For sponsoring this program, Balagan and Somerville Arts Council would like to thank a Somerville- based A/V rental and dealer

FOOD is an inseparable component of the existence of any living creature on this planet, an object of obsession, discussion, craving, disgust; a fetish; a ritual, a celebration, a form of artistic expression; a sign of cultural identity; a tool to gain power, to stir a revolution, to win the heart of the beloved, to revenge, to bring people together or alienate them; a subject of political, social and philosophical discourse… All these thoughts about FOOD guided us in our search for films for this program. The filmmakers of FOOD FOR THOUGHT program take you on the journey to explore the cultural, political, artistic, and personal phenomena of FOOD through a variety of film genres. Among the filmmakers featured are Jan Svankmajer, Sam Green, Max Coniglio, Les Blank, Joanna Priestley, Karen Aqua, Reynold Reynolds, Chuck Stattler, Jorge Furtado, Lawrence Klein, Jared Madeiros, and others.
--Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva

PART I

Candyjam 16mm, 7 min, 1988 (Portland, OR, Somerville, MA and others)
Director: Joanna Priestley, Karen Aqua and others

Puppets, drawings and object animation. Produced and directed by Joanna Priestley and Joan Gratz. Music by Dave Storrs. Animated by David Anderson, Karen Aqua, Craig Bartlett, Elizabeth Buttler, Paul Driessen, Tom Gasek, Joan Gratz, Marv Newland, Christine Panushka and Joanna Priestley.

CANDYJAM is a whimsical, entertaining, animated collaboration by 10 animators from four countries. Each person created asegment of the film, using candy in their composition.

Awards and Exhibition: First Prize, Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Honorable Mention, National Independent Film and Video Competition; Certificate of Merit, Chicago Int'l Film Festival; Cash Award, Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Honorable Mention, Northwest Film and Video Festival; Zagreb Int'l Animation Festival.

Pie Fight’ 69 16mm, 8 min, 2000 (San Francisco, CA)
Director: Sam Green and Christian Bruno

San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker Sam Green received his Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. He has directed several documentary films including Pie Fight '69 was screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and won first prize at the 2000 Black Maria Film Festival. Green teaches at the Academy of Art College and the Film Arts Foundation. He has received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Council for the Humanities and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Potence 6.5min 16mm on video, 2001 (Fitchburg, MA)
Director: Lawrence Klein

"Pithus, the last barbarian, is haunted by Grenlac The Perverter, and by his own sexual confusions in this rage-filled tale." Lawrence Klein's films have been shown in the Visions Festival (2001 & 2002, juror's choice in 2001); F4 Film Festival (Most Original film Award 2002); The Rhode Island Film Festival (2001); The Boston Undeerground film Festival (2002); the New Hampshire Film Expo. (2001).

Ain't We having Fun 16mm, 3 min, 1976 (Minneapolis, MN)
Director: Chuck Stattler

Turkey Extravaganza...

Food Safety and You video, 4 min, 2000 (Boston, MA)
Director: Jeff Smith

Chicken can be a delicious meal, but raw chicken can be a breeding ground for deadly bacteria.

Written and directed by A.E.S. president Jeff Smith, this infomercial illustrates the demise of a typical American family through food-borne diseases. But once the A.E.S. kitchen-safe system is installed, the family can carry on in their kitchen happily and safely. At American Emergency Safety Company, your safety is our business.

Chicken Real 16mm, 20min, 1970 (El Cerrito, California)
Director: Les Blank

Chicken Real: A surrealistic (and often hilarious) look at a large-scale chicken farm that produces 156
million chickens a year! Lots of chicken songs.

Les Blank is a prize-winning independent filmmaker who has been making films since the 1960s, is best known for a series of poetic films that led Time Magazine critic Jay Cocks to write,

"I can't believe that anyone interested in movies or America...could watch Blank's work without feeling they'd been granted a casual, soft-spoken revelation."

John Rockwell, writing in The New York Times, adds,
"Blank is a documentarian of folk cultures who transforms anthropology into art."

 

Eat Like a Winner video, 8.5 min, 1997-98 (Boulder, CO)
Director: Dan Boord and Luis Valdovino

Eat like a Winner is a salute to The Joy of Cooking and Claude Levi- Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked. It is a visual anthropology of the aspects of life at the close of the millennium as seen through food. If as the art historian Roger Shattuck contends, we may understand early twentieth century French culture through the notion of the food banquet, then cultural life at the conclusion of the twentieth century is reflected in self-help cook books and diet obsessions. The tour of food found in this tape is orchestrated by a fictional narrator who believes that food is more than a life style choice, it is a way of life which has philosophical dimensions. In Eat like a Winner we learn about the history of food, are told how to construct the perfect martini, and ask the question "where does ham come from?" Eat Like a Winner was shot on location in Ohio, Buenos Aires, Oklahoma and San Diego.

