The Balagan Experimental Film & Video Series concludes another exciting season of alternative film & video programming with a Big Balagan bash, featuring an array of incredible short films and videos by several of New England’s extraordinarily talented, award winning artists. Most of these works have been made within the last year, many of which will be New England or World premieres. Tonight’s program will also mark Balagans 50th program in just under 3 years! To celebrate the 50th show, Balagan is moving to the 250 seat Moviehouse II and hosting a special screening of Balagan premieres by local film and video makers. Featured artists are: Louise Bourque, Abraham Ravett, Amy Kravitz, Robert Todd, Joe Gibbons, Abigail Child, Steven Subotnick, Alfred Guzzetti, Antony Flackett, & Ellie Lee. The artists will be in person and we invite all of you for a post-screening discussion and celebration.

Self Portrait Post Mortem 3min, 35mm, 2002
Director: Louise Bourque

Rossetti's Beatrice uses Stan Brakhage as interior decorator in this through-the-glass-darkly two-way mirror moving picture of death after death. —Steve Ausbury, Cinematexas International Short Film Festival catalogue, 2002

An unearthed time capsule consisting of footage of the maker's youthful self – an “exquisite corpse” with nature as collaborator.Bourque buried random out-takes from her first three films (all staged productions dealing with her family) in the backyard of her ancestral home (adjoining the grounds of a former cemetery) with the ambivalent intentions of both safe-keeping and unloading them (she was relocating). Upon examining the footage five years later she found that the material contained images of herself captured during the making of her first film. That discovery seemed handed over like a gift and prompted the making of this film, a metaphysical pas-de-deux in which decay undermines the image and in the process engenders a transmutation.

Louise Bourque is a French Canadian filmmaker teaching cinema at Emerson College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Bourque’s work has been presented in more than twenty countries and broadcast most recently on the Sundance Channel. Her films have been screened multiple times at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Toronto International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, among many other such venues. She has received numerous grants, honors and awards for her work.

Roost 4.5min, 35mm hand drawn animation, 1998
Director: Amy Kravitz

Roost describes, in abstracted imagery, a desolate place in which new life kindles belief in God. "The wild hen at roost is blessed, Delirious angels sing 'round her nest Rejoice! In the old barn, a new voice.

Amy Kravitz has made animated films and taught animation for most of her life. Her work is internationally recognized and has won many awards. She has received critical acclaim for technical excellence, innovation, and her powerful ability to communicate through abstract movement and imagery. Her work attempts to induce genuine experience through the usually vicarious medium of film. She directed "River Lethe", 1985; "The Trap", 1988; and "Roost", 1998 among other works. She holds an BA in Anthropology from Harvard University and an MFA from Cal Arts in Experimental Animation. She is an Associate Professor of Animation at Rhode Island School of Design where both her innovative teaching methods and her students' work have received international attention.

Trauma Victim 16min, 16mm, 2002
Happy Peppy Sparky Doggy 3min, 16mm, 2002
Director: Robert Todd

Trauma Victim: "Based on the feelings I had (and footage I shot) last summer in between Maximum Security Prisons across the US, this film's protagonist is yet another spider caught in its own solipsistic web as our civilization has instructed its spinning. I I am taking the position of the Introvert who uses images in nature to tell Its story as a permanent adolescent idling through a life eternally half-lived.” (RT)

Happy Peppy Sparky Doggy:
SEE: Sparky the Wonder Hound perform AMAZING feats never before seen on the Big Screen! HEAR: Canine latration at its finest in full Kadachromatic splendor!
FEEL: The Power of the Happiest, Peppiest Little Dogling spreading Puppy Love throughout his friendly neighborhood as he romps and frolics in this tale of sheer delight! If you've ever known a dog like this (and I'm sure you have) you won't want to miss the chance to share "Happy, Peppy, Sparky Doggy" with your family and friends. He's the All-American Woofer that makes us all feel like we belong together in this alienating, dog-eat-dog world of opportunism and disinterest that we can comfortably call, "Home".

