The planet EARTH becomes smaller and smaller, within a couple of days Earth's inhabitants are able to cross the entire globe, within hours they migrate from one culture to another, from wealth to poverty, from busy urban metropolitans to serene landscapes, from the war-zone to the paced life in the suburban towns. Their constant need to survive and never-stopping experiments with environment exhausted the LAND and put Earth's dwellers in the constant battle for both physical and emotional space to exist, a place to belong and imagination to escape to.

"Spaces/Places", a film program curated by the Balagan's Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva, takes you on a journey through cultural, political, psychological and imaginative places and spaces encountered and recorded by filmmakers in the form of documentary, experimental, and fiction films and videos. Among the filmmakers are Katerina Cizek and Peter Wintonick, Reynold Reynolds, Bryan Papciak, Robert Todd, Alfred Guzzetti, Paul Winkler, Mike Nourse, Charles and Ray Eames, Peter Tscherkassky, Antonio S. Cecilio Neto, Peter Greenaway, Matthias Müller, Richard Rogers, Stephen Marshall.

THE PROGRAM IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE!

Sidney Harbor Bridge 13min, 16mm, 1977 (Australia)
Director: Paul Winkler

This film is a stunning virtuoso work, a tour de force in its exploitation of the in-camera matting technique. The screen is divided into many different images of the Sydney Arbor Bridge and the water below. The sense of movement created in the composite shots is of the bridge in dancelike animation, of its constituting a giant, fluid, slinky toy. A soundtrack of tinkling belllike noises accentuates the film's rhythmic and musical conception.

Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News 57min, video, 2002 (Canada)
Director: Katerina Cizek & Peter Wintonick

SEEING IS BELIEVING is an unprecedented exploration into the political and social uses of handicams and new communications technologies. Human rights activists, war crimes investigators, right-wing videographers and ordi-nary citizens are arming themselves with tools of the new visual revolution. What happens when amateur front-line advocates pick up camcorders to document what they see? What are the risks and responsibilities? And what are the wider impacts on television and audiences? On international law and society? On documentary practice? Co-directed by Katerina Cizek and Peter Wintonick, SEEING IS BELIEVING illuminates the work and words of key international journalists and media activists. It also shines a verité spotlight on Joey Lozano, a courageous video-activist who documents rights abuses against indigenous people in dangerous corners of the Southern Philippines. But does Joey’s camera prevent violence - or jeopardize lives? Drawn from original shooting around the world, and sampling hundreds of hours of exclusive archives, SEEING IS BELIEVING provides a dramatic window into the power of do it-yourself filmmaking.

Katerina Cizek has shot documentary films around the world. From people-smuggling - to water crises - to youth gangs - she exposes tough yet often overlooked human rights issues. She worked at various newspapers, as well as live radio and television at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1993, she co-founded The Nation, the first-ever independent news magazine to serve the James Bay Cree Indians. She began working in documentaries as additional cinematographer and editor of Power of the North, a “rockumentary” about the struggle over Canada’s northern rivers. Made for America’s VH-1 (an MTV affiliate), it was the first political documentary ever to feature the music of heavy metal band Metallica. She returned to the Czech Republic in 1994 to examine the Velvet Revolution in Waiting for A Miracle (director, producer, editor). Among her other credits are highly acclaimed The Dead Are Alive: Eyewitness in Rwanda, (1995) a harrowing documentary about the Rwandan genocide, broadcast in 15 countries; In Search of the African Queen: A People-Smuggling Operation, a result of two-year investigation about the harrowing journeys of global refugees and people-smugglers in an operation spanning 4 continents; The Water Wars for European TV on the growing water crisis in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan).

