Morgan Fisher films are really inspiring. I recommend those screenings.
A month ago we showed some of his films in Barcelona. It was very difficult
to coordinate the copies and the subtitles, but finally the screening was really
great:
http://visionary-film.blogspot.com/2011/02/modelo-estandar-el-cine-de-morgan.html
Thank you Morgan for your attention and your patience,
Gloria Vilches and I really appreciate it.
Best,
Albert Alcoz
________________________________
De: Myron Ort <zeno_at_sonic.net>
Para: Experimental Film Discussion List <frameworks_at_jonasmekasfilms.com>
Enviado: vie,25 marzo, 2011 22:04
Asunto: Re: [Frameworks] HFA Presents MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS
I am based in Northern California (hour north of SF), but will be
visiting the Los Angeles area mid May.
I too am a huge fan or Morgan (who once visited me up here some years
back -- we have mutual friends and acquaintances -- I think I met
him at a private screening of Abe Osheroff's first documentary around
the time that Thom Anderson was working on his Muybridge film, I hate
to think how many years ago that was....
Myron
On Mar 25, 2011, at 12:58 PM, Mark Toscano wrote:
> I'm happy to say that the prints of Documentary Footage, Phi
> Phenomenon, and Production Footage will be from the Academy's
> preservations/restorations, which came out great, thanks to
> Morgan's extensive collaboration. He's really fun and inspiring to
> work with for me as an archivist.
>
> The two videos are very rarely screened and a substantial addition
> to Morgan's more known/circulated work - Turning Over is hilarious,
> and Protective Coloration is unsettling and powerful.
>
> Morgan is a fantastic thinker and speaker, and I'm a huge fan of
> his work, so I wholeheartedly recommend these shows. If anybody
> out there is on the fence about going, definitely go!
>
> Mark T
>
> p.s. Myron, where are you based?
>
>
> --- On Fri, 3/25/11, Myron Ort <zeno@sonic.net> wrote:
>
> From: Myron Ort <zeno@sonic.net>
> Subject: Re: [Frameworks] HFA Presents MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS
> To: "Experimental Film Discussion List"
> <frameworks@jonasmekasfilms.com>
> Date: Friday, March 25, 2011, 11:13 AM
>
> Wish I could see this. Any chance there will be a similar show on
> the West Coast sometime?
> I like the point made here about the comedic vein. I am thinking
> Morgan connects on some level to Buster Keaton.
> Myron Ort
>
> On Mar 25, 2011, at 8:52 AM, Gravely, Brittany wrote:
> MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS
> APRIL 8 – APRIL 10
>
> CAMBRIDGE, MA: The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to screen
> MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS from FRIDAY APRIL 8 – SUNDAY APRIL 10, 2011.
>
> An influential presence in the second wave of postwar American
> experimental cinema that began in earnest in the late 1960s, Morgan
> Fisher (b. 1942) has created a body of films whose lucidly complex
> engagement with the cinematic apparatus, and with conceptual art,
> is just beginning to be fully appreciated. Few filmmakers have so
> presciently explored- and expanded- critical debates central to
> Modernist art and its reception and also revolving around the
> relationship between art and industry, and between theory and
> practice. Fisher’s films are, in truth, only part of a more
> expansive art practice and his Production Stills was, tellingly,
> screened in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with
> its historic “Information” show, among the first US museum exhibits
> devoted to conceptual art. In 2005-06, one-person exhibitions at
> the Tate Modern and Whitney Museum inspired renewed interest in
> Fisher’s films, and he has recently received
> recognition for his paintings and other non-film work that employ
> strategies similar to those in his films.
> Focusing with rare intensity and insight upon the construction
> (and deconstruction) of cinematic illusionism, Fisher’s earliest
> films, such as The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing
> Preparations for an Unmade Film (2) and Production Stills, revealed
> the careful self-reflexivity and theoretical sophistication that
> have remained important trademarks of his work. Fisher’s late
> masterpieces Standard Gauge and ( ) have added another dimension to
> his meta-cinematic concerns, channeling Fisher’s ardent love, and
> deep knowledge, of cinema into a heartfelt, and at times distinctly
> melancholy, searching for the essence of film. Fisher’s late films
> offer a radical, “termite” history of the cinema from within the
> machine, a recovery and even an ontology, of precisely those film
> techniques and technologies that are typically overlooked and,
> paradoxically, designed to be invisible- the insert, film gauges,
> and the motion picture camera itself.