Robert Todd has been working in and teaching film production since 1989, producing over twenty short pieces in various formats. Since 1985 he has been working as a painter, musician, and editor/sound designer on experimental, narrative and documentary films and videos. Robert's films have been screened at the festivals around the world and received a number of awards including Ann Arbor Film Festival Old Peculiar Award, New England Film Festival Director's Choice Award, Utah Film Festival Best Documentary Award and others. He holds a Masters Degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Rosetta Stone 8min, video, 2001
Director: Alfred Guzzetti

“The sea. Within a rectangle, another sea, slightly behind or ahead of it in time--it is hard to be sure. A guide in the British Museum stands beside the Rosetta Stone and tells a gathering of tourists in Italian: "Within a short time all knowledge and consciousness of this form of writing was lost." The moon inside the wall of a room. Veiled by radio static, an accented voice tells us: "The earth is not like the moon, a dead planet, but one which is active and moving all the time. The key is under the ocean." (AG)

Alfred Guzzetti has made, or collaborated on, many documentary and experimental films and tapes. His feature-length film, Family Portrait Sittings, was included in the Berlin, Edinburgh, and Sundance Film Festivals. Beginning Pieces won the Grand Prize at the 1987 USA Film Festival, while an earlier short, Air took first prize in the experimental category at the 1972 Chicago Film Festival. Guzzetti collaborated with Susan Meiselas and Richard Rogers on Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1984-85) and the feature-length Pictures from a Revolution (1988-91), which premiered at the New York Film Festival and received two prizes at the Leipzig International Festival. Guzzetti has been awarded fellowships from The Artists Foundation of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1993 he has been at work on a cycle of small-format videotapes, the most recent of which is The Tower of Industrial Life. He is the author of the book Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Analysis of a Film by Godard (Harvard University Press, 1981). He is a professor of film & video at Harvard University.

Where the girls are 4.5min, 16mm on video, 2002
Cake and Steak 2min, 16mm on video, 2002
Director: Abigail Child

Where the girls are: "A glimpse into the subversive alien body of a North American suburban teen as she rehearses her baton twirling, obsessively and beautifully. The practice of pose and control, the connection to parade and discipline, the young flesh and costume dress conjoin with ballet, object, fetish, desire and military 'air' to create a document that is at one critical and canny. An anti-paean to an ideal of female machine youth conceived for both loop installation and single-screen projection." (AC)

Cake and Steak: "A rambunctious embrace, body to body, woman to woman, entrance to exit- inlaws-foregrounding the construction of cinematic meaning, the elusive nature of memory and desire, the hysteric familial arena of the social. A comedy of manners and movement, the film, like all parts of this new series, excavates 'girl training' in the legacy of home movies and post-war American suburban culture, and is conceived for both loop installation and single-screen projection." (AC)

Abigail Child is a film and video maker whose original montage pushes the envelope of sound-image relations with sensitivity, smarts and passion. Her work in the 80s explores gender while focusing on strategies for rewriting narrative, creating the cult classics “Mayhem” and “Covert Action” while her 1990s productions recuperate documentary to poetically explore public space. Her recent films Surface NOISE (2000), DARK DARK (2001) and WHERE THE GIRLS ARE (2002) were premiered at the respective New York Film Festivals. • Her award-winning art is extensively exhibited in both solo and group shows, including The American Century, 1950-2000 at the Whitney Museum, the Whitney Biennial (1989 + 97), the New York Film Festival & Video Side Bar (1989 + 1993), the London, Rotterdam, Pesaro, and Torino Film Festivals, among others. She is author of several books of poetry (A Motive for Mayhem, Mob and Scatter Matrix). Her films have been shown on television both here and abroad and for her media work, Child has received Fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright Foundations, ITVS "American Narratives", NEA Interarts, the Jerome Foundation, Massachusetts Arts Council, Creative Artists Foundations, and multiple grants from from New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council for the Arts. Her films are in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; her work has been written about in The New York Times, The Village Voice, LA Times, AfterImage, LA Weekly, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Toronto Globe among others. Child studied History & Literature at Radcliffe College and graduated with a MFA from Yale University School of the Arts. She has taught film/video production & history at various schools and is currently Chair of the Film Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Mizuko (Water Child) 9min, video, 2002
Director: Abraham Ravett

