the 37th new york film festival at the walter reade theater:
views from the avant garde

Sponsored by Grand Marnier

Additional suppport from La Perla
and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith
Selection Committee: Kent Jones, Gavin Smith and Mark McElhatten

PROGRAM ONE:
THE DEMON OF ANALOGY (SERPENTINE DANCE)

CHIMP FOR NORMAL SHORT
Leslie Thornton, US, 1999, 6 minutes
The accident-prone protagonist in this short piece was "found" in a series of adventure shorts from the 1920's. Cut to evoke and mimic parts of Thornton's post-apocalyptic science-fiction serial Peggy and Fred in Hell, CHIMP F0R NORMAL SHORT continues--in another register--the anxious interrogation of the detritus of technological modernity begun by Peggy and Fred. From Buster Keaton to King Kong via Peggy and Fred, the mimetic thread of chimps and human children weaves itself into our reflections on ourselves and our world, with just enough accidental similarity and difference to make us really uncomfortable. -Thomas Zummer

QUARRY MOVIE
Greta Snider, US, 1999; 9 minutes
Producer: Greta Snider
The collaborating filmmakers are: Nathan Corbin, Michael Ginsburg, Gretchen Hogue, Shin Homma, Shannon Insana, Lisa Krist, Mary Molina, Max Rubinstein, Greta Snider, and Tony Stone. Editor: Shannon Insana.
This movie began as an attempt to document a place...not only its image as lensed, but its weather, its soil, and its toxins. Ten filmmakers fanned out over the landscape, seeing it through twenty eyes. In the avant-garde tradition of messing with the surface (the "environmental film" has been around in various incarnations for years - e.g. silt), the film documents this place outside of the camera as well. The organisms in the water and the soil have made their marks on it; the water's physical erosion acts upon the image; even the leached metals in this exhausted quarry pit's waters can be seen in the chemicals used to process the film.
The idea in the QUARRY MOVIE was not to use techniques to achieve a "look," but rather to achieve a presence, and then see what it looks like. The QUARRY MOVIE comes out of a fruitful combination of documentary and avant garde interests.

FILTER BEDS
Guy Sherwin, UK, 1998; 9 minutes


ZILLERTAL
Jurgen Reble, Germany, 1999; 11 minutes
An old trailer had been in the trees of a garden for months. Now and then it was coated with various chemicals. Through chemical disintegration and weathering the old plot of the film resolved to a great extent. Colors emerged from black and white. Black areas transformed into mountainous regions.

MOEBIUS STRIP
Luis Recoder US, 1999; 13 minutes
A comedy of errors, accidents, chance events, is inscribed into the fabric of a late 40's sports film. The effect is hilarious, often achieving slapstick results, while undercurrents of the sublime disturb the spectacular display of bodies in movement.
Note: Luis Recoder's work will be shown at the Walter Reade Theater on November as part of Image Innovators. You can read about the program here.

ANGUS MUSTANG
Stephanie Barber, US, 1996; 4 minutes
ANGUS MUSTANG is a short, poetic film which is thinking about travel, parallels, lying. It is sweet but is revelling in its small evils and manipulations -- "you have to look," "also we like to lie." The high road, the low road and how women sleep and work. The film is dense but somehow sites lightly upon ideas, is concerned more with interest than understanding. ANGUS MUSTANG is a road sign in texas, two town names which are near anagrams of each other. I am whooshing by and this sign is a perfect metaphor, huge and small at once.
--Stephanie Barber

ANOTHER WORLDY
Leslie Thornton, US, 1999; 23 minutes
ANOTHER WORLDY is organized around the interplay between archival (ethnographic dance) films, chorus line dances from the 40's, and early Edison studies of movement and dance. The soundtrack consists of 1990's techno/industrial music, interwoven with ethnographic recordings, and voice-overs. All of the material, sound and image, is meticulously edited to form unlikely and surprising para-harmonic sound/image clusters. ANOTHER WORLDY has been described as an "anti-musical," a recursive ethnography, a lost club film, a brilliantly anarchic deconstructive dance film, but it is perhaps most powerful as a relentless and shocking "comparative mythology" of (mediated) ritual and spectacle. -Thomas Zummer

