Cineric, Inc. presents
A Ciné Salon Event
In cooperation with Anthology Film Archives, New York, and Deutsches
Filmmuseum, Frankfurt. Co-sponsored by the Howe Library, The Main Street
Museum of Art, and Department of Film and Television Studies at Dartmouth
College
Lectures by cinema scholars and historians, film screenings and discussions
explore the experimental dimensions of early American popular cinema.
HOWE LIBRARY, 13 East South Street, Hanover, New Hampshire
All Event Free and Open to the Public
Information: Series Curator Bruce Posner (603) 542-1254 or posn@cyberportal.net
On the Web: www.thehowe.org * www.sover.net/~msm/
*
www.hi-beam.net/org/cinesalon/cinesalon.html
* www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
Funding by grants from New Hampshire Humanities Council, New Hampshire
State Council on the Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts and National
Endowment for the Arts. Program Patrons: FOOTAGE.net, The Dartmouth
Bookstore, VideoMax
SEPTEMBER 20, Monday, 7:30pm
DAVID STERRITT, Film Critic, The Christian Science Monitor
THE BRONX IS UP AND THE BATTERY'S DOWN: NEW YORK CITY ON SCREEN
The craggy streets, looming skyscrapers, ever-changing light, and sheer,
buzzing humanity of the largest American city has attracted filmmakers
since the early days of American cinema. This program illustrates the
diverse array of visual ideas, from the gleamingly abstract to the grittily
emotional, that the metropolis has inspired in screen artists of widely
varying sensibilities.
Films:
MANHATTA (1921) by Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand 7m; A BRONX MORNING (1931)
by Jay Leyda; CITY OF CONTRASTS (1931) by Irving Browning 18m; THE PURSUIT
OF HAPPINESS (1940) by Rudy Burckhardt 7m
David Sterritt, Ph.D., is film critic for The Christian Science Monitor and
Associate Professor of Film at C. W. Post Campus, Long Island University.
He is author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible; Mad To
Be Saved: The Beats, the '50s, and Film; The Films of Alfred Hitchock, and
Robert Altman: Interviews (forthcoming).
OCTOBER 4, Monday, 7:30pm
DAVID JAMES, Professor of Critical Studies, University of Southern California
THE HEART OF THE MATTER: THE AVANT-GARDE IN HOLLYWOOD
The common-place assumption that the film industry and the avant-garde are two
distinct traditions has been accompanied by a geographical logic that
assigns the industry to Los Angeles and the avant-garde to San Francisco
and New York. In fact, Los Angeles has sustained vital and innovative
non-industrial filmmaking from the earliest days of cinema. James'
presentation will consider one period when the avant-garde was created in
the heart of Hollywood itself.
Films:
SALOME (1923) Alla Nazimova [clip]; LULLABY (1925) by Boris Deutsch 10m;
LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413 - A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA (1927) by Robert Florey & Slavko
Vorkapich 10m; EVEN AS YOU AND I (1937) by LeRoy Robbins, Harry Hay & Roger
Barlow 9m
David James, Ph.D., is Professor of Critical Studies at School of
Cinema-Television, University of Southern California and author of
Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties as well as editor of The
Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class and To Free the Cinema:
Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground.
OCTOBER 18, Monday, 7:30pm
DALE DAVIS, Founder & Director, New York State Literary Center
MODERNISM COMES TO CINEMA: JAMES SIBLEY WATSON, JR. AND MELVILLE WEBBER
Dale Davis, who acts as Watson's literary executor, will discuss the films
in terms of their relationship to modernist poetry, Ezra Pound as a
behind-the-scenes film auteur, and the films as a visual expression of the
sensibility that produced "The Dial," America's acclaimed literary
and arts
magazine published and guided by Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson,
Jr. between 1920-1929. . Dr. Watson was also instrumental in the
development of fluorocinematography at the University of Rochester.
Films:
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1927) by James Sibley Watson, Jr. & Melville
Webber 15m; LOT IN SODOM (1933) by James Sibley Watson, Jr. & Melville
Webber 29m
Dale Davis is Founder and Director of New York State Literary Center and
the archivist, curator and literary executor of the correspondence,
manuscripts, and papers of Dr. James Sibley Watson, Jr., publisher of The
Dial (1920-1929) and early avant-garde filmmaker.
NOVEMBER 1, Monday, 7:30pm
CECILE STARR, Author, Experimental Animation & Discovering the Movies
BUSBY BERKELEY AND AMERICA'S PIONEER ABSTRACT FILMMAKERS
In pre-war Hollywood and in the New York area, a number of creative artists
introduced the basic universal symbols of primitive ethnic art (circles,
star-bursts, and other geometric forms) into the 20th century's most modern
art form--the motion picture. This program samples diverse ground-breaking
achievements in the most commercial and the most obscure areas of cinema
history.
