edge that reflects the experience of the Dominican Diaspora, and the genre that was formerly maligned by the high society is transformed into an emblem of national pride.
9:00 MUSIC AND SOUL IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Richard Olivier
REMEMBER MARVIN GAYE
2002, 56 minutes, Belgium, documentary . In English.
In 1981, Marvin Gaye, Motown’s “troubled man,” took refuge in Belgium, where he lived for two years. Richard Olivier met him and filmed the genius of Rhythm ‘n Blues at a time when he was trying to find peace within himself. REMEMBER MARVIN GAYE is an intimate and revealing musical portrait of a lesser-known facet of the singer’s life.
more screenings of both of these
[March descriptions will be added as Anthology lists them]
March 4-7
Nicolas Philbert Retrospective
(you missed this once, don't miss it again!)
Sat Mar 6
Brakhage Pittsburg Trilogy + Takahiko Iimura videos
Sun Mar
Text of Light+ Iimura films (probably better than the videos)
Mar 10-16
NYUFF
Thurs Mar 18
Session 9 (Cimax Golden Twins soundtrack)
[why am I not interested in either the Jon Moritsugu or the Craig Baldwin retros? oh yeah. I have no sense of humor there we go]
(Boris Barnet retro in here somewhere, worth thinking about seeing)
Mar 27+ 28
James Benning's California trilogy!!!
Sat, Jan 31
5:30ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage PASHT (1965) 5 minutes. BLUEWHITE (1965) 8 minutes. BLOOD’S TONE (1965) 8 minutes. VEIN (1965) 8 minutes. FIRE OF WATERS (1965) 7 minutes. THE HORSEMAN, THE WOMAN AND THE MOTH (1968) 19 minutes. Total running time: 55 minutes. In this group of film poems Brakhage sings of death, childbirth, life and love. THE HORSEMAN, THE WOMAN AND THE MOTH is a tour-de-force of drawing directly onto the film’s surface, which is painted, dyed and treated so that it grows controlled crystals and mold as textures of the figures and forms of the drama.
Friday Feb 6 - Thurs 12:
8:00 PREMIERE THEATRICAL RUN
Stan Brakhage
A CHILD'S GARDEN AND THE SERIOUS SEA
1991, 80 minutes, 16mm, color, silent. Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, NYC.
In poet Ronald Johnson's great epic Ark, in the first book Foundations, the poem “Beam 29” has this passage: “The seed is disseminated at the gated mosaic a hundred feet/below, above/long windrows of motion/connecting dilated arches undergoing transamplification:/'seen in the water so clear as christiall'/(prairie tremblante)” which breaks into musical notation that, “presto,” becomes a design of spatial tilts: This is where the film began; and I carried a xerox of the still unpublished ARC 50 through 66 all that trip with Marilyn and Anton around Vancouver Island. As I wrote him, “The pun 'out on a limn' kept ringing through my mind as I caught the hairs of side-light off ephemera of objects tangent to Marilyn's childhood: She grew up in Victoria; and there I was in her childhood backyard ...”: and then there was The Sea – not as counter-balance but as hidden generator of it all, of the The World to be discovered by the/any child ... as poet Charles Olson has it: “Vast earth rejoices,/deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things,/everything issues from the one, the soul is led from drunkenness/to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead,/the man awake lights up from the sleeping.” (Maximus, from “Dogtown - I”) – S.B.
“A seriously beautiful film which defies verbal commentary.” – Adrian Martin
“A lifetime of polished techniques–prisms, diffusion lenses, sudden camera movements, percussive shifts in exposure, oversaturated colours, tricks of scale.” – J. Hoberman
NOTE: Princeton University professor and Anthology co-founder P. Adams Sitney will be present to discuss the film on Saturday, February 7.
Sat. Feb 7th
6:00ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage
SONGS 1-14
1964-65, 55 minutes.
SONG 1: Portrait of a lady. SONGS 2 & 3: Fire and a mind’s movement in remembering. SONG 4: Three girls playing with a ball. SONG 5: A childbirth song. SONG 6: The painted veil via moth-death. SONG 7: San Francisco. SONG 8: Sea creatures. SONG 9: Wedding source and substance. SONG 10: Sitting around. SONG 11: Fires, windows, an insect, a lyre of rain scratches. SONG 12: Verticals and shadows caught in glass traps. SONG 13: A travel song of scenes and horizontals. SONG 14: Molds, paints and crystals.
