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 na•ve, 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.