JEFFERSON PRESENTS...#73 10/21/06

From: ADAM ABRAMS (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Oct 13 2006 - 14:58:36 PDT


EXPERIMENTS with MOVIES happening in PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
email suppressed
        

Jefferson Presents ... NEXT SCREENING:
WHEN: Saturday, October 21, 2006, 8PM
WHERE: Garfield Artworks 4931 Penn Ave.
HOW MUCH: $5/$4 students, seniors
OCTOBER PROGRAM: On October 20 and 21 JP... and the Andy Warhol Museum join forces to present two evenings of unusual cinema, all projected in the original film format. These programs are for ADULTS ONLY. Read below for more info:
        

In October, Jefferson Presents… teams up with the Andy Warhol Museum for 2 evenings of different live film presentations with Jack Stevenson appearing in-person to introduce and discuss each program.

Jack Stevenson is an American film writer, collector, and teacher living in Denmark since 1993. His published books include Lars von Trier (2002) and Dogme Uncut (2003), and has contributed pieces on the Danish film scene to various American and European film periodicals. His new book, Totally Uncensored! The Wild World of Scandinavian Sex Cinema – the Myth, the Movies, the Happenings, is due to be published shortly. This is Stevenson’s first Pittsburgh appearance.

Program #1: Friday, October 20, 2006, 7:30PM @ The Andy Warhol Museum located at 117 Sandusky Street (Part of Good Fridays- admission is $7.00):

TOTALLY UNCENSORED! Everything you always wanted to know about Scandinavian erotic cinema but were afraid to ask.

TOTALLY UNCENSORED! is a bracing examination of post-war Scandinavian sex cinema and the impact it had on a more Puritanical Anglo-Saxon film culture through the 50's, 60's and 70's. Legendary films as well as obscure gems are to be screened (in excerpts) and discussed in a show guarenteed to enlightened and startle even the most jaded cineasté. Not for the faint-hearted! (Contains explicit material)

 

Synopsis: Revolutionary things were happening in American film culture in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s as censorship barriers fell seemingly day by day. Scandinavian cinema played a central role in this battle for screen freedom. Films like I, A Woman (whose title Warhol evoked with his movie I, A Man), I Am Curious (Yellow) and many others attracted crowds, generated massive press and figured in high-profile court cases, helping to set in motion the wider sexual revolution. In this lecture/screening presentation Jack Stevenson will map the evolution of postwar Scandinavian erotic cinema, from the Swedish naturalist films of the ‘50s up to the early ‘70s, when the effects of Denmark’s abolition of censorship came to the fore and placed the focus on that country. Based on his soon to be published book, Totally Uncensored! The Wild World of Scandinavian Sex Cinema – the Myth, the Movies, the Happenings.

Program #2: Saturday, October 21, 8PM @ Jefferson Presents… at Garfield Artworks located at 4931 Penn Ave. in Garfield. Admission is $5 or $4 for students w/ valid ID

MOVIES WITH ROOTS IN HELL – The Effects of Drugs on American Cinema

Synopsis:” This 16mm compilation documents almost 60 years of drug depictions in American film. The material, which spans the years 1916 to 1972, consists of a variety of genres and formats including short (exploitation) subjects from the 30’s as well as trailers, a silent film, underground films, military educationals and extracts from at least one feature film. This diversity of genre, period and style distinguishes the program from recent documentaries or DVD releases on the same subject, and screenings at the 2006 Rotterdam Film Festival, where I moderated a panel discussion on the topic, were sold out and audiences were extremely enthusiastic. Based in part on my book: Addicted: The Myth & Menace of Drugs in Film.”- Jack Stevenson

Stevenson’s books will be available for sale at both screening locations.

 
        
                
        Also check out this program of experimental films screening at the Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24
        

Film Program Tuesday, October 24 @ 9:15PM at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Harris Theater, 809 Liberty Ave., Downtown Tickets are $8 or $5 for a youth ticket (under age 25)

PIONEERS IN REVOLT: A LESBIAN AND GAY AVANT-GARDE FILM RETROSPECTIVE

Curated by Gordon Nelson of Jefferson Presents …

This program is designed to serve as an introduction to a selection of essential gay and lesbian artists working in the area of experimental film and video. All of the short films and videos included in this screening are considered significant revolutionary milestones in the history of film and represent a wide array of approaches to personal expression through cinema.

