From: Mark McElhatten (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Sep 17 2009 - 16:10:13 PDT
THE WALKING PICTURE PALACE on
October 5, 6, 7. At Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue, New York, New York
This edition of The Walking Picture Palace will open with a live
performance by Bruce McClure, and will then feature two programs with
visiting artist Ben Russell including the U.S. premiere of Let Each
One Go Where He May (in the wake of its World Premiere at the Toronto
International Film Festival, the final program in a series of special
New York tributes to experimental pioneer, the late Chick Strand. Ben
Rivers will present the U.S. premiere of Human Rites. Lewis Klahr will
present a program which will include Prolix Satori, 3 World
Premieres In addition our last program with Ben Rivers will also
include multiple premieres by Ken Jacobs and Luther Price. Other films
may be announced. Curated by Mark McElhatten
Bruce McClure
PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINAE
A three-part performance for multiple projectors and guitar pedals.
–Monday, October 5 at 7:00.
BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON WITH THE NYC PREMIERE OF THE COMPLETE TRYPPS!
TRYPPS 1-6 –Monday, October 5 at 9:15.
A TRIBUTE TO CHICK STRAND (1931-2009)
Part two- (part one at Views NYFF Walter Reade Theater on October 3)
–Tuesday, October 6 at 6:30.
BEN RUSSELL
LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY 2009, 135 minutes, 16mm.
“–Tuesday, October 6 at 9:15.
LEWIS KLAHR IN PERSON WITH PROLIX SATORI–
Wednesday, October 7 at 6:45.
THE SHINING HOUR – PREMIERES, REVIVALS AND SURPRISES
New work by Ben Rivers – Ken Jacobs –Luther Price April Simmons
Caskie and others to be announced.
–Wednesday, October 7 at 9:15.
Descriptions below:
PROGRAM 1:
Bruce McClure
PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINAE
A three-part performance for multiple projectors and guitar pedals.
“McLure’s stray tones and guided sonic accumulations, gloriously
assaultive and transcendently nuanced, scour our senses in a manner
that could be the envy of the Velvet Underground, Glenn Branca, and My
Bloody Valentine. In his latest work McClure expands his vocabulary of
self-interrupting loops and mutations using bi-packed imagery that tip
the scales into a landscape that is liminal and dreamlike.” –M.M.
PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINAE “‘flies leisurely over the sea to level
off in an environment that they are suited for.’ While visiting the
cathedral in Bristol I saw a sacristy door decorated with a pelican
feeding its young with the blood dripping from sores on its chest. In
Glasgow there are stained glass windows with the same subject.” –Bruce
McClure
(* “Lord Jesus, blessed pelican.” –St. Thomas Aquinas)
–Monday, October 5 at 7:00.
PROGRAM 2:
BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON WITH THE NYC PREMIERE OF THE COMPLETE
TRYPPS! TRYPPS 1-6
“Using a fabricated old English term as its guiding principle, this
ongoing series of (mostly) 16mm films is conceptually organized around
the possible meanings that its title elicits – physical voyages,
psychedelic journeys, and a phenomenological experience of the world.
Begun in 2005 in a somewhat vain attempt to hold cinema up as a mirror
to the live and fully embodied reception of the crazy noise music
scene in Providence, Rhode Island, the TRYPPS films quickly expanded
their formal and critical language to include the various poles of
action painting, avant-garde cinema, portraiture, stand-up comedy,
global capitalism, and trance-dance a lá Jean Rouch. While the form of
these works varies radically from one to the next, when taken as a
whole they can be seen to enunciate what their maker calls
‘psychedelic ethnography’ – a practice whose aim is a knowledge of the
Self/self, a movement towards understanding in which the trip is both
the means and the end.” –B.R.
BLACK AND WHITE TRYPPS NUMBER ONE (2005, 6.5 minutes, 16mm, b&w,
silent)
BLACK AND WHITE TRYPPS NUMBER TWO (2006, 8 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
BLACK AND WHITE TRYPPS NUMBER THREE (2007, 12 minutes, 35mm, color,
sound) With Lightning Bolt.
BLACK AND WHITE TRYPPS NUMBER FOUR (2008, 10.5 minutes, 16mm, b&w,
sound)
TRYPPS #5 (DUBAI) (2008, 3 minutes, 16mm, color, silent)
TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) (2009, 12 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
Total running time: ca. 60 minutes.
–Monday, October 5 at 9:15.
PROGRAM 3:
A TRIBUTE TO CHICK STRAND (1931-2009)
The second part of an October tribute to the late Chick Strand.
(Part 1 will take place during the New York Film Festival’s “Views
from the Avant- Garde on Saturday, October 3, at the Walter Reade
Theater see http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.html for future listing.)
A Tribute to Chick Strand (1931-2009) Part Two.
Tonight we feature three recurrent modes in Strand’s filmmaking
projects: the ethnographic, the personal documents of female sexuality
and memory, and the “surrealistic” compilation film.
COSAS DE MI VIDA, shot over a ten-year period, is part of a
continuing series of films about Anselmo, a Mexican-Indian, orphaned
at age 7, as he moves into adulthood.
