April 30, Saturday, 11:00AM, 2005
 CHOREOGRAPHING CINEMA I
Location: Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), 640 Huntington Ave., Boston

and

April 30, Saturday, 1:30PM, 2005
 CHOREOGRAPHING CINEMA II
Location: Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), 640 Huntington Ave., Boston

The program is supported in part by a grant from the Boston Cultural Council, and funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is administrated by the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism, and Special Events.

CHOREOGRAPHING CINEMA I and II are curated by Alla Kovgan for the Boston Cyberarts Festival and presneted in collaboration with Dance Films Assoication (New York) investigates a diverse spectrum of relationships between dance and film. These films are neither documentaries, nor documentations. All of them are rather creating/choreographing a dance, a movement or a dance-like feeling. This “hybrid film dance” – whether created by a dancer within the space of a film frame, whether choreographed through the movement of the camera and composition of the mis-en-scene, or constructed through the means of editing and such film techniques as painting on film – mesmerizes; reveals the hidden between the frames; inspires audiences to relate to cinema yet in another way, rejuvenates the eye, and offers new ways for humans to see the world.

“CHOREOGRAPHING CINEMA I” unites films that communicate through strong dance ideas. In these films, the key characters are dancers/performers who, with the help of the cinematic language, create a dance that exists only within the film space. All films are Boston premieres and include ROSA (a collaboration of world renown Peter Greenaway (UK) and Belgium choreographer Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker); KAZUO OHNO (a film by Daniel Shmid that features the legendary Japanese performer and the founder of butoh Kazuo Ohno); CLOWN (an animated short by Irina Evteeva with the Russia’s most favorite mime Slava Polunin); COST OF LIVING (one of the biggest recentt hits of the dance film festivals around the world by Lloyd Newson & his company DV8 from the UK), and finally DOM SVOBODE (a phantasmagoric short of En-Knap, the most renown dance troupe in Slovenia).

“CHOREOGRAPHING CINEMA II” is a collection of films wherein filmmakers become choreographers. They choreograph dancers, people, objects, images, landscapes, light and painterly shapes. The film choreographers include Guy Maddin (Canada), D.A. Pennebaker (USA), Meredith Monk (USA), Stan Brakhage (USA), Konstantin Bronzit (Russia). Artavazd Peleshian (Armenia).

CHOREOGRAPHING CINEMA I

CHOREOGRAPHING CINEMA II

CHOREOGRAPHING CINEMA I

Rosa 15min, 1992 (Belgium/UK)
Director: Peter Greenaway
Choreographer: Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker
Woman and a man, a grand mansion, elegance mixed with oppressive decor...

Peter Greenaway is a world-known for his films “The Draughtsman's Contract” (1982), “A Zed & Two Noughts” (1985), “The Belly of an Architect” (1987), “Drowning by Numbers” (1988), his most successful (in the mainstream) film of1989 “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover”, ‘Prospero's Books” (1991), the controversial ‘The Baby of Mâcon” (1993), “The Pillow Book” (1996), and “8 1/2 Women” (1999).

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, one of the most prominent modern European choreographers studied at MUDRA in Brussels, the school linked to La Monnaie and to Maurice Béjart's Ballet of the XXth Century, and then at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York. On her return from the States, she founded her company Rosas and created “Rosas danst Rosas” – the creation that brought Rosas an international recognition. Together with Rosas and Brussels' Royal Opera De Munt/La Monnaie, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has launched a new international school for contemporary dance, where sixty students coming from some 25 countries are trained, over a three-year period, by more than 50 teachers. http://www.rosas.be/

KAZUO OHNO 14 minutes, 1995, Japan (presented with support of The Aichi Arts Center)
Director: Daniel Schmid
Choreographer: Kazuo Ohno


Photo: Daniel Schmid
Kazuo Ohno is one of the forefathers of BUTOH, the Japanese avant-garde dance movement that emerged in the late 50s. The film captures Kazuo Ohno when he is 80 embodying his favorite Spanish dancer Antonia Merce “L’Argentina”.

Daniel Schmid was born in 1941 in Switzerland, Schmid Founded Tango Film Productions with Fassbinder in 1965. His filmography includes “La Paloma” (1974), “Il Bacio Di Tosca” (1984) and “The Written Face” (1995).


Clown 10min, 2002, Russia
Director: Irina Evteeva
Cinematography: Slava Polunin
A dance animation about love, grief, solitude and death of a clown. The film stars one the most famous Russian mimes Vyacheslav Polunin.

Irina Evteeva is a masterful animator from St. Petersburg. Her films have been screened at the numerous festivals around the world. Evteeva's technique is ravishingly fascinating. She eschews computers in favor of a painstaking, craftsman’s approach, altering cinematographic images (her own and vintage) by painting on glass frames with bold lines and upsettingly bright colors.

