WALKS
EMILY DIED
EMILY DIED
ONTIC ANTICS STARRING LAUREL AND HARDY
ONTIC ANTICS STARRING LAUREL AND HARDY
ARTHUR LIPSETT RETROSPECTIVE
|
|
Korridor (Dietmar Brehm, Austria, 1997, 18m)
The fifth film in Brehm's "Black Garden" horror series is composed
mostly of found footage and the filmmaker's mirror projections into the
preexisting compositions. The thin, blighted decadence and amateur
stagings of this photosession torture garden gel with the uncanny
potency of ominous repetitions, resulting in a film that feels both
creepily revealing and hermetically sub-ordinary.
"I concentrated the lens on a very narrow field and allowed the horde of
found footage actors to react with each other. I wanted to construct an
insidious/traumatic phenomenon in which the head and body glide through
the picture again and again and are extinguished in black
frames."--Dietmar Brehm
Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy
(Martin Arnold, Austria, 1997, 15m)
Arnold's love triangle transfixes Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and Fay
Holden in a spastic dance of faltering gestures, breathless yearning and
erotic keening that answers to the call of the wild.
"The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial,
a cinema of repression.... If piece touchee expresses sexuality and
passage a l'acte aggression, then perhaps Andy Hardy finds
melancholia."--Martin Arnold
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 77m
Sat October 10th: 2pm
Sun October 11th: 9pm
PROGRAM 2
Immer Zu
(Janie Geiser, U.S., 1997, 7m)
The dark-meshed moirés of the memory book in its pulp fiction edition
form obsidian riddles that cut time to ribbons. Life puts us in the
critical condition of having to play espionage with our own stolen
recollection of events, preserving them in a code often difficult to
retrieve as it sinks into the limited access of the mental underworld.
Intrigue
(Jim Jennings, U.S., 1998, 11m silent)
"The film was shot and edited in the camera beneath the El at Brighton, Brooklyn a.k.a. 'Little Odessa.' The film is to be experienced for what it is and at the same time suggest a spectrum of incomprehensible inner emotions. The title suggests the motivation which culminates here."--Jim Jennings
Nocturne
(Peggy Ahwesh, U.S., 1998, 30m)
Forming an informal trilogy with Ahwesh's The Deadman and The Color of
Love, Nocturne features Anne Kugler, Bradley Eros and Karen Sullivan in
a minatory scenario in film and pixelvision combining plot elements
culled from Mario Bava's The Whip and the Flesh (1963) with writings on
sexuality and violence from Kathy Acker, the Marquis de Sade and Steven
Shaviro. "A certain kind of psychological horror film based on fear,
disquietude and the anticipation of violence. The unearthly lovers'
encounters are shrouded among the shadows of the night and the lurid
dreams of the imagination, with no clear division between fact and
hallucination, between life and death, between dread and desire."--Peggy
Ahwesh
An W + B
(Kurt Kren, Austria, 1976, 8m, silent)
Austria's Kurt Kren, one of our most important and influential
filmmakers, died in May. In the disputed histories which build the house
of film, Kren was momentarily but unforgivably denied. Now he haunts the
house with rude and playful shadows. Many of his films were exquisite
distillations and expansions of living time. One of his personal
favorites, An W + B filters the numinous and the concrete into dense
transparency.
Noema
(Scott Stark, U.S., 1998, 10m)
Noema is neither Boogie Nights nor the nights of Scheherezade, but a
Decameron-like tournament of missing links and coitus interruptus, grown
dizzy on a daisy chain of synchronized decouplings and eager hesitations
where bodies never merge--porno unplugged. In this skeleton dance of
surplus motion the transitional moments of awkward repositioning create
a multiple oasis of non sequitur inconvenience and human practicality
where exaggerated mechanics rotiserrie with equestrian grace. The
impaired visual intelligence, unmotivated camerawork and default mise en
scene of Stark's found footage assert their deficiency and allure with
mechanical insistence and a splayed adagio infects the scenes with polar
melancholy.
"Noema is philosopher Husserl's term for 'the meaning of an object that
is formed in the domain of consciousness.' Pornographic videos are mined
for the unerotic moments between moments, when the actors are engaging in an awkward change of position or when the camera pans meaningfully away from the urgent mechanisms of sex up to a cheap painting on the wall or the distant embers of a crackling fire. A piercing musical score loops endlessly throughout, and the repetitive and curious
iterations of movement become furtive searches for meaning within their
own blandness."--Scott Stark
Wandelt/Walks
(R.G.A. Gerlach, Netherlands, 1997, 3m)
Pointilistic tourists, toylike in unsuspected capture, forfeit the
castle but gain static immortality. A piecemeal souvenir plays into our
hands and leaves behind an imaginary landscape where color dye is light
and space is both arbitrarily shattered and whole.
Emily Died
(Anne Robertson, U.S., 1998, 26m)
In Reel 80 of her ongoing Super 8 Five Year Diary, a work-in-progress
begun in 1981, Massachusetts-based filmmaker Anne Robertson, who will
narrate the film in person during its projection, continues her
unflinching self-examination and contemplation of a confusing world.