SOFT FICTION is a landmark film of unflinching candor in which
several women confide life stories that mark the flesh and strike at
the heart.
Strand on ELASTICITY: “Amnesia is not knowing who you are and wanting
desperately to know. I call this the White Night. Euphoria is not
knowing who you are and not caring. This is the Dream of Meditation.
Ecstasy is knowing exactly who you are and still not caring. I call
this the Memory of the Future.”
WATERFALL (1967, 3 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
COSAS DE MI VIDA (1976, 25 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
SOFT FICTION (1979, 54 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound)
ELASTICITY (1976, 22 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.
–Tuesday, October 6 at 6:30.
PROGRAM 4:
Ben Russell
LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY
2009, 135 minutes, 16mm.
“Beginning in the ghetto squats just outside of Paramaribo, Suriname,
and ending in the rapids that lie just past the last occupied Maroon
village on the Upper Suriname River, this film follows two unnamed
brothers as they make the long journey upriver, tracing the footsteps
of their ancestors who escaped from slavery 300 years prior. As
members of the 20,000-strong Saramaccan Maroon tribe living in the
South American jungle interior, the film’s silent protagonists travel
through the frontlines in the battle between tradition and global
capitalism, one in which any sort of movement forward necessitates a
continual re-enagagement with the past. Shot on 16mm and consisting of
13 ten-minute long tracking shots, [the film] operates in the uncanny
space(s) between documentary and fiction, history and mythology,
record and re-enactment.” –B.R.
–Tuesday, October 6 at 9:15.
LEWIS KLAHR IN PERSON WITH PROLIX SATORI
“This screening includes 3 premieres – LETHE, NIMBUS SMILE, and NIMBUS
SEEDS – from a new series entitled PROLIX SATORI. As opposed to other
times I’ve worked in series, this one will be ongoing and open-ended.
It will include, as the title implies, films with durations both long
and short, and that offer experiences of variation with all the
repetition that implies. As for the emotional character and thematic
focus of PROLIX SATORI, clues can be found in the meaning of the title
itself.” –L.K.
Lewis Klahr is one of the most original and prolific film artists of
his generation. Intensively archeological in his approach to
autobiography and cultural ephemera he created two major series in the
eighties and nineties- PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS and TALES OF THE
FORGOTTEN FUTURE in super 8 and ENGRAM SEPALS the series completed in
the 21rst century in 16mm. J. Hoberman has called Klahr “ the reiging
proponent of cut and paste”one reason the casual viewer might find
surface resemblance to the work of experimental animators like Harry
Smith,Stan Vanderbeek and Larry Jordan. But Klahr more appropriately
belongs to the lineage of filmmakers like Anger,Harrington ,Kuchar,
Warhol and Cornell. Artists who also had a profound understanding and
affinity with Classical Hollywood while forging permanent departures
through radical form. And like Jacques Tourneur, Klahr is a creator of
atmospheres, not mere evocations of mood and setting but ontological
terrains where event and emotion register with archetypical power and
dreamlike intensity” – M.M.
Tonight’s screening features pieces with music by Bernard Herrmann,
Rhys Chatam, Velvet Underground, Gustav Mahler, Morton Feldman, Iggy
Pop, The Byrds, Mercury Rev, Jefferson Airplane, and Rodgers and
Hammerstein.
Order to be determined:
LETHE (2009, 22 minutes, video)
MERCURY (2009 2 minutes, video)
NIMBUS SMILE (2009, 8,30 minutes, video)
NIMBUS SEEDS (2009, 8.30 minutes, video)
DOWNS ARE FEMININE (1994, 9 minutes, 16mm)
TWO HOURS TO ZERO (2004, 9 minutes, 16mm)
GOVINDA (1999, 24 minutes, 16mm)
ENGRAM SEPALS (2000, 6 minutes, 16mm)
ENCHANTMENT (1983, 3 minutes, Super-8mm-to-video)
FALSE AGING (2008, 14.5 minutes, video)
–Wednesday, October 7 at 6:45.
PROGRAM 6:
THE SHINING HOUR – PREMIERES, REVIVALS AND SURPRISES
April Simmons Caskie – PRIVATE MAILING CARD (2009 2 min. video)
Ben Rivers – In Person Premieres:
HUMAN RITES OR MY CHILDHOOD OR MAY TOMORROW SHINE THE BRIGHTEST OF ALL
YOUR MANY DAYS AS IT WILL BE YOUR LAST (2009)
Ken Jacobs – Premieres:
THE DAY WAS A SCORCHER (2009, 8 minutes, video)
JONAS MEKAS IN KODACHROME DAYS (2009, 3 minutes, video)
BOB FLEISCHNER DYING (2009, 3 minutes, video)
GRAVITY IS TOPS (2009, 10 minutes, video)
BROOK (2009, 2 minutes, video)
WALKWAY (2009, 6 minutes, video)
Luther Price:
An impromptu selection from the “unscreenable” INK BLOTS series, which
will include a few of the following possibilities :
SLEEPING BEAUTY, THE NIGHT BEFORE, INK BLOT #16, GREEN #14, BLUE
DREAM, THE BURNT NIGHT, and THE TURQUOISE GARDEN.
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