Dan Boord received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1980. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. Luis Valdovino received an MFA from the University of Illinois in 1987. Currently, he is Associate Professor of Art at the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO. Boord's and Valdovino's works have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Venice Biennale, Italy, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France and others. Boord's works have been broadcasted on WNET, New York and WGBH, Boston and presented at the International Public Television Conference in Stockholm. Together artistis produced several award winning tapes and curated the programs "La Voz Latina: Latina/o Video Art from the U.S.A." that have been screened throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States.

The Drowning Room 35mm,10min, 2000 (Ireland /USA)
Director: Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley

"The Drowning Room, by Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley, is a lush fantasy of underwater life, in which mundane moments are transformed into dynamic poetry." - Sundance Film Festival 2000

Reynold Reynolds has created four films and three videos since 1995, often in conjunction with his own gallery installations. Among his awards are prizes from the South by Southwest Film Festival and Ireland’s Cork Film Festival for Seven Days ‘Til Sunday (1998), and an honorable mention from The Sundance Film Festival for The Drowning Room (2000). His video and installation works have been presented in Havana, London, Berlin, Seattle, and New York.

PART II

La Big Fiesta 8min, 16mm, 1999 (Boston, MA)
Director: Max Coniglio

La Big Fiesta is a hand drawn animation. A slice of Neopolitan life through the eyes of an Italian American. Max Coniglio is a native from Naples, Italy and has been drawing cartoons as early as he can remember. Max works from memory and has used animation as a tool for capturing those memories and recreating them the way he remembers them.

How Far Will the Sweetbread Go? 10min, video, 2002 (Boston, MA)
Director: Jared Medeiros

How Far Will the Sweetbread Go? documents the baking of a Portuguese Sweetbread. The predominately matriarchal tradition is passed down from my grandmother to my father, and from him to me. The video is an example of how things change through generations.

"I just graduated from Tufts/ Museum School with an MFA concentrating in film/video. My video HI AVO was an official selection of the 2000 Rhode Island International Film Festival. DOOMED was screened last year at the Balagan Experimental Film and Video Series." -Jared Medeiros

Food 35mm, 14 min, 1993 (Czech Republic/UK)
Director: Jan Svankmajer

"Three courses of delicious vignettes in which Svankmajer animates grey-suited men as human vending machines, shows a couple at dinner devouring the contents of a restaurant, and takes us on a tour of a cannibalistic banquet.

One of the great Czech filmmakers, JAN SVANKMAJER was born in 1934 in Prague where he still lives. He trained at the Institute of Applied Arts from 1950 to 1954 and then at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts (Department of Puppetry). He soon became involved in the Theatre of Masks and the famous Black Theatre, before entering the Laterna Magika Puppet Theatre where he first encountered film. In 1970 he met his wife, the surrealist painter Eva Svankmajerova, and the late Vratislav Effenberger, the leading theoretician of the Czech Surrealist Group, which Svankmajer joined and of which he still remains a member. Svankmajer made his first film in 1964 and for over thirty years has made some of the most memorable and unique animated films ever made, gaining a reputation as one of the world's foremost animators, and influencing filmmakers from Tim Burton to The Brothers Quay. His brilliant use of claymation reached its apotheosis with the stunning 1982 film DIMENSIONS OF DIALOGUE. In 1987 Svankmajer completed his first feature film, ALICE, a characteristically witty and subversive adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, and with the ensuing feature films FAUST, CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE and his newest film LITTLE OTIK (OTESANEK) Svankmajer has moved further away from his roots in animation towards live-action filmmaking, though his vision remains as strikingly surreal and uncannily inventive as ever." - Zeitgeist Films

Isle of Flowers 16mm, 15 min, 1990 (Brazil)
Director: Jorge Furtado

"From Brazil, this is a hilarious but ultimately devastating film about values, the food chain, and the human condition on a real life Brazilian island where pigs eat first, and the people are fed what the pigs leave over." - Ikarus First Run Films. Awards: Blue Ribbon Winner, 1991 American Film Festival, 1991 Sundance Film Festival

"The human disaster of poverty is brilliantly depicted here. Anyone who wishes to stimulate an exploration of our human condition - of work and poverty, of despair and hunger, and of moral challenge - will find this an extraordinarily powerful and important film." - Hospital & Community Psychiatry

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe 16mm, 23 min, 1979 (El Cerrito, California)
Chicken Real 16mm, 20min, 1970
Director: Les Blank

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe: "Yes, German film director Werner Herzog really does eat his shoe to fulfill a vow to fellow filmmaker Errol Morris -- boldly exemplifying his belief that people must have the guts to attempt what they dream of. Inspiring."

- Les Blank (see bio above)