February 23, Saturday, 7:15PM, 2002
Balagan at BUFF II
Location: Oni Gallery @ 684 Washington Street at Kneeland St. in Boston's Chinatown
[T: Boylston on Green Line; Downtown Crossing on Red; Chinatown on Orange]

We are pleased to once again be part of the Boston Underground Film Festival (http://www.bostonundergroundfilmfestival.com/ ). This year, we’ve compiled a diverse program of short works from nine accomplished and remarkable local filmmakers.

Program:

Switch Center 8min, 16mm 2001
Director: Ericka Beckman

This film is a tribute to the Soviet architecture of the future, and at the same time a reaction to seeing it be transitioned to shopping malls or global corporate office structures. I was invited by Balazs Bela Studio in Budapest, Hungary to produce a short experimental film there. I was the first American artist to be invited by this famous film collective after the fall of Soviet power. The collaboration took place in August 2000, culminating in a 10 minute color 16mm film. SWITCH CENTER is an experimental document shot in many defunct Danube Water Works locations on the outskirts of Budapest. It includes many old water towers and a 1960's water purification plant which was left in perfect condition for 25 years. The architecture inspired me to make a document of the factory, to recreate the workings there in sight and sound. Many of Budapest¹s industrial sites, which were built during their soviet occupation, are now being demolished or bought up by commercial interests. While I was meditating on the animation of 6 story water tank, a Pokemon commercial was being filmed down the corridor.

Ericka Beckman makes movies that are playful in the most liberal sense. Boldly colored and cheerfully self-absorbed, they take their structure, rhythm, and imagery from games. Given the difficulties inherent in avant garde film production, Beckman's work is improbably optimistic - it seems to celebrate its own coming into existence. There is something undeniably calisthenic about her vision, which is characterized by exhoratory chants repetitive gestures, and the iconic use of sports equipment and cheerleaders. Beckman's roots are in the art world. She began making movies in the mid 1970s using the then new technology of sync-sound super 8. Her first films were neither documentaries nor narratives, but rather idiosyncratic constructions that triumphed over the limitations of the narrow-gauge format with their ingenious homemade special effects. (...) If Beckman's narratives are often cryptic, her work is preoccupied by a recurring core of themes - competition, cognition, role-playing, and what she's called "the coordination of the self in the physical world." -- J. Hoberman

Ericka Beckman teaches at Mass College of Art. She will be showing a full program of her works on March 7th 2002 in the Balagan Series.

Party Noise 1min, video, 1996
Fuzzy Guns 1min, video, 1996
Snip/Hop 45sec, video, 2001
Director: Antony Flackett

Party Noise is from a series of short videos called "Sound Bites" in which sounds and images captured on tape are rhythmically chopped up but never seperated. Fuzzy Guns is the only piece from the "Sound Bites" series that incorporates a preexisting piece of music inthis case for both comic and political effect. Snip/Hop is a very short video about transforming a simple action into something exciting and funky.

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.

Introduction to Living in a Closed System 16min, 16mm, 2001
Director: Brittany Gravely

"What each of them [Lewis Mumford and R. Buckminster Fuller] has done, really, has been to write philosophical poems celebrating a world that does not truly exist, and perhaps can never exist, even though the poems are true."
Allan Temko

Introduction to Living in a Closed System is a fractured educational film based upon the idea of a biospheric utopia: a contained, self-sustaining, controlled environment which survives through dynamic systems (here, involving machines, plants, animals, and humans), each of which effects the development of the others. This hope of human-made technology and the natural world in harmony manifests itself in the collage of imagery, sounds, and text. The disparate elements variously unite or fall apart as all of the visions, fears, and dreams of this retrospective/future place attempt to operate within the ideal of a unified, efficient system. The film serves as an introduction to the complexity of the poetry and the problems created by pastoral dreams of synthetic futures. Brittany Gravely is currently a graduate student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Introduction To Living In A Closed System was part of her thesis project. She is the director, editor, and sound designer. In addition to 16mm, Brittany also works in a variety of areas including sound, video, and installation.

Sanctus 19min, 16mm, 1990
Director: Barbara Hammer

Sanctus is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson (Fall of the House of Usher, 1929) and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as it protects it. Sanctus portrays a body in need of protection on a polluted planet where immune system disorders proliferate.