Sun Feb 8
5:45 ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage
SONGS 15-22
1965-66, 75 minutes.
SONG 15: A series of individual portraits of friends and family – Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Ed Dorn, Jonas Mekas, others. SONG 16: A flowering of sex in the mind’s eye, a joy. SONGS 17 & 18: The movie house cathedral and a singular room. SONGS 19 & 20: Women dancing and a light. SONGS 21 & 22: Two views of closed-eye vision.
Sat Feb 14
5:30 ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage
ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT (1958); CAT’S CRADLE (1959); SIRIUS REMEMBERED (1959); THE DEAD (1960); THIGH LINE LYRE TRIANGULAR (1961); MOTHLIGHT (1963); BLUE MOSES (1963).
Total running time: 90 minutes.
With ANTICIPATION Brakhage leaves psychodrama and enters the “closed eye” vision period. The program contains a unique example of a film made without a camera, MOTHLIGHT, and one of Brakhage’s few sound films, BLUE MOSES.
8:00 HAPTIC REFRACTIONS: A CAMERALESS EVENING
Curated by Irina Leimbacher and Steve Polta
A cinema based on touch, gestures of contact between the surface of film and the world, is the basis of tonight's screening. Emulsive transformations, both human and the earth's, palimpsests of paint and scratchings, or traces left by light and life transform the site of film into a new experience of sight. Films include: silt's performance of their triptych UNTITLED (excerpted from ALL PIECES OF A RIVER SHORE), a continuation of their investigations of film emulsion as a microcosmic peering into the earth's crust, Fred Worden's AUTOMATIC WRITING 2, Rock Ross' PSYCHO PORPOISE, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof's LIGHT MAGIC, Saul Levine's LIGHT LICK: ONLY SUNSHINE, Karen Johannesen's UNTITLED, Alexis Bravos' THE WORLD'S DRY LEVER, Luis Recoder's SILVER RECOVERY, Steve Polta's A GLIMPSE OF SOVIET SCIENCE and Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage's CONCRESCENCE. –Irina Leimbacher and Steve Polta
(silt, Luis Recoder, Fred Worden, Solomon+Brakhage, Saul Livine? how could this not be crucial?)
Sun Feb 15
5:00 ESSENTIAL CINEMA
Stan Brakhage
23RD PSALM BRANCH
1966, 95 minutes.
“The furthest that Brakhage came in extending the language of 8mm cinema was his editing of 23RD PSALM BRANCH...the phenomenal and painstaking craftsmanship of this film reflects the intensity of the obsession with which its theme grasped his mind. In 1966, out of confusion about the Vietnam War and the American reaction to it, Brakhage began to meditate on the nature of war...the fruit of his studies and thoughts was the longest and most important of the songs...it is an apocalypse of imagination.”
–P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM
Sat Feb 21:
8:30 FILMS BY MICHELE SMITH
Michele Smith
LIKE ALL BAD MEN HE LOOKS ATTRACTIVE
(2003, 23 minutes)
THEY SAY
(2003, 49 minutes)
This new work consists of one film split into two parts. Two parts which can be seen in either order, or separately if one so chooses.
In LIKE ALL BAD MEN HE LOOKS ATTRACTIVE the mixed mediums are woven together on mini-DV. The materials are one reel of 35mm film, and two reels of 16mm film. Inset into the 35mm film are plastic shopping bags, translucent plastic folders and plates, mylar drafts used as blueprints for bridge construction, viewmaster slides, paparazzi slides found at a tourist memorabilia shop on Hollywood Boulevard (including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston and George Peppard with a big white rabbit), slides purchased in the gift shops at the Getty Museum and at the Hearst Castle, “sign here” tabs from my accountant, the wings of a dying butterfly that I tried to rescue from the hot pavement of a grocery store parking lot, Hollywood movie trailers, 8mm home movies and stag films, 16mm footage, including an episode of Green Acres, viewmaster stills from 1970s TV shows, etc. Some things were not inset into the reel but recorded in the same manner and later cut in digitally. Panels or film “carpets,” large mats made of 16mm film. Old magic lantern slides. The base film the elements are physically cut into is a workprint of raw footage of an unknown actor with a bandaged finger standing in front of the camera. He occasionally raises an envelope and reacts to a clapboard. I received this reel of film from a friend who's a bit of a packrat (like myself). Before I met him, his house had burned down and this reel was one of the few items which survived. The decayed parts are where the emulsion melted from the heat.
