TOTAL MOBILE HOME microCINEMA

Total Mobile Home/MicroCinema 

CALENDAR #5 / WINTER-SPRING 1996

TOTAL MOBILE HOME IS AT
51 McCOPPIN STREET
(NEAR THE CORNER OF MARKET AND VALENCIA).
ALL SHOWS BEGIN AT 8PM WITH A $5 DONATION. 

email tmh@sirius.com



A Trip to the Land of Knowledge

(1995, 65min,16mm, b&w, color/sound)

Friday March 1

Zoe Beloff (artist in person)

Zoe travels from NYC to screen her most recent film A Trip to the Land of Knowledge "A young girl escapes from her black and white reality into Kodachrome fantasy only to find herself face to face with her worst fears. Juxtaposing documentary footage of my old high school in Scotland with found home movies and staged melodrama, the film describes what it feels like to be a trapped adolescent girl. Pressured by parents and teachers, she refuses to fulfill their expectations, experiencing the scary awakening of sexuality as her body grows out of control."-ZB

For a peek into Zoe's mysterious world, check out her "Beyond" (digital serial) on the world wide web <http://www.hi-beam.net/beyond/> 

Enigmas and X-Terrestrials 
with GEORGE KUCHAR

Saturday March 16

Tales of the Twilight Typist (1995, 50 min.,video)

"In this video made 2 years ago while visiting my mom in NYC. It was at the time of my Birthday and instead of just staying in the Bronx and overeating, I traveled around with my 8mm video camera to capture on tape some folks not yet exposed to my camcorder's lens. There are three episodes of social interaction, the longest being a two day visit with famed horror and UFO author Whitley Strieber. He welcomed me into his upstate NY home and took me on a tour of his haunted terrain that fueled some of his best selling books. He articulates extensively about the mystery that engulfed him in those surroundings, and we meet his wife, son and cat.

In the middle of this tape there is a sequence with another author who writes about UFO enigma John Keel. We visit his friend Doug Skinner and interact with his world of books and talking puppets.

The New York artist Mimi Gross is the first person on the tape and she opens her loft to my video vision." -GK

also featuring 2 of George's UFO 16mm. films:
blips-(1979,16mm, b&w/sound, 30min.) "This 16mm movie is the first one in my UFO series (which spans 4 or 5 films) and is sort of an overture to the series. Marion Eaton, star of Thundercrack! has a pretty big part in it and the movie touches on several subjects that are explored further in the rest of the films in the series"

The X People (1985,16mm, color/sound, 25min.)"this 16mm. movie is a talkie about the Men in Black mystery. It's talking heads in color and the heads read from books now and then. The film is rarely seen and not missed in some quarters. People interested in low budget cheapie flicks appear to really enjoy it. 

A Salon with Sidney Peterson*

Monday March 25 

A MOVIE HOUSE IS AN ENLARGED CAMERA                                       
OBSCURA FOR THE SALE OF POPCORN, A 
DARKROOM FOR STAR-GAZING RIGHT SIDE UP

"The term Experimental film is probably "insufficiently lighthearted," as Duchamp replied when asked about a diatribe in which he had been called "the most overrated figure in modern art." I think I prefer Visionary, not because I hallucinate or see apparitions but because I like tails that wag dogs, particularly when they can be described as belonging to a tradition of Romantic poets older than the oldest living poet. Useful and suggestive points of reference are established."-S.P.

In a suffocating landscape of conditions which many have wearily come to take as an entropic given, what are the disruptive possibilities for those who call themselves "artists"? And what can we accomplish tonight in several hours in the company of an interested visitor?

You are invited to join us for an exchange of ideas with filmmaker, writer and artist Sidney Peterson. Readings from Peterson's Dark of the Screen, a memoir and homage to the moving image. Screening: rarely seen 16mm cartoons from Peterson's working days in Hollywood in the late 1950's:
The Invisible Mustache of Raoul Dufy
The Merry Go Round in the Jungle
Also: Laughing Gas, a Charlie Chaplin one reeler from 1914

*Please note this event requires a telephone reservation (please call 431-4007 between 3/17/96 and 3/24/96) and has a $10 donation. 

TOTAL RUBE GOLDBERG: 
CHAIN REACTIONS, WACKY INVENTIONS 
& KINETIC THINGS

Friday April 5

A program of live action films, cartoons, newsreels and documentaries inspired by the imagination and influence of the cartoonist/inventor Rube Goldberg.

featuring: Leapyear (1918) by Rube Goldberg plus a Rube Newsreel(1928)
Coney Island Rides (1920)
It's a Gift (1923)-Snub Pollard
Cartoon Factory (1925) & Earth Control (1928)- Max Fleischer
Persian Market & It's a Wild TV Performance (1957)-Spike Jones
Homage to Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York (1968)-Robert Breer

plus in the Grotto a video chain reaction of Fishli and Weiss's The Way Things Go and a segment of a recent documentary on Roman Signer (a Swiss artist who deals in delightful explosives) 

HOLE part 1, part 2
a film by John Writer

Friday April 12

Journey of My Lit Descent (part 1) 35 min., 16mm,b&w,color/silent
IN THE END ARE THESE STONE HANDS (part 2) 105 min.,b&w,color/silent

Behind this lit flesh
with black blood churned in it-
* a contemplation of death in two parts, joining round in her dance, the moon, dressed in long white gowns, trains the eye through stations of awaited faces. They are recognitions to them of awaited faces. These are recognitions to them be passed into memory's field, an illuminated white, where she the moon is turned and only attuned to what is gone - Nothing. Returned, fully waxed, this candle's lit flame, attempts to conceive from itself/or his eye, a warming of its own violent black/white flicker, radiating that which was made past from war - to come. Impatience - bravo! given to this, I am gone over to her, mother of mothers. nothing but mercy. Hers is a wit mercy, clear to the end.

