[Frameworks] The Complete Films of Fred Camper (March 4 & April 16)

From: Patrick Friel <patrick.friel_at_att.net>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:06:52 -0600

White Light Cinema Presents
 
 
The Complete Films of Fred Camper (Two Screenings)
 
 
Program One:
A Sense of the Past: Short Films by Fred Camper (1967-1976)
Friday, March 4, 2011 ­ 8:00pm
 
And
 
Program Two:
Fred Camperıs SN
Saturday, April 16, 2011 ­ 8:00pm
 
 
Both Screenings at The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
 
 
 
 
White Light Cinema is extremely pleased to present these very rare public
screenings of the complete films of Fred Camper. Camper has been a
thoughtful and articulate writer on film for over forty years (much of his
writing is available on his website) and, more recently, has been producing
an astonishing body of digital artworks. His earlier filmmaking practice,
however, is little known. Long out of distribution (some never in
distribution), his short 16mm and Super-8mm films have not been publicly
screened for decades. And this presentation of his stunning feature-length
Super-8mm film SN is only its third-ever public showing. These films may not
be screened again for many years, due to their irreplaceability.
 
 
 
PROGRAM DETAILS:
 
 
Program One:
A Sense of the Past: Short Films by Fred Camper (1967-1976)
Friday, March 4, 2011 ­ 8:00pm
 
 
Joan Goes to Misery (1967, 8 minutes, 16mm, sound)
A Sense of the Past (1967, 4 minutes, 16mm, silent)
Dan Potter (1968, 39 minutes, 16mm, silent)
Welcome to Come (1968, 3 minutes, 16mm, sound)
Bathroom (1969, 25 minutes, 16mm, silent)
Ghost (1976, 1 minute, super-8, silent)
 
³My five early 16mm films were made in a two year period when I was between
19 and 21, after I had been interested in cinema for only a few years. Each
of my early films is somewhat different. Joan Goes to Misery was actually
commissioned by a television show that wanted an "underground" film. It's my
only film with a narrative, one with psychological overtones, and, like the
others, shows influences from both classical Hollywood and avant-garde
filmmaking. A Sense of the Past was shot without pre-planning during a long
weekend reading Henry James, and I would like to think that its form was
somewhat influenced by his passive descriptions that seem to both evoke and
conceal great, not fully articulated, traumas. Dan Potter, showing a young
man in the woods, was shot over many months as the landscape changes from
summer to winter. Though not a portrait, it was inspired by the way Gregory
J. Markopoulos's portraits in Galaxie intermingle the identities of his
figures with objects around them; less obvious influences are F.W. Murnau's
Tabu and the relationships between figures and backgrounds in the films of
Howard Hawks. Welcome to Come, which depicts a somewhat mysterious
transformation of the image in the course of a single zoom, was my only film
to achieve a small measure of "popularity," with a short write up in Variety
and prints purchased by several film teachers who still show it today.
Bathroom shows a somewhat seedy bathroom, beginning with a stab at seeing it
"objectively" that soon fails; the forms descend into what I hope is a
terrifying, even self-destroying irrationality. One inspiration was the long
take depiction of madness at the end of Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour; another,
the two out-of-focus shots of the altar near the end of Douglas Sirk's The
First Legion. The program ends with my less-than-one-minute long super-8
film Ghost, which leads to a fleeting final image I hope worthy of its
title, and which will be screened twice in a row, my usual practice with
this film.² (Fred Camper)
 
 
***************************************************
 
 
Program Two:
Fred Camperıs SN
Saturday, April 16, 2011 ­ 8:00pm
 
 
SN (1984, c. 110 minutes, super-8, silent)
 
³SN was born out of an intense personal despair, and a desire to depict a
failure of the self, coincident with my discovery of super-8 as a medium
completely different from 16mm, well suited to a kind of analog for the
written diary. Its images' natural lack of illusionistic presence and
authority contributes to the failure theme. The original plan for the film
would have required perhaps twenty years of full time work and a great deal
of money, leading to a very long film only a small part of which would have
been screened each time, selections made with a controlled use of random
numbers. What I show now is in ten sections, and in the eighth, on three
short reels, a tiny piece of the original plan survives: sixteen short serve
as the source for this section, and which three are screened and the order
in which they are screened at each showing is determined randomly. I have no
final prints of any of SN; most sections are edited workprint or edited
original, and are thus not exactly as they were intended to look. Still, I
believe in it as a film. In part a portrait of Manhattan's constricted
spaces, and more generally of the way humans occupy space, it also presents
the failed journey of a self to organize, or become present in, the world.
The film has only been screened publicly twice before, and will likely only
be screened rarely in its original format in the future.² (Fred Camper)
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fred Camper has been writing and publishing on cinema since the late 1960s,
and on art since the late 1980s. He has taught at a number of colleges and
universities, and presented film programs throughout the world. For the last
six years, he has mainly concentrated on making his own art, mostly photo
based digital prints; cinema is one key inspiration. His Web site is
www.fredcamper.com <http://www.fredcamper.com> .
 
 
 
 
 
 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
 
 
Admission: $7.00-10.00 sliding scale
 
 
Website: www.whitelightcinema.com
 






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Received on Mon Feb 28 2011 - 21:07:13 CST