The
Dancing Bulrushes
5min, 16mm, 1985 (USA) *Tradtional
Trickster*
Director: Joanna Priestley
THE
DANCING BULRUSHES is based on a traditional
Ojibwa tale about coyote, the trickster. The
film was created frame by frame, directly
under the camera, by moving sand on a piece
of back-lit plexiglass. Awards and Exhibition:
Special Judges Award for New Animation Talent,
USA Film Festival; Cash Award, Sinking Creek
Film & Video Festival; Third Place, FOCUS
Film Festival; Athens Int'l Film Festival;
LA Int'l Animation Celebration; San Francisco
Int'l Film Festival.
Joanna
Priestley is an experimental filmmaker
who has produced, directed and animated 13
films. She has received three individual artist's
fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts, as well as fellowships from the
American Film Institute, the MacDowell Colony
and the Djerassi Foundation. Her films have
received top honors at over 80 film festivals.
Ms. Priestly has taught cinema history and
animation at the Northwest Film Center, Oregon
Art Institute and Volda College in Norway
and has presented workshops in Germany and
throughout the USA. She was co-founder and
director of FILMA: Women's Film Forum, Regional
Coordinator of the Northwest Film Center and
Founding President for ASIFA Northwest
Mother's
Day 15min, 16mm, 1948 (USA)
Director: James Broughton
One
of the first major works of the San Francisco
film movement, MOTHER'S DAY is a painfully
humorous recollection of childhood in which
a family of singular adults recreate their
infancy by behaving as they did when growing
up.
"Humorous, satirical, and overwhelmingly
skillful, this ironic camera exploration of
the artist's world of memory, imagination
and perception is among the finest, most challenging
films yet produced in this country."
- Arthur Knight
"MOTHER'S
DAY for me is one of the great films in film
history." - Peter Kubelka
Awards: Belgium, 1949; Venice, 1952.
The
Black Imp 4min,video, 1905 (France) *Trickster’s
new friend: film*
Director: Georges Melies
Not only demonstrate Méliès's
astounding employment of double exposure,
makeup, editing and theatrical trickery, but
provide mesmerizing insight into the social
context of his work, which blended Victorian
approaches to astronomy, superstition and
feminine beauty with the unnatural wonders
of 20th Century technology and heavy doses
of slapstick.
GEORGES
MELIES, Pioneer filmmaker and proprietor of
Paris's mystical Théatre Robert-Houdin,
where Méliès learned the skills
to become a cinematic illusionist and developed
an interest in the supernatural.
Courtesy Moments: After You 3.5min, video,
1998 (Canada) *TRICKSTER remaking through reusing*
Director: John Marriott
As
part of an ongoing series entitled “Art
that Says Hello”, Canadian Filmmaker
John Marriott makes an effort to improve everybody’s
life by spreading a thick layer of courtesy
around Vancouver.
Alternumerics
V.2 8.5min, video, 1999-2002 (USA)
Director: Paul Chan
Video
documentation of interactive work. Alternumerics
explores the relationship between language
and interactivity by transforming the simple
computer font into an art art form that explores
the fissure between what we write and what
we mean. By replacing individual letters and
numbers (known as alphanumerics) with textual
and graphic fragments that signify what is
typed in radically different ways, Alternumerics
transforms any computer connected to a standard
printer into an interactive art making installation.
“I
don’t know why I began to mutilate fonts
into forms that both reduce and expand its
power. It wasn’t as if language had stopped
working for me. I could still seduce my enemies
and humiliate my friends with the existing
alphanumeric set on my keyboard: I could still
write. But I wanted more. I got greedy. I
wanted language to work for me and no one
else. For Mac and Windows.” –Paul
Chan
Whirl-Mart
5min, video, 2002 (USA)
Director: Breathing Planet
Whirl-Mart
is a participatory social engineering project.
In an attempt to fuse art, theatre, and activism
in the public sphere, I designed and proliferated
a replicaple Consumption Awareness Ritual that
has been adopted and performed internationally.
Whirl-Mart
Ritual Resistance is a participatory experiment.
It is art and action. It came into being in
2001 as a response to Adbusters magazine’s
call for foolish action on the first of April.
What began as a single happening in Troy,
NY has over the course of a year evolved into
a ritual activity that is performed across
the U.S., and known around the world. It is
a ritual during which a group gathers and
silently pushes empty carts through the aisles
of a superstore. Whirl-Mart utilizes tactics
of occupation and reclamation of private consumer-dominated
space for the purpose of creating a symbolic
spectacle. http://www.breathingplanet.net/
The
End is the Beginning 2min, video, 2003 (USA)
Director: Suara Welitoff
Local
filmmaker Suara Welitoff’s tender portrait
of local musician (ex-Come, Uzi, Dangerous
Birds) Thalia Zedek. Suara’s work is
known for its focus on the way that interpersonal
dimensions of experience intersect with and
alter the unfolding of time.
Play>>
6min, video, 2003 (Finland)
Director: Liisa Lounila
Apparently,
though the process is complex, the thought
behind the third piece in Lounila’s trilogy
of still-films, Play>> was a
simple one; “My friend Niina Rinne and
I were sitting in a bar and wondering what
could be a trendier way of spending your spare
time. What is it that makes the same people
go to the same cellar night after night, to
the same party where nothing happens and still
everybody shows up!”
Liisa
Lounila (Finland) works with both video
and photography, and currently also with painting.
Most of her works use photography, and she
is interested in the still image, the captured
moment. Her visual vocabulary is often very
simple, since she finds it interesting to
work with a limited number of visual elements.
Shot with a hand-made 360° pinhole camera,
transformed into a video, Lounila describes
the shooting technique, which is also known
as time-slice photography and a virtual camera:
"The camera works by photographing the
subject simultaneously from all directions
with many separate cameras. When these pictures,
each taken from a slightly different angle,
are joined together in a film, it creates
the illusion of movement around a static subject."
The
Vestal Theatre 10min,16mm, 1971 (USA) *All
previous TRICKSTERS combined"
Director: Helene Kaplan
A
documentary shot in the lobby of a movie theater
from behind the candy counter. The camera
was turned off only when it ran out of film.
It was shot sync-sound fixed camera. The movie
goers could see the camera clearly (no Allen-Funt
cute). Like Monet's cathedral, this same image
would never have been the same again. The
image is composed of complex, multilayered
planes of focus. And I love the way people
ask for popcorn and tap their dollar bills.
Film time and real time are the same.
*for
Trickster Dissert*
