Intimacy, kinship, gatherings, meals, marriage, holidays, childhood, grandma, divorce, abuse, dis-functionality, pain...... Films of the "Family Stories" program construct a portrait of our collective family as humans. All of us should be able to uncover some familiar lines among it.

Star Garden 16mm, 22 min, 1974
Director: Stan Brakhage

The "STAR," as it is singular, is the sun; and it is metaphored, at the beginning of this film, by the projector anyone uses to show forth. Then the imaginary sun begins its course throughout whatever darkened room this film is seen within. At "high noon" (of the narrative) it can be imagined as if in back of the screen, and then to shift its imagined light-source gradually back thru aftertones and imaginings of the "stars" of the film till it achieves a one-to-one relationship with the moon again. This "sun" of the mind's eye of every viewer does not necessarily correspond with the off-screen "pictured sun" of the film; but anyone who plays this game of illumination will surely see the film in its most completely conscious light. Otherwise, it simply depicts (as Brancusi put it): "One of those days I would not trade for anything under heaven."-Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage (born 1933) completed his first film, Interim, in 1952 at the age of nineteen, and as of 1998 has completed 300 personal, independent works ranging in length from 9 seconds to four hours and incorporating a wide variety of innovative and uniquely expressive forms and techniques. He has, in addition, written several books, including Metaphors on Vision, A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book, The Brakhage Lectures, Seen, Film Biographies, The Brakhage Scrapbook, Film at Wit's End, I...Sleeping and The Domain of Aura.

Brakhage lived for many years with his growing family in the Colorado mountains near Boulder and during that time made films primarily inspired by and expressive of the environment in which he lived (though that source being "as diverse as to have included love-making, childbirth, children's play, mountains in snow-storm, potted plants, flames of heart and forest fires, trips to town and, even, journeys around the world"). Since 1986 Brakhage has been living in the town of Boulder, where he gives ongoing support to many younger filmmakers as well as continuing his own prolific output of work, creating work that is photographed, hand-painted on film and, most recently, films created by scratching and gouging the film emulsion itself.- Zeitgeist Films

Alpsee 16mm, 15 min, 1994
Director: Matthias Müller

ALPSEE is a brilliant autobiographical essay on childhood, family and memory. It is an exceedingly complex work revealing new layers every time you watch it. In Alpsee, terror has taken on a harder-edged shape compared to previous films by Matthias Müller; this nightmare has something alluring about it. I could not take my eyes off the mellow colors of this film. In the end, the blue of the skies is falling down and turning into red. This part appears almost Dionysian to me, sensuous and liberating, as if the cyclical structure of ALPSEE had to be blown up in the end by a final intimate moment. - Christian Cargnelli

This tidy doll's house is filled with the fetid air of the Fifties and Sixties. But Müller does not play the indictor's part: ALPSEE has a mellow, refined humor and keeps an ironical distance to its subject matter. - Alexandra Jacobson

Awards and Exhibition: Distinction, "Recommended" by the German Commission of Valuation; Berlin Film Festival; Main Prize, 41st Oberhausen Short Film Festival; Wellington Film Festival; First Prize, Filmothek of Youth.

Matthias Müller is a filmmaker, video artist, photographer and independent curator living and working in Bielefeld, Germany. With his films and videos he has taken part in major film festivals worldwide, such as the festivals of Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Rotterdam. His work has also been featured in several group exhibition like the documenta X and the Manifesta 3 as well as in solo exhibitions. In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, dedicated a retrospective to him. His films and videos are part of the collections of institutions like the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona and include: Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book (1989), Home Stories (1990), Sleepy Haven (1993), Alpsee (1994), Sternenschauer - Scattering Stars (1994), Pensão Globo (1997), Vacancy (1998), Phoenix Tapes in collaboration with Christoph Girardet, 1999), nebel (2000), Phantom (2001), Container (2001), Manual (in collaboration with Christoph Girardet, 2002), and Pictures (2002). His work has been honored with more than 40 awards worldwide.

I'll Cry Tomorrow S8 original, approx. 20min, 1999
Director: Luther Price (Artist In Person)

This film (I'll Cry Tomorrow) is as real as it gets for me...... I began making the film during the time when both my mother and sister got lung cancer only months apart and some of the footage is of them shooting each others matching surgical scars on low quality video. the entire film has a strange home video tint about it and the sound , in all of its distortion,adds to the anxiety and the parasite within.... there is no stopping it.....no promise ,hope or even forgiveness ... a saturation of clinging memory thrown into a cassarole and baked on high until dry and uneatable yet served three times a day....breakfast ,lunch and dinner.... over and over and over again.....until the taste becomes so familiar ,you no longer bother to chew or swallow......there is only the consumption of it left . and when there is nothing left to eat and there are no words left to say and your eyes quietly role back into your head, the parasite is left like a lonely maggot on a pork chop until its next host..... - Luther Price

[Luther] Price is an anomaly on many levels. He's gay but unwelcome by the gay community, which reviled him for the alleged homophobic excesses of Sodom. He invents alter-egos including the short-lived "Fag" and the more enduring "Tom Rhoads." He's worked as a waiter, played in bands (and started a country band), and "committed suicide" in one of his performance pieces via a candy overdose. Much of his personal history is mysterious, in spite of his frequent use of himself and his family and their history via photos and home movies in his films. He was nearly killed (and was heavily scarred) in a shooting accident in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s. He works in a disreputable format, appears in various guises in his own work from stylized, frozen-faced drag queen to naked performance artist to clown. And he occupies the same contested cultural space as artists like Karen Finley in being so controversial that his work has occasioned the immediate firing of programmers who have dared to show it. Increasingly revered as a filmmaker, he¹s also made a strong impact in his sculpture, photography, and performance art.

Price's film work has an oppressive intensity, envisioning an alienated world of often mindlessly repeated rituals and poses that entrap and suffocate his subjects. He sets up a constant dialogue between his compromised victim-subjects (often himself or his own family) and the equally compromised film stock itself. Images of ruptured flesh and ghostly birthday parties are further ruptured and drained of life by Price's torturous manipulations of the film, which can include chemical processing, filters, optical printing, re-photography, and even holes punched in the frame. What emerges is Price's great subject in the breaches, breakdowns, and collapse of body, family, and society, and by extension all of life, in the face of unstoppable philosophical forces. What makes it work is the nonstop flow of extraordinary, unforgettable imagery. - Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/29/lutherprice.html