Walking Picture Palace at Anthology

From: Mark McElhatten (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Sep 14 2007 - 13:34:57 PDT


THE WALKING PICTURE PALACE
October 4- 10
at ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES 2nd Street and Second Avenue New York,New
York
212 505 5181

PROGRAM 1:
Bruce McClure
INAUGURATION OF THE PALACE (SCRUBBING THE WINDOWS WITH SOUL DETERGENT)
2007, ca. 30 minutes.
Performance for multiple projectors.
&
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Betzy Bromberg
A DARKNESS SWALLOWED
2005, 78 minutes, 16mm, color.
“At once the most elliptical and also the most overt work in a career
that spans nearly 30 years and more than a dozen dazzling films, A
DARKNESS SWALLOWED opens on a pair of faded photographs showing an old
dented car, one with a child standing beside it and the other without.
Speaking in voice-over, Bromberg references a past event, one that will
forever haunt her although it occurred before her birth. The film then
sinks downward, dipping below the surface of the rational world to mine
the seemingly infinite layers of the past stored within the fleshy
entrails, chalky bones, sinewy spider webs and gnarled ligaments of
both the body and the Earth.” –Holly Willis
–Thursday, October 4 at 7:00 Bruce McClure and Betzy Bromberg at 7:35
aprox.

PROGRAM 2:
FILMS BY FRED WORDEN
VUDOO (1976, 5 minutes, 16mm, silent)
“I made this film in 1976 as an early stab at considering how a flow of
frames passing through a projector might yield an experience of
continuity if representation and naturalism were happily out the
window. It was based on my then fascination with fractal geometry and
the notion of self-similar patterns as one of nature’s most ubiquitous
underlying structures.” –F.W.
THE OR CLOUD (2001, 6 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
“Adventurous eyeballing then, in the ideal, an epiphanous moment of
mutual recognition and commiseration between energy forms. ‘There is a
vibration which exists to enrapture and console us’ (Rilke). I like to
think this vibration can be detected streaming out of THE OR CLOUD.”
–F.W.
IF ONLY (2003, 7 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
HOW THE HELL I RIPPED JACK GOLDSTEIN’S PAINTING IN THE ELEVATOR (1989,
23 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound)
HERE (2005, 11 minutes, DV, color, sound)
“HERE is a place, an optical location brought into being through
conjuring in order to accommodate a clandestine rendezvous between Sir
Laurence Olivier and Georges Méliès.” –F.W.
EVERYDAY BAD DREAM (2006, 6 minutes, DV)
TIME’S ARROW (2007, 11 minutes, DV)
New York Premiere!
“‘Time’s arrow’ is a term coined by British astronomer Arthur Eddington
in 1928 to describe the directionality of time. He cast it as a one-way
street aimed into the future. The term has since come to be applied to
a plethora of natural processes that are seen to be one-way, which is
to say, irreversible.” –F.W.
AMONGST THE PERSUADED (2004, 23 minutes, DV, color, sound)
“The human susceptibility to delusional thinking has, at least, this
defining characteristic: easy to spot in others, hard to see in
oneself. This film is about us. I believe it’s true. See the iron jaws
of the mechanism at work as the filmmaker falls into the biggest and
most obvious delusion of all: the belief that he can master his own
delusions by making a film about them.” –F.W.
–Thursday, October 4 at 9:30.

PROGRAM 3:
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
FILMS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON
with a SNEAK PREVIEW of THE SNOW QUEEN and other works to be announced.
THE GENERAL RETURNS FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER (2006, 11 minutes, 16mm,
film-to-video, color, sound)
Learning to love again, with fear at its side, the film draws a balance
between the romantic and the horrid, shaping a concurrently skeptical
and indulgent experience of the beautiful. A Frank O’Hara monologue
(from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of
the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.
AND WE ALL SHINE ON (2006, 7 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, spreading
deception and myth along its murky path.
YOU DON’T BRING ME FLOWERS (2005, 8 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
Viewed at its seams, a collection of National Geographic landscapes
from the 60’s and 70’s conjures an obsolete romanticism currently
peddled to propagate entitlement and individualism from sea to shining
sea; the slideshow deforms into a bright white distress signal.
BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA (2004, 11 minutes, DV, sound)
Designed as a loop. An exercise in possession and repetition, enacted
across nine summer landscapes.
CHIQUITITA AND THE SOFT ESCAPE (2003, 10 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
Twin attempts at structuring images of home and loved-ones break down
in the face of the romantic.
–Monday, October 8 at 7:00.

PROGRAM 4:
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Jessie Stead
FOGGY MOUNTAINS BREAKDOWN MORE THAN NON-FOGGY MOUNTAINS
2006, 59 minutes, video.
FOGGY MOUNTAINS is a structural motion picture but it also samples
tendencies from other popular genres such as road movies and music
videos. The structure in question is a cinematic catalogue containing
nine variations of the 1949 bluegrass instrumental ‘Foggy Mountain
Breakdown’. Thus a thread is pulled through the random landscape by
this American sonic icon, as it relentlessly mutates through the
decades. With the conflicting definitions of the word “breakdown”
itself, (and a band of famous and non-famous musicians called The Foggy
Mountains Breakdown More Than Non-Foggy Mountains Band) an
old-fashioned, absurdo-epic journey begins to prove the motion
picture’s lone hypothesis: that foggy mountains breakdown more than
non-foggy mountains.
Also screening: HUGE FLAG and THE ORACLE.
–Monday, October 8 at 9:00.

PROGRAM 5:
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
PHIL SOLOMON ( First Appearance in New York in 5 years!)
WHAT’S OUT TONIGHT IS LOST (1983, 8 minutes, 16mm, color, silent, 16fps)
THE SECRET GARDEN (1988, 23 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
THE EXQUISITE HOUR (1989, revised 1994, 14 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
REMAINS TO BE SEEN (1989, revised 1994, 17.5 minutes, 16mm, color,
sound)
TWILIGHT PSALM II: WALKING DISTANCE (1999, 15 minutes, 16mm)
.–Tuesday, October 9 at 7:00.

PROGRAM 6:
MARK LAPORE ANNUAL TRIBUTE PROGRAM
With special guests and additional films to be announced.
A DEPRESSION IN THE BAY OF BENGAL (1996, 28 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS (1997, 32 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound)
LUNATIC PRINCESS (2005, 4 minutes, DV, b&w, sound)
–Tuesday, October 9 at 9:15.

PROGRAMS 7 & 8
These two group programs will feature new film and video work including
the New York Premieres of A COVENANT ADAM by Ariana Hamidi and THIS IS
MY LAND by Ben Rivers with both filmmakers present and other filmmakers
to be announced before showtime.

PROGRAM 7:
“THINGS I SHOULD TELL YOU BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE”
“The world is blue like an orange.” – Paul Eluard
–Wednesday, October 10 at 7:00.

PROGRAM 8:
DIM. : LENGTH X WIDTH X DEPTH (“Time will catch on fire and you will be
sorry”)
“Outside everything is mortal and everything is outside.” –Paul Eluard
–Wednesday, October 10 at 9:30.

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