("He looks charming with his extinguished torch; but, gentleman, death is not really so aesthetic."- Friedrich Schiller) also 'The Anxiety of Form in Its Making Fateful' a fifteen minute discussion preceding the films. 

PROSTHETIC AESTHETICS 
and OTHER CURIOSITIES

Saturday April 27

At the Leaky Palace (180 6th Street)

Motor on over to futuristic Victorian times where film and video work exploring the previously uncharted territories of the space-time continuum amazingly exists. The Prosthetic Aesthetic series uses the film apparatus to investigate the process of viewing and perception by creating a character who explores the architecture of the senses. Its body becomes an appendage or prosthetic limb to the various forms of mechanical strengthening devices. Its role is that of another performer in this mirrored circus, able to record its experience while being simultaneously monitored from the outside. including: Prosthetic Aesthetics by Emily Richardson and other curiosities: Cockatrice by Richard Squires, work by Inger Lise Hansen, Nicola Levinsky and more. 

URSONATA 
and OTHER DADA

Friday May 17

1. Ursonata (1922-32),35 min. - Kurt Schwitters' Sonata in Primal Sounds, arranged for two performers by Simone Junge and Konrad Steiner.

"KS, poet, painter, sculptor, reciter, playwright, created his Ursonata as music for one instrument: voice. The piece is rigorously constructed on the traditional form, using nonsense syllables as thematic material to create an energetic and hilarious dada sonata."

2. The music accompanying the intermission to be The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet which comprises side four of Freak Out!

3. OTHER DADA, at the moment titled Other Dada Amplified in an Aluminum Bowl will disform the second half of the evening. 

The Unquiet: Speaking MAUSCHELN*

Friday May 24

A work in progress/discussion with Jeffrey Skoller

For 19th and early 20th century Europe, the word "Jew" was as much a biological term as anything else. In that stereotype, the Jewish man was described as constitutionally timid, weak, hysterical or in a word feminine. This video essay focuses on more contemporary counter-images of the "new" Jewish male as the militaristic, tough, aggressive Israeli Sabra and the virile, hip, neurotically hyper-confrontational image of the American Jew. Structured around a series of interviews, that range from West Bank settlers, to Israeli and American youth, poets, cultural critics and psychiatrists, talking is the central medium here. These interviews are mixed with rare historical images and Skoller's own original footage focusing on events from the Hebron Massacre in 1993 to the U.S. 60s counter-culture movements and on figures from Abbie Hoffman to Baruch Goldstein, from Gershom Scholem to Lenny Bruce.

*(GER.) Anti-Semitic term for the corruption of language by speaking it with a "Jewish" accent. 

JEROME CAROLFI (artist in person)
Then & Now: a 10 year retrospective

Friday June 7

Jerome Carolfi is a San Francisco based filmmaker whose work is charged with sensitivity, depression and intricate sound play. Featuring:

Sanguine Memories: 1985,16mm, 6.5 mins
Two Motels (and a few other things): 1986,16mm, 8.5 mins.
Four For Four: 1987,16mm, 12 1/2 mins.
Lunacy: 1988,16mm, 12 1/2 mins.
Town of Day: 1989,16mm,16mm, 13 1/2 mins.
Loci Lacunae: 1993, 6 1/2 mins.

As Far Away As Here: 1996, 16mm, 25 mins. (in progress)

Made in the context of a gay man reopening his childhood wounds of shame and abandonment, As Far Away As Here takes its title from the distance from which I had once felt an earthquake. The film is a psychic journey into the geography of the mind, a kind of "soul-quake" if you will. The premise of the film is ostensibly the embarking on a road trip across the American West to attend a wedding, but shifts in its course to elucidate an emotional process: coming to grieve the loss of love. Home movies shot on the road trip are interwoven with a variety of other elements to create the mythical quest to reunite with the lost love that can never be found. 

Mirror Games and
Will-o'-the Wisps

Films by Charlotte Pryce and Ross Lipman

FRIDAY JUNE 21

Perforated silver silvers haunted By light/dark umbras and embers; Gathered, arranged, disturbed and pursued in Chicago, London, Budapest, and San Francisco.

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear." --Puck

Featuring: X, Why, 10-17-88, Kino-i, Cold Polished Pictures-Disturbed, Thin Breath--Quivering, Rhythm 92, Rhythm 93 and others.

TOTAL MOBILE HOME IS AT 51 McCOPPIN STREET (NEAR THE CORNER OF MARKET AND VALENCIA). ALL SHOWS BEGIN AT 8PM WITH A $5 DONATION.

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