REMOVED
Naomi Uman, US, 1999; 5 minutes
A few years ago, Naomi Uman, private chef to Malcolm Forbes, Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt, traded in her egg beater and oven mitts for a 16mm Bolex and acid resistant black rubber gloves. From the camera to the negative cut, Naomi is truly an independent film maker. She shoots, hand processes and edits all her own films, giving each movie her signature home-made look.
REMOVED: Using a soft porn film from the 70s, nail polish, bleach and a magnifying glass, Naomi Uman is constructing or deconstructing a fragment of the original film and in its place making a short piece of pornography in which the woman is present only as a hole, an empty, animated space.
OUTER SPACE
Peter Tscherkassky, Austria 1999; 14 minutes
A premonition of a horror film, lurking danger: A house -- at night, slightly tilted in the camera's view, eerily lit -- surfaces from the pitch black, then sinks back into it again. A young woman begins to move slowly towards the building. She enters it The film cuts crackle, the sound track grates, suppressed, smothered. Found footage from Hollywood forms the basis for the film. The figure who creeps through the images, who is thrown around by them and who attacks them is Barbara Hershey. Tscherkassky's dramatic frame by frame re-cycling, re-copying and new exposure of the material, folds the images and the rooms into each other. It removes the ground from under the viewer's feet and splits faces, like in a bad dream.
From the off, from outer space, foreign bodies penetrate the images and cause the montage to become panic stricken. The outer edges of the film image, the empty perforations and the skeletons of the optical sound track rehearse an invasion. They puncture the anyway indeterminate action of the film. Cinema tearing itself apart, driven by the expectation of a final ecstasy. Glass walls explode, furniture topples over. Tscherkassky puts his heroine under pressure, drives her to extremes. Time and time again she appears to hit out against the cinematic apparatus, until the images begin to stutter, are thrown off track. OUTER SPACE is a shocker of cinematographic dysfunction; a hell-raiser of avant-garde cinema. It conjures up an inferno which pursues the destruction (of cinematic narrative and illusion) with unimaginable beauty. --Stefan Grissemann
Total Running Time: 95 minutes
Sat Oct 9: 2pm; Sun Oct 10: 6pm

PROGRAM TWO: IN RESIDUE

FOOL'S SPRING
Jerome Hiler and Nathaniel Dorsky, US, 1966-7; 5 minutes
The first of these two 100 foot camera rolls is also by chance Jerry's first film. Its tenderness of vision and openess of form changed forever my sense of what filmmaking could be. Two months later I attempted a response -- Nathaniel Dorsky

PAINTING THE TOWN
Jim Jennings, US, 1998; 11 minutes
As a teenager, I started making films in the late 60's with a 16mm Keystone camera that my father's family had used to make home movies in the 30's, 40's and 50's. Since graduating from Bard College in 1973 as a Film Major, I have lived in NYC, making films on and off, while simultaneously being employed in unrelated fields. On more than one occasion I tried and failed to make a film in Times Square. A year ago while walking through there at night, I was inspired to try again. The filming was done on consecutive weekend nights. Between weekends I would have the 100-foot roll or two developed and project them once or twice. Propelled by "chords" and "melodies" that tantalized me, I would then go back for more in the editing room, after exhausting the shooting process, I freed my "Lullaby of Broadway". These two screenings of PAINTING THE TOWN are dedicated to Ken Jacobs, whose work and encouragement I am grateful for.--Jim Jennings

MUKTIKARA
Jeanne Liotta, US, 1999; 11 minutes
From the Sanskrit, 'gentle gazing brings liberation'
the title is also the name of the particular body of water
which is the image-subject of the film.
Landscape as 'inscape',
not inertly present but beckoning an active perception;
a seeing and a seeing into.
"...as if my eyes were still growing..." Gerard Manley Hopkins

MOXON'S MECHANICAL EXERCISES OR, THE DOCTRINE OF HANDY-WORKS APPLIED TO THE ART OF PRINTING
David Gatten, US, 1999; 26 minutes
At the end:
A meditation on the development of the printing press and its role in the spread of Christianity throughout Europe, the relationship between words and images, the fine line between the legible and the illegible, and the mind/body intersection/split in Baroque philosophy. This handmade film, with its images generated entirely from cellophane tape, is the latest in a series of works investigating cameraless techniques for producing motion picture images.
In the middle:
Continues and expands my previous investigations into the relationship between text and image, legibility and illegibility, translation and adaptation ... proceeds from the landmark moment in the middle of the fifteenth century when Gutenberg inaugurated the use of movable type in the West with his 42-line Bible. Using a cameraless, cellophane tape and ink transfer process, words themselves were lifted from a number of historical texts, the ink-words were fixed directly onto a clear film base and some 24,000 individual frames of text were contact printed onto 16mm filmstock . . . a text-as-image in which the words take shape and slide away almost as though formed from liquid metal. A constant restaging of appearance as disappearance, the image oscillates: small pockets of meaning emerge for an instant and then vanish into the flow of material which constitutes a passage through time and space... notion of the Baroque house in which souls are in ascension from a lower floor comprising "pleats of matter" to an upper floor which contains the "folds of the soul," ... the text-as-image in the film is itself constantly in transformation, translation, and ascension as it pushes upward, disappearing at the ceiling of the frame.
While beginning:
Knew that it had to and knew that it should: be free from the page and slide 'till reborn. Knew that it had to and knew that it could: peeled from the page in frame-at-a-time mornings. Knew that it had to and knew that it would: flashlight fumbling and film tape crunching... refused to stay still, could not be stopped. Monk-like sequestered, scriptorium scribbling: light from the window was light from above. Knew that I had it and knew that I couldn't: stretch the material in frames of my making. . . looked for instructions and found an Instructor: Moxon directed and Moxon framed timely, found I should follow and follow I tried. --David Gatten

