PROGRAM 1 : THE ORIENTALIST, PART I
Sat Oct 16: 11am
The Orientalist: Chapters 1-5
Michele Smith, U.S., 2004; 148m
1. Odalisque (49m)
2. Export (30m)
3. Jerusalem (35m)
4. Still Life Past (19m)
5. and then (15m)

PROGRAM 2: INFORMED BY FIRE
Sat Oct 16: 2:30
Terrace 49 Janie Geiser, U.S., 2004; 6m; sound by Leon Rothenberg
Orchard Julie Murray, U.S./Ireland, 2004; 10m
Let Me Count the Ways, Minus 10, 9, 8, 7... Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2004; 20m
Anaconda Targets Dominic Angerame, U.S., 2004; 11m
The Future Is Behind You Abigail Child, U.S., 2004; 16m; original score by John Zorn
Isahn Soon-mi Yoo, Korea/U.S., 2004; 16m
Paradise Crushed Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2002; 12m
End in New World Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2004; 3m
Total running time: 93m

PROGRAM 3: LEWIS KLAHR
Sat Oct 16: 5
The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy U.S., 2003-04; 33m
Two Days to Zero (23m)
Two Hours to Zero (9m)
Two Minutes to Zero (1m)
Daylight Moon (A Quartet) U.S., 2002-04; 40m
Valise (15m, 2004)
Hard Green (5m, 2004)
Soft Ticket (7m, 2004)
Daylight Moon (14m, 2002)
Total running time: 74m

PROGRAM 4: THE MIND MOVES UPON SILENCE
Sat Oct 16: 7
Redshift Emily Richardson, U.K., 2001; 4m
Behind This Soft Eclipse Eve Heller, U.S., 2004; 9m
Deliquium Julie Murray, U.S., 2004; 14m
Luke Bruce Conner, U.S., 1967/2004; 22m
Tabula Rasa Vincent Grenier, U.S., 1993-2004; 7m
# 6 Okkyung Andrew Lampert, U.S., 2004; 4m
Mirror Matthias Müller & Christoph Girardet, Germany 2004; 7m
Michelangelo Eye to Eye / Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 2004; 17m
Total running time: 73m

PROGRAM 5: MIKE AND GEORGE KUCHAR PRESERVED
Sat Oct 16: 9:15
with special host John Waters
Sylvia's Promise George Kuchar, U.S., 1962; 9m
Born of the Wind Mike Kuchar, U.S., 1962; 24m
The Thief and the Stripper George Kuchar U.S., 1959; 25m
A Town Called Tempest George Kuchar, U.S., 1963; 33m
Total running time: 91m

PROGRAM 6: THE ORIENTALIST, PART II
Sun Oct 17: 12 noon
The Orientalist: Chapters 6-8
Michele Smith, U.S., 2004; 150m
6. Crossroads, slipping (52m)
7. "we hear sirens..." (48m)
8. Bearing Lines and Shadow (50m)

PROGRAM 7: NINA FONOROFF
Sun Oct 17: 3
The Eye of the Mask U.S., 2004; 45m
The Accursed Mazurka U.S., 1994; 40m
Total running time: 85m

PROGRAM 8: ERNIE GEHR
Sun Oct 17: 5:30
Precarious Garden U.S., 2004; 13m
The Astronomer's Dream U.S., 2004; 15m
The Collector U.S., 2003; 18m
Passage U.S., 2003; 15m
Total running time: 63m

PROGRAM 9: PETER KUBELKA'S POETRY AND TRUTH
Sun Oct 17: 7:30
Dichtung und Wahrheit / Poetry and Truth Austria, 2003; 13m
Mosiak im Vertrauen Austria, 1954/55; 17m

PROGRAM 10: PANG EPOCH
Sun Oct 17: 9:30
Play Matthias Müller & Christoph Girardet, Germany, 2004; 8m
Chasmic Dance Daichi Saito, Canada, 2004; 6m
Aspect Emily Richardson, U.K., 2004; 8m
Life on Mars Isabelle Nouzha aka Ahzuon Ellebasi, Belgium, 2004; 8m
Phantom Matthias Müller, Germany, 2004; 6m
Axe Christof Janetzko, Germany, 2004; 10m
Stable Robert Todd, U.S., 2003; 7m
Echo, Echo Dietmar Brehm, Austria, 2004; 6m
Palermo - "history" standing still Janet Merewether, Australia, 2004; 11m
Come to See 'ya Eric Saks, U.S., 2004; 20m
Dirt Eric Saks, U.S. 2004; 25m
Total running time: 115m

PROGRAM 1 : THE ORIENTALIST, PART I
The Orientalist: Chapters 1-5 (Michele Smith, U.S. 2004)
1. Odalisque (49 min)
2. Export (30 min)
3. Jerusalem (35 min)
4. Still Life Past (19 min)
5. and then (15 min)

Recorded off manual film viewers, magnifying glass, television. Projected through mesh fabrics and metal, taped-off glass, reflected against harlequin pattern shopping bags, framing nighttime TV, weaving through a Greek line circle dance. TV commercials, a 1965 Italian James Bond knock-off on pink faded 16mm, battle of the network stars, artificial night skies, made-for-TV movies of homeland security, newsclips off CBN about suicide bombers, birth control, carpet cleaners, cosmetics, SUVs, Dean Martin, mobile phone ads. On distance. Etc. Around five hours. Frame by frame edited in iMovie, NTSC, approximately 30 frames per second, split every two to three frames throughout. Various stages and textures of film to video translations interwoven frame by frame, onto multiple screens into one screen, either a monitor or projected. A micro-mosaic, impressionism, moving in time, a fragmented structure mixed together by the perception of the viewer. - Michele Smith
Sat Oct 16: 11am
Chapters 6-8 screen on Sunday morning.

