"We must find out what words are and how they function.
They become images when written down,
but images of words repeated in the mind
and not of the image of the thing itself."
- W.S. Burroughs

Relationships between the language and mind, between geometric figures or patterns of letters on screen and their meaning as well as mystery, inventiveness, misunderstanding, subtlety, emotion... The works in this program explore the power of human language in cognitive, artistic, and visual sense. Featured artists include Janie Geiser, Paul Sharits, Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse, Henry Hills, Owen Land, Takahiko Iimura, Peter Rose.

A I U E O N N Six Features 7min, 16mm, 1994
Director: Takahiko Iimura

Combining the comical and the absurd, I created six funny faces, which were manipulated by System G (Real time texture mapping developed by Sony), to animate the visual images of Japanese vowels in Japanese and Roman alphabet. The concept is developed from Jacques Derrida's "Differance" in which the difference of "image," "letter" and "voice" works in space and movement. Thus six images of "AIUEONN" differ and delay with the letters and the voices, creating an example of multiculturalism. (T.I.)

Iimura deconstructs our coherence as he shifts between the English Roman alphabet and Japanese characters, injects spoken Japanese and manipulates the computer images of his features. The images often take on geometrical shapes, others recall the classical images from Japanese woodcuts of a Samurai warrior grimace.-- Robert West, Curator, Mint Museum of Art

Takahiko Iimura has been a pioneer artist of Japanese experimental film and video, working in film since l960 and with video since 1970. He is also a widely established international artist, having numerous exhibitions in Japan, the USA, and in Europe. One of his early films, "Onan", was awarded Special Prize at the legendary Brussels International Experimental Festival, l964. Recently he has been involved in using the computer, publishing multimedia CD-ROMs/DVDs combining film, video, graphics, text, and animation. http://www2.gol.com/users/iimura/home2.html

Remedial Reading Comprehension 12min, 16mm, 1992
Director: Owen Land

Two kinds of material are used: 1) Material in the tradition of the "psycho-drama" or "personal film"; 2) Material of the sort used in industrial, educational, or advertising film. Questions are raised about the necessity of using acceptably "artistic" material to make a work of art, as well as about the relationships between "personal" and "impersonal" works.

"One of the ways that REMEDIAL READING COMPREHENSION works is in the degree of filmic distance which each image has in the film. Distance here refers to the degree of awareness on the part of the viewer that the image he is watching is a film image, rather than 'reality.' [Land's] film does not try to build up an illusion of reality, to combine the images together with the kind of spatial or rhythmic continuity that would suggest that one is watching 'real' people or objects. It works rather toward the opposite end, to make one aware of the unreality, the created and mechanical nature, of film." - Fred Camper, Film Culture

Word Movie (Fluxfilm 29) 4min, 16mm, 1966
Director: Paul Sharits

Approximately 50 words visually "repeated" in varying sequential and positioned relationships/spoken word soundtrack/structured, each frame being a different word or word fragment, so that the individual words optically-conceptually fuse into one three and three-quarter minute-long word.

A noteworthy participant in the American avant-garde cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, Paul Sharits (1943-1993) was also a teacher and proponent of "structural film." Intrigued by the physical properties of the filmstrip, its development and projection, Sharits created a series of films that examined the boundaries of physical perception. In Ray Gun Virus, created in 1966, Sharits used color fields that flicker at various rates and rhythms to capture the elements of time and frame. Works like this one approached filmmaking as an examination of the pure structures that make film a unique medium. Sharits used the term "Locations" to describe his gallery installation works, which were looped to run continuously. His advocacy helped launch experimental filmmaking at numerous colleges and universities in the United States.

The Red Book 11min, 16mm, 1994
Director: Janie Geiser, Sound Design by Beo Morales, engineered at Harmonic Ranch.

THE RED BOOK is an elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language and identity from the point of view of a woman amnesiac. THE RED BOOK suggests the ways in which language defines us, and reaches back into dismemberment myths about the creation of different tongues through the breaking apart of bodies (in this case, the woman's body). As the film progresses, the submerged images of her stored memory appear and collide with the present world in circular rhythms, and there is a sense of irretrievable loss.

