flicker home
  announcements
  artists
  images
  links
  this week
  venues

contact

 
links

This week [May 11 - 18, 2008] in avant garde cinema

Enter your event announcements by going to the Flicker Weekly Listing Form .

To receive the weekly listing via email, send a message to Subscribe .

Pick new dates! Display calendar events for any dates you specify.

Events are sorted alphabetically BY CITY within each DATE . This page is updated every Sunday.
  • Tuesday, May 13, 2008
  • Wednesday, May 14, 2008
  • Thursday, May 15, 2008
  • Friday, May 16, 2008
  • Saturday, May 17, 2008
  • Sunday, May 18, 2008

    • This week's programs (summary):

    Tuesday, May 13, 2008
    top

    Brooklyn, New York: Light Industry
    8 PM, 55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
    The Green Light and the Lone Rose
    Curated by David Gatten 1 for sorrow 2 for joy 3 for a girl 4 for a boy 5 for silver 6 for gold 7 for a secret that's never to be told 8 is a wish and 9 is a kiss 10 for the person who most you miss The places we live, the spots where we go, the things we do, the songs we choose to sing: for friends and for strangers, for the one next to you and for the one who isn't. Ten pieces of sound and light, featuring premieres of new works by Jessie Stead and Mike DeAngelis.

    Venice CA: Potter-Belmar Labs
    7pm, 7 Dudley Cinema
    Fortune
    What does the future hold? What follows us from the past? What do we need to know about the present? Live cinema performers, Potter-Belmar Labs, will answer these questions and more, on tour stops throughout the U.S. Southwest and West Coast in May 2008. Traveling by train, this pair of itinerant fortune-tellers will probe the collective subconscious of audiences from Albuquerque to Seattle, and on many stops in between. Potter-Belmar Labs brings the ancient tradition of the magic lantern show to the 21st Century, inviting the audience to participate in a collective fortune-telling experience, and presenting the results in music, sound and moving image. The Fortune tour is made possible in part through Meet the Composer's MetLife Creative Connections program.

    jacksonville: THE LAST HURRAH PICTURE SHOW
    8:00p.m., 406 chelsea st
    Landscape Suicide & Confederation Park
    “In “Landscape Suicide” Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. Benning has created a script which is a masterpiece of understated colloquial writing, and the actors he employs to re-enact confessional testimony and incidents recounted in trial transcripts perform with a flatly convincing lack of affect reminiscent of Gary Gilmore. The two monologues are embedded in Benning’s characteristic meditations of landscape: long shots of the Wisconsin farmlands, general stores, dirt roads and pick-up trucks, and the carefully tended lawns, swimming pools, sprawling bungalows and malls of the middle-class California suburb. These images are offered in the classically spare mise-en-scene which Benning has perfected in his work as a cinematic poet of the contemporary American environment. Here, in his most accessible film so far, the beautiful, open vistas are dense with the significance of the catastrophes they engendered.”-anonymous 16mm 1986 95min. “In the voice-over to his most recent film, CONFEDERATION PARK, Texas filmmaker Bill Brown makes reference to ‘the secret languages of exile,’ and while this reflective, even somber film presents a pastiche of places across Canada where Brown has lived, its real subject is the limits of knowledge. Its long takes are accompanied by verbal meditations on the nation’s recent history, including the separatist bombings in Quebec during the 60s, and the battle between English and French becomes a metaphor for the filmmaker’s divided mind. Brown applies stickers with city names to a huge outdoor map of Canada, his voice-over suggesting that ‘we’ve found our place in the universe’ as a result of the ‘Copernican revolution’ - but then the stickers are blown away by the wind. Brown implies that images are insufficient: we need to know their history, their locations, their meaning. But landscapes can’t be fully decoded, nor past events captured on film: in the final shot a woman sings, ‘I don’t know where he’s headin’ for,’ while a car travels in a circle.” - Fred Camper, Reader 16mm 1999 30min

    Wednesday, May 14, 2008
    top

    Santa Cruz: Sidewalk Screenings
    8:30 PM, Cedar @ Locust St (downtown)
    The Show Starts on the Sidewalk
    The Show Starts on the Sidewalk features work that either documents public intervention or is an intervention in itself. Screenings will take place in outdoor locations in public places in San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa Cruz. These films consider relational aesthetics, interventions, Situationist practices, Fluxus style events and explore the followings concepts: Intervention: An action undertaken in order to change what is happening or might happen in another’s affairs, especially in order to prevent something undesirable In·ter·rupt (v) 1.To halt the flow of a speaker or of a speaker’s utterance with a question or remark. 2. To disturb somebody who is busy doing something, causing him or her to stop. 3. To cause a break in the flow of something or put a temporary stop to something. 4. To discontinue doing something temporarily. 5. To obstruct or block a view In·ter·fer·ence (n) 1. Involvement in something without any invitation or justification. 2. Hindrance or obstruction that prevents a natural or desired outcome. 3. An unwanted signal that disrupts radio, telephone, or television reception. In·tru·sion (n)1. A disturbing of somebody’s peace or privacy by an unwelcome arrival or presence. 2. An unwelcome presence or effect that disturbs or upsets something. In·volv·ing (adj) Holding the attention. Alternatively, Bring Your Own Definition! Curated and produced by Nomi Talisman and Bill Basquin