PROGRAM 2: INFORMED BY FIRE
Above: Terrace 49

Terrace 49
(Janie Geiser, U.S., 2004; 5½ min; sound by Leon Rothenberg)
All those movements the fraying of rope the approach of the truck and distant parenthetical incidents becoming part of the relay with the Active Invisible - everything advancing like an orchestration of predestination or an intricate fateful quirk that builds up to an instant, an intersection where life is torn. - Mark McElhatten

Images of impending disaster - slamming doors, a truck careening down a hill, and a frayed, almost snapping, elevator rope - collide with the repeated image of a woman - body, cycling toward ephemerality as the woman disappears into the texture of the film itself. In my recent films, I have been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a lush, disorienting, ambiguous film space, and an atmosphere of temporal suspension. In Terrace 49, I further break up this space, dividing the film frame into shards, as fractured as memory and as fragile as glass. - Janie Geiser

Orchard
(Julie Murray, U.S./Ireland, 2004; 8 min.)
Much of the footage that comprises Orchard is of a 19th century ruin that included a walled orchard in an area known as Rostellen in southwest Ireland. It is set deep in the woods and the crumbling brick and mortar of the broken walls has become the anchor for the roots of slender trees, so uninhibited for all this time that they reach 20 feet in height and have thick roots that follow like slow lazy trickles of water and in other places branch and wind over the brickwork in an apparently intelligent arterial arrangement reminiscent of the human body. Some footage of Central Park is in there, as well as Niagara Falls, the main Dublin to Cork road and a thin smoking woods on the outskirts of Rosslare, Co. Waterford. All these facts seem somewhat incidental to the film's eventual form, though. - Julie Murray

Let Me Count the Ways Minus 10, 9, 8, 7...
(Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2004; 20 min)
Let Me Count the Ways is an ongoing serial about violent terror and its aftermath. In episodes Minus 10, 9, 8, and 7, personal reminiscence is mixed with archival and new footage in an exploration of the interior of fear. From footage of the artist's father on the way to Hiroshima, through reference to 9/11, the phenomenology of horror and the echo of its rupture are presented with an intensity which moves the viewer from history to the present and beyond. - Leslie Thornton

You are now visiting Destruction.
History. Our home movie. History in stages. The theater of operations is continuous though often site specific. Memory atomized and retouched. Being human and inhumane we dress up like gods and go out to play. Hide and Seek. Duck and Cover. Shock and Awe. Scorch and Bloom. We are forever changing. Our own mutation just barely glimpsed occurs to us, simply explained, as a defect in the mirror.
Soon we are the victors and the victims of forgetfulness and immunity. Armored in alibi. Soon we are confused about the heroes and villains and we are generous with indispensable self-forgiveness.
The new golden rule: All is fair in love and war. Taste your own medicine but swallow this first: Every horror is justified and, more importantly, necessary. Testimony is so shaky and scratchy, the signal deteriorates or becomes classified information, voices get lost. Acclimate to the fallout while we bask in the afterglow. Just deserts. Sorry you got in the way of the inevitable.

But look at you. You are so photosensitive…You're on fire….
Human photograms play dead lying down in the rubble and blasted beds. This blinding light is our newsflash. Pretty ashes rain down on sunless vacancies. Our victory garden. You can get up now. I don't want to play anymore. You can get up now! In Hiroshima incongruities rose from the ashes and carpeted the silhouettes. "Little Boy," the bomb dropped by the Enola Gay, instantly destroyed 70,000 buildings and killed 100,000 civilians, another 100,000 died from the radiation effects in the five years that followed. At the moment of the attack the heat created a false spring where plants and flowers sprung to life. While back at home children drank freshly contaminated milk under blue skies and died 50 years later, the result of the prelude the "Trinity" atomic tests that took place three states away.

Mr.Oppenheimer regrets…

He was such a beautiful, thoughtful man, loving the violin as much as Einstein. Reading the Bhagavadgita in Sanskrit. He grew up in splendor with Cezanne and Van Gogh originals on the walls of his childhood home. He ended his life discredited and melancholy in autumn years devoted to sailing in the Virgin Islands. In the Jornada del Muerto at the time of the "Trinity" test Oppenheimer quoted the John Donne poem the test had been named after: "Batter my heart, three personed God; for you/As yet but knock ,breathe, shine and seek to mend;/That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend/Your force, to break, burn, and make me new." After his atomic weapons were used to vaporize humans in Japan, Oppenheimer wanted to turn back the clock. But the hands of the clock were fastened to a time bomb, the future an alluring radiant vortex. This physicist thought that weapons of such magnitude and indiscriminate destruction disqualified themselves from future military practicality, but on the contrary they were made to order.
" I fear we have blood on our hands" he said. And President Truman replied "Don't worry it will come out in the wash."

