VIEWS FROM THE AVANT-GARDE premieres experimental films from the frontiers of cinematic possibility. This program is curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith; and organized by Kent Jones, Gavin Smith and Mark McElhatten
PROGRAM 1:
LIGHT SPILL
Total Runtime: 110m
Sat Oct 7: 2pm; Sun Oct 8: 9pm
 
THE HEART OF THE WORLD
(Guy Maddin, Canada, 2000, 5m)
Commissioned by the Toronto Film Festival
"Guy Maddin?s five minute feature is a thimble sized epic of sacrifice,
salvation and innuendo turned inside out. Like a Kino Eye version of the Fleischer brothers'
Koko?s Earth Control or Metropolis on an (unlaced) shoestring, The Heart of the World comes hurtling off the screen with the crazy
determination of a runaway train. Maddin exposes a sibling rivalry of
biblical proportions and a romantic triangle - beware when saviors
attract! A fair haired fallen Messiah with a heart of gold divides the
brothers but unites the world." - Mark McElhatten
"I'm sorry! I've abused this Prelude - turned it into a soapbox for my tireless campaign to redeem melodrama. Without anyone suspecting a thing, I've jammed tiny, microscopically fleeting plot twists between the images of my ostensible movie presentation, deviously submerging in this way an entire feature film, all in a mere five minutes - the world's first subliminal melodrama! Please watch carefully." - Guy Maddin
THE FOURTH WATCH
(Janie Geiser, US, 2000, color; 9m)
"The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last
section
before morning was called the fourth watch. In these hours before dawn,
an
endless succession of rooms is inhabited by silent film figures
occupying
flickering space in a midcentury house made of printed tin. Their
presence
is at once inevitable and uncanny. A boy turns his head in dread, a
woman's eyes look askance, a sleepwalker reaches into a cabinet which
dissolves with her touch, and hands write letters behind disappearing
windows. The empty rooms continually reassert themselves and fill with
impossible, shadowed light." - Janie Geiser
THE GLASS SYSTEM
(Mark LaPore, U.S., 2000; 19m)
"Shot primarily in Calcutta, The Glass System looks at life as it is played out in public. Every street corner turned reveals activities both simple and mesmerizing: a knife sharpener on a bicycle; a tiny tightrope walker; a hauntingly slow portrait of the darting eyes of schoolgirls on their way home; the uncompleted activities of a young contortionist.
The Glass System expresses the filmmaker's sense of yearning for a lost New York, a place which exists in a dream where life in the streets was both complicated and fleeting." - Mark LaPore
SURFACE NOISE
(Abigail Child, 2000; 18m)
Found footage exploring public and private space, organized formally as a sonata, centered around work and issues of class: the divisions between home and public, owners and workers, saturation and flow, structure and improvisation.
"I work in media, both film and video. I began as a documentarian and moved into more experimental work by the late 1970s out of a sense of the politics of poetic forms and an aesthetic prediliction toward invention. My films extend the avant-garde and montage traditions of Eisenstein and Vertov, as well as the surrealist traditions of Buñuel and Breton in an attempt to examine, critique and play with and within the social realities of our era. In addition to these stylists from early in the century, my influences include the postwar films of Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage and the under-recognized Len Lye. These works support my commitment to wit, clarity and an investigation of the daily. I expand on these traditions by focusing on sound/image relationships, and by examining gender, the portrayal of women and desire." - Abigail Child
MOON STREAMS
(Mary Beth Reed, US, 2000, 6m)
"Moon Streams represents a hand-painted abstraction of creation. The
intensity of flowing water on the moon's surface builds as the
shifting colors reveal the consequence of chaos in space." - Mary Beth Reed
LIKE A DREAM THAT VANISHES
(Barbara Sternberg, 1999, 40m)
"Like a Dream that Vanishes continues my work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, the 'stuff' of life echoed in the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses. (Your life is like a candle burning ...)
Imageless emulsion is intercut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scène of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles. The movement between form and formlessness, appearing and withdrawing, creation and dissolution (death) are felt. The film image, as the reality behind it, is not quite graspable." - Barbara Sternberg
ORIGIN OF THE 21ST CENTURY
(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 2000; 13m)
Part paean, part lamentation for the 20th century.
With poetic apositeness these images (from Kubrick, Dreyer, pornography,
war reportage and the 19th century Lumière brothers) unlock and act as
?Rosebud? and Rosetta Stone as Godard looks at a century vanished
but undead in his most concise and heartbreaking film.