SILVER RUSH
Cécile Fontaine, France 1999, 6 minutes
This film, like all my 16mm films, was made from whole "found films": given to me by friends aware of my filmmaking practice, i.e., to build collage films from pre-selected footage of those found films, by peeling the emulsion off their original base and fixing it by tape on a new one which surface has been chemically or manually changed -- creating new colors, superimpositions, encrustations or split images...
Following that process, "Silver Rush" is a mixing of various footage of fiction, advertising and documentary films around "chases" or "rushes" of many kinds --Cécile Fontaine

HOSPITAL FRAGMENT
Guy Maddin, Canada, 1999; 4 minutes
The attempts of a young man to consumate his love for a young woman are thwarted by a fish-monger.
My pictures are musty and decaying - so am I. Things gone and almost forgotten produce a sweet sad yearning in me. A brittle piece of movie triggers the same quivering flavours on my palate as a fragile memory. Footage must be fragile, yet blindingly bright with the bravado of things falsely remembered, re-remembered or completely forgotten. Movies produce irrational feelings which help viewers hear the mysterious music of subliminal plots, fetishistic gestures, decors and choreographies, for these are the elemental sub-components which throb like music in my fevered head.--Guy Maddin

TWILIGHT PSALM I: THE LATENESS OF THE HOUR
Phil Solomon, US, 1999; 5 minutes
THE TWILIGHT PSALMS (1999-2000) is a series of short visual tone poems, a personal history of the Twentieth Century at closing time. Series dedicated to Rod Serling of Binghampton, N.Y
A little nachtmusick, a deep blue overture to the series. Breathing in the cool night airs, breathing out a children's song; then whispering a prayer for a night of easeful sleep. For Mark Lapore, who came back, just to help a friend breathe a little easier.

HOME
Luther Price, US, 1998-9; 13 minutes

clothes lines all the while remembering that car ride when they drove over the flower patch destroyed caught a butterfly and let it go but the wing was still in hand you're free it dropped to the ground the sky turned people didn't see brown dirt and ground they will go soon and maggots will come too they forget flesh is meat i want you dead thing i miss the way you sing make teeth in my mouth show green and the wall was great, and solid the floor made me fall splinter get up push forward stiff into dark let someone else eat the pie and hold it still for a moment the dress will keep still too sucking baby turns his head he wants pie too moving not really alive but give him a piece anyway

Luther Price / Tom Rhoads

TWILIGHT PSALM II: WALKING DISTANCE
Phil Solomon, US, 1999; 15 minutes
Imagining one of those rusted medieval film cans having survived centuries, a long lost Biograph / Star, a Griffith / Méliès co-production, a two-reeler left to us from, say, the Bronze Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, when they poured down like silver, not be to fixed and washed, mind you, but free to reform and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds, mere holding patterns of faces, places, and things, shape-shifting according to whim, need, the uncanny or the inevitable...WALKING DISTANCE is a simple Golden Book tale of horizontals and verticals, a cinema of ether and ore... for Anselm Kiefer
Total Running Time: 85 minutes
Sat Oct 9: 9pm Sun Oct 10: 2pm

PROGRAM THREE:
"WINGED DISTANCE / SIGHTLESS MEASURE" -- THREE FILMS BY ROBERT BEAVERS

I have returned several times to the question of how to show the 'reverse side' of an object in film. How to give the full sense of this as it is related to other facets of prismatic space in film. It retains a fascination for me whether it is the two sides of a hand or the turning of a page or the dialogue between two figures.

FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF...
US, 1971-98; 48 minutes
When FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF... was filmed in Florence in 1971, I had already made several films with colored filters and moving mattes. Each film was formed by the place in which I then lived--either Greece or Brussels, Zurich or Berlin. The initial choice in Florence was more complex because the filming locations were selected by drawing upon certain details from Leonardo Da Vinci's life--the little that is known to be related to the city--and from other comments in his notebooks. The very first scene of doves being set free from a shop near the Bargello is inspired by the mention of such a scene in the Vasari biography. It is then suddenly extended into the present (of 1971) by one of my own handwritten notes, so that the flight of the dove is interwoven with the turning of the page (or matte) then juxtaposed to a view of my opening a window onto the Florentine rooftops.

WORK DONE
US, 1972-99; 22 minutes
From the first moment, the filmmaker is present as an active observer. This is usually shown in clusters of quick camera movements with my profile framing the view. A natural pace develops between the searching-on-location and the central scenes of my writing at the table. The notebook is given filmic form and holds a quantity of visual elements in ever-changing relation.
Finding the present in the past: I was stimulated by Leonardo's precepts or his observations on disegno and chiaroscuro. As a result, I filmed certain qualities of shadows and their movement. There was time to observe the placid water under the Santa Trinita bridge or to compare the Arno at a more turbulent point with waves of blonde hair. Inspired by the freedom and range of this autodidact, I attempted to translate a few isolated elements of his vision into film. It reached the point where I could look into the film camera as a camera obscura and place pure colors there.

THE PAINTING
US, 1972-99; 12 minutes
Finding the past in the present: Because this was a first (extended) encounter with the city, vestiges of the early Florence came to life as I glimpsed them. I saw the window, painted in perspective on the via Maggio, or the ideal proportions of Alberti's facades, and each gained a place in the film. The window, with its painted black recesses, suggested new uses for my matte-forms, and it extended further to that other window in my room, seen at night. All suggest searching and the incandescence of thought.
These layers of reference are sometimes in synch and more often simply overlap. A space appears between the written notes, which are remnants of my earlier intentions, and the actual filming, developing in its own direction. The full gamut of these qualities allows for productive accidents and later intuitions. The measured rhythm of reading--or the glimpse of a few words--is woven into all of the other movements. One passes from the apparent stillness of the notes to actively see the movement in the editing. Each new image and sound changes the meaning of a note as it appears and reappears in the turning of the 'matte-page.'
Dividing the frame in half, the matte turns from one side to the other and this repetition creates a strong suggestion of perspective, almost a sense of the image turning to its reverse side in a few prismatic moments, when the sound also encourages this impression.
Total running time: 82 minutes
Saturday, October 9: 6 pm

Read more on Robert Beavers and his work here.

PROGRAM FOUR: SPECTRES OF THE SPECTRUM

Craig Baldwin, US, 1999; 85 minutes
"S.O.S" is an energized, activist science-fantasy collage-allegory on autonomous resistance to the golobalization of the telecommunications industry--a film that mocks America's military-industrial miracle, that critiques high-tech robber-barons, and that opts for the agency of human curiosity and invention.
In this found-footage fairy tale set in the year 2007 in a blighted desert outpost outside of Las Vegas, a young telepathic woman ("BooBoo") scavenges for survival on an old bombing range, while her father ("Yogi") is holed up in a cinder-blockhouse pirate-broadcasting rambling diatribes on the impending electromagnetic "Pulse." His revolutionary fervor enables him to link up with other communications outlaws, but the embittered daughter, in psychological extremis, can hardly endure another day on planet Earth. A solar eclipse affords her a cosmic opportunity to save the world, through a superluminal voyage back into time to retrieve a secret message left on the airwaves by her scientist grandmother, now deceased.
Coverting their Airstream trailer into a spaceship, the spiritually recharged BooBoo manages, despite asteroid showers and hostile saucers, to overtake the outwardly propagating early-TV broadcasts, allowing for an accelerated review of mid-century science--fact and fiction. Yogi and his "TV Tesla" correspondents counterpoise in-flight commentary in an imaginative effort to trace the history of scientific, military, and corporate exploitation of radiant-energy technologies. In an increasingly elliptical montage of live-action, archival film, "broadcast" video, and speculative interviews, our "chrononautical" quest warps into a playfully critical reading of the redolent artifacts of modern media-archeology.
Through retro-tech agit-prop rants, and self-reflexive cinema concrete riffs, and appropriated industrial-film FX, the compilation narrative is finally resolved, as BooBoo's transcendental sarifice holds forth the prospect of the supersession of individuated ego, historical representation, and yes, of space-time itself, for cinema and for the imagination.
Sun Oct 10: 9pm