Wintonick is most noted for producing and directing (with Mark Achbar) MANUFACTURING CONSENT: Noam Chomsky and the Media, which he also edited. It is the most successful theatrically launched non-fiction feature in Canadian history (a winner of over 2O awards in 5O film festivals, which was also broadcast in many languages in two dozen countries.) He directed the multi-award winning CINEMA VERITE : DEFINING THE MOMENT about the history and contemporary legacy of that revolutionary which has played in over 5O festivals. During his career in the commercial film industry, Wintonick worked for some of the major movers, shakers (and snakes) in the Motion Picture Jungle. He has aided and abetted the development of many young independent filmmakers, ceaselessly acting as executive producer, editor and consultant on numerous projects. With co-producer Francis Miquet, their Montreal-based production company, Necessary Illusions, produces documentary cinema and television on a whole range of social, political, media and cultural issues. Currently editor of POV magazine,which highlights the business and art of independent and documentary film, Wintonick has written for (inter)national cinema magazines, has programmed the odd film festival, organized digital documentary conferences and panels, lectures on cinema history, and co-created a global internet site for independent film, The Virtual Film-Festival (1994-96). Among his various filmmaking credits are The QUEBE-CANADA COMPLEX: Scenes from a Country 'on the couch' for CBC and SRC – a pseudo-psychiatric look at the neurotic notion of the nation, identity and 'the other';' THE STREET, a non-fiction feature made with 3 homeless Montrealers; THE NEW CINEMA, a video documentary about independent film; A RUSTLING OF LEAVES: Inside the Philippine Revolution, about the present political situation in the Philippines; and many others. Wintonick was the Canadian producer and post-production coordinator for Peter Watkins' THE JOURNEY, a 14 hour megadocumentary series about nuclear peace, development and the media. He is currently post-producing and developing several documentary works: about UTOPIA; on STORYTELLING; and MAD MUNDO, a citizen-driven series and webplex on Globalization, in partnership with Paris-based Article Z. http://www.seeingisbelieving.ca/

Seven Days til' Sunday 10min, 35mm, 1998 (New York City)
Director: Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley

A success of image sequences shows the human figure falling through the cityscape towards violent annihilation by the natural forces of fire and water.

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. Their decision to work together was somewhat haphazard; Jolley had taken some photographs of a mannequin falling, and they came up with the idea of a short video installation. Seven Days Til Sunday emerged as a three-part black-and-white loop of "bodies" falling off a building.

Watch 12.5min, video ,2003 (Jamaica Plain, MA) premiere
Director: Robert Todd

Calcutta Intersection 10min, video,2003 (Brookline, MA) preview
Director: Alfred Guzzetti

Tuning in to the historical unconscious while life goes on as usual.

Guzzetti has made both documentary and experimental films and tapes. With the feature-length Family Portrait Sittings (1975) he began an autobiographical cycle that continued with Scenes from Childhood (1979) and Beginning Pieces (1986). He collaborated with Susan Meiselas and Richard Rogers on Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1985) and the feature-length Pictures from a Revolution (1991) and with Ákos Östör and Lina Fruzzetti on two anthropological projects, Seed and Earth (1994) and Khalfan and Zanzibar (2000). Since 1993 he has been at work on a cycle of small-format videotapes, including The Tower of Industrial Life (2000) and Down from the Mountains (2002). He is the author of the book Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Analysis of a Film by Godard (Harvard University Press, 1981).

Power of Ten 9min, 16mm, 1977 (New York City)
Director: Charles and Ray Eames

Probably the best known of the Eames Films, Powers of Ten refines and extends the journey of its predecessor by presenting it in color and in great scientific detail. Starting at a one meter square image of a picnic, the camera moves 10 times further away every 10 seconds, reaching to the edge of the universe; then the journey is reversed, going 10 times closer each ten seconds, ultimately reaching the interior of an atom. http://www.eamesoffice.com/films/

Charles and Ray Eames are among the most important American designers of this century. They are best known for their groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design (e.g., the Eames Chair), industrial design and manufacturing, and the photographic arts. For complete biography visit http://www.eamesoffice.com/resources/bio.html

Charles and Ray Eames made over 100 short films, starting in 1950. Their films are their essays—a clear explication of their philosophy and ideas in their own voice. Charles once said that the film “come about as a result of one of two situations: it’s either a logical extension of some immediate problem we are working on, or it is some we have been wanting to do for a long time and can’t put it off any longer.”

Water Wrackets 12min, 16mm, 1975 (England)
Director: Peter Greenaway

In Water Wrackets a full mythology is implied by the descriptions of a waterside community. The voice-over includes snatches of an archaic language, purely fictional and a precursor to the field day Greenaway would have with invented languages in The Falls. Visually we see only a series of water surfaces -- lakes, streams and rivers. This is typical of Greenaway in that these images both have little immediate relevance to the voice-over content, yet wonderfully evoke an off-screen lost culture for whom water was both life source and cultural metaphor.
http://www.okazo.com/portfolio/writings/writgreenaway.htm

"From my enthusiasm for J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I invented a fictitious early population for that area called Wrackets. The Wrackets belonged in the swamps, the Mariotts lived in the hills, there was another group who lived in the forest; I was going to develop a very serious bogus anthropological-archaeological study of these mythical characters."- Peter Greenway http://www.wayney.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/waterwrackets.htm

