March 24, Friday, 8:00PM
Balagan on Tour in Lowell: What is Avant-Garde Film?
Location: Revolving Museum, 22 Shattuck Street, Lowell, MA 01852, http://www.revolvingmuseum.org/contact/index.html
Balagan collborates with Revolving Museum in Lowell to present three pilot programs of avante-garde films.

Met State 10min, 16mm on video, 2000 (Waltham, MA)
Director: Bryan Papciak

Shot over the course of three years, Bryan's animated short, MET STATE, is a pixilated portrait of a decaying space -- namely, the long-abandoned, Metropolitan State Mental Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts. It has won the Best Experimental Film Award at the World Animation Celebration, the Silver Plaque at the Chicago Int'l Film Festival, and the Best Cinematography Award at the New England Film & Video Festival. In addition to specializing in experimental cinematography & mixed media television commercials, Bryan also teaches film and animation at Rhode Island School of Design.

Burn 35mm on video, 10min, 2001
Director: Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley

Burn is a stunning evocation of those unspoken, unconfronted somethings, those secrets, worries and lies, forming a force which is always a part of the fabric of everyday interactions; at first niggling at the edges, then - provoked by a word or a gesture - suddenly searing through everything and everyone in its path.

Having both a film and an installation run as part of a single piece has been the mark of the Jolley-Reynolds collaboration in the four years since they met at the New York School of Visual Arts. Both Seven Days 'til Sunday and The Drowning Room were screened both in a gallery and in a cinema space. While compromise may be an essential part of any successful collaboration, Jolley and Reynolds found it easy to negotiate in their earliest pieces. Jolley, the photographer, created an installation with the striking visual image as central; Reynolds, the film-maker, had his work of determinate length with credits to mark the beginning and end. Both artists could feed their individual habits. "Every piece that we've done," admits Reynolds, "in my mind has existed as a film. But from Patrick's point of view they all probably exist as art works." -Belinda McKeon, Irish Times, http://www.temple-bar.ie/review_november_2001.asp

Reynolds and Jolley met in 1995 in the graduate program of the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Reynolds, who was born in Alaska and lives in New York, was concentrating on filmmaking in the multidisciplinary program. Jolley, an Irishman who now splits his time between New York and London, was primarily interested in photography. Today they both continue to work on their own projects, which for Reynolds include short films and commercial productions, and for Jolley include gallery exhibitions of his photographs.

Noise in my back yard 22min, video, 2000
Director: Geoff Adams

Noise In My Back Yard is a personal documentary charged with a dilemma: how can this video maker manage the ecology of his backyard? In a series of diverse video vignettes, Geoff Adams confronts the history, philosophy, business and practice of personal land management.

Geoff Adams is a film, video, and music maker living in Providence, RI. For 20 years he has made work for both art and commerce. Geoff has directed TV spots for ad agencies, and made programs for corporations, non-profits and institutions. Nowadays, to make time for art-making, Geoff limits his commercial activity to the creation of the live-action segments for the PBS animated show ARTHUR produced by WGBH. Geoff's newest video, Noise In My Back Yard, explores the dilemmas of backyard ecology. NIMBY was screened at many festivals in 2001 and won top awards at the Athens International Film & Video Festival, and The New England Film & Video Festival. Geoff has also received two National Daytime Emmy Awards, a George W. Peabody Award, and a R. I. State Council on the Arts Fellowship. He is an active saxophone player and scores all of his video and television work. Geoff is currently an adjunct instructor in the Film, Animation and Video Department at Rhode Island School of Design. Go to http://www.geoffadams.com to see things like a CV, a few clips, some syllabi and more.

CLIP:4000f. 3min 10sec, 16mm, 2001
Director: Robert Todd

Clip A sequence of 10 images presented in 10 groups of 400 alternating frames. The primary image of a bird is gradually disfigured by the successive introduction of competing imagery, yet the overall field seems to have its own life.

Introduction to Living in a Closed System 16min, 16mm, 2001
Director: Brittany Gravely

"What each of them [Lewis Mumford and R. Buckminster Fuller] has done, really, has been to write philosophical poems celebrating a world that does not truly exist, and perhaps can never exist, even though the poems are true."
Allan Temko

Introduction to Living in a Closed System is a fractured educational film based upon the idea of a biospheric utopia: a contained, self-sustaining, controlled environment which survives through dynamic systems (here, involving machines, plants, animals, and humans), each of which effects the development of the others. This hope of human-made technology and the natural world in harmony manifests itself in the collage of imagery, sounds, and text. The disparate elements variously unite or fall apart as all of the visions, fears, and dreams of this retrospective/future place attempt to operate within the ideal of a unified, efficient system. The film serves as an introduction to the complexity of the poetry and the problems created by pastoral dreams of synthetic futures. Brittany Gravely is currently a graduate student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Introduction To Living In A Closed System was part of her thesis project. She is the director, editor, and sound designer. In addition to 16mm, Brittany also works in a variety of areas including sound, video, and installation.

Special Report 4min, video, 1999
Director: Bryan Boyce

What if TV news wasn't merely horrifying but literally came from horror movies? Bryan Boyce puts terrifying words in the mouths of America's top-rated merchants of terror.

San Francisco native Bryan Boyce is a film and video artist whose work has been shown at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam International Film Festival, NY Expo of Short Film and Video, NY Underground, Chicago Underground, Cinematexas, RESFest and the Pacific Film Archive.

The Family of Her 12min, 16mm, 1996
Director: Bill Morrison

A combination of documentary, fiction, and "found" footage tells the story of a Library of Congress clerk who, in 1939, saves an ancient film collection from incineration.

Award-winning filmmaker Bill Morrison has seven titles in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, including "Light Is Calling," "Decasia" and "The Film of Her." His work has been screened at The Tate Modern, Lincoln Center, The Whitney Museum, London’s ICA, MassMOCA, Carnegie Hall, The Wexner Center, BAM, The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum among many other venues. His films have been broadcast on PBS, The Sundance Channel, and Arté, and have been featured at international film festivals worldwide, such as Sundance, Rotterdam, San Francisco and Edinburgh. His projected set work with the acclaimed performance ensemble Ridge Theater has been recognized with two "Bessie" awards for excellence in theatrical design (1993, 2003) and a Village Voice "Obie" for collaborative design (2001). Bill has received grants from The Guggenheim Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, The 2004 NEA Creativity Grant, NYSCA, NYFA and Creative Capital. "Decasia" premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and was named one of the ten best films of 2003 by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice.

"I started to see that the Film of Her was the composite, like the opus of what all these things [shorts] were leading to. But, intellectually, it's going back to the roots..." - Bill Morrison http://desires.com/features/thefilmofher/her_interview.html

and others....