Read an article about Janie Geiser at http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Geiser.html

"Images appear as in a graceful collage: glimpses of words are written in white vanishing ink; a woman is drawn in outline, as if she were a paper doll made of red construction paper. Everything is red, white, black, or gray in this smashing little film, which has graphic flair and a surrealistic edge." - Caryn James, The New York Times

Janie Geiser isan internationally recognized filmmaker and theater artist whose work is known for its sense of mystery, its detailed evocation of self-contained worlds, and its strength of design. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and she has been recognized with numerous awards, including an Obie Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant and a 2002 Rockefeller Fellowship in film. Geiser has also made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary puppet theater through her innovative original theater works. She began making films in 1990, first as an element of her performance work, and then as a separate form. Since that time, Geiser’s films have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. http://www.freewaves.org/festival_2002/artists/geiser_j.htm

Language Lessons 9min, video, 2002
Director: Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse In collaboration with Pamela Z

Language Lessons entwines the search for the fountain of youth with the dream of a common language. The fountain both promises and frustrates eternity, while this dream offers hope for common ground. The lessons, made vivid by watery, elemental images and multiple voices, suggest that communication remains at the limits of our imagination.

Jeanne C. Finley is a California-based independent video producer. Through the use of true stories set in an experimental documentary form, her videoworks explore the tension between individual identity and the cultural and social institutions that both shape and affront that identity. In 1990, she received a Fulbright Fellowship to travel to Yugoslavia, where she directed programs for Radio/TV Belgrade. She is currently an artist-in-residence in Istanbul, Turkey, through a grant from the Lila Wallace Readers’ Digest Foundation.

Plagiarism 10min, 16mm, 1981
Radio Adios 12min, 16mm, 1992
Director: Henry Hills

Plagiarism: A raw documentary of the New York "language poets" in their milieu, with Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (co-editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E), James Sherry and Hanna Weiner.

Radio Adios : Starring: Hannah Weiner, Diane Ward, Sally Silvers, Jemeel Moondoc & Muntu, Aline Mayer, Jackson MacLow, Abigail Child, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews and Rashied Ali on drums, with George Kuchar as a Maoist revolutionary.

A superabundance of useless information effectively subdues freedom of speech. Condense and survive! RADIO ADIOS is a monologue in 12 plaited strands; an extremely precise, condensed and intensely rhythmic Busby Berkeleyish spectacle of an examination of conversational and literary language over a fair range of vocal timbre, microphones, volume settings and single-system sync peculiarities and its dissolution into music to the accompaniment of simultaneous Manhattan ambiences punctuated by fragments of jazz ... personalized handheld camera movement, movement from cut to cut - juxtapositions of scale, pulsating changes in light intensity, a varying pallette of various filmstocks, generations, etc., at an appropriately furious pace and in strict one-track sync ... offering simultaneously several levels of apprehension or interpretation to encourage multiple viewings. Text published in O.ARS/3: Translations (Cambridge, 1983).

Born in Atlanta, Georgia (USA), Henry Hills has made 22 short experimental films since 1975 which have been shown in numerous festivals around the world. Hills received his B.A. in English from Washington & Lee University. He was a conscientious objector during the Viet Nam war. From 1977-80, Hills edited CINEMANEWS, a West Coast film journal. Throughout his career he has been active as a curator, organizing programs at Anthology Film Archives, Millennium, Collective for Living Cinema, Roulette, Segue and various clubs and galleries. Upon moving to New York in 1978 he began an association with the "Language" poets and with the first generation Downtown improvised music scene. MONEY (1985) documents these movements of the early 80s with an all-star artist cast, while simultaneously developing parallel formal innovations. One of the densest sync-sound films ever made (2500 "scenes" in 15 min), MONEY, which remains entertaining today, was the culmination of a string of radically formal investigatory studies (PLAGIARISM and RADIO ADIOS) into the possibilities of sound/image sync. He has recently finished editing the Austrian documantary feature IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN. http://www.henryhills.com