Even though Peter Greenaway is an Englishman, he was actually born in Newport in Wales (his mother is Welsh) on April 5th, 1942. At an early age he decided he wanted to be a painter. He developed an interest in European cinema, focusing on the films of Antonioni, Bergman, Godard, Pasolini and Resnais. In 1962 he started studying at the Walthamstow College of Art, where amongst his fellow students was musician Ian Dury (who Greenaway would later cast in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover). In 1965 he joined the Central Office of Information (COI), where he remained for the next eleven years as a film editor and then a director. In 1966 he made a film called Train, composed of footage of the last steam train arriving at Waterloo Station (directly behind the COI), structured into an abstract Man Ray ballet mécanique, all cut to a musique concrete track. He also made a film called Tree in 1966, the tree in question was surrounded by concrete outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. The 1970s would see Greenaway getting much more serious with his filmmaking. In 1978 he made Vertical Features Remake and A Walk Through H. The former is an examination of arithmetical structure and the latter a journey through various maps. In 1980 Greenaway delivered his most ambitious and extraordinary film of his career, The Falls - a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopedia of flight-associated material all relating to 92 victims of the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). The 1980s would see some of Greenaway's best films, The Draughtsman's Contact in 1982, A Zed & Two Noughts in 1985, The Belly of an Architect in 1987, Drowning by Numbers in 1988, and his most successful (in the mainstream) film in 1989, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. The 1990s brought the visually spectacular Prospero's Books in 1991, the controversial The Baby of Mâcon in 1993, The Pillow Book in 1996, and 8 1/2 Women in 1999.

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.

Outer Space 10min, 16mm, 1999 (Austria)
Director: Peter Tscherkassky

"A young woman, night, an American feature film. She enters a house, a dark corridor, a thriller. While she forces her way into an unknown space together with the viewer, the cinematographic image-producing processes go off the rails. The rooms telescope into each other, become blurred, while the crackling of the cuts and the background noise - the sound of the film material itself - becomes louder and more penetrating.

"The pace becomes frenetic, the woman is being pursued by invisible opponents, pushed against a mirror, walls of
glass burst, furniture tilts and the cinematographic apparatus which the heroine begins to attack in blind fury also
collapses. The images jump and stutter, the perforation holes tilt into the picture, the sound track implodes in a will
o' the wisp destruction scenario - something which only film can do so powerfully. In ten minutes OUTER SPACE races through the unsuspected possibilities of cinematographic errors - a masterpiece." - Stephan Grissemann

Peter Tscherkassky was born in 1958 in Vienna, Austria. He lived in Berlin 1979-1984 and studied philosophy. He wrote his doctoral thesis Film as Art. Towards a Critical Aesthetics of Cinematography in 1985/1986 and currently teaches filmmaking at the Academies of Applied Arts in Linz and Vienna. Tscherkassky is a founding member of Sixpack Film and an organizer of several international avant-garde film festivals in Vienna and film tours abroad. Since 1984 he has been writing numerous publications and lecturing on the history and theory of avant-garde film. In 1993 and 1994 he was an artistic director of the annual Austrian film festival "Diagonale" and in 1995 an editor of the book Peter Kubelka.

Terror / Iraq/ Weapons 3min, video, 2003 (Chicago, IL)
Director: Mike Nourse

This is not a re-mix. This is a summary. No words have been repeated, and all instances appear in chronological order, taken from a 30 minute speech given by President George W. Bush. Scary isn't it?

Mike Nourse earned a B.A. in Communication from DePaul University in 1999, and an M.F.A. in Visual Communication from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, where he received a Graduate Fellowship Award. Originally from Montreal, Mike heads up Zero One Projects, a digital production company serving non-profit organizations. Specializing in video and design work, some of Zero One's clients include The National Jazz Museum, Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, Conjugate Projekt, Community Architexts, World Seido Karate Organization, and SEIU Local 1. Mike is an adjunct factulty member of the Communication department at Depaul, where he teaches Media Arts Design, Video Production, and Digital Video Editing in DePaul's new Digital Media Center. Mike also teaches graduate projects for SAIC's Visual Communication department. His work has been screened in festivals around North America and Europe, and was recently featured on two DVDs (Select Media Festival and The Lost Film Festival).