Films:
Busby Berkeley dance sequences: WHOOPEE (1930), 42ND STREET (1933), GOLD
DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933) & FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933). ALLEGRETTO (1936) by
Oskar Fischinger 3m; RHYTHM IN LIGHT (1935) by Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth
& Melville Webber 5m; FANTASMAGORIE (1938-40) by Douglass Crockwell 8m;
COMPOSITION #1: THEMIS (1940) by Dwinell Grant 3.5m; COMPOSITION #2:
CONTRATHEMIS (1941) by Dwinell Grant 3m
Cecile Starr is a film historian living in New York City and teaches at
Burlington College, Burlington, VT. She authored Experimental Animation
and Discovering the Movies as well as lectures on and distributes films by
Hans Richter, Alexander Alexeieff & Claire Parker, Walter Ruttman, Helen
Levitt, and Mary Ellen Bute.
NOVEMBER 15, Monday, 7:30pm
BRUCE POSNER, Series Curator, Ciné Salon
WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAMED: BEFORE THE AVANT-GARDE LEFT FOR EUROPE
Entering territories uncharted, Posner will unveil a startling cinema
created by pre-avant-garde American filmmakers working in a broad array of
film styles. The controversial perspective offered through slides and
films will conclude with the unnerving film collaborations attempted by
Dada artists Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in New York City between 1919 and
1921 and a Modernist nude study by photographer and painter Charles Sheeler
in 1919.
Films:
EPILEPTIC SEIZURES #1-9 (1905) by Walter G. Chase 10m; THE COUNTRY DOCTOR
(1909) by David Wark Griffith 16m; THE YELLOW GIRL (1915) by Edgar M.
Keller 15m; LE RETOUR A LA RAISON (1923) by Man Ray 3m; ANÉMIC CINÉMA
(1926) by Marcel Duchamp 6m
Bruce Posner is Director of Ciné Salon, the Upper Valley's alternative
film
theater located at the Howe Library and editor of Articulated Light: The
Emergence of Abstract Film in America, Foregrounds and Backgrounds: The
Optical Cinema of Pat O'Neill, and Super 8MM: The Last Frontier.
NOVEMBER 29, Monday, 7:30pm
SCOTT MACDONALD, Author, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent
Filmmakers
BEGINNING OF THE END/END OF THE BEGINNING: THE IDEA OF NATURE IN
EARLY AMERICAN CINEMA
Using slides of nineteenth century American painting and some of the
earliest American films about "nature" shot by camermen for Edison
and
American Mutoscope and Biograph studios, MacDonald will discuss how early
experiments in cinematically representing nature are, simultaneously, a
culmination of nineteenth century thinking and a premonition of avant-garde
films.
Thomas A. Edison: WATERFALL IN THE CATSKILLS (1897), FALLS OF MINNEHAHA
(1897), CAPTAIN NISSEN GOING THROUGH WHIRLPOOL RAPIDS NIAGARA FALLS (1901);
American Mutoscope and Biograph: DOWN THE HUDSON (1903), IN THE VALLEY OF
THE ESOPUS (1906); H20 (1929) by Ralph Steiner 10m; SKY BLUE WATER LIGHT
SIGN (1972) by J.J. Murphy 9m; STUDY OF A RIVER (1996) by Peter Hutton 14m
Scott MacDonald, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Film and American
Literature at Utica College and Hamilton College and author of A Critical
Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Vols. 1-2-3), Screen
Writings, Avant-Garde Film/Motion Studies, and The Garden in the Machine
(forthcoming).
DECEMBER 13, Monday, 7:30pm
PATRICIA ZIMMERMANN, Professor of Communications, Ithaca College
MORPHING HISTORY: RETRIEVING REGIONAL AMATEUR FILM FROM OBLIVION
By focusing on early-to-mid 20th century New England "home movies"
culled
from Northeast Historic Films, Zimmermann will show how motion pictures
alter our conceptions of history when events are recorded by amateurs with
8mm and 16mm cameras versus conventional journalistic methods of filmmaking
or writing.
Films:
Sound and silent films including works by amateur movie-makers Archie
Stewart, Elizabeth Woodman Wright, and Hiram Percy Maxim, founder of the
Amateur Cinema League in 1926, will be analyzed as important aesthetic and
historical documents depicting rural American life.
Patricia Zimmermann, Ph.D., is Professor of Communications at Roy H. Parks
School of Communications of Ithaca College and author of Reel Families: A
Social History of Amateur Film and States of Emergency: Documentaries,
Wars, Democracies, (forthcoming). She is an active board member of
Northeast Historic Film, one of the premier archives of regional amateur
film in the country located in Bucksport, Maine.
Programs subject to change without notice.
Copyright 1999