March
18,
Thursday, 7:30PM
In Transit
Daybreak
Express 5min,
16mm on video, 1953
Director: D.A. Pennebaker
Pennebaker's
first movie; a New York subway ride to a score
by Duke Ellington.
http://www.pennebakerhegedusfilms.com/
"D.A.
Pennebaker began his career in film over
40 years ago. After having attended Yale and
M.I.T., and spending time in the Navy, Pennebaker
worked a variety of jobs, including stints as
a painter and an advertising copywriter. His
first directorial triumph was 1960's Primary,
a cinema-verite account of the 1960 Democratic
primaries that helped establish him as a major
figure in American film. Since then, Pennebaker,
now 72, has filmed or collaborated with some
of the century's most important cultural figures.
In the '60s, he made a pair of landmark music
films: the much-heralded 1967 Bob Dylan documentary
Don't Look Back and the 1969 concert film Monterey
Pop. In the '70s, Pennebaker's projects included
collaborations with Norman Mailer and Jean-Luc
Godard, and he filmed David Bowie's last performance
as Ziggy Stardust for Ziggy Stardust And The
Spiders From Mars: The Movie. In the '80s and
'90s, Pennebaker has made a number of concert
films, in addition to directing the Oscar-nominated
documentary The War Room, which followed Bill
Clinton's campaign strategists during the 1992
election. His well-received documentary about
Carol Burnett's stage comeback, Moon Over Broadway,
is being slowly released across the U.S., as
is a re-released Don't Look Back. - " http://www.theavclub.com/avclub3318/avfeature3318.html
Rhythm
1 min, 16mm, 1957
Director: Len Lye
RHYTHM
(1957) shows Len Lye's remarkable sense of motion
applied to the editing of live footage. The
result is extraordinary - the footage becomes
a kinetic composition, brilliantly synchronised
to the rhythms of African drum music.
The
film was commissioned as a commercial for the
Chrysler Corporation. Len Lye was supplied with
stock footage of the assembly of the car. By
using hundreds of jumpcuts, he created a dramatically
speeded version of the process of car assembly.
RHYTHM is one of the great displays of jump-cutting.
Jonas
Mekas has praised it as a very pure example
of filmmaking: "It's filled with some kind
of secret action of cinema."
The
film won first prize in the annual competition
of the New York Art Directors Award, but was
then disqualified because it had not been screened
on television. At the worldwide experimental
film festival in Brussels in 1958, RHYTHM was
also awarded a medal.
Born
in 1901 in New Zealand, "Lye was
the pioneer of many film-making techniques,
including 'direct animation', the process of
drawing and scratching designs directly onto
film. He made his first animated film in 1929
and continued experimenting with new film-making
techniques to the end of his life in 1980. Throughout
his 50 year career as a film-maker, Lye saw
animated film as a perfect medium for experiment.
He wanted animators to be "free radicals".
He once wrote: "There has never been a
great film unless it was created in the spirit
of the experimental film-maker. All great films
contribute something original in manner or treatment".
"Lye
was also a pioneer of 'kinetic sculpture' (sculpture
that involves movement), making his first experiments
around 1920. He wrote: "One of my art teachers
put me onto trying to find my own theory of
art. After many early morning walks an idea
hit me that seemed like a complete revelation.
It was to compose motion, just as musicians
compose sound. This idea was to lead me far,
far away from...traditional art". He saw
his work in film and kinetic sculpture as part
of the same attempt to develop a new art of
motion." - http://www.govettbrewster.com/NR/lenlye/BIOG/BIO2.HTM
MM
8 min, 16mm, 1996
Director: Timoleon Wilkins
The
recovery of film lab detritus inspired this contemplation
of the personal and cinematic past and future.
Somber and farcical in tone. MM follows an imagistic
stream-of-consciousness back to the imagined (and
real) circumstances of my birth. Elements ranging
from the use of archetypal mother-images and western
perceptions of the third-world to scratching on
the film itself are woven into lyrical cohesion
by means of subtle color montage and dramatic
music-play. The symbolic vehicle of this journey
is the airplane: within it a voyage of the spirit
begins over war-strewn jungles and after a flight
of discovery, ends at the precipice of an unknown
future. Filmmaker Bruce Conner appears briefly
in the role of mystic pilot of this journey and
the film is, in part, an homage to his work.