Wholes 10min, video, 1991 (Brazil)
Director: Antonio S. Cecilio Neto

A humorous and scathing satire, WHOLES considers the social ills plaguing Sao Paulo, Brazil, the "sixth or maybe seventh" largest city in the world, through the metaphor of potholes, which may or may not be a problem, in fact, may or may not exist, depending on who you ask, and therefore may or may not need attention.

Vacancy 15min, 16mm, 1998 (Germany)
Director: Matthias Müller

Brasilia, the "city of hope," "the ultimate utopia of the 20th century" (Umberto Eco), is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a location as old as the filmmaker. Segments of amateur footage and feature films shot on location in the early sixties are inserted in his 1998 travelogue. The utopian city as represented in VACANCY is a place abandoned from its inhabitants, a museum kept alive by its staff only.

Matthias Müller is a filmmaker, video artist, photographer and independent curator living and working in Bielefeld, Germany. With his films and videos he has taken part in major film festivals worldwide, such as the festivals of Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Rotterdam. His work has also been featured in several group exhibition like the documenta X and the Manifesta 3 as well as in solo exhibitions. In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, dedicated a retrospective to him. His films and videos are part of the collections of institutions like the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and the Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona and include: Aus der Ferne - The Memo Book (1989), Home Stories (1990), Sleepy Haven (1993), Alpsee (1994), Sternenschauer - Scattering Stars (1994), Pensão Globo (1997), Vacancy (1998), Phoenix Tapes in collaboration with Christoph Girardet, 1999), nebel (2000), Phantom (2001), Container (2001), Manual (in collaboration with Christoph Girardet, 2002), and Pictures (2002). His work has been honored with more than 40 awards worldwide.

Quarry 27min, 16mm, 1973 (Boston, MA) (tenatively)
Director: Richard Rogers

"Quarry" (1970), a portrait of an abandoned quarry in Quincy, that captures the striking natural beauty of
the site as it explores the social rites of the young people who gather along its shores to enjoy moments
of leisure in what was once a place of toil.

Richard P. Rogers (1944–2001) maintained two full-time careers: he was a celebrated director and producer of (mostly nonfiction) films and an inspired teacher of still photography and filmmaking here at Harvard. Rogers’s appetite for knowledge was omnivorous, taking him from the jungles of Nicaragua to the fountains of Rome, from the bedrooms of colonial New England to the streets of working-class Albany, New York. Throughout these travels, his unsparing artist’s eye turned as often back onto himself: touching on a range of topics from art and architecture to history and literature, his films spoke in many voices, from the politically engaged to the personal and experimental. Among his best known works are two long-form independent documentaries, Living at Risk and Pictures from a Revolution (both collaborations with Susan Meiselas and Alfred Guzzetti); an award-winning portrait of William Carlos Williams, made for the PBS poetry series "Voices and Visions"; and the dramatic feature A Midwife’s Tale. At Harvard he was mentor to a new generation of committed filmmakers, and under his directorship, the Film Study Center became an important catalyst for nonfiction production. During his brave battle with illness last year, he continued to teach full time and to work on an independent documentary about the social, economic, and ecological changes affecting the community on Long Island where he lived for many years. We honor his immeasureable contributions to Harvard and to the field of nonfiction film with this retrospective of his work. All events are free and open to the public. http://www.harvardfilmarchive.org/calendars/02marapr/rogers.htm

Copwatch 8min, video, 2001 (Boston, MA)
Director: Stephen Marshall (Guerilla News Network)

American television audiences have long been accustomed to the celebration of rawkus police action via the Fox Network's signature exploitation, COPS. And while, for many, the show is a tell-tale sign of our militarized world, for others, it represents something far more sinister and far-reaching. Namely, the broad inculcation and deep internalization of the notion that society cannot exist without the men and women in blue who patrol the perimeter of our increasingly gated communities. By carefully omitting coverage of police brutality and corruption, COPS has succesfully sanitized the image of our urban police forces in ways that few propagandists could have ever imagined possible.

And so, in the spirit of striking back by reversing the power structure, GNN presents CopWatch, a journey into the dangerous world of community police oversight as epitomized by pioneer activists Andrea Pritchett and Jacob Crawford. Founded in 1990, the Berkeley chapter of CopWatch sought to revitalize the Sixties-era initiative originally conceived by the Black Panthers. Over the past twelve years, CopWatch chapters have begun to spring up across the United States. With the recent high-profile cases of police brutality and fears of a looming police state, they might be just in time. http://www.guerrillanews.com/copwatch/