- Mark McElhatten
PROGRAM 2: PETER HUTTON & NATHANIEL DORSKY
Total Runtime: 63m
Sat Oct 7: 6:30pm
TIME AND TIDE
(Peter Hutton, US, 2000; 35m)
"The first section of the film is a reprint of a reel shot by Billy Bitzer in 1903 titled Down the Hudson for Biograph. It chronicles in single frame time lapse a section of the river between Newburgh, NY and Yonkers. The second section of the film was shot by filmmaker Peter Hutton (1998-99) and records fragments of several trips up and down the Hudson River between Bayonne, New Jersey and Albany, New York. The filmmaker was traveling on the tugboat "Gotham" as it pushed (up river) and pulled (down river) the Noel Cutler, a barge filled with 35,000 barrels of unleaded gasoline."
- Peter Hutton
"In recent years filmmakers as diverse as Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis
and Stan Brakhage have offered extraordinary films in which landscape
and seascape were paramount. It is fitting then, that Hutton, one of the
greatest visual poets of the portraiture of place, has just completed his first
film in many years - a meditation on the Hudson River.
Combining the luminescence and formal contemplation of the Hudson Valley
painters with documentary and ecological concerns, Time and Tide
extends the panoramic field of Hutton's previous
Portrait of a River. And after decades of an exclusive devotion to and mastery of
reversal black and white stocks, Time and Tide marks Hutton's inaugural
foray into color negative." - Mark McElhatten
ARBOR VITAE
(Nathaniel Dorsky, 2000; 28m)
"Arbor Vitae is a gesture towards a cinema of pure being.
Its atmosphere is haunted by the period in which it was shot, the year of 1999. Although the cuts are open and numerous in their intent, the underlying motivation is the delicate reveal of the transparency of presence, our tender mystery midst the elaborate unfolding of the tree of life." - Nathaniel Dorsky
PROGRAM 3: BENEATH THE SECOND HAND
Total Runtime: 110m
Sat Oct 7: 9pm; Sun Oct 8: 2pm
PRELUDE
(Michael Snow, Canada, 2000; 2m)
Commissioned by the Toronto Film Festival
"A carefully prepared "rush job" and come on. Every second counts in
Prelude, an unblinking wild three-way where most every action (teaser
ingredients of 'sex,' 'violence' music and food) occurs thrice, as sound,
verbal description and visual event. Though these constituent parts
are out of joint and rarely meet in the same incremental 'time
zone,' perfect synch seems only to occur dead center within the room.
The action occurs within the same camera pan and single take. Like
some of Snow?s greatest work, the seemingly offhand Prelude is conceptually meticulous.
The film constructs a momentary physical world subject to specific behavioral and cinematic
laws that parody the idea of 'Coming Attractions.' Taking off on the
apparent paradoxes and backhanded clairvoyance of all trailers - how can
something prepare a path and 'trail' behind, acting as
an appetizer, but also spoiling all narrative surprise?
Time and tempi are torqured to match the exaggerated metabolism and
delivery of such advertisement cum films."
- Mark McElhatten
"I am interested in exploring sound-image relationships that are structural and have little or nothing to do with reinforcing narrative
(this is sad, this is funny, this is exciting, etc).
My "Prelude" filmically depicts a scene which
in itself is a prelude to a film. However, the sync sound of the acted scene has been rearranged so that it "preludes" (and post-preludes) the visual actions which produced it. The image and the sound are the result of a single tripod panning shot showing six Torontonians eating, talking, and in a hell of a hurry not to be late for a Festival screening." - Michael Snow
DELLAMORTE DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE
(David Matarasso, France, 2000; 2m)
"It's alive: the dead can dance in this playfully deranged gothic jigsaw
jig, which frantically disects, reassembles and reanimates a trailer for Michele
Soavi's Italian zombie splatterflick Dellamorte dellamore aka
Cemetary Man. Scream and scream again." - Dylan Dog
SPIRAL VESSEL
(Janie Geiser, US, 2000; 6m)
"A found psychological test kit yields puzzle figures with cutout ears,
cutoff heads, and pullaway body parts. The ear opens into an interior
world of shifting science book images which, when isolated, evoke
mysteries more than they reveal facts." - Janie Geiser
THE ADVENTURE PARADE
(Kerry Laitala, US, 2000; 5m)
"Listen to our Bullhorn recitation. Our procession
imparts the darkest of reveries for you to recoil from
or embrace as the origin of our entrapment. However,
the sprightly buttress overshadowing this cinema,
submerges it further. As we see fit to excoriate our
visage to you the audience, we reveal everything. We
present to you an unveiling and beguiling presence....