THEY SAY consists of two reels of heavily-edited (frame-by-frame) and overlaid 16mm film. It was then intercut with the grainy and scratchy melodrama rental tapes. I used a few 16mm found footage source reels as the main focus to play with narrative structure in a way related to but different than in my first work. I used a lot of footage from one narrative short film about a boy and a wild horse. When nearing the end I tired of editing it and decided to put it out into my garden and then dumped a few litter boxes on top. Contents– wood pellets and bunny poop. I forgot how long I left it outside–it rained a few times. Perhaps a week. It was later washed with laundry detergent and hot water.
I want my films to be open. The viewer creates the version of the film they will see by the way in which they view it. This is on a narrative/symbolic/metaphorical level as well as on a visual and structural level. The rapid intercutting and weaving of strands of different footage and elements creates a time space where one must mix what they are seeing for themselves. There is no one way to perceive the links of still images into an illusion of movement. One can, with a readjusting of their viewing, change their experience of the work throughout. –M.S.
(saw "Regarding Penelope's Wake", it's strong and worth seeing, and screening the day before this is)
Sat Feb 28
5:00 MUSIC AND SOUL IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
James Spooner
SANTO DOMINGO BLUES
2003, 73 minutes, USA, documentary. In English and Spanish with English subtitles.
Guitar-playing singer songwriter Luis Vargas takes us back to his own humble beginnings in the dusty little town of Santa Maria in the Dominican Republic, where his father still lives. Through performances, first-person accounts and vérité scenes involving Luis and other bachateros (as these musicians are known), as well as the fans and opponents of this music, the story of Bachata unfolds. It was called the “Song of Bitterness” and was infamous as the anthem of the hard-drinking, womanizing, down-on-his-luck man, vilified as the entertainment of the brothels and the cabarets, and worshipped by the down-trodden poor as the deepest expression of their feelings. In lyrics heavy with sexual innuendo, double entendres and outright bawdiness, bachateros address themes of the everyman, singing comically exaggerated tales of ruined romances and unrequited love, of barroom camaraderie and maudlin drunken escapades. The advent of massive Dominican immigration to New York and other American cities in the eighties and nineties created a new market for the bachateros. Luis and contemporaries come to play in New York and write songs with a hard urban edge that reflects the experience of the Dominican Diaspora, and the genre that was formerly maligned by the high society is transformed into an emblem of national pride.
9:00 MUSIC AND SOUL IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Richard Olivier
REMEMBER MARVIN GAYE
2002, 56 minutes, Belgium, documentary . In English.
In 1981, Marvin Gaye, Motown’s “troubled man,” took refuge in Belgium, where he lived for two years. Richard Olivier met him and filmed the genius of Rhythm ‘n Blues at a time when he was trying to find peace within himself. REMEMBER MARVIN GAYE is an intimate and revealing musical portrait of a lesser-known facet of the singer’s life.
more screenings of both of these
[March descriptions will be added as Anthology lists them]
March 4-7
Nicolas Philbert Retrospective
(you missed this once, don't miss it again!)
Sat Mar 6
Brakhage Pittsburg Trilogy + Takahiko Iimura videos
Sun Mar
Text of Light+ Iimura films (probably better than the videos)
Mar 10-16
NYUFF
Thurs Mar 18
Session 9 (Cimax Golden Twins soundtrack)
[why am I not interested in either the Jon Moritsugu or the Craig Baldwin retros? oh yeah. I have no sense of humor there we go]
(Boris Barnet retro in here somewhere, worth thinking about seeing)
Mar 27+ 28
James Benning's California trilogy!!!