Award: Best Northern California Film, Humboldt
Int'l Film Festival, 1998
Exhibition: SF Int'l Film Festival, 1997; Ann
Arbor Film Festival, 1998.
"Timoleon Wilkins' classicist avant-garde
cinema is an anomaly within contemporary film
practice. Using a plethora of techniques derived
from (but not limited by) the works of Brakhage,
Anger, Conner, Baillie, Schofill, and his beloved
Will Hindle, Wilkins has fashioned a mytho-poetic
vision of his own resolutely in the American
grain. His stunning Kodachrome imagery (deep,
deep reds and blues), redolent of home-movies,
educational films, the specter of Hollywood,
arcane Americana - frames a world of memory
and experience: the breathtaking Colorado mountains
of his childhood and the neon-swathed streets
of his adopted home of San Francisco.
"Wilkins'
major theme is the very American nostalgia for
an innocence of long-ago childhood typical of
the best products of our Puritan ethos. His
vision is one too aware of the impossibility
of fulfillment of this yearning and is therefore
laced with a delicate irony. His work flirts
with incoherence, yet this is due to the fragmentary
nature of modern consciousness and the contemporary
social world which, in a fashion willfully nave,
he attempts to process in a worldview mystic,
social, aesthetical. He redeems this incoherence
by the sheer beauty of his vision, a vision
which sees beauty in all, and projects a consuming
beauty into places where it would perhaps be
thought untenable. In this manner he finds transcendence.
"Eschewing
issues of contemporary frivolity, Wilkins has
grounded his work in the central concerns of
experimental cinema's most productive phase:
the development in cinematic terms of Romantic
imagination and passion." - Brecht Andersch
Turkish
Traffic 4min, 16mm, 1998
Director: Jeff Sher
Music
by the Shyam Brass Band Mere Hathon Mein.
Hand-painted Near East musical ecstasies. OR,
a celebration of modern Turkish traffic in the
former Constantinople.
Exhibition and Award; Permanent Collection Museum
of Modern Art; Ann Arbor, Director's Prize, Black
Maria.
Rules
of the Road 31min, 16mm, 1993
Director: Sue Friedrich
RULES
OF THE ROAD takes a searching look at how
our dreams of freedom, pleasure, security and
love are often symbolized by one of our favorite
objects: the automobile.
"...
the light, almost whimsical tone of the film
should not blind us to the part of it that is
irreducibly personal. Station wagons are everywhere;
everybody's got a sad love story. But only one
filmmaker, to my knowledge, has Su Friedrich's
eye .... With RULES OF THE ROAD, she creates
a film like a perfect short story." - Stuart
Klawans, The Nation
"Filmed
with her trademark energy and intensity ...
it boasts an uncommon amount of visual and narrative
imagination." - David Sterrit
"Friedrich
makes elegant road kill of her emotional fixation
... it's a funeral parade for a love that gets
comically, and ironically, stuck in traffic."
- Susan Gerhard, The San Francisco Bay Guardian
Exhibition:
Premiere, New Directors/New Films, Museum of
Modern Art, NY; Melbourne, Sydney
Fuji
8.5min, 16mm, 1974
Director: Robert Breer
"A
poetic, rhythmic, riveting achievement (in rotoscope
and abstract animation), in which fragments
of landscapes, passengers, and train interiors
blend into a magical color dream of a voyage.
One of the most important works by a master
who - like Conner, Brakhage, Broughton - spans
several avant-gardes in his ever more perfect
explorations." - Amos Vogel, Film Comment
Awards:
Oberhausen Film Festival, 1975; Film as Art,
American Film/Video Festival.
Castro
Street 10min,
16mm, 1966
Director: Bruce Baillie
Coming
of consciousness.
Inspired
by a lesson from Erik Satie; a film in the form
of a street - Castro Street running by the Standard
Oil Refinery in Richmond, California ... switch
engines on one side and refinery tanks, stacks
and buildings on the other - the street and
film, ending at a red lumber company. All visual
and sound elements from the street, progressing
from the beginning to the end of the street,
one side is black-and-white (secondary), and
one side is colour - like male and female elements.
The emergence of a long switch-engine shot (black-and-white
solo) is to the filmmaker the essential of consciousness.
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