“My son's unreturned motel key prompts the imagination to consider lives and "presences" left in that room.” (AR)

Abraham Ravett was born in Poland in 1947, raised in Israel and emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1955. He holds a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Filmmaking and Photography and has been an independent filmmaker for the past twenty years. Mr. Ravett received grants for his work from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Artists Foundation Inc, Boston, MA., The Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, The Japan Foundation, The Hoso Bunka Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. His films have been screened internationally including the Museam of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, The Collective For Living Cinema, N.Y.C., Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA., S.F. Cinematheque, L.A. Forum, Innis Film Society, Toronto, Canada, and Image Forum, Tokyo, Japan. Mr. Ravett teaches filmmaking and photography at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.

SEAN and DAWN 1.5min, video, 2002
Director: Tony Flackett

Video-dance-music - director Antony Flackett; dancers: Sean Curran and Dawn Kramer.

Antony Flackett is a local video, performance, sound and multimedia artist. He received an MFA from Mass College of Art where he now works managing a computer/video lab for the Computer Art Center. He curates shows for VideoSpace as well as for his own show on Cambridge Community Television called "Tony's Choice." His video work has been show locally and abroad at places such as; the Decordova Museum, The Knitting Factory and the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm Sweden. Visit Antony's web site - www.djflack.com to check out his music, videos and interactive musical animation.

Who is Uncle Sam 1.5min, video, 2002
Director: Ellie Lee

One of ten shorts commissioned by the 2002 Seattle One Reel Film Festival, in which filmmakers were invited to create short videos about one theme: Who is Uncle Sam?

Ellie Lee was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Boston. Her previous film, the animated documentary Repetition Compulsion, premiered at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival, screened in over sixty other festivals, aired on PBS’ P.O.V., and was nominated for a 1998 National Emmy Award. Lee is a Rockefeller Film Fellowship nominee and the recipient of twenty international awards and fellowships.

Hairyman 3min, 35mm animation, 1998
Director: Steven Subotnick

Hairyman: a personal and poetic interpretation of a southern American folk tale involving granny, a little girl, and the hairyman.

Steven Subotnick is an internationally recognized independent animator. His recent works include "Devil's Book", a collaged and calligraphic abstraction, and "Hairyman", a poetic folk tale. He has produced experimental animation for Absolut Vodka and has worked on projects ranging from commercials to interactive CD-ROM’s. Subotnick has taught animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, at Rhode Island School of Design, and at Harvard University.

Confessions of a Sociopath Super 8 on video, 2001-2002
Director: Joe Gibbons

Confessions of a Sociopath is an autobiographical film on digital video and Super 8 film, conceived as a real-life version of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. In this film, Joe Gibbons plays a fictionalized version of himself as he discovers a roomful of Super 8 footage from his own life, detailing events he can no longer recall. This footage shows his earlier film experiments, his descent into destructive behavior, and his "bottoming out" on drugs and alcohol. At a certain point, the films are replaced by random photos, police records, and psychiatric hospital records. In the role of the narrator, Gibbons uses psychiatric terminology to describe his past exploits, as a way of poking fun at both his own misfortune and at psychiatry’s ability to medicalize non-conformity. Through Confessions of a Sociopath, the now-reformed narrator seeks to understand his life, and make amends.

Joe Gibbons works in film and video, making features and shorts. His work has been shown at numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and included twice in the Whitney Biennial, and is regularly included in the NY Video Festival and the Rotterdam Film Festival. His last feature The Genius, starring Karen Finley and himself, had a month-long run in NYC at Anthology Film Archives and was included in such festivals as New Directors/New Films, AFI and Rotterdam. He lives in Boston and teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.