Now that we have have exposed our deepest inner-most
thoughts, what do you have to offer in
recompense?" - anonymous
THE ZERO ORDER
(Bobby Abate, US, 2000; 34m)
Read more about Bobby Abate's Zero Order at his
website.
"Blake Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany?s was both sublime and subliminally
devious in substituting gamin androgyny, dry hustle and nostalgia for the
explicitly bisexual candor, sex work and incest-haunted past of
Truman Capote?s Holly Golightly. Wild thing Bobby Abate invokes, refracts and
obsesses over both texts as guiding fictions and phantom
prescences as they infiltrate the filmmaker's subconscious and street level New York City.
In both the book and the original
film, going to Tiffany?s was a curative pilgrimage for Holly, combating
the wilderness of inner anguish. In The Zero Order the text of Breakfast
at Tiffany's becomes an unruly but ultimately protective talisman
against the 'taming' directive of hypnotic societal commands.
The Zero Order is at times reminiscent of both Warhol and Fassbinder in charting
the slippery alliances of play acting, dramatic re-enactment, possession
and breakdown."
- Mark McElhatten
LOST MOTION
(Janie Geiser, US, 2000; 11m)
"Lost Motion uses small cast metal figures, toy trains, and other found
objects to trace a man's journey through impossible landscapes. His
wanderings lead him to the tracks, a forgotten landscape of derelict
erector set buildings populated by lost souls. Dream merges with
nightmare in this post-industrial land of vivid night." - Janie Geiser
NOT RESTING
(Nicky Hamlin, UK, 1999, 4m)
"Not Resting is a short 'portrait' of a bedroom, mostly shot from the bed itself. The camera records walls, angles and the shadows they cast. Birdshit on a window, crumpled sheets and corners of the room are seen in wide, medium and extreme close-up. The film moves from light to dark, from sheets to shadows." - Nicky Hamlin
BLITZE
(Dietmar Brehm, Austria, 2000, 7m)
"A mode of vision in which subject and object oscillate: a glance
triggers flashes of lightning in the brain; synaptic activity during a
dream replaces the glance... The feeling of discomfort caused by Blitze
is made possible by the relevance Brehm adds to his found
footage: he permits the telling of a story which is turned completely
around and, as in a dream, the story is nothing more than a subsequent
synthesis of images which appear suddenly." - Bert Rebhandl
SLOW DEATH
(Stom Sogo, US/Japan, 2000, 15m)
"It comes so quickly like a ball pencil dot in the end of the sentence. It shoots like a pistol into vein and to the heart. It contains the rest; nothing to do with the past, I guess. Point is something within has just ended. That's it."
- Stom Sogo
TWIG
(Michael Mideke, U.S., 1967, 2m)
"Twig emerged from a condition of poverty below which there could be
very little filmmaking. Outdated film hand processed in short lengths,
printed by sandwiching picture and stock in the sprocket of a
synchronizer mounted over a lightbulb, print also developed in short
hunks. The nominal subjects were ink drawings photographed with a
borrowed camera, spraypaint on film, found objects contact printed. The
lab sessions were interrupted by long days bent over the Griswald
splicer, organizing frame by frame, making new arrangements to be
combined in printing.
The staccato pace, the very short duration of the images and the use
of clear frames all lead to the formation of afterimages producing,
among other things, impressions of color. Given no time to move within
the images, eye movement tends to be paralyzed except for a sort of
involuntary pursuit of the light areas as they shift around the screen.
The film enforces in the viewer a kind of passivity which can be quite
rewarding if it is accompanied with watchful alertness, abandoning
oneself to the ride and yet paying attention."
- Michael Mideke
IN ABSENTIA
(The Quay Brothers in collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen, UK; 2000, 22m)
The first new film by the Brothers Quay in six years,
In Absentia is a collaboration with the celebrated avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who composed and conducted original music for the film.
Shot in black and white and color and projected in CinemaScope, In Absentia combines live action and animation with dazzling use of light to convey the mindscape of a woman alone in a room repeatedly writing a letter with broken off pieces of pencil lead, while outside her window vistas of ever changing light register her every emotion. The film is dedicated to "E.H. who lived and wrote to her husband from an asylum."
PROGRAM 4
Sun Oct 8: 7pm
TEATRO AMAZONAS
Sharon Lockhart, US, 1999; 40m
"Filmmaker/photographer Sharon Lockhart will present the long-awaited New York premiere of her new film - a deadpan conceptual/sociological/experiential tour de force. Filmed in a single fixed take in the fabled Amazonian opera house with 308 individually selected residents of Manaus,
Brazil." - Mark McElhatten
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