Febuary 19, Thursday, 7:30PM
City Symphonies
Blood Orange Sky 26 min, video, 1999
Director: Jem Cohen
Blood Orange Sky is a portrait of Catania, Sicily. Includes the ocean at 5 a.m., the fish market, the distributor of pornographic films, the woodworker, the elephant statue, housing projects, and a young girl in an orange sweater.
Catania is a large and remarkable city without many tourists or tourist attractions. Its people live in the shadow of Mt. Aetna, an active volcano.
Original soundtrack music was composed for the project by Mark Linkous of the band Sparklehorse. The project also contains music made by local Catania musicians.
The film/video was made at the invitation of a Sicilian arts group, Officine.
CONTINUUM
17min, 16mm, 1987
Director: Dominic Angerame
"...
CONTINUUM, though
a film only 15 minutes in length, is one of
the more remarkable works within
recent cinematic history. In it, the world,
the workers within the world, and
the labor of making the film itself are equated
through montage and a brilliantly concentrated
filmic ‘painterliness’. The result
is an experimental film which
is at the same time a document of propaganda
in the sense that, at its
conclusion, one finds oneself closer to the
science of the motion of society
in its monumentality, with streets, buildings,
the building of them, and the workers
and their instruments (drills, tar) creating
a constructivist poetry within the eyes.
"Without sloganeering, the filmmaker has nevertheless organized harmonies and dissonance’s of people and objects to the extent that aethestics leads to the threshold of revolutionary consciousness, so that CONTINUUM is a film that can be received with enthusiasm in both union hall and Cinematheque. And that is no mean achievement in a time when sophisticated cultural forms are often so removed from the real needs of the populace, hiding behind masks of liberty that do not get out of the prison of the tyrannies of individuality, and therefore opportunism.
"The Filmmaker’s work...everywhere is informed by a collective sensing that takes hold of the ordinary and makes it mighty in perception...for his latest film is a major event."— Jack Hirschman
"...the images of CONTINUUM certainly haunt me: there was the softest continual casualness of editing (beseeming "casualness", I should say; for I certainly DO know how difficult this is to accomplish), and a steadiness-of rhythm, always moving/moving but never as anything ominous to me, or inexorable—something more like very heavy water lapping. Then the blacks and whites, evolving from some gray ‘cloud’ into the stark sharp glistens of ‘stars’ in the deep black of ‘tar’—for the ‘tar’ too seemed more night that what you’d photographed. It was amazing to me how little evidence there was in the film of the Time in which it was made, or even the location: I found myself tending to forget that these were City-chores, that this was rooftop work, soforth: just the labor, the continuity of labor, timeless, and ongoing, withOUT inexorable. Bravo."— Stan Brakhage
"In a superb manner, CONTINUUM builds from the bottom up a complex and finely woven picture of a day-in-the-life of labor, or a work, in progress, and without end, microcosmically reflecting a history of any labor and many an art.
"Through elegantly overlaid, constructionist windows of geometric form, we see into the turgid furnace of man’s multifarious tasks, and, as in a vision, behold the ballet of his tools and accouterments: steaming tar, turning pulleys, swishing mops, changing lights and sewer-plates, acetylene torches and sandblasting serpents, snorting sting of jackhammers and gleaming jewels amid grime where undinal heat makes the atmosphere buckle.
"And in the midst of it all—the streets, the bridges, the roads, the roofs, the endless river of communication cables and the windowed monoliths of jutting superstructure—there stands man, that somewhat Sisyphian, but irrepressible beast; not so much brawny as dauntless, to wit, wired for the thing-at-hand, welded to the task made a titan in collective will.
"The film is like a dream you can’t put your finger on and can’t forget, because the very truth of it is so evasive, suggestive, labyrinthine. And then it dawns on you, or rather circumnavigates you: the very fact of life is heroic, makes heroes of each of us, every man, woman, and child, from the carpenter unto the architect, and the whole of it is so thoroughly interdependent, so very closely interwoven."— Ronald Sauer
Hart of London (1969/70) 16mm, color, sound, 79 min
Director: Jack Chambers / Olga Chambers
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"Jack
Chambers is one of Canada's most famous and
greatest living painters. Why then have his
films been as neglected as they have been? I
feel that it is because his films do not arise
as an adjunct to his painting (as is true in
the case of most other painter film-makers)
but that, rather, Jack Chambers has realized
the almost opposed aesthetics of paint and film
and has created a body of moving pictures so
crucially unique as to fright paint buffery:
thus his films have inherited a social position
kin to that of the films of Joseph Cornell in
this country. The fact is that four films of
Jack Chambers have changed the whole history
of film, despite their neglect, in a way that
isn't possible within the field of painting.
There are no 'masters' of film in any significant
sense whatsoever. There are only 'makers' of
film in the original, or at least medieval,
sense of the word. Jack Chambers is a true 'maker'
of films. He needs no stance, or standing, for
he dances attendance upon the coming-into-being
of something recognizably new: (and as all is
new, always, one must question the veracity
of all works, whatever medium, which beseem
everything but that truth)." -- Stan Brakhage.
Perception is a sensory communication that occurs at a primary level between organisms; through the skin to the core and back through the skin again into the exterior world. HART OF LONDON is that kind of film.
For more information read FRED CAMPERS review at:
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Chambers.html
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