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

"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