Leslie Thornton both narrows and broadens the scope of this time rustling through fragments of documents and keepsakes, initiating a new film series that finds the ties between familial and world histories, the past and the present, the countdown towards zero. - Mark McElhatten

Anaconda Targets
(Dominic Angerame, U.S., 2004; 11 min, digital sound )
“We don’t have time to get scared, everything happens in a few seconds. “The sight lights up just in front of the windshield, everything is ready for the computer to do its work. “It’s the computer that has the last word.”- Paul Virillio

About 2,000 troops from the US led military coalition were engaged in close in combat on March 4, 2002 with small pockets of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the rugged terrain of northeastern Afghanistan as part of an operation called Operation Anaconda.... The footage in the piece was part of this mission.

The Future Is Behind You
(Abigail Child, U.S., 2004; 16 min; original score by John Zorn)
The Future Is Behind You creates a fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive from 1930s Europe, reconstructed to emphasize gender acculturation in two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and grow up together under a shadow of oncoming history. I am looking, as always in found material, for the story below the story. Here there are at least three levels: 1) the home movie in which a family from 1930s Austria near the Swiss border poses for the camera, preternaturally happy. Unusually, the mother is main cinematographer; 2) the historical moment which remains as text trace, undermining the image and serving as covert motive for the action; 3) the development of gender identities - the innocent freedom of the elder transformed into socially bruised "bride," the irrepressibility of the younger moving from tomboy to awkward, diffident adult. At once biography & fiction, history & psychology, The Future Is Behind You excavates gestures to get at the heart of narrative; it seeks a bridge between private & public histories. - Abigail Child

Isahn
(Soon-Mi Yoo, Korea/U.S., 2004; 16 min)
In October 5, 2001, I saw on the TV news that Mr. Chung, an 82-year-old man originally from North Korea, had killed himself after failing to get into the lottery to take part in the family reunion and meet with his family in North Korea.
     The split screen in Isahn is from the stereoscopes at Imjingak, which is located 30 kilometers from Seoul on the border of North Korea. Tourists and displaced North Koreans can go and drop a few coins in the stereoscopes to look at the government sanctioned photographs of North Korea.
     The images from the stereoscopes are mixed with contemporary footage (shot in 1999) of Burmese refugee camps around Mae Sot, Thailand, in which inhabitants are forced to relocate to yet another anonymous site.
      For those who are not allowed to go back home, the sights of exile are just ersatz landscapes. Sometimes they may offer consolation. Oftentimes they work as hindrance. Many would say, "When I close my eyes, I can still see my hometown so vividly."- Soon-Mi Yoo

Paradise Crushed
(Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2002; 12 min)
Paradise Crushed, the "last" episode of Thornton's ongoing science-fiction serial Peggy and Fred in Hell, encapsulates our history from the Industrial Revolution to the End of the World. It is a kind of perpetuum mobile, a self organising generative machine.

End in New World
(Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2004; 2½ min)

Total running time: 93m
Sat Oct 16: 2:30

PROGRAM 3: LEWIS KLAHR
The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy
(U.S., 2003-04; 33 min)
Two Days to Zero (23 min)
Two Hours to Zero (9 min)
Two Minutes to Zero (1 min)
Music excerpted from Glenn Branca's "The Ascension" (1980).
Film commissioned by the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival "Just A Minute" program.
A feature length narrative compressed three different times into three separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized. A crime story told three different ways concerning the events of a two month period leading up to, and immediately following a bank robbery. The imagery has all been appropriated (the fancy, art world sanctioned term for stealing) from four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then-popular American TV show 77 Sunset Strip.

Daylight Moon (A Quartet)
(U.S., 2002-04; 40 min)
Valise (14½ min, 2004)
Hard Green (5 min, 2004)
Soft Ticket (7 min, 2004)
Daylight Moon (13½ min, 2002)

Here in middle age, finally self permission to directly take on some of the richest source material imbibed in my childhood - indelible memories, impressions, physiognomies, secondhand experiences and imaginings about - World War II, baseball, the Mississippi River, mythopoeic crime. The quartet a symmetrical structure suggesting wholeness - four the number of the directions, the winds, The Beatles, completeness. The reappearance of the Cartesian Diver figure, the protagonist of my first cutout animations in Picture Books for Adults and my first 16mm film The Pharaohs' Belt. I can't help but wonder what his reemergence heralds for me: the beginning of a new phase or merely the final grace note for the one that's ending?