    Troy, NY: 51 3rd
    7 pm, 51 3rd Street
    TWO NIGHTS OF TOURING EXPERIMENTAL FILMS & VIDEOS AT 51 3RD ST. in
    TWO NIGHTS OF TOURING EXPERIMENTAL FILMS & VIDEOS AT 51 3RD ST. in TROY, NY in MAY (first screening is next week) WEDNESDAY MAY 14 7PM ACTION NEWS Experimental films and videos and music videos from Philadelphia Fantastical video narratives, metaphysical workout videos, music videos, and experimental animations and documentaries by Ryan Trecartin, Ted Passon, Sarah Christman, and other artists from Philadelphia. http://tinyurl.com/2yfeyu WEDNESDAY MAY 21 7PM THE FREE TRANSLATORS Video screening plus special performance by Miss Reading and Miss Recognition The Free Translators (Mary Billyou and Sabine Gruffat) present a program of video screenings deliberately complicating the textual content of our everyday lives and dedicated to the idea that multiple translations continually unhinge single meanings. http://tinyurl.com/yvqtdr

    Thursday, May 15, 2008
    top

    Los Angeles CA: Potter-Belmar Labs
    8pm, Echo Park Film Center
    Fortune
    What does the future hold? What follows us from the past? What do we need to know about the present? Live cinema performers, Potter-Belmar Labs, will answer these questions and more, on tour stops throughout the U.S. Southwest and West Coast in May 2008. Traveling by train, this pair of itinerant fortune-tellers will probe the collective subconscious of audiences from Albuquerque to Seattle, and on many stops in between. Potter-Belmar Labs brings the ancient tradition of the magic lantern show to the 21st Century, inviting the audience to participate in a collective fortune-telling experience, and presenting the results in music, sound and moving image. The Fortune tour is made possible in part through Meet the Composer's MetLife Creative Connections program.

    San Francisco, California: Bay Area Video Coalition
    6pm, Bay Area Video Coalition, 2727 Mariposa Street, 2nd Floor
    Rohstoff: Raw Material - Site Specific Exhibition
    Opening night of the next exhibition in BAVC's ROHSTOFF [raw material] series, featuring site specific video by Rebeca Bollinger, Nate Boyce, Anthony Discenza, Brook Hinton, Sade Huron and Laura Splan. (Exhibition runs through July)

    Friday, May 16, 2008
    top

    Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Filmmakers
    8:00 pm, 5243 N. Clark St.
    Chicago 360 v.3
    Co-presented by Split Pillow Split Pillow presents the third installment of its decade-long project chronicling early 21st century life and culture in the Windy City, Chicago 360. Five mini-documentaries centering around the theme "Work in the City" provide a glimpse into some of the jobs and workers that help define the Chicago landscape. The world's largest button-making operation, street-side peanut vendors, the changing image of Chicago's working class, the evolution of urban journalism, and the ultimate selfless job of parenting come under examination in this fascinating work. Split Pillow is a Chicago-based non-profit motion picture production and media literacy education company now in its sixth season of producing a full season of new works by Chicago filmmakers primarily for Chicago audiences.