Dom Svobode 30 min, 2000, Slovenia
Director: Saso Podgorsek
Choreographer: Iztok Kovac
“Cobra and Phantom gave birth to Dom Svobode. The godfathers were Kurasawa and Bunuel. The town of Trbovlje is Galilean see. The walls are not vertical any more.” - Saso Podgorsek

Iztok Kovac, dancer, choreographer and the founder of EN-KNAP, an international dance group, has one of those creative energies which has enabled him, starting from nothing, to bring Slovene modern dance onto the European and world stages.

Born in 1964, Saso Podgorsek graduated from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Since then he has realized a number of programmes for Studio Ljubljana at TV Slovenia and collaborated with Arxel Tribe production house (computer animation), Iztok Kovac and his group En-knap, as well as of Mute Records, Ajax Studio, ZRC SAZU, Stop magazine and several advertising agencies.

Cost of Living 34min, 2004, UK (2005 winner of the Dance on Camera festival -New York)
Director: Lloyd Newson
Choreographer: Lloyd Newson and DV8
David and Eddie are street performers struggling to get by in a seaside town. The Cost of Living follows them as they work, argue, fail at romance and fall out with old friends. The Cost of Living is part dance film, part drama. The stories are told through a combination of stylized movement and dialogue.

The Cost of Living is the fourth film of the DV8 Physical Theatre (http://www.dv8.co.uk/). DV8's work is about taking risks, both physically and aesthetically, dealing with personal politics and, above all, communicating ideas and feelings clearly and unpretentiously. It is determined to be radical yet accessible, and to take its work to as wide an audience as possible.

As the Artistic Director of DV8 Physical Theatre since 1986, and DV8 Films since 1989, Lloyd Newson has had a dynamic impact on contemporary dance by challenging the traditional aesthetics and forms that pervade most modern and classical dance. Instead, Newson concentrates on connecting meaning to movement and addressing current social issues. Newson has created 14 works for stage, consistently receiving major British and international awards. After studying psychology, Newson won a full scholarship to London Contemporary Dance School. He went on to dance with many notable choreographers of the era before founding DV8. His work has included commissions from the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festivals and Tate Modern, and films for the BBC and Channel 4.

CHOREOGRAPHING CINEMA II

God 4min, 2003, Russia
Director: Konstantin Bronzit
A humorous animated short about Shiva's encounter with a fly. "Sometimes the Gods can be vulnerable." - Moscow Film Festival

Konstantin Bronzit is an internationally acclaimed animator and cartoonist. He graduated from art school in 1983 and from the Department of Industrial Design at the School of Art and Design in 1992. During his studies, Konstantin also worked as an animator at the Studio of Popular Science Films. It was at this studio where Bronzit made his first film "The Round About" in 1988. In 1988, Konstantin began actively drawing cartoons for magazines and newspapers. By 1994, he had participated in numerous international cartoon competitions winning more than twenty different awards for his cartoons. From 1993 until 1995, Konstantin worked as a scriptwriter, director and animator for several films for the Moscow animation studio "PILOT". In 1994, he graduated from higher courses in scriptwriting and directing with Fjodor Khitruk in Moscow. Bronzit's short animated films, including "Switchcraft", "Pacifier", "Knock Knock", "Die Hard", and "At The Ends of the Earth" have received more than 45 prizes and awards from festivals throughout the world including the grand prizes at ANNECY'95 and ANNECY'98.

Heart of the World 6min, 35mm, 2000, Canada
Director: Guy Maddin

Commissioned for the 25th Anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival, the award-winning short The Heart of the World is a brilliant, breathless parody of silent Soviet propaganda films.
For his distinctive style and unique vision, Guy Maddin is often referred to as the Canadian David Lynch. Born in 1958 in Winnipeg, Canada, Guy Maddin began his career as a banker but soon, in his late 20s, abandoned this meatier for filmmaking when he made his first short film “The Dead Father”, in 1985. Since then, he has gained international recognition among critics as well as admiration and devotion among an overwhelming number of fans from around the world. His first short was followed by his first feature, the cult hit, “Tales From the Gimli Hospital”, in 1988. “Archangel” was named the Best Experimental Film of 1992 by the National Society of Film Critics. His feature, “Twilight of the Ice Nymphs” (1997), starred Frank Gorshin and Shelley Duvall. He won an International Emmy in 2002 for his television ballet film, “Dracula: Tales From a Virgin's Diary”. He was honored with a lifetime achievement award for his work at the 1995 Telluride Film Festival. His most recent feature “The Saddest Music of the World” (2003) stars Isabella Rossilini.

Daybreak Express 5min, 1953, USA
Director: D.A. Pennebaker

Pennebaker's first movie; a New York subway ride to a score by Duke Ellington.