Lewis Klahr on Two Minutes to Zero (A Trilogy) & Daylight Moon (A Quartet) 2002-04
When I first started "time traveling" via collage in my mid-twenties, I naively figured I'd immerse myself, exhaust the impulse by coming to grips with some core revelation about my childhood and get back to describing the present. If someone had told me that more than two decades later I'd still be unpacking that trunk of veils where memory and history intersect and collide, I wouldn't have believed them (back then I still believed in catharsis).
     So what exactly has been taking so long?
     What I underestimated is the degree of difficulty, despite how one pointed my focus has often been, to "unpack that trunk." It's been a long, slow wind inside, to penetrate collage and experimental film deeply enough to fine tune the empathetic projection required to reach the far shores of memory both lived and imagined. Only now, perhaps aided by the distance of middle age, am I feeling the control and insight to fully engage the found images and sounds that provoked this journey of (re-?)animation in the first place. Daylight Moon (the film not the series), completed two years ago, marked a turning point of sorts as it veered toward abstraction and organized itself around one of my most central childhood memories - an experience of the color green that wasn't attached to a particular object or even a specific memory. I wouldn't have been able to access this kind of everywhere and nowhere mnemonic experience, let alone recognize it in my twenties.
      With the premier of these two new series - Two Minutes to Zero (A Trilogy) and Daylight Moon (A Quartet) - it seems like a good time to say that I consider all of my 16mm collage films (with the exception of my two attempts at linear narrative) and the series groupings they have to date appeared in, to be part of one larger work 1964. The value of this decision resides in the increased flexibility of sequencing it allows. Films can now exist in more than one series - already existing example being Elsa Kirk (1999) which is included in both Engram Sepals (2000) and The Aperture of Ghostings (2002). The aim is to produce, through recombination, a retelling that expands upon the initial meaning of the individual films by changing the filter of their surrounding context.
      Which brings us back to the present. Ah - the elusive present! Wasn't that my original aim, to finish with the past and get back to describing the present? Over the past few years I've frequently been asked in post screening discussions would I ever work with contemporary imagery? The answer is yes, my films always use contemporary imagery. When we describe the contemporary it is too often straitjacketed by that limited, tyrannical sense that consumerism and pop culture demand we regard it. What this overlooks, ignores and asks us to dismiss is a huge part of everyday reality - the pastness of the present - the place my work has always issued from and endeavored to describe.
Total running time: 74m
Sat Oct 16: 5

PROGRAM 4 : THE MIND MOVES UPON SILENCE
Above: Redshift

Redshift (Emily Richardson, U.K., 2001; 4 min)
In astronomical terminology "redshift" is a term used in calculating the distance of stars from the earth, hence determining their age. Redshift attempts to show the huge geometry of the night sky and give an altered perspective of the landscape, using long exposures, fixed camera positions, long shots and timelapse animation techniques to reveal aspects of the night that are invisible to the naked eye. It takes these formal concerns into an emotional realm and uses the figurative to express philosophical ideas about our relationship to the world.
      The film has a gentle intensity to it, and is composed of changes of light across the sea, sky and mountains. It shows movement where there is apparent stillness, whether in the formation of weather patterns, movement of stars, the illumination of a building by passing car headlights or boats darting back and forth across the sea's horizon.
      The sound has been composed for the film by Ben Drew, taking field recordings of the aurora borealis as a starting point, and using purely computer generated sound to create a soundtrack that reflects the unheard elements present in the Earth's atmosphere. - Emily Richardson

Behind This Soft Eclipse (Eve Heller, U.S., 2004; 9 min)
A crossing of paths behind the seen, a labor of love in the wake of one who was just here. - Eve Heller

Deliquium
(Julie Murray, U.S., 2003; 16m (but represents 800 years))
Hidden among the pounding of animal hides,
All flattened into maps, their shapes
Explicit replicate butterfly wings, lie the motives of Lír.
The king who paid improper attention to his children.

From that first fascination
And its lascivious gaze,
Came the gorged desire for substance,
Among the skins,
Nets, shadows and milk bottles
Pried from the stomachs of metal fish,
Steam, smoke and things that won't stay,
Speared, dangled, measured, divined,
All dreamed through wallpaper,
Or dowsed from something they drowned in long ago.

Snowed in on either side
The swans, Lír's beloved children,
Begin their 800 year journey
From the lake to the sea
To the escape, the deliquescence. - Julie Murray

Luke
(Bruce Conner, U.S., 1967/2004; 22 min)
with Paul Newman and Dennis Hopper; music by Patrick Gleeson
Luke is a poetic film document created entirely by Bruce Conner in 1967 during one day of the production of Cool Hand Luke on location near Stockton, California on a country road.
      The main subject of the film is the Cool Hand Luke production apparatus and the people working behind the camera. The scene being photographed for their movie is a sequence with about 15 shirtless convicts working at the side of a hot black tar road with shovels. Sand is tossed on the road until it is covered. Then they move farther down the road. Shotgun carrying guards oversee their work at all times. The set itself has a representation of military and police officers as well as a highway motorcycle policeman.
     The actors (Paul Newman, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton, George Kennedy, etc.) are seen in front and behind the camera that is shooting the movie. The event becomes a stop and go parade since the entire crew and equipment must also be moved down the road to continue filming the continuity of dialogue and action. The final shot is a view of the actors moving their shovels as if they are tossing the sand on the road but the shovels are empty.
      The original running time for the regular 8mm film would be about 2½ minutes. The final digital edit of the film to tape transfer in 2004 (with original music by Patrick Gleeson) is longer because each picture frame lasts one third of a second: three images a second. It has the character of both a motion picture and a series of still photos. The filming with the hand-held camera created immediate edits in the camera with regular 8mm speed (18 frames per second) as well as one frame at a time.

