From: Mark McElhatten (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Oct 10 2005 - 09:27:07 PDT
THE WALKING PICTURE PALACE
Anthology Film Archives
Second Avenue and Second Street
New York 212 505 5181
Monday October 10
Maya Deren Theater
7;00 pm.
Bruce McClure –
CHRISTMAS TREE STAND (Parts I, II, and III)
2004 - For four modified 16 mm. projectors. B & W sound. Variable
duration.
The projectionist's domain is conditioned by the absence of casual
light from
outside sources. The poignancy of this condition can be felt both in
the
hopeless task of trying to exclude light from a space and the abhorrence
expressed by so many who yearn for the radiance of a room with a window
that gives onto a bespangled 'scape. "Christmas Tree Stand" is a
primer on correspondences elevating the sufferance of the projectionist
and celebrating the pitching forward of light and sound while excluding
the emulsified occurrences regimented by the motion picture camera from
the cinematic equation. B.Mc.
WALKING PICTURE PALACE PROGRAM 4 in the Maya Deren and Courthouse
Theaters.
Hans Michaud
MorningFilms 5/2003-7/2003 Double Projection
Fred Worden
IF ONLY
2003, 7.5 minutes, 16mm.
The intoxicated camera operator shoots the moon slipping through the
barren trees. The rabbit hole's light shadow appears and he obliges,
head first, no looking back. His cranium (like yours) is packed with
illusions, but down the rabbit hole they treasure the same just so long
as they're custom fabricated, hand tooled and conscious. Down this
hole, stalking the unforeseen non-translatable is all. Join in here. –
Fred Worden
David Gatten
HARDWOOD PROCESS
1996, 14 minutes, 16mm, silent, 24 fps, color and b&w.
"HARDWOOD PROCESS is, I think, a truly astonishing mastery of film, and
of such a quality of humanitas as to disarm any sense of 'the
overwhelming' which mastery often is causing… the film continues to
exist as if its notes were found 'in a bottle' so to speak… brave,
clear senses of being human, yet mixed with this the texture of being
sunk into the grain of life." – Stan Brakhage
Larry Gottheim
MNEMOSYNE MOTHER OF MUSES
1987, 16 minutes, 16mm, color, sound.
A mirrored form in counter-movement, dense with emotion-charged memory
– a rapidly sparking dynamism of image and afterimage, swirling
resonant words/music, juxtaposing loss, my father's stroke, Toscanini,
Siodmak's THE KILLERS, the Red Robin Diner… I seem to be quickening." –
L.G.
David Gatten
WHAT THE WATER SAID, NOS. 1-3
1997-1998, 16 minutes, 16mm, sound, color and b&w.
These films are the result of a series of camera-less collaborations
between the filmmaker, the Atlantic Ocean and its underwater
inhabitants. For three days in January and three days in October of
1997, and again, for a day, in August of 1998, lengths of unexposed,
undeveloped film were soaked in a crab trap on a South Carolina beach.
Both the sound and image in WHAT THE WATER SAID are the result of the
ensuing oceanic inscriptions written directly into the emulsion of the
film as it was buffeted by the salt water, sand and rocks; as it was
chewed and eaten by the crabs, fish and underwater creatures. – D.G.
Nisi Jacobs
LITTLE BITS OF SKIN (WORDS)
2005, 8 minutes.
Struck by the ease of someone as articulate and expressive as my father
losing their language facilities overnight with the advent of a stroke,
I began filming the text of the city. The recorded audio is a montage
of Peter Rose's fabricated dialects when I recorded him reading a poem
of mine mixed with synthetically altered wailing. Moments of mangled
writing from various days after the stroke weave into the formal blocks
of words in the environment playing between language as symbol,
language as image, and language as pure experience.
Keewatin Dewdney
MALTESE CROSS MOVEMENT
1967, 8 minutes, 16mm.
"The film reflects Dewdney's conviction that the projector, not the
camera, is the filmmaker's true medium. The form and content of the
film are shown to derive directly from the mechanical operation of the
projector - specifically the maltese cross movement’s animation of the
disk and the cross illustrates graphically (pun intended) the
projector’s essential parts and movements. It also alludes to a
dialectic of continuous-discontinuous movements that pervades the
apparatus, from its central mechanical operation to the spectator’s
perception of the film’s images... (His) soundtrack demonstrates that
what we hear is also built out of continuous-discontinuous ‘sub-sets.’