"In Sanctus, Barbara Hammer addresses in a visually and aurally stunning fashion the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the raw material onto which she creates images. She has transformed "found footage,"—scientific x-ray films from the 1950s—into a lyrical journey, into a celebration of the body as a physical and spiritual temple. For 19 mesmerizing minutes, between the SMPTE test film which contains the static image of a woman’s face used for focus purposes at the head of the film, to the crumbling sprockets at the tail of the film, discarded x-ray images of human forms are vividly given a new life."--Jon Gartenberg, Film Dept., Museum of Modern Art, NY

Barbara Hammer, an internationally recognized film artist who has made over eighty films and videos, is considered a pioneer of lesbian-feminist experimental cinema. She is known for creating groundbreaking experimental films dealing with women's issues on gender roles, lesbian relationships and coping with aging and family. Hammer is responsible for some of the first lesbian-made films in history, including such landmarks experimental shorts as Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976). Hammer earned an MA in film at San Francisco State University and took courses in multimedia digital studies at the American Film Institute. Her most recent work focuses on global issues outside her community: Devotion: A Film About Ogawa Productions (2000) and My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities (2001). Some of her films are included in the permanent collections of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Burning Memories Pt.1 forbidden songs 3 min, video, 2001
Director: Bob Harris

Enigmatic agitprop

Bob Harris is a Film/Videomaker and Professor of Communications/Media (Fitchburg State College). He has screened his works at museums and festivals nationally and internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museo Laboratorio Di Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy; Exit Art; Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels and others. Prior to teaching, Bob played a significant role in the foundation and establishment of the Video Departments of Anthology Film Archives and P.S. #1, in New York City.

Hike Hike Hike 4 min, 35mm on video, 2001
Director: Anouck Iyer

A meditation on the rhythms and cycles of a dogsled journey.

Anouck Iyer began her filmmaking career at the Rhode Island School of Design where she majored in Film/Video/Animation, specializing in animation. Her degree film project Cloth & Bone won awards nationally and toured through the film festival circuit internationally. Upon her graduation from RISD, Anouck moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where she worked with the animation studio Filmtecknarna. She returned to the states to pursue her Master’s degree from the California Institute for the Arts in experimental animation. While attending CalArts she was awarded a grant from Eastman Kodak to complete her thesis film Barren Boughs. Once the film was completed, Anouck left the Los Angeles area and returned to the east coast to free-lance as an illustrator/animator for several Boston based studios. Anouck just completed her third film, Hike Hike Hike which was co-produced by the Film Study Center at Harvard University where she worked as a teaching assistant for visiting animation professor Wendy Tilby. She is currently living in Portland, Oregon.

Light Lick: AZ sent 3min, Super 8, 2000
Note to Poli 3min, 16MM, 1981
Near Site 2min, 16MM, 1976
Director: Saul Levine

Light Lick: AZ sent. One of a series of films called Light Licks which are made frame by frame often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into frames left unexposed. Light Licks are ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice.

Note to Poli "A note to the filmmaker Poli Marechal 'about' penetration: matter and light, substance and smoke. Images of drinking coffee and having sex evaporate as smoke is blown into a shaft of light on a refrigerator." -- Marjorie Keller

"NOTE TO POLI, part of a series of intimate 'notes,' represents a burst of sexual energy as the prelude to a cigarette in the sunlit kitchen, as if the balancing of eros and narcosis precluded the intervention of splicing." -- P. Adams Sitney, The Village Voice

Saul Levine has been making films since 1964. He works in Regular 8, Super 8. 16MM, and DV. His works have been shown on every contintent except Antarctica. Saul has been a film professor since 1968 and teaching at Mass College of Arts for the last 22 years.

White people 4 min, video, 2001
Director: Dana Moser

Dana Moser's films and videotapes have been seen in numerous venues including the ICA (Boston), the Brattle Theater, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the Collective for Living Cinema in NYC. He has also created performances and live events using digital imagery and telecommunications for the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The National Museum of Science and Technology, Ottawa; The Kitchen, NYC; The International Gartenbauaustellung, Munich; The Visible Language Workshop at M.I.T.; and the 42nd International Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Dana was also a co-founder of the trashy political cabaret rock band "Adult Children of Heterosexuals" and teaches as an associate professor in the department of Media and Performing Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Met State 10min, 16mm on video, 2000
Director: Bryan Papciak

Shot over the course of three years, Bryan's animated short, MET STATE, is a pixilated portrait of a decaying space -- namely, the long-abandoned, Metropolitan State Mental Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts. It has won the Best Experimental Film Award at the World Animation Celebration, the Silver Plaque at the Chicago Int'l Film Festival, and the Best Cinematography Award at the New England Film & Video Festival. In addition to specializing in experimental cinematography & mixed media television commercials, Bryan also teaches film and animation at Rhode Island School of Design.