Tabula Rasa
(Vincent Grenier, U.S./Canada, (1993-2004) 7:20 min. Mini DV, color, sound. Camera, production and editing by Vincent Grenier. Additional camera by Bill Rowley. Sound recording by Joel Schlemowitz.)
Filmed in a South Bronx high school, Tabula Rasa is a biased, cinematic attempt to sort through and take to task the enormity of that institution’s project for the students in this “high need district” of NYC. This video’s goal is not to portray the successes or failures of the institution, it is instead engaged in a less tangible but no less real discourse. Through sound-image juxtapositions, digital manipulation and layering, this video attempts to deal at once with the propensity to mislead and the eloquence of the recorded image. The ambiguous qualities of appearances, so assiduously cultivated by institutions, the motivations found in the clues that tells the history of objects, colors, textures, architecture and ultimately, psychological states of mind are but some of the players in this poetic and cultural happening.
     All the material for this digital video was initially shot on 16mm film, in June of 1993. We hear the voices of mediation counselor Victor Hall and student John Cruz. The filming would not have been possible without the help of an extraordinary teacher, Dan Sheehan. - Vincent Grenier

#6  Okkyung (Andrew Lampert, U.S., 2004; 3½ min)
Silent and loud. Plucked and bowed. You should hear Okkyung play! A film duet from an ongoing series of portraits of New York City improvising musicians. - Andrew Lampert

Mirror
(Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller , Germany 2003; 8 min)
"The characters in a tragedy, the air they breathe, the settings, are sometimes more absorbing than the tragedy itself, as are the moments before and afterwards, when the plot is at a standstill and the dialogue is silenced." - Michelangelo Antonioni

A woman, a man, guests at an evening party. Settings, which are gradually abandoned; the remains of an event, gazes that have lost their object. In Mirror, frozen tableaux are animated by light alone, which creates connections but also isolates the figures and separates them from the surrounding space. Like the axis of a mirror, a tear runs through the center of the image, separating the two halves but uniting them into a single motif at the same time. Mirror creates an atmospheric image of the "in between", the nameless sphere between belonging and isolation. - Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller

Michelangelo Eye to Eye / Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo
(Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 2004; 17 min)
"In our relation to things formed through vision and ordered according to the figures of representation, something slips, goes by, passing on from the foreground to the background, always escaping our grasp in some way. This is what we call gaze." - Jacques Lacan
Michelangelo Antonioni appears on screen for the first time in a filmed encounter with Michaelangelo's Moses (recently restored) in the Church of St. Peter in Chains.
"All directors are accustomed to keeping an open eye inside and an open eye outside themselves: until these two sights come up to one another and, like two images coming into focus, overlap. This union of eye and brain, eye and instinct, eye and conscience spurs you to let people see." - Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964
Michelangelo and I have travelled a lot. Journeys have always healed us. Becoming estranged, going to live in unknown places have always brought us so far from ourselves that coming back, emptied of our selves but enriched by such experience, was always comforting. We used to go very far; today, our trips are much nearer home.
     Each time I go to Saint Peter in Chains with Michelangelo and visit the tomb of Julius II it is like venturing on a trip. I saw Michelangelo in front of Moses completely estranged, as it happened to him in the African desert.
     I always believed this is his strength: to gaze at something with his clean eyes, so green and beautiful, without any filter. Michelangelo's gaze rests gently on the statue of Moses and is able to feel the memory's weight of all that he saw, lived and learned in his life.
     For him, gazing can be as intense as praying.
     Now that his steps and gestures match a great silence, to be next to him when he is rapt in gazing inspires a deep stillness, a reverent respect for his wandering.
     Our first trip together was in China, in 1972, when he shot his documentary film Chung Kuo - Cina (China). When we got back and viewed the dailies, I realized that I missed almost all that Michelangelo had been able to see: all those colors, all those nuances of blue in the Maoists' garments, those shy smiles of the girls, that dusty light. In front of his screen, I experienced another trip.
     Today I have the luck of being with him once again while he is preparing his film in Saint Peter in Chains. I silently wait for him to give us his gaze. - Enrica Antonioni Total running time: 73 minutes
Sat Oct 16th 7:00 p.m.

PROGRAM 5: MIKE AND GEORGE KUCHAR PRESERVED

with special host John Waters

Above: Born of the Wind, A Town Called Tempest
"George and Mike Kuchar's films were my first inspiration…These were the pivotal films of my youth, bigger influences than Warhol, Kenneth Anger, even The Wizard of Oz. Here were directors I could idolize - complete crackpots without an ounce of pretension, outsiders to even "underground" sensibilities…The Kuchar brothers gave me the self-confidence to believe in my own tawdry vision. They still make funny, sexy, insanely optimistic films and videos every day of their lives…The Kuchars may be the only real underground filmmakers left in America today." - John Waters

" A film is more important than a lunch": response given by Douglas Sirk when he learned that George Kuchar was unavailable due to his editing schedule for a luncheon in San Francisco.

