From: Masha Godovannaya (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Oct 16 2005 - 23:49:58 PDT
This is a forwarded message
From: Raffaella Morra <email suppressed>
To: "Raffaella Morra" <email suppressed>
Date: Friday, October 14, 2005, 11:21:25 AM
Subject: INDEPENDENT FILM SHOW 5th Edition 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 november 2005 Palazzo delle Arti - PAN (via dei Mille, 60 - 80122 Napoli)
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E-M ARTS o.n.l.u.s. Palazzo delle
Arti - PAN
via Petrarca, 50 - 80122 Napoli
via dei Mille, 60 - 80122 Napoli
tel. +39 0815757417 - Fax +39 081 454064 /
tel: +39 081 7410067 fax: +39 081 7416195
<mailto:email suppressed>
www.em-arts.org
<mailto:email suppressed?subject=dal%20sito%20PAN>
email suppressed / www.palazzoartinapoli.net
INDEPENDENT FILM SHOW 5th Edition
16 - 17 - 18 - 19 november 2005 from 8.00 pm
coordinated by Xavier Garcia Bardon
Palazzo delle Arti - PAN (via dei Mille, 60 - 80122 Napoli)
The Independent Film Show is devoted to the exhibition of experimental film.
In a way, it is not surprising that this film festival is organized by an
art gallery, as experimental film has certainly as much to do, or far more
to do, with the plastic arts than it does with cinema, as conceived in its
most classic and commonly accepted sense. It is film considered as an art
form, and films considered as works of art. All throughout its history,
experimental cinema has had many different abodes. It has been shown at such
various places as movie theatres, universities, coffee shops, concert
places, art galleries... And even today, its influence and its new forms are
present in many different contexts. What is then the place of experimental
cinema? Where does it belong to? Where is it actually screened today? During
four days, coordinated by Raffaella Morra, the PAN - Palazzo delle Arti di
Napoli will host the fifth edition of the Independent Film Show, for which
three international curators have been asked to propose three programmes and
present them in Naples. Probably even more than during former editions, this
year's festival will bring along exciting questions regarding the place that
is to be held by experimental film.
Masha Godovannaya is a Russian experimental filmmaker and film curator who
has lived in New York and worked at the Anthology Film Archives. After
having curated a programme last year for the Independent Film Show, for this
current edition she has dedicated her efforts to compile Tired Snow (Vol.
III), a selection of recent films and videos by experimental and independent
Russian filmmakers and artists. Painters, sculptors, visual artists, all of
them share a poetic and visual language as a mean of expression. And even
though some of the films deal with political and social issues, most of them
are mainly visual experiments. It must be also pointed out that these films
were all produced in particularly difficult conditions, due both to the
political and economic situation in Russia. Has this peculiar situation
influenced or not the artists, and how, is certainly an interesting question
this programme raises. But above all Tired Snow (Vol. III) intends to be a
showcase for contemporary Russian artists working in the field of
experimental film, video and animation: a good opportunity to discover the
work of Ivan Maximov, Anzhela Ashihmina, Boris Kazakov and Vadim Kyzenkov,
among many others.
The Politics of Perception is a programme conceived by an archivist and a
researcher, Paolo Simoni, one of the founders of Home Movies. A
Bologna-based association, Home Movies is devoted to the collection of
amateur films, promoting creative approaches to this unique film genre
through film programmes, installations and intermedia screenings. Collective
memories or unintentional documents on everyday life, amateur films, as well
as industrial, educational and other sorts of ephemeral films, can be
considered as an exceptional source both for social and film history.
Besides, their re-framing and re-editing in the context of found footage
films for instance, appears as a cultural and artistic practice with a wide
political and critical dimension. Nowadays, with new modes for the
electronic diffusion of images being ruled by the principles of open source
and creative commons, these practices are beginning to take a whole new
dimension, and the resulting films are often genuine vehicles for
alternative sources of information and counter-information.
The Politics of Perception offers a selection of American found footage
films from the 1960s till today, from Stan Vanderbeek and Bruce Conner to
Jay Rosenblatt and Leslie Thornton. The main inspiration for this programme
comes from a 2004 film by Rick Prelinger, Panorama Ephemera. This film,
which could be described as a history of the American imaginary landscape,
was made from countless reedited sequences taken from ephemeral films
belonging to the Prelinger Archives, which were founded in 1983 in New York
City to collect, preserve, and facilitate the access to films of historic
significance that had not been collected anywhere else (in 2002 the
Prelinger collection would be acquired by the Library of Congress). This
programme, which can be regarded as the result of a recycling process
itself, is dedicated to all the film archivists in the world who just like
Rick Prelinger regard their work as an act of creation.
Katia Rossini, a Brussels-based film activist and co-founder of the Cinema
Nova, is responsible for the third programme, which this year is a double
one. The last two days of the festival will be entirely devoted to Expanded
cinema, its history and its influence on today's experimental film and
visual arts. What are we precisely talking about? Works which examine the
traditional ways of making and editing films and - above all - contribute to
demolish the generally accepted idea that films should be "projected for an
audience from one projector onto one screen" [1]. Expanded cinema pieces
invent new ways of screening films, employing various and/or modified
projectors, using new surfaces as screens, in short, modifying in multiple
ways the conventional cinematic process.
The Expanded cinema movement was born in the mid-1950s and reached its peak
during the 1960s but its influence on today's practices is particularly
obvious: not only moving images have now definitely entered the gallery
space, with many installations using film or video projections, but also the
use of cinema for intermedia performances in musical and theatrical contexts
has become more and more frequent. From the Historic Expanded Cinema to the
Expanded Cinema Today gives us the opportunity to go back to the roots of
this process. Expanded film screenings (including multiple projections),
film/video installations and film performances being today's main heritage
of the historical Expanded cinema works, each of the nights will feature a
film programme, an installation and a live performance.
Once again, the confrontation of old and new works will undoubtedly raise
relevant questions regarding the connections between cinema and the other
arts, but also concerning film itself, both as a technical process and as an
art form. "The forms of cinema are proliferating, as Sheldon Renan wrote in
1967, every new way of creating or controlling light is potentially a new
form of cinema. Metal, film, magnetic tape, cathode tubes, living bodies,
plastic, glass, computer: these are materials of cinema, the secondary
materials. They provide means to work with the basic materials of cinema -
light and time. It is only light and time that link all the forms of cinema,
past, present and future."
Xavier Garcia Bardon
Per info: E-M ARTS o.n.l.u.s.
via Petrarca, 50 - 80122 Napoli tel. +39 0815757417 - Fax +39 081 454064
<mailto:email suppressed>
www.em-arts.org
_____
[1] Sheldon RENAN, The Underground Film. An introduction to its development
in America, Studio Vista, London, 1967, p. 227.
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For those, who may be in Naples, Italy, during this time.
-- Best regards, Masha mailto:email suppressed __________________________________________________________________ For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.