The film is organized around the principle that it can only complete
itself when enough separate and discontinuous sounds have been stored
up to provide the male voice on the soundtrack with the sounds needed
to repeat a little girl’s poem:
The cross revolves at sunset
The moon returns at dawn
If you die tonight,
Tomorrow you are gone.”
- William Wees, “The Apparatus and the Avant Garde,” Cinema Canada
Robert Nelson
SPECIAL WARNING 1974/98 16mm 7 min.
NY PREMIERE!
David Gatten
FRAGRANT PORTALS, BRIGHT PARTICULARS AND THE EDGE OF SPACE
2003, 12 minutes, 16mm, 24fps, b&w, silent.
A companion of sorts to WHAT THE WATER SAID. An attempt to assess the
potentials, possibilities and pitfalls of finding meaning in – or
assigning human meaning to – the natural world; by way of Wallace
Stevens. "The Idea of Order at Key West" and "Of Mere Being" translated
into Ogham (the 5th-century "tree alphabet" derived from a notational
system used by shepherds to record notes on their wooden staffs), and
carved a letter at a time into a piece of semi-transparent flexible
wood (black leader). – D.G.
Total program time: ca. 90 minutes.
Ernie Gehr
PASSAGES
2003, 15 minutes, 16mm. Premiered at Views NYFF 2004.
Jim Jennings
CLOSE QUARTERS
2004, 7 minutes, 16mm.
A portrait of home " A sanctuary, a place of relationships. A place
where sleep happens."- Jim Jennings
Mark LaPore
THE SLEEPERS
1989, 16 minutes, 16mm.
Memory, as well as the residue of information in text and film from
Sudan, led me to make The Sleepers in order to resolve the impression
that the third world is present in the first world as an idea and a
condition. The Sleepers is a film about how notions of culture are
often defined by information received indirectly--information which
frequently violates the particulars of people and place and makes
questionable one's ability to portray specific individuals as
representatives of culture.
Luther Price
DIPPING SAUSE
2005, 10 minutes, 16mm. Premiere.
Stom Sogo
PS WHEN YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
2003, 12 minutes, dv. Premiered at Views NYFF 2003.
Stan Brakhage
NIGHTMARE SERIES
1978, 20 minutes, 16mm.
“Four films so related to each other as to be an equivalent to that
frightful dreaming which makes Wake of the following day, so that it be
spent mourning the events of the night. A decade & 1/2 ago, poet Robert
Kelly told me that the "crucial work" of our time might be what he
calls "the dream work": I hope, with this SERIES, to have entertained
his challenge more thoughtfully than with any previous "dream"
filmmaking. In homage to Sigmund Freud and Surrealism, this film
proposes clear visual alternatives to the consideration of both "The
Interpretation of ..." and all previous representations of ...
dreaming.” S.B.
Total program time: ca. 90 minutes.
-Tuesday, October 11 at 7:00.
9:00
Leslie Thornton
PHOTOGRAPHY IS EASY
2005, 4.5 minutes. Premiere.
Katherin McInnis
OPEN
2004, 4 minutes.
Mark LaPore
PORTRAITS
2005, 6 minutes.
Humphrey Jennings
FILM TBA
Ernie Gehr
WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY (AFTER LUMIERE)
2004, shot ca. 1972-73, 12 minutes.
Rebecca Baron
HOW LITTLE WE KNOW OF OUR NEIGHBOURS
2005, 48 minutes.
“How Little We Know of Our Neighbours is an experimental documentary
about Britain's Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to
contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and
privacy. At its center is a look at the multiple roles cameras have
played in public space, starting in the 1880's, when the introduction
of the hand-held camera brought photography out of the studio and into
the street. For the first time one could be photographed casually in
public without knowledge or consent. Mass Observation used
surreptitious photography to record and scrutinize people's behavior in
public places. Mass Observation was an eccentric social science
enterprise founded in the late 1930's in England that combined
surrealism with anthropology. The film traces the history of the
movement from its inception as a progressive if naive "anthropology of
ourselves" in the 1930's through its reincarnation as a civil spy unit
during World War II and its eventual emergence as a market research
firm in the 1950's. Mass Observation's history is echoed in a range of
present-day phenomena from police surveillance to web cams to reality
television that points to ways in which our notions of privacy and
self-definition have changed.” R.B.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.