From: Thomas Beard (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Nov 03 2008 - 08:19:45 PST
Light Industry
http://www.lightindustry.org
Films by Matt McCormick
Friday, November 7, 2008 at 8pm
55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, New York
Portland filmmaker Matt McCormick comes to Light Industry, presenting a
collection of recent works, including the brand-spanking new Light Tiger
Eye, as well as The Problem with Machines that Communicate and clips from
his on-going installation project Future So Bright.
The Problem with Machines that Communicate, which made its world premiere at
the 2008 SXSW Film Festival, is an experimental narrative that examines
three lonely characters interacting with technology in a world that
otherwise doesn¹t seem to notice them. Don is a custodian who is never taken
seriously, George is a very old man exploring the vivid detail of the world
around him, and Hazel is an office worker who is desperate to engage in real
conversation. But while each struggle with traditional forms of
communication, the inadvertent by-products of their loneliness produces
entirely new, abstract forms of communication. Features Marty Crandall,
Elyse Sewell, and George Andrus.
Future So Bright is an art project mapping and cataloging the abandoned
relics of American western expansion. First exhibited at the Elizabeth Leach
Gallery and recently included in the curated portion of Art Basel Miami
Beach, it is a series of film installations that detail and document
abandoned structures in the American West. Captured on 16mm film and then
transferred to digital video, the images create a visual time capsule of
forgotten and disregarded spaces, many of which are quickly being reclaimed
by nature or new development.
Also on view will be recent music videos for bands such as The Shins, YACHT,
and Sleater-Kinney, as well as miscellaneous tidbits such as PSAs made for
MTV and other surprises.
The Problem with Machines that Communicate, 2008, 13 mins
Light Tiger Eye, 2008, 4 mins
Australia (The Shins music video), 2007, 4 mins
Afterglow (Arthur & Yu music video), 2007, 4 mins
It Was a Crushing Defeat, 2007, 7 mins
fifty years later, 2006, 3 mins
Future So Bright, work in progress, 12 mins
See a Penny Pick It Up (Yacht music video), 2007, 4 mins
Past and Pending (The Shins music video), 2003, 5 mins
Jumpers (Sleater-Kinney music video), 2006, 5 mins
The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, 2001, 16 mins
Selection of recent commercials and PSAs, 2006-7, 4 mins
Plus some other stuff.
Matt McCormick is an artist and filmmaker whose success spans both the art
and independent film worlds. He has had three films screen at the Sundance
Film Festival, has had work exhibited at Art Basel, the Moscow Biennial, and
the Museum of Modern Art, and his film The Subconscious Art of Graffiti
Removal was named a "Top 10 Film of 2002" by both Artforum and the Village
Voice. He has also directed music videos for The Shins, Sleater-Kinney, and
YACHT, while also collaborating on projects with artists such as Miranda
July, James Mercer, Patton Oswalt, and Calvin Johnson. Matt also won a 2007
Rosey Award for a series of global warming public service announcements he
directed for MTV. His work crosses mediums and defies genre distinctions to
fashion witty, abstract observations of contemporary culture and the urban
landscape. A collection of Matt¹s music and sound recordings titled Very
Stereo was released in 2007 by Marriage Records, and his photography and
installation work is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Matt is
also the founder of both the internationally recognized video distribution
label Peripheral Produce and the Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film
Festival, Portland¹s premiere event for experimental, documentary, and
otherwise obscure contemporary cinema.
Tickets - $6, available at door.
Too Early, Too Late
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 16mm, 1981, 105 mins
Introduced by Pedro Costa
Sunday, November 9, 2008 at 8pm
55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, New York
³In June 1980, the Straubs spent two weeks filming in the French
countryside. They were seen in places as improbable as Treogan, Mottreff,
Marbeuf and Harville. They were seen prowling close to big cities: Lyon,
Rennes. Their idea, which presides over the execution of this opus 12 in
their oeuvre (already twenty years of filmmaking!) was to film as they are
today a certain number of places mentioned in a letter sent by Engels to the
future renegade Kautsky. In this letter (read offscreen by Danièle Huillet),
Engels, bolstered with figures, describes the misery of the countryside on
the eve of the French Revolution. One suspects that these places have
changed. For one thing, they are deserted. The French countryside, Straub
says, has a 'science fiction, deserted-planet aspect.' Maybe people live
there, but they don't inhabit the locale. The fields, roadways, fences and
rows of trees are traces of human activity, but the actors are birds, a few
vehicles, a faint murmur, the wind.
³In May 1981, the Straubs are in Egypt and film other landscapes. This time
the guide isn't Engels but a more up-to-date Marxist, author of the recent
and celebrated Class Struggles in Egypt, Mahmoud Hussein. Again offscreen,
the voice of an Arab intellectual speaks in French (but with an accent)
about the peasant resistance to the English occupation, up until the
'petit-bourgeois' revolution of Neguib in 1952. Once again, the peasants
revolt too early and succeeded too late as far as power is concerned. This
obsessive recurrence is the film's 'content.' Like a musical motif, it is
established from the outset: 'that the middle-class here as always were too
cowardly to support their own interests/that since the Bastille, the plebes
had to do all the work.' (Engels)
³The film is thus a diptych. One, France. Two, Egypt. No actors, not even
characters, especially not extras. If there is an actor in Too Early, Too
Late, it's the landscape. This actor has a text to recite: History (the
peasants who resist, the land which remains), of which it is the living
witness. The actor performs with a certain amount of talent: the cloud that
passes, a breaking loose of birds, a bouquet of trees bent by the wind, a
break in the clouds; this is what the landscape's performance consists of.
This kind of performing is meteorological. One hasn't seen anything like it
for quite some time. Since the silent period, to be precise...
³These scruples are astonishing. They are not fashionable. To shoot a film,
especially in the country, means generally to devastate everything, disrupt
the lives of people while manufacturing country snapshots, local color,
rancid back-to-nature museum pieces. Because the cinema belongs to the city
and no one knows exactly what a 'peasant cinema' would be, anchored in the
lived experience, the space-time of peasants. It is necessary therefore to
see the Straubs, city inhabitants, mainland navigators, as lost. It is
necessary to see them in the middle of the field, moistened fingers raised
to catch the wind and ears pricked up to hear what it's saying. So the most
naked sensations serve as a compass. Everything else, ethics and esthetics,
content and form, derives from this.²
- Serge Daney, from ³Cinemeteorology," originally published in Libération,
February 20-21, 1982. Translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum.
To be preceded by:
6 Bagatelas, Pedro Costa, Jean-Marie Straub, and Danièle Huillet, video,
2001, 16 mins
Tickets - $6, available at door.
About Light Industry
Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New
York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project has
begun as a series of weekly events at Industry City in Sunset Park, each
organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually, Light
Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art
spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other
intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings,
performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the
presentation of time-based media and foster an ongoing dialogue amongst a
wide range of artists and audiences within the city.
About Industry City
Industry City, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is home to a
cross-section of manufacturing, warehousing and light industry. As part of a
regeneration program intended to diversify the use of its 6 million square
feet of space to better reflect 21st century production, Industry City now
includes workspace for artists. In addition to offering studios at
competitive rates, Industry City also provides a limited number of
rent-stabilized studios for artists in need of low-cost rental space. This
program was conceived in response to the lack of affordable workspace for
artists in New York City and aims to establish a new paradigm for industrial
redevelopment--one that does not displace artists, workers, local residents
or industry but instead builds a sustainable community in a context that
integrates cultural and industrial production.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.