    San Francisco, California: Artists Television Access
    door 8pm - show 9pm, 992 Valencia Street (at 21st)
    The Fundraiser for the Independent Collaborative Media Project (ICMP) presents Fou Fou Ha!, Freddy McGuire and Torsten Kretchzmar at the ATA.
    San Francisco, CA – May 16th, 2008. A triple feature of the finest independent performers is shown at the ATA (992 Valencia Street) on Friday May 16th starting at 9pm. The burlesque dance spectacle FOU FOU HA! together with the twisted lounge sound-artists FREDDY McGUIRE and the German electro pop performer TORSTSEN KRETCHZMAR join their creative forces to raise funds for the Independent Collaborative Media Project. Asking for a $10 to $1000 sliding scale the audience awaits a unique blend of intricate dance choreography, smooth vocals wrapped in electronic sound tunes and a live video interaction “Gesamtkunstwerk” that is topped of with a one of a kind Raffle! The proceeds will go toward a video project that will reclaim the creative soul of the once so avantgardistic art of the music video genre. About the Artists: Fou Fou Ha! (www.foufouha.com) Combining buffoonery, intricate dance choreography, mayhem, drag-queens and cheap Burbon, FOU FOU HA! is a troupe of performers like no other. Described as a cross between Venetian Carnival Clowns, Dr. Suess and the Cockettes, Fou Fou HA! has been seen all over the Bay displaying edgy playfulness and gender-bending dance antics. Freddy McGuire (www.myspace.com/freddymcguire) FREDDY MCGUIRE is Anne McGuire, accompanied by electronic musician Wobbly (Jon Leidecker). Together they perform as The Freddy McGuire Show, in twisted lounge mode. Anne is widely regarded for her video work, and has a screening at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh this June. Wobbly performs and releases his anti-pop collage music quietly and occasionally internationally, and will be opening for Matmos on the West Coast wing of their upcoming Summer tour. Torsten Kretchzmar (www.kretchzmar.com) The German electro pop talent Torsten Kretchzmar is best described as the love child of Kraftwerk and Sprockets. His live multimedia show surprises the audience with his unexpected usage of the spoken word. The synergy of hip sounds, amazing choreography, Torsten’s unique voice - all synced to stunning video projections creates a show experience the critics enthusiastically call “WTF was that?!” and “OMG – who gave this guy a visa to the U.S?!”.

    Saturday, May 17, 2008
    top

    Buffalo, New York: Squeaky Wheel
    8 pm, 712 Main Street
    THE FREE TRANSLATORS
    Reminiscent of the do-it-yourself approach of the Riot Grrrl movement, this Spring two feminist provocateurs are taking their multimedia show on the road. Mary Billyou and Sabine Gruffat are hailing from Brooklyn, NY and Madison, WI to present “The Free Translators” touring east coast cities and towns with a program of radical videos and performances. As the title suggests, The Free Translators’ video program is inspired by widely accessible texts. The artists perform in many of their own videos, sometimes enacting the news, dictating words written by the Marquis de Sade, or excerpting from Virginia Woolf’s anti-war essays. By re-interpreting the texts for the audience, the videos explore notions of identity and communication, re-imagining issues raised by feminist consciousness, the quality of attention today in the midst of multiple authorial references, and the diminished space of citizenship around the monologue of mass media. In between video screenings, The Free Translators present two “Live Tactical Translations,” or, live multimedia experiments inspired by 1970s feminist art and Soviet avant-garde news troupes. Culling from their library of text, sound, and image, alter egos Miss Reading and Miss Recognition communicate through matching headsets and manipulate analog recordings as they educate audiences in their unique methods of reading and comprehension.

    Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Filmmakers
    8:00 pm, 5243 N. Clark St.
    Chicago 360 v.3
    Co-presented by Split Pillow Split Pillow presents the third installment of its decade-long project chronicling early 21st century life and culture in the Windy City, Chicago 360. Five mini-documentaries centering around the theme "Work in the City" provide a glimpse into some of the jobs and workers that help define the Chicago landscape. The world's largest button-making operation, street-side peanut vendors, the changing image of Chicago's working class, the evolution of urban journalism, and the ultimate selfless job of parenting come under examination in this fascinating work. Split Pillow is a Chicago-based non-profit motion picture production and media literacy education company now in its sixth season of producing a full season of new works by Chicago filmmakers primarily for Chicago audiences.

    New York, New York: Jefferson Presents...
    8PM, The Museum of Modern Art, Theater 3 (Celeste Bartos Theater)
    The Museum of Modern Art PopRally series presents Pittsburgh's experimental film collective Jefferson Presents...
    PopRally invites you to a screening of films by the experimental Pittsburgh film collective Jefferson Presents… The artists present all-new work in 16mm celluloid film using combinations of uncommon vintage “analyst” projectors. A number of these special one-of-a-kind projection performances will be accompanied by live sound by several Pittsburgh based musicians. Appearances by established filmmakers and newer artists—including Adam Abrams, Tony Balko, Mike Bonello, Olivia Ciummo, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, Tara Merenda, Caleb Morgan, Gordon Nelson, Ross Nugent, Greg Pierce, Brian Dean Richmond and Rebbyro, showcase the best of Pittsburgh’s experimental film scene. Steven X. Boyle, Nick Falwell, Samuel Gangwish, and Jim Lingo contribute sound works.

    San Francisco, California: Other Cinema
    8:30, 992 Valencia Street
    Notendo + Potter-Belmar
    In Carl Diehl's paranormal polemic on Metaphortean Phenomena, circuit- bending, globsters, and glitches are advanced as missing links in techno- cultural evolution. The perceived obsolescence of blurry Bigfoot pics is reclaimed as an adaptive strategy to short-circuit saturated surveillance- a counter-narrative of radical ambiguity! Featuring Jason Jones' Son of Sasquatch performance, noteNdo's (also in person) live Nintendo hacking, Jesse England's VCR-wrangling, and Gijs Gieskes, Phil Stearns, and LoVid's electro-anomalies. The evening rounds out with the vidsonic trips of San Antonio's Potter-Belmar Labs, improvising cine-miasmic trajectories thru Fortean space! Come early for Leonard Nimoy, Lori Surfer, Sam Green's plaster Bigfoot, and Jefree Anderson's UFO update. *$8.

