As a part of the Director's Cut series, Balagan presents a special program of Experimental works by local filmmakers Alfred Guzzetti, Ericka Beckman, Hal Hartley, Robert Todd, Louise Bourque, Joe Gibbons, Devon Damonte and Karen Aqua.

Boston and it's outskirts, have long been a hot-bed for Experimental Filmmaking. This phenomenon is due in-part to the high concentration of Schools and Film Foundations that offer some of the most progressive film/video programs in the country such as: Mass College of Art, Boston Film & Video Foundation, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Emerson College, and Harvard University to name a few. The artists that teach and work at these institutes are some of the nations best contemporary experimental filmmakers and their mentoring and activism in the community has fostered the growth of the independent film tradition in Boston, influencing countless of local artists over the years. The filmmakers selected in this special Balagan program, share a passion for expression through film and video and a desire to reach and educate people seeking to learn about alternative cinema techniques and theories. Their commitment to filmmaking and community outreach is a testament to their creative spirits. We are fortunate and honored to be able to bring their works to you in this special program of the Balagan Experimental Film & Video Series.

A Tropical Story 9.5 min, 1999, video
The Tower of Industrial Life 15min, video, 2000
Director: Alfred Guzzetti

Still from the Tower of Industrial Life, videotape, 2000

A Tropical Story: "Fleetly edited images and sounds of ! stunning clarity suggest the push and pull of a vivid present and inner recollection, 'a lesson on thinking of something and being far away from it and seeing other things entirely.'" (NYVF)

The Tower of Industrial Life: "An exquisite montage of ephemeral images and sounds gathered from near and far are juxtaposed with the intangible implications of dreams and the implacable facts of a war-torn planet to lull us into a sublime sense-memory reverie." (NEFVF)

"In recent works like A Tropical Story and The Tower of Industrial Life, Guzzetti captures the multivoiced and multilayered nature of experience, the distinctive way in which the "things that we see and hear daily mix with the conscious and unconscious stream of our thoughts, fears, and memories." His tapes haven screened at the New York Video Festival and featured in the recent Digital Room program in Copenhagen". - Harvard Film Archive Calendar

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.

Switch Center 8min, 16mm 2001 Premiere!!!
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 1960¹s 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 MassArt. She will be showing a full program of her works in the Spring Balagan series 2002.

The New Math(s) 15min, video, 2000
The Other Also 7.5min, video, 1996
Director: Hal Hartley

The New Math(s), based on a text by William Blake and with a score by the celebrated Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, and The Other Also, commissioned by a French art gallery for a series of works about "love".

Over the past decade, Hal Hartley has operated largely under the radar of the massive media attention focused on "independent film" in this country. At the same time, he is viewed abroad as one of the most significant American directors of his generation. Hartley was selected by French television¹s La Sept Arte as the sole American participant in its prestigious "2000 Seen By" film series and was tapped by the Salzburg Opera Festival for a major staging of his play Soon. Festival awards for his screenplays at Sundance and Cannes bear witness to Hartley¹s gift for quirky characters, lively dialogue, and wry humor: his films are all immediately identifiable by the deliberate cadence to his actors¹ delivery and the strange normalcy that cloaks even the most eccentric turns of his plot lines. Yet these films are marked equally by a sensuous awareness of color and formal movement, as well by their hip rock scores‹often composed and performed by the ubiquitous Ned Rifle (a Hartley alter ego). A fundamental humanity‹reminiscent of the sensibility of the French New Wave‹pervades Hartley¹s narratives, even amidst outbursts of violence and quiet despair. In brief, he is an auteur. And if we can be said to have reached the end of cinema, then Hal Hartley may well be our last auteur. - Harvard Film Archive Calendar

This semester, Hal Hartley is a visiting lecturer at Harvard University.

CLAM UP 3.5min, 16mm, 2001 Premiere!!!
Director: Robert Todd

"One man's search to discover the secret inner life of a clam leads to an astonishing conclusion."

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 and is a professor at Emerson College.

Just Words 10min, 16mm, 1991
Director: Louise Bourque

Just Words is about a woman overburdened by the weight of roles imposed upon her by her times and generation who comes to confine herself in the depths of a profound silence, to withdraw in her inner world which allow for a life of her own. Inspired by Not I, a work by Samuel Beckett, the film proceeds by using home movie images and addresses, by means of an intimate portrait, the alienation with which women of many generations have been faced socially through the limits of their exclusive roles as wife and mother.

"...a 10 minute tour de force... In Just Words, Bourque intercuts footage of her mother and her sisters with a performance by actress Patricia MacGeachy of Samuel Beckett's Not I; the result is unnerving (as all Beckett is) yet touching (as some Beckett is not)." ‹Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 1992.

Louise Bourque is a Canadian experimental filmmaker living in the Boston area where she is currently teaching cinema at Emerson College and has been Visiting Film Faculty at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts since 1996. Her films have been widely presented in festivals worldwide and she has received numerous grants, honors and awards for her work.

Hellhound 8min, pixelvision, 1995
Director: Joe Gibbons

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.

GROUND ZERO / SACRED GROUND 9min, 16mm, 1997
Director: Karen Aqua

Aqua's most recent film, "GROUND ZERO / SACRED GROUND," was inspired by travels and research in New Mexico (in the Southwestern United States), where she spent a number of months as an Artist-in-Residence. The film explores the juxtaposition between a Native American rock art site and the nearby Trinity Site (where the first atomic bomb was tested).

Karen Aqua has been making animated films since her graduation from Rhode Island School of Design in 1976. Her award-winning films have been screened nationally and internationally, including at the New York Film Festival, and at international animation festivals in Zagreb, Hiroshima, Ottawa, and Annecy (France). She has received film production grants from the American Film Institute, Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, New England Film/Video Fellowship Program, New Forms Regional Initiative, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Puffin Foundation. Aqua was a Lecturer in Animation at Boston College from 1984-1991, and Animation Instructor at Emerson College in 1987. She has served as a juror for major animation and film festivals in the US and Canada, and has presented one-person screenings of her work at museums and universities around the US, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), California Institute of the Arts, University of Oregon, and Harvard University. Since 1990 she has produced, directed, and animated over a dozen segments for the acclaimed "Sesame Street" television program.

Slipping a Mickey (part 1) 2.5min, 16mm, 2001 Premiere!!!
Director: Devon Damonte

Devon Damonte is an independent experimental animator who has been making films by hand without cameras for the past 15 years. He also frequently teaches workshops and lectures on direct animation. In other incarnations, Damonte is the former program director for Boston Film Video Foundation and has worked as an arts administrator and programmer on both coasts. His work is currently on exhibit in the "Animations" show at PS 1 Contemporary Arts Center in New York through January 2002, and recently screened at the Telluride International Experimental Cinema Exposition. Direct Animation is the technique of creating cinematic images by working directly onto motion picture film stock by hand, without using cameras. Various graphics are set in motion by using the film material as a vehicle for a moving "canvas." Techniques may include (but aren¹t limited to) painting, scratching, adhering thin semi-transparent materials to the film with tape or glue, ironing to transfer inks from plastic, and various other strange and obsessive methods not recommended by the manufacture.