> An undergraduate art history major at Harvard, Fisher received his
> formal training in filmmaking in Los Angeles, at USC and UCLA,
> before taking a variety of jobs in the commercial film industry- as
> an editor, stock footage researcher, assistant director and even
> bit actor- working for the likes of Roger Corman and Haskell
> Wexler. Typically identified with the structuralist film movement,
> Fisher’s work must also be understood in the broader context of
> conceptual and minimalist art, on the one hand, and, on the other,
> the emergent “apparatus theory” of Marxist film scholars in the
> 1970s, led by Jean-Luis Baudry. Counterbalancing and enriching the
> theoretical rigor of Fisher’s films is their subtle and unexpected
> humor which offers a nuanced variation of the rich yet
> underappreciated comedic vein running throughout the work of other
> avant-garde filmmakers in the same generation as Ernie Gehr, Owen
> Land and Michael Snow.
> The HFA is proud to welcome Morgan Fisher back to Harvard for this
> rare opportunity to screen and discuss his pioneering films.
> Invited to select a film that could complete and complement his
> retrospective, Fisher chose Alfred Hitchcock’s rarely screened
> Under Capricorn.
>
> Screening Schedule:
> Director Morgan Fisher in Person
> Special Event Tickets $12
> April 8 at 7pm
> The Director and his Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations of
> an Unmade Film (2)
> USA 1968, 16mm, b/w, 15 min.
>
> Documentary Footage
> USA 1968, 16mm, color, 11 min.
>
> Phi Phenomenon
> USA 1968, 16mm, color, 11 min.
>
> Production Stills
> USA 1970, 16mm, color, 11 min.
>
> Cue Rolls
> USA 1974, 16mm, color, 5.5 min.
>
> ( )
> USA 2003, 16mm, color, 21 min.
>
> TRT: 74 min.
>
> Director Morgan Fisher in Person
> Special Event Tickets $12
> April 9 at 7pm
> Projection Instructions
> USA 1976, 16mm, b/w, 4 min.
>
> Picture and Sound Rushes
> USA 1973, 16mm, b/w, 11 min.
>
> Production Footage
> USA 1971, 16mm, color, 10 min.
>
> The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm
> USA 1973, 16mm, color, 1.5min.
>
> Turning Over
> USA 1975, video, b/w, 15 min.
>
> Protective Coloration
> USA 1979, video, color, 13 min.
>
> Standard Guage
> USA 1984, 16mm, color, 35 min.
>
> Detour - The final shot only.
> Directed by Edgar Ulmer.
> USA 1945, 35mm, color
>
> TRT: 92 min.
>
> Under Capricorn
> April 10 at 3pm
> It is well known that some of Hitchcock’s films take place all but
> entirely in a single confined space: Rope, Rear Window, Lifeboat.
> By working within this self-imposed limit Hitchcock showed that
> shifts from one space to another, all too easy in film and on which
> almost all narrative films depend, are hardly a necessity. Another
> limit in film is a material one, the length of a roll of film.
> There can be no shot longer than eleven minutes. It is clear that
> the staging of many of the scenes in Under Capricorn was conceived
> of in relation to this limit, in fact working backwards from it.
> The action in these scenes—the dialogue and how it is delivered,
> the movements of the actors, the rhythms they all create—was
> composed to accord with a length of time close to the maximum that
> a roll of film allowed. This procedure inverts the way scenes in
> almost all films are shot, where they are built up piece by piece
> from the elements of classical
> decoupage—the establishing shot, two-shot, close-ups—to move the
> story forward without regard for how long each shots lasts. In a
> scene shot in a continuous take, everything necessary has to happen
> but nothing beyond. And the execution of the scene is as exacting
> as its composition. Everything must happen perfectly: how the
> actors deliver their lines, their expressions, their gestures, how
> and where they move, how the camera moves. One mistake in the least
> detail, and there is no alternative but to start over again. You
> can’t cut around mistakes, you can’t get rid of lines you don’t
> need or add lines that you do, you can’t go back and shoot pick-
> ups. The longer the take and the more complicated the movements of
> the actors and the movements of the camera, the more opportunities
> for things to go wrong. Not only does everything has to happen
> perfectly, it has to happen without apparent effort, when in fact
> the shot is the result of a large
> number of people making extraordinary efforts, the work of each
> exactly coordinated with the work of everyone else. For me the
> sustained perfection of the long takes in Under Capricorn inspires
> awe. - Morgan Fisher
> Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. With Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotton,
> Michael Wilding.
> USA 1949, 35mm, color, 117 min.
>
> Harvard Film Archive
> 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
> (617) 495-4700
>
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa <
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa>
> General Admission Tickets $9, $7 Non-Harvard Students, Seniors,
> Harvard Faculty and Staff. Harvard students free
> Special event tickets (for in-person appearances) are $12.
> Tickets go on sale 45 minutes prior to show time. The HFA does not
> do advance ticket sales.
>
> Press Contact:
> Brittany Gravely
> Publicist
> Harvard Film Archive
> 24 Quincy Street
> Cambridge, MA 02138
> 617-496-3211
> bgravely@fas.harvard.edu
>
>
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Received on Sat Mar 26 2011 - 03:09:42 CDT