Chronicling a cyclic struggle for stable psychic space and physical
well-being, Robertson's confiding self-presentation raises uncomfortable
questions for the entrusted viewer while leaving a lasting impression of
an undefeated spirit and enduring idealist.
"Emily Died covers the period May 14 to September 26, 1994. Within is
personal documentary; midway occurs the death of my 3-year-old niece
Emily; the impact of her death is explored."--Anne Robertson
19 Scenes Relating to a Trip to Japan
(Konrad Steiner, U.S., 15m)
The tradition of artists who have worked with dual projection and
multiple image films includes Warhol, de Hirsch, Sharits, Snow, Cornell,
Dorsky and Jacobs. Steiner joins their ranks with 19 Scenes, where two
separate images interact or combine in a series of elegant variations to
create contrapuntal murals of reinvented and divisible space and
ambiguous panoramas, set to a traditional song on the theme of
impermanent love.
"Two moving pictures side by side relating to each other in various simple ways,
to a woman playing koto and singing six songs about ephemeral love, and to my
visit to Japan"--Konrad Steiner.
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 110m
Sat October 10th: 9pm
Sun October 11th: 6pm
PROGRAM 3
Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy
(Ken Jacobs, U.S., 1998, approx
80 mins)
With his nervous system film performances, Jacobs wrings changes out of
startled frames and makes the infinitesimal matter. Ontic Antics - the
simple shift of a vowel or the advance of a film frame creates a world
of difference in definition and character. Basking in that shade of
difference he plumbs the frame with surgical decisiveness and amatory
delicacy. Welcome to microtonal cinema. Taking Laurel and Hardy's
Berthmarks as point of departure, Jacobs supercedes slapstick, moving
into the deeper dimensions of the human comedy - psychological
imbroglios, time-space predicaments, the unruliness of uncooperative
gravity, the unlimited expressiveness of the limited body hallucinated
into Rorschaching deliveries.
"Hardy walked a thin line between playing heavy and playing fatty.
Laurel adopted a retarded squint, with suggestions of idiot savant.
Their characters were at sea, clinging to each other as industrial
capitalism was breaking up and sinking. Beautiful losers, they kept it
funny, buoying our spirits. Laurel and Hardy... forever."--Ken Jacobs
preceded by:
One
(Fred Worden, U.S., 1998, 23m, silent)
Countering the glut of superficial work that has turned abstraction into
a decorative effect, Worden has made a groundbreaking film. Pushing the
language of genuine cinematic abstraction forward and seizing upon the
gifts and gullibilities of our eye-brain perceptual system, One
catalyzes a maelstrom of unlocked imaginings that may seem to originate
onscreen or in the activated and suggestible viewer. Never random,
Worden, in tandem with his viewer, creates a field of limitless play from
a single frame of film.
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 103m
Sun October 11th: 2pm
PROGRAM 4
ARTHUR LIPSETT RETROSPECTIVE PROGRAM
21-87 (Canada, 1964, 9m)
Free Fall (Canada, 1964, 9m)
A Trip Down Memory Lane (Canada, 1965, 12m)
Fluxes (Canada, 1968, 23m)
N-Zone (Canada, 1970, 45m)
Very Nice, Very Nice (Canada, 1961, 6m)
With his sardonic clairvoyance Arthur Lipsett was the quintessential Man
With X-Ray Eyes. His terrible gift for acuity brought him pain and
insight, allowing him to create a cinema of richly eccentric coherence
and innovation out of the chaos of life and filmic refuse. His work is
redolent with the seismic rustle and look of the 1960s and is deeply
concerned with dehumanization, consumerism, the eclipse of religion,
man's farcical pursuit of annihilation, and apocalyptic thinking. No
wonder Stanley Kubrick invited Lipsett to make the trailer for Dr.
Strangelove, an assignment, like so many opportune offers, the filmmaker
declined. The favorable comparison to contemporaries Bruce Conner and
Christopher MacLaine is apt but does only partial justice. Lipsett was
unique in his approach to found footage and in particular sound and
composition. He often composed his soundtracks--densely intricate aural
collages with both contrapuntal and discrepant relations to his
images--prior to editing. Lipsett not only moved to the beat of a
different drummer but pitched his tent on the far side of sanity,
eventually committing suicide just short of his fiftieth birthday. His
most accomplished films resulted from a fruitful but difficult
relationship with the National Film Board of Canada where he worked as
an editor, animator, director and scavenger at large. Although he left
behind several unfinished films, and is credited with directing many
others, it is the collage films in this program that form the core of
his work and best represent his extraordinary sensibility.
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 104m
Sat October 10th: 6pm
With thanks to David Schwartz, Brian Frye, Jytte Jensen, John Sirabella,
Madeleine Bellille, Lynne Williams, Joanne Leduc, Christianne Talbot and
the staff of the National Film Board of Canada in New York and Montreal.
Special thanks to Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage.
Main Film Festival Program
Youssef Chahine Retrospective
Eisenstein's STRIKE
Bergman's IN THE PRESENCE OF A CLOWN
NYFF Archive
|
