IF YOU STAND
WITH YOUR BACK
TO THE SLOWING OF THE SPEED
OF LIGHT IN WATER
TRISTE
TRISTE
PENSÃO GLOBO
THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS
SECURE THE SHADOW
THE IDEA OF NORTH
FLIGHT
THE PRESENT
HAPPY-END
PONY GLASS
...or lost
|
|
Main Film Festival Program
New York Film Festival Special Events
Wojciech Has Retrospective
NYFF Archive
VIEWS FROM THE AVANT GARDE
STIRRINGS, STILL and THE WORLD HAPPENS TWICE were curated by Mark McElhatten
and Gavin Smith.
The ROBERT BEAVERS and GREGORY MARKOPOULOS programs were curated
by Richard Peña
Note: Tickets for and the Views from the Avant Garde Series can be purchased at the Walter Reade Theater. For more information please call 875-5601 daily after 1:30 pm.
STIRRINGS, STILL (Program 1)
Wednesday, October 8: 7:30 pm
Saturday, October 11: 2 pm
Commingled Containers
(1997, U.S., Stan Brakhage, 4 mins, silent)
The world premiere of Stan Brakhage's return to photographed film.
Triste
(1996, U.S., Nathaniel Dorsky, 18 mins, silent)
"During the Bronze Age a variety of sanctuaries were built for curative
purposes. One of the principal activities was transformative sleep. This
montage speaks to that tradition. In Triste, the images are a
complicated variety of things from normal life, seen very carefully, the
poignancy of the montage cannot be reduced to verbal or conceptual
interpretation, therefore offering the viewer a more intimate
cinema."--Nathaniel Dorsky
The Five Bad Elements
(1997, U.S., Mark LaPore, 27 mins)
"A filmic Pandora's Box full of my version of 'trouble' (death, loss,
cultural imperialism) as well as the trouble with representation as
incomplete understanding."--Mark LaPore
A dark and astringent film that allows the filmmaker's personal
subconscious drives and the equivocal bad conscience of ethnography to
bleed through into overt content. In several of his previous films
(Depression in the Bay of Bengal and The Sudan Rolls) LaPore applied
inspiration received from the early cinema of the Lumiere brothers
allowing the integrity of the shot and the long take to convey a sense
of continuing development. We witness discrete unfoldings of small
narratives and performative processes of labor or unconscious movement
that carry the tell tale symptoms of cultural transitions. There is also
a heightened and uncanny sense of ordinariness (perhaps most strongly
felt in LaPore's work in progress 100 Views of New York) seen with a
tweaked awareness of instability and evanescence, the knowledge that the
present has no permanent residence, the contemporary is in continuous
eviction.
The serendipitous orchestration of the world composing itself
in time within the domain of the fixed frame is set in a delicate
equipoise with the sensibility and organizing vision of the filmmaker.
With his exquisite observational acuity (visual, anthropological,
sociological) and formal severity LaPore's approach aspires to a kind of
rich transparency. Poetically decisive compositions open up the
impedance in the flow and transference of the fabric of the real as it
passes away into photochemical illusion. LaPore is expanding a tradition
of experimental documentary filmmaking practiced by Calvacanti, Wright,
Rouch, Gardener, the Macdougals, Hutton and Gehr, conducting profoundly
cinematic, highly distilled personal investigations into the nature of
cultural flux and reverie.
The hand held camerawork and the particular
leverage of The Five Bad Elements both pushes and works against
LaPore's previous tendencies in order to create compound fractures of
potent abbreviations - seemingly dislocated images uncategorically taken
and placed into "improper" contexts, severed from a mappable space or
geography - and overextended, unexpurgated scenes in which sight is
caught actively probing or transfixed in seeming paralysis. By
interrupting already truncated and mysteriously unmoored images with
sections prolonging the durations and decay time of images normally torn
from our sight, LaPore offers not provocation or obsession as much as
permission to travel deeper into the image. The image as it pertains to
actual experience - not only a filmic event or an approximate residue
that stands in for something else as all images do. Refusing to satisfy
curiosity with information, LaPore frustrates the usual complicities
between image and documentary fact by dealing with representation as an
execution of likeness, while still reckoning with the standard exchange
rate of the image in its metaphoric fidelity to the real, the elusive
and the tangible aspects of the image. LaPore's audacities are almost
camouflaged by his refined sense of restraint, his austerity and lyrical
contemplativeness.
The title of the film is mischievously cribbed from a
gang of troublemakers that appears in Chinese filmmaker Xie Jin's film
Hibiscus Town but also hints at the biblical concept of The Seven Deadly Sins, of universal ingredients - the four elements - earth, water, air and fire. Bad elements can refer euphemistically to a criminal milieu, "the wrong crowd", as well as suggesting the antiquated medical notion of the circulating "humors" that govern disposition and health. Going to the source of trouble was part of the filmmakers intent. LaPore: "I was more interested in who put those things into Pandora's box than I was in who let them out." In short the film is concerned with notions of basic and invasive influences, economy and eros, the rudiments of human composition, human error and the transgressive. Elements quietly attempts a suspect and perilous curative measure akin to bloodletting. "Key" evidence is spilled along with what would normally be suppressed or discounted as tangential. By exhibiting its own undercurrents and letting them hold sway, Elements thwarts commitment to documentary obligations which would prohibit its strangely moving and tainted disclosures. If we are used to works of transgression announcing themselves as such and then flamboyantly misbehaving as spectacular and bracing "entertainments," LaPore's move to a higher level of accomplishment could catch us off guard or seem oblique. Sound and image are subtly and rigorously counterpointed so as to fall into unnatural relations, blistering as they graze against each other and leaving a stinging afterglow of synethesisia and emotional voltage. By building the film on normally inadmissible evidence, telegraphed inferences, metaphoric leaps and omissions, damaged testimonies and scattered remains the film fabricates an impeccable and elegant architecture from a materially incomplete and unsound body. In the fragmented corpus of human beings and continents which is The Five Bad Elements, LaPore has created a film which itself acts as an absorbent object, a kind of metastatic sin eater that aims at expiation through its own contamination, redistributing poisons into a netherworld that still clearly resides at the core of its own physical and visible existence.