Jonas Mekas : How did your film career really start?
George Kuchar: We're 21 now, but for many years now our films have been scorned. At the age of 12 I made a transvestite movie on the roof and was brutally beaten by my mother for having disgraced her and also for soiling her nightgown. She didn't realize how hard it is for a 12-year-old director to get real girls for his movie. But that unfortunate incident did not end our big costume epics. One month later Mike and I filmed an Egyptian spectacle on the same roof with all of the television antennas resembling a cast of skinny thousands. Our career in films had begun. - Village Voice; March 5, 1964

      This program celebrates the first annual "Avant-Garde Masters" grants awarded to Anthology Film Archives for their project to make preservation prints of the 8mm films of Mike and George Kuchar. 16mm "blow ups" were made at at Cineric Inc. film laboratory in New York. The Avant-Garde Masters program is funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Tonight's program is a unique presentation - different titles will be shown at Anthology Film Archives, November 3 - 4. The National Film Preservation Foundation press release on Kuchar preservations can be seen here.  Further details available here soon.

Sylvia's Promise
(George Kuchar, U.S., 1962; 9 min)
Love comes in all sizes. But the bonds of love extract a terrible price to be paid in flesh. A vow weighs heavily on the heart. Sylvia makes a promise but can she keep it?

Born of the Wind
(Mike Kuchar, U.S., 1962; 24 min)
Donna Kerness and Bob Cowan, whose torrid off-screen romance caused a sensation in the steam room of the St. George Hotel, are teamed for the first time in this poignant film of shriveled beauty and bloodless vengeance. Mr. Cowan is a striking performer resembling a vulture with shoestrings on its head. He and the buxom Miss Kerness battle front and center in the biggest clash of the hams since Godzilla and King Kong, and it's one of the mysteries of gravity that Kerness doesn't flop on her face, she being so top-heavy.

"A tender and realistic story of a scientist who falls in love with a mummy he has restored to life... 2,000 years as a mummy couldn't quench her thirst for love!" - George Kuchar

The Thief and the Stripper
(George Kuchar, U.S., 1959; 25 min)
Three years to complete... It dares to lay bare the naked carcass of a generation gone mad with moral decay. Starring Tony Reynolds and Candy Newman in the film that got them married!

"An early film, depicting today's youth... raw and brutal." - George Kuchar

A Town Called Tempest
(George Kuchar, U.S., 1963; 33 min)
Rarely has the cinema equaled such spectacle! Seldom have movies probed so deeply in the rotten core of hypocrisy and weakness! Only the talents of Larry Leibowitz and Zelda Kaiser, his cousin from Hawaii, could make this tale of hatred and fanaticism come alive from the screen and hit you in the face with truth.

"What happened that afternoon that left a town in shambles, its people in search of God?" - George Kuchar
Total running time: 91m
Sat Oct 16: 9:15

PROGRAM 6: THE ORIENTALIST PART II

The Orientalist: Chapters 6-8
(Michele Smith, U.S., 2004, 150 min)

6. Crossroads, slipping (52 min)
7. "we hear sirens..." (48 min)
8. Bearing Lines and Shadow (50 min)
Sun Oct 17: 12 noon

PROGRAM 7: NINA FONOROFF
The Eye of the Mask
(U.S., 2004; 40 min)

Inspired by 19th-century French "decadent" literature and early writing on photography, The Eye of the Mask examines the contradictory and somewhat perverse inner life of an aesthete, a world-weary young man who seeks to break with the mundanity of practical life and live exclusively for his fantasy: aesthetic pleasure and the worship of an idealized form of beauty. As the film progresses, he becomes increasingly dependent upon a fantasmatic relationship with a photograph of a woman who he has never met, and whom he believes to be dead, or vanished. In alternating scenes, the woman-quite alive, and apparently somewhat older - appears in an austere costume, wearing a mask that covers half of her face and which she is resigned to wear in perpetuity. She moves somewhat as a sleepwalker through a series of natural locales. The two characters inhabit separate worlds that eventually emerge in relation to one another: the woman finally goes to the young man's room as an apparition, in the hopes of reclaiming a long-buried aspect of her humanity. In this ghostly rendezvous, both are unmasked, and bitterly disappointed, as examples of the idealized figure that each has constructed from imagination. The final section of the film features a resplendent transgendered figure who inherits the story of the other two, embodying the sensibilities of both characters. Among a cache of treasures that have washed up on the beach, s/he finds a mysterious mask of unknown origin: when she wears it, she is awash in the sensory impressions of the woman who wore it first. Vibrant layers of inks and dyes appear intermittently throughout the film, suggesting a dense feverishness. - Nina Fonoroff

The Accursed Mazurka
(U.S., 1994; 40 min)
Obsessive journal entries, clinical reports, varied sources of music, and a series of watercolors depicting a pierced and bleeding brain are among many elements that make up a chronicle of mental breakdown. Instruments of electrical transmission are metaphors for the diseased brain, as reconstructed by a woman who once lost her reason, her body, and her foothold in personal identity. The unseen protagonist at first attributes her illness to repeated hearings of a Chopin mazurka on the radio. Radio static, a switchboard gone awry, and a woman imagistically redoubled playing the accordion, are some points of departure for a rant situated in the remembrance of a mental state so extreme as to make impossible any attempt at representation. Like an overwound mechanism, the woman's account is eclipsed by images and sounds that derail the story. The reports of a series of practitioners on the patient's symptoms and "progress" reveal the ineffectuality of conventional mental health treatment, while the patient offers hyperbolic excesses in describing her experience. On the road to recovery, she searches for possible causes for her lapse of sanity. Her provisional understanding makes reference to a 1963 home movie of her family dancing on the lawn of their house: "It is not for me to ransack scenes of the past for clues or explanations.... So, let these people dance in peace... they have done nothing wrong... there is no culpability to be found among these shadows." - Nina Fonoroff

