Program:

Stones 7.5min, video, 2000
Director: Jane Hudson

The video STONES is based on images from the megalithic circle at Avebury, England. STONES represent the ancient human impulse to shape space and material into a meaningful form. The scale, rough profile and placement as part of a huge circle give these stones a presence which surpasses language (there is still the mystery of origins). It is my goal to represent this experience of "presence" in the projection of these images into the "real space" of architecture. The original video images have been digitally processed to simulate old film implying/giving the suggestion of an archeology of vision through the "aura" this filmic look gives to the images. The sound of the ubiquitous wind pervades the piece and charges the space. Jane Hudson is Video Artist and Instructor of Video and Graduate Studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, since 1974. Jane exhibited at MOMA, MFA, Boston, Mill Valley Film/Video Festival, Cal., in Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and venues in Boston, New York, Paris and Czech Republic. She received grants from NEA, Mass. Artists Foundation, Mellon Foundation. The extended CV is available at http://world.std.com/~jhudson

So To Speak 20min, video, 2000
Director: Jacqueline Goss

A girl and her teacher learn to use the fixtures of speech as they move deeper into domestic space; their relative positions shift accordingly. Drawing from writings by and about Helen Keller, Genie the Œwild child' and Janet Frame, So To Speak is structured as a tour of the house and grounds of language. Jacqueline Goss works with many electronic media in order to give voice to understated or silenced stories of both real and imagined women. In some of her videotapes, Goss uses her own natural speaking voice to offer up off-kilter interpretations of historical and fictional female characters which are crafted to fit into personal narratives. In other works, Goss reshapes found footage to let the characters speak for.

What more could you ask for? 3.5min, 16mm, 1997
Director: Joan Nidzyn

Resembling a silent PSA, the film uses text and the repeated image of a woman running to describe the drug Rohypnol. As much cynical as it is informative, the film exposes the ambiguity of journalism that at once exposes and seductively advertises its information. All text is pulled from a newspaper article about the drug. Joan Nidzyn lives in Boston and teaches filmmaking at Massachusetts College of Art. Joan's work deals with issues of family history, the body and female identity. Her approach to filmmaking is experimental as she tries to express herself with a language that is primarily visual. Her films have been shown across the United States and in Israel and Chile.

I Can't Help It 7min, video, 1998
Director: Dana Moser

A short experimental documentary on the surprising conclusions drawn from research into patients who have had the two hemispheres of their brains surgically severed. Discoveries made by the team led by Dr. Michael Gazzaniga raise fascinating and disturbing questions about the role cognition plays in our perception of purposefulness. Dana Moser's films and videotapes have been seen in numerous venues including the ICA (Boston), the Brattle Theater, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the Collective for Living Cinema in NYC. He has also created performances and live events using digital imagery and telecommunications for the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The National Museum of Science and Technology, Ottawa; The Kitchen, NYC; The International Gartenbauaustellung, Munich; The Visible Language Workshop at M.I.T.; and the 42nd International Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Dana was also a co-founder of the trashy political cabaret rock band "Adult Children of Heterosexuals" and teaches as an associate professor in the department of Media and Performing Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Fissures 2.5min, 16mm, 1999
Director: Louise Bourque

A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces they leave. In making this piece, I literally manipulated and distorted the film plane through experimentation in doing my own contact printing of personal home movie images. The point of contact is continuously shifted so that the film plane appears warped and the images fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like resurfacing memories. The footage was hand-processed and solorized as well as colored by hand through toning before a final print was made at the lab. 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.

Them! 1955 Revisited! 6min, video, 1998
Director: Paul Turano

Science Fiction film ŒThem!' (1955, Directed by Gordan Douglas) - a particular episode where the unknown antagonist inadvertently created by human science and nuclear technology is encountered for the first time. The work attempts to "revisit" and recast the original conventions of the genre, to manipulate and interrogate them, at times in both humorous or contemplative ways. In transforming it from Cold War artifact into a metaphor for our own contemporary cultural "Us versus Them" psychosis, the re-visitation references the same qualities of socio-pathological and psycho-sexual neurosis that are exhibited in the apocalyptic science fiction films of today. Paul Turano has independently produced numerous 16mm and Super 8 films for the past 10 years. He has taught film production and film studies at Hampshire College, Massachusetts College of Art, Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, and the Boston Film Video Foundation. Currently he is a visiting Faculty at the School for The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His films have been shown nationally and internationally and have received awards and citations from festivals.- notably a Kodak Special Merit Award for his film "87 Prospect St." at the 1994 New England Film and Video Festival. He received a 1999 Massachusetts Media Fellowship Special Merit Award for his recently completed experimental feature "This is a Film about Mars..."

Notes after Long Silence 15min, s8, 1989
Director: Saul Levine

A film about association and memory. The title come from a Yates poem, "Speech after long silence." The film explores the reltionship of various images and how they interact together. Images from the Vietnam war intercut with various images of daily life, television, construction of the Redline in Harvard sq. and images of family and other various imagery in an examination of the way these images interact and influence with one another. Saul Levine has been making films since 1964. He works in Regular 8, Super 8. 16MM, and DV. His works have been shown on every contintent except Antarctica. Saul has been a film professor since 1968 and teaching at Mass College of Arts for the last 22 years.

Final Exit 5min, pixel vision video, 2000
Director: Joe Gibbons

In Final Exit an aged one is confronted with his options in blunt terms. Does he want to drag out his existence, increasingly infirm and a burden to his caretakers, or go quietly, before resentment overcomes sentiment? Does he wish to go on living with the quality of his life increasingly diminished, or euthanized? Would he prefer cremation or burial? This tape confronts the issues of mortality and advancing decrepitude facing even the friskiest of us. 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 New York and Boston and teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Fable: I Want the World Clean 15min, 16mm, 1999
Director: Robert Todd

Musing on the violence we do to the world and its histories by trying to rid them of impurities, this fantastic "tale" centers on a family's house that's been passed down through five generations. What could be more satisfying (or sadder) than cleaning out the attic's family treasures for a yard sale? And what could be more dangerous? Initially inspired by a world in which the idea of ethnic cleansing can thrive, "Fable: I want the world, clean" is a poetic film that describes the challenges we face preserving our personal and familial legacies in an ever-expanding World culture that favors novelty and change. 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. He holds a Masters Degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.