"D.A. Pennebaker began his career in film over 40 years ago. After having attended Yale and M.I.T., and spending time in the Navy, Pennebaker worked a variety of jobs, including stints as a painter and an advertising copywriter. His first directorial triumph was 1960's “Primary”, a cinema-verité account of the 1960 Democratic primaries that helped establish him as a major figure in American film. Since then, Pennebaker, now 72, has filmed or collaborated with some of the century's most important cultural figures. In the '60s, he made a pair of landmark music films: the much-heralded 1967 Bob Dylan documentary “Don't Look Back” and the 1969 concert film “Monterey Pop”. In the '70s, Pennebaker's projects included collaborations with Norman Mailer and Jean-Luc Godard, and he filmed David Bowie's last performance as Ziggy Stardust for “Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: The Movie”. In the '80s and '90s, Pennebaker has made a number of concert films, in addition to directing the Oscar-nominated documentary “The War Room”, which followed Bill Clinton's campaign strategists during the 1992 election. His well-received documentary about Carol Burnett's stage comeback, “Moon Over Broadway”, is being slowly released across the U.S., as is a re-released “Don't Look Back”. " – http://www.theavclub.com/avclub3318/avfeature3318.html

Lovesong 12min, 2001, USA
Director: Stan Brakhage

"LOVESONG is a hand-painted elaborately step-printed work which utilizes light transparencies in combination with light bounced directly off the surface of the individual film frames to establish and eventually enmesh two distinct entities of variable paint (more distinct than superimposition or bi-packing could acvieve) - said entities taking on separate personae against which (and finally in conjunction with which) the glyphic representations of body-parts gradually entwining, separating and re-combining again and again, are interwoven with the expressively drawn sexual organs represented in dark outlines which often 'explode' into black sperm-marks surrounding mutliply colored egg-likenesses." - Stan Brakhage

"Stan Brakhage made almost 400 films in his fifty-year career, ranging from psychodramas to near-documentaries to completely abstract works. His films display great sensual beauty, and reveal complex and profound meanings. He made film worthy of the other arts not by documenting art but by creating uniquely cinematic forms that reflect his many influences from poetry, music, painting, and dance. Brakhage is perhaps best known as an advocate of the first-person mode, of films that reflect their maker's individual vision, but much of his work eludes categorization, and part of his project was to constantly expand notions of "subjectivity" and "self." Creating visual music by focusing on organizing light moving within the time and space of cinema, he also made films that, in their relentless avoidance of predictability, renew themselves, and the viewer, at each instant of their unspooling. This program presents some of Brakhage's greatest achievements. By exploring the tension between daily seeing and the more abstracting elements that he saw as ways of plumbing other stratas of consciousness, Brakhage explored the boundaries between quotidian existence and the more imaginative, even unknown, realms that he took as a principal subject. A few of these films are joyous light bursts, and a few are somber death-songs, but the majority negotiate the twilight world between the life and death drives, riven by apparently contradictory impulses that seek to unify and fragment, to connect and to distance. Indeed, these opposing aspirations are present in virtually all Brakhage's best work, films that dance with light while also appearing to peer over a precipice." - Fred Camper http://www.fredcamper.com

Ellis Island 28min, 1982, USA
Director / Choreographer: Meredith Monk
Between 1892 and 1927, almost 16 million people came to Ellis Island attempting to immigrate to the United States. For the 280,000 who were turned back, Ellis Island became the “Isle of Tears.” Meredith Monk and Bob Rosen chose this site as the setting for a historical/psychological ghost story about our ancestors. Ellis Island blends documentary, experimental, fiction and dance modes in what Monk describes as “a mosaic of sounds and images woven together into formal musical design.”

“Though it is inspired by historical fact, the work is not a documentary. Though it usesprofessional actors, it has no dialogue and no storyline in the ordinary sense. It does, however, try to suggest something of the atmosphere and mystery of a ghost story, the ghosts in this case being our ancestors.” – Meredith Monk

“Meredith Monk has been composing, choreographing, and performing her work both solo and in larger groups since the mid-60s. She is equally noted for the quality of her voice and the way she uses it in speech and song, creating music for a capella voices. Other elements of her work are dance, ritual movement, lighting effects, and small props.”– http://www.meredithmonk.com

“I have never made a dance film per se, but the fact that my films are for the most part nonverbal and nonlinear in structure naturally relates them to an art form that speaks without words.” – Meredith Monk

Seasons 29min, 1972, Armenia (USSR)
Director: Artavazd Peleshian

"It's not specifically the seasons of the year or of people: it is everything. One should not forget that this film's "heroes" are not the people, but the seasons and nature. It is not man who imposed himself upon nature, but rather nature that imposes itself upon man. The film is about the interrelationship between man and nature." - Scott McDonald, A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews With Independent Filmmakers

Discovered to the world by the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard who became his first and most ardent supporter, Armenian Filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian is today considered as one of the most important filmmakers of our time, he received the Scam Prize for Television for his whole work in 2000. Born in 1938 in Leninakan, Armenia, Artavazd Peleshian lives and works in Moscow. He studied cinema at the VGIK (Cinematic Institute of Moscow) in the 1960s.