Kenneth Anger - Fireworks (1947, 16mm, b&w/so, 15 min.) A landmark of both experimental and gay cinema, Kenneth Anger's film is a bizarre, disturbing dreamscape of violation, rape, and homoerotic sadomasochism. The film opens with Anger awaking from a troubled dream and leaving his house to go on a stroll. He is confronted by a band of buff sailors who proceed to beat, manhandle, and molest him. Fireworks ends with the amazing image of a sailor unzipping his fly and pulling out a lit roman candle. Recalling other surrealist masterpieces such as Un Chien Andalou and Meshes in the Afternoon, this film uses elliptical narrative structure and dream-like visual metaphors and puns.

"A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a 'light' and is drawn through the needle's eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to a bed less empty than before." - KA

Jack Smith - Scotch Tape (1959-1962, 16mm, color/so, 3 min. ) With Jerry Sims, Ken Jacobs and Reese Haire. Scotch Tape was shot on the rubble strewn site of the future Lincoln Center. The title arises from the piece of scotch tape which had become wedged in the camera gate.

By all accounts, Jack Smith was one of the most volatile, exhausting and creative of the original members of the New American Cinema group of the early 1960s. Best known for his controversial featurette Flaming Creatures (1963), Smith devoted his life not only to filmmaking but to acting, writing, photography and performance art. -Constantine Verevis, Senses of Cinema

George Kuchar - Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966, 16mm, color/so, 15 min.) "A very direct and subtle, very sad and funny look at nothing more or less than sexual frustration and aloneness. In its economy and cogency of imaging, HOLD ME surpasses any of Kuchar's previous work. The odd blend of Hollywood glamour and drama with all-too-real life creates and inspires counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality." - Ken Kelman

"This film could cheer an arthritic gorilla, and audiences, apparently sensitized by its blithely accurate representation of feelings few among them can have escaped, rise from their general stupor to cheer it back." - James Stoller, The Village Voice

Barbara Hammer - Superdyke (1975, 16mm, color/so, 20 min.) A comedy about a troop of shield-bearing Amazons who take over city institutions before relaxing in the country.

"SUPERDYKE took women into the streets when Barbara armed a platoon of vagina warriors with Amazon shields in an attempt to overthrow San Francisco. They marched through City Hall, usurped the bus lines, demythologized the consumer mentality at Macy's (to the recorded astonishment of casual shoppers), and wandered through the erotic art museum. Barbara's frenetic handheld lens caught the startled reactions and the glee of the participants. SUPERDYKE has a home-movie quality to it, but its committed and loose moments in the playground confirm its comic rationale." - P. Gregory Springer

Curt McDowell - Loads (1980, 16mm, b&w/so, 22 min.) "San Francisco-based Curt McDowell has always been a pioneer in sexual frankness, but his new film, LOADS, goes far beyond his earlier all-out efforts and puts such big-time dabblers in eroticism as Bernardo Bertolucci and Nagisa Oshima decidedly in the shade." - David Ehrenstein, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

"I love the fact that I can't understand my films when I first make them. It feels like I'm making them out of a real raw place." -KM

Matthias Muller - Alpsee (1994, 16mm, color/so, 15 min.) "ALPSEE is a brilliant autobiographical essay on childhood, family and memory. It is an exceedingly complex work revealing new layers every time you watch it. In Alpsee, terror has taken on a harder-edged shape compared to previous films by Matthias Müller; this nightmare has something alluring about it. I could not take my eyes off the mellow colors of this film. In the end, the blue of the skies is falling down and turning into red. This part appears almost Dionysian to me, sensuous and liberating, as if the cyclical structure of ALPSEE had to be blown up in the end by a final intimate moment." - Christian Cargnelli

Sadie Benning - Jollies (1990, video, 11 min.) Intensely personal and revealing, Jollies details Benning's early sexual experiences and experimentation with both boys and girls until, eventually losing her virginity to a girl, she embraces her coming-out and her queer identity. Benning takes us through typical pre-teen and adolescent experiences as she attempts to sort through and understand both her feelings and her sexuality. She is quick to note that although her feelings are perfectly normal for any adolescent, it is the object of her affections that makes her not only different but, as she will soon come to realize, invisible in the larger culture that expends its time, energy, and advertising on heterosexual love. -Melissa Rigney, Senses of Cinema
        
                
                        
        
                
                                                                
                        
                
                                
                

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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.