Retrospectroscope
(1997, U.S., Kerry Laitala, 4 mins, silent)
Wraith infested spools spark to life. In 1895 Georges Demeny invented
the revolving glass disc phonoscope/bioscope. This apparatus was
designed for animating chronophotography and "to indulge the curiosity
to commit a series of piquant indiscretions." Putting a new spin on this
paracinematic apparatus, Laitala built a kind of sibling rival to that
previous invention. Made out of plexiglass transparencies and set in
motion - the Retrospectroscope.
Pensão Globo
(1997, Germany, Matthius Müller, 14 mins)
Thirteen years after his elegiac Aus der Ferne/The Memo Book, Müller
revisits Lisbon, the City of Fate, of longing and decay and divisible
selves. Shadowing his protagonist from a hotel cell into the labrynthine
streets, the film never sidesteps the stations of dissolution and the
sense of imminent destination. With oversaturated colors, both sanguine
and succulent, vision swims and slips away in echoing superimpositions.
These overlapping exposures convey a sense of proprioception and of the
permeable boundaries between life and death.
Secure the Shadow
(1997, U.S. Kerry Laitala, 8 mins)
"Secure the Shadow, Ere The Substance Fade/Let Nature imitate what
Nature has Made." This early advertising motto for photography has the
ring of a Victorian poem and the shiver of an epitaph. Photography's
initial triumph was to arrest the fugitive and to fix a moment in time
like an insect in amber. Following the development of Fox-Talbot's
transient pictures, it was clear that photography could be more than
just The Pencil of Nature - it was also a scalpel and a spade. With a
view towards permanence and the everlasting, cameras began indexing the
usual, the anomalous, and the pathological. Images ranged from the
trachea of the silkworm to the nimbus of the moon, life spied on unaware
and the dead composed in idealized sleep. Kelly Laitala's film derives
its title and in part its spirit from that motto and that history of
imagemaking, but she creates a work that is unique to her own idiolect
and concerns, and is distinctly cinema, recalling its genus as the
quintessential Frankensteinian patchwork creature. Secure the Shadow
is steeped in melancholia, involuntary schadenfreude and a sense of
spoil that is both anachronistic and transcendental. A collection of
stereoptic medical photographs, a menagerie of unseasonable decay,
surfaces throughout the film, arriving in negative haloes of blue haze
only to deetherealize into restored pictures of positive deformity.
Flesh and spirit are pitted against the industriousness of corrosion
with wearying vigilance, as owls transform from sentinel guardians into
mocking gargoyles in the twinkling of an eye. The plangent
correspondences between emulsion and mortal flesh, editing and surgical
suturing and taxidermy, collecting and cataloguing as craft, science and
mania, are established directly or in innuendo. The recurrent images of
the Crazy quilt (specifically the commerative and mourning quilts that
function therapeutically, much like post-mortem photography) is
emblematic of the above concerns. As a visual equivalent, the Crazy
quilt is often associated with the symphonic collages and derangements
of popular songs composed by Charles Ives, whose numinous cacophony is a
phantom presence here, breathing life into the film even though it is
Ives' less anxious serenities and metaphysical questions that provides
shading to Secure the Shadow's turbulent complexion. Laitala's
unsettling imagery and design manages to invoke Ives' music of the
spheres, the silver swan of Orlando Gibbons, the workaday utensils of
life and death, the gnawing deathwatch beetle's deviant arabesque, the
spider's web and the awkward makings of The Human Dress.
The Idea of North
(1995, U.S. Rebecca Baron, 14 mins)
In the guise of chronicling the final months of three polar explorers
marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron's film investigates the
limitations of images and other forms of record as means of knowing the
past and the paradoxic interplay of film time, historical time, real
time and the fixed moment of the photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact
voiceover and allusive sound fragments, evidence and illustration, in
Baron's words "meaning is set adrift."
The Present
(1996, U.S. Robert Frank, 22 mins)
"Using the camera with intuition. Being prepared to improvise. Keeping
an eye on the moment. Inside and outside. The present."--Robert Frank
Beading impromptus and minor incidents, Frank scrutinizes his
surroundings, visits friends and surveys a lifetime's paraphernalia
with a confiding air of casual distraction, in search of his subject.
With unerring perspicacity for the telling implications of any given
instant, this deceptively miscellaneous scrapbook of sifted evidence and
shifted tenses is masterfully edited into meaningful shape. Embracing
the out of reach and close at hand, The Present is a beautifully vital
film of rueless melancholy, laced with prophetic levity.
Flight
(1996, U.S. Greta Snider, 5 mins, silent)
Meticulous and fleet, Greta Snider's Flight is a high contrast memento
mori, an impossible dialogue of father and daughter mutual address. A
spontaneous response to loss and its afterimage prompts an intricate
construction of perishable effects brought to light through indelible
flashpoints and suspended farewells.
"Flight is my father's photographic legacy, compiled and transformed
into light. I wanted to materialize what spirit ephemera I have
remaining from him. His family photographs, his hobbyist pictures of
trains and roses, his airplanes and his obsession with birds circling,
this material is shot through his eyes. The images are imprinted onto
the film, like a fingerprint or trace. It's his movie, really..."--Greta
Snider
Total Running Time: 116 mins
|