Total running time: 85m
Sunday October 17, 3:00

PROGRAM 8: ERNIE GEHR
Above: Precarious Garden

Precarious Garden
(U.S., 2004; 13½ min.)
It's easy to lose your footing when you try to keep in time with the dance of Eidolons. Where is everything... exactly? Nearby. Doubled over in laughter silently playing hide and seek with our fingertips. All is relative. Color - spectral. Translucent solidities, wavering balance. Our foundations change pitch, shift and sink, then seconds later run firmly to meet us. Peril impels us towards delight. This film, Precarious Garden, remembers the delicacies of perceptual indecisions and binds them into bouquets of backyard florescence and prismatic spray. "It is as if the soft diaphanous membranes of petals and leaves were the substance of a surrogate mental retina" (Catherine de Zegher). As with Gehr's film Mirage, the terraces and bends of available light traveling through store-bought optics creates a spectacle of uncertainty and splendor. A lesson in survival. A day in the sun. - Mark McElhatten

The Astronomer's Dream
(U.S., 2004; 15 min)
Particles of dust - insolent creatures - filling the air with dreams and enchanted sounds of night, tantalizing the real with their dance of veils. Be quick! Be quick! They are awakening ... Curtains! - Ernie Gehr

The Collector
(U.S., 2003; 18 min)
What drives the collector? Textures. Colors. Phantasmagoric memories and associations. The present. The passage of time. Sleep. - Ernie Gehr

Passage
(U.S., 2003; 15 min)
Nothing extraordinary. Just a ride on the S-Bahn (elevated train) through a small section of what used to be East Berlin. An anxious journey fraught with projections. A ride very much in the present, but due to history and family history, also a journey into and out of time.- Ernie Gehr

Total running time: 63m
Sun Oct 17: 5:30

PROGRAM 9: PETER KUBELKA'S POETRY AND TRUTH

For many years Kubelka has given lectures on cinema in its relation to pre filmic activities - music, cooking, basic human endeavors and forces of nature. Tonight he will present a lecture especially designed for the occasion of the North American premiere of his first film in over 26 years. Both films will be shown twice.

Poetry and Truth / Dichtung und Wahrheit
(Austria, 2003; 13 min)

Dichtung und Wahrheit contains collected pieces from publicity films with a common element: they show actors before they start and then begin to play what they are directed to represent. Repeated ready-made takes create cycles of symbolic significance, glorified glimpses of the contemporary human condition: the beauty from a hair conditioner, courting and insemination by chocolate-feeding, labourless birth onto a varnished floor, animal and inanimate companions. It was my aim not to shape the found material perfectly into an unambiguous message but to preserve the full richness of archaeological information. My point of view has changed from the contemporary artist into an observer looking into the distant past. - Peter Kubelka See Alexander Horwath's feature on Peter Kubelka in the new issue of Film Comment.

Mosaik im Vertrauen
(Austria, 1954/55; 16½ min.)
Sun Oct 17: 7:30

PROGRAM 10: PANG EPOCH
"The beloved desert around you" - Pasolini

Play
(Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Germany, 2003; 7 ½ min.)
Audiences in movies. In Play, the onscreen action can only be seen reflected in the facial expressions and gestures of the audience. In sequences of analogous reactions, individual behavior condenses into collective behavior. The event is transferred from the stage to the hall; audience members become the actors in an unpredictable drama. - Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller

Chasmic Dance
(Daichi Saito, Canada, 2004; 6 min)
A visual metaphor for creative process as a sustained state of flux whereby the deconstruction and reconfiguration of source material manifest themselves as a series of rapid abstract movements. Alluding to the cosmic dance of Shiva, the film is an expression of primal rhythmic energy, moving dialectically but without sublimation. Regeneration ignites destruction, and transformation invites mutation, through clashes of opposing modes such as video/film, surface/depth, and light/darkness. The original materials used in the film were images of the human body shot on 16mm film; they were modified through accidental processes in video transfer, and the resulting images were re-filmed back on 16mm, passing through multiple stages of printing on a modified Steenbeck. The film was hand-processed, optically printed and contact printed by the filmmaker.- Daichi Saito

Aspect
(Emily Richardson, U.K., 2004; 8 min)
Aspect is filmed in a forest over the period of a year. Using photographic techniques, such as time-lapse and long exposures on single film frames the forest year is condensed into a few minutes. Light, color and shadow travel across its surface and the film shifts between seeing the trees as trees and seeing the movement of light and shadow abstracting the real environment. Your eye is taken all over the screen with this perpetual movement and change of light and color. There is no one focal point - it is continuously changing. As with Redshift and Nocturne, light becomes the main protagonist.
      In Aspect fragments of unconscious forest sounds, ants in their anthill, the wind across the forest floor, the crack of a twig are reconfigured into an audio piece which articulates the film (and the forest) in an illusive and ambiguous way. Sound by Benedict Drew. - Emily Richardson

Life on Mars
(Isabelle Nouzha aka Ahzuon Ellebasi, Belgium, 2004; 8 min)