    Sunday, May 18, 2008
    top

    Chicago, Illinois: White Light Cinema
    6:30pm & 9:00pm, The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
    Tearoom - With Filmmaker William E. Jones in Person!
    White Light Cinema and The Nightingale are pleased to co-present an evening with the acclaimed Los Angeles-based filmmaker William E. Jones, who will screen his controversial new work Tearoom (1962/2007, 56 mins., video), which was selected for the 2008 Whitney Biennial. A provocative act of appropriation, Jones presents original 1962 police surveillance footage of a men's bathroom with only very minor intervention. The images are raw and powerful and the film invites exploration from a number of perspectives: portraiture, queer history, anthropology, sociology, documentary, voyeurism, structural film, and ever kinesthetics. It is a rich work, both fascinating and disturbing. Jones writes: "Tearoom consists of footage shot by the police in the course of a crackdown on public sex in the American Midwest. In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department photographed men in a restroom under the main square of the city. The cameramen hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. The film they shot was used in court as evidence against the defendants, all of whom were found guilty of sodomy, which at that time carried a mandatory minimum sentence of one year in the state penitentiary. The original surveillance footage shot by the police came into the possession of director William E. Jones while he was researching this case for a documentary project. The unedited scenes of ordinary men of various races and classes meeting to have sex were so powerful that the director decided to present the footage with a minimum of intervention. Tearoom is a radical example of film presented 'as found' for the purpose of circulating historical images that have otherwise been suppressed." Jones has published a companion book Tearoom (2nd Cannons Publications), which contains many historical texts relating to the Mansfield cases, as well as over 100 frame enlargements from the video. Limited copies of the book will be available for sale at the screenings. Showing with Tearoom is a short experimental video Jones made from the original footage: Mansfield 1962 (2006, 9 mins., video). Additional information on Tearoom, including reviews, interviews with Jones, and historical texts relating to the case, can be found at Jones' website: www.williamejones.com. William E. Jones has been making work for nearly twenty years. His films Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997) were both highly acclaimed documentary-essay works and his recent video v.o. (2006) has had great success on the film festival circuit and at film venues around the world. His films and videos were the subject of a retrospective at the Tate Modern in London in 2005. He works in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox and teaches film history at Art Center College of Design under his own name. Admission: $7.00-10.00, sliding scale.

    Los Angeles, California: Filmforum
    7:00 pm, Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N. Fairfax Ave.
    Filmforum presents Noisy People: Film + Live Performance!
    Noisy People (2006, 76 minutes, video) is a feature length video documentary by musician Tim Perkis following the tightly-knit group of unusual sound artists and musicians from the San Francisco improvisational music community. After the screening will be a LIVE PERFORMANCE by a quartet of the subjects of the film -- Tom Dill, Gino Robair, Phillip Greenlief, and Tim Perkis. Los Angeles Filmforum, copresented with Cinefamily and NewTown, at the Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N. Fairfax Ave (South of Melrose) Park at Fairfax High School across the street. General admission $15; $12 for Filmforum and Cinefamily members. www.lafilmforum.org or www.silentmovietheatre.com

    San Francisco, California: SFAI
    3pm, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street
    Latent Images: SFAI MFA Film & Video Screening
    Part of a long history within SFAI’s Film department of working beyond the boundaries of traditional narrative and treating film and video as fine arts, Latent Images presents the best of an exciting body of work from eleven emerging film and video artists: Rodney O’Neal Austin (Albert), Matthew Bonner (A Film about Idealism), Chris Kennedy (Lay Claim to an Island), Ryota Mori (Electric Lights), Alex Musto (En Passant and Generation’s End), Vanessa O’Neill (Sanctuary), Jonathan Sajda (Arcadia and Isabelle, Oceans Be Damned), SEO Won-Tae (Sugar-coated Film), Rosario Sotelo (Recámara), Michiko Takahashi (Sugar-coated Film), and Laura Zaylea (Flower Fall). Though participating artists work from within their own perspectives and sensibilities, they are all committed to exploring and expanding the expressive potential of the moving image. From the lighthearted to the sublime, from the political to the personal, these works eschew easy categorization and, in turn, reconfigure both the ways in which meaning is found and the ways in which we come to see.

    Let us know about your alternative film/video event!

    Enter your event announcements by going to the Flicker Weekly Listing Form .

    To receive the weekly listing via email, send a message to Subscribe