Phantom
(Matthias Müller, Germany, 2002; 5½ min.)
A geography of shadows. Silhouettes that never quite take shape. Anaemic figures, seen in negative, forced to wander between narratives restlessly but caught in a loop which repeats without end. They are a living dead confined to a cinematic space they cannot leave. - Matthias Müller

Axe
(Christoph Janetzko, Germany, 2004; 9½ min. silent, 35mm, 1.33)
This film is a compilation made out of the discarded clippings of various other films.
      Axe (pronounced ashay) is a key word in the Yoruba language, spoken in West Africa (Nigeria) and means "life force."
The film emulsion was altered through a series of biochemical processes and collage techniques in order to form a visual metaphor for the multifarious appearances and transformations present in African religious rituals.
      The stylistic devices of abstract expressionist painting seemed to me to be best suited to represent the phenomenon of the ritual frenzy. There are a number of parallels between childhood games and certain forms of religious ritual that the film attempts to illustrate through the use of montage.
      And although the beat of the African drum influenced the rhythm of the cut, I decided in the end to dispense with sound altogether so as not to influence the suggestive effect of the film.- Christoph Janetzko

Stable
(Robert Todd, U.S., 2003; 7 min)
The family-run farm is a staple of romantic Americana. Industrialization's reformation of our material and ideological makeup brought with it an idealized notion of the Farm as a point of origin and innocence, and in so doing created a cultural rift between agriculturists and bourgeois. Film's entry onto the cultural stage coincided with the high watermark of industrial hegemony in the Western world, and as a product of Industry, provided a new representational language for bourgeois culture. As such, the character of the lens through which the filmmaker posits the Farm has been either romantic or ethnographic. This film brings the aesthetics of that romanticism to a rather complicated crossroad, creating, through the maker's necessarily bourgeois eye and means, an ersatz cycle of life that resists simplicity. All image layering in this work was done in-camera. - Robert Todd

Echo, Echo
(Dietmar Brehm, Austria, 2004; 6 min)

Palermo - "History" Standing Still
(Janet Merewether, Australia, 2004; 11 min)
"...then all will be the same though all will be changed..."-Lampedusa
Palermo - anyone, anytime, anywhere. An exploration of the construction of "history", "authenticity" and the "period" film.
Palermo - "History" Standing Still was shot on Super 8 by the filmmaker on location in Palermo in 1999 and was completed in 2004. The film, an experimental form of documentary, plays with the idea of "authenticity" in non-fiction films, and the ways in which the textural qualities of the image and soundtrack, as well as performance, contribute to, and complicate, these readings. - Janet Merewether

Come to See 'ya
(Eric Saks, U.S., 2004; 20 min.)
A love song, an unabashedly sentimental lyrical screen poem. The source audio is a series of answering machine messages left for filmmaker Mark Rance over a long weekend by a now-lost friend, Charly Haywood. I have wanted to work with these recordings for more than 10 years and in the end I am glad it took so long to get to it. I think if I had worked with the material (I did attempt it) before now I would never have made this kind of syrupy minimalism and I probably would not have shown it, but now that have fooled around with my telephony fetish long enough, I think there is a purity I am willing to share, born out of a eulogistic not caring. - Eric Saks

Though the general ingredients of the sounds and images in Come to See 'ya are easily identifiable, the net effect is almost inexplicable. What is it about these shots of sunset streaked skies and lampposts, these unanswered calls of imposing loyalty and perplexed belligerent affection? Those elements conspire to create a witches brew of poignancy, rebuke and ridiculousness. Come to See 'ya is an object lesson in plaintive harassment and passive-aggressive stone silence, deliberately thrown at us with casual force. Somewhere past the somber chill of Pelle Lowe's film Smoke (which combined skies and cityscapes, the invasively intimate probes of official application forms with the strains of Louis Andriessen's De Tijd /Time) and the end of the world melancholy meets missed connection phone message of Sonic Youth's "Providence," Come to See 'ya arrives as a portrait of serrated humanity, of defensible or indefensible pathos and ruthlessness. They say there are two sides to every story and there lies the problem… for there are always more sides than that. Come to See 'ya tells at least one side maybe three.. maybe more...- Mark McElhatten

Dirt
Eric Saks, U.S. 2004; 25m
This work should not be seen with any other work. Dirt snapshots the topology of my archive of answering machine tapes plucked from thriftstores since 1992, a "found" idea I embraced from longtime collaborator Bob Campbell. This project also features some of the earliest prank recordings (grade school years), made by longtime collaborator Patrick Tierney, on the precursor to the answering machine. Dirt is at once a kind of battle of the sexes, and yet the project tries to be a slightly unfocused anthropological document to a communication format which is now hard to access as technology eclipses cassette tapes with answering machines engineered with digital chip storage-listening access which requires the diligence of hacking to exact the cultural artifact. I am tickled that all the visual material was downloaded off the Internet and does not belie its funky web compression artifacts. Dirt may be circling back to my older work, with its long duration and difficult-to-see structure yet it employs some accessible and literal montage marriages and may have something to do with my recent wedding. - Eric Saks

Total Running Time: 115m
Sunday October 17th 9:30

Past Programs:
2003 Views from the Avant Garde       2002 Views from the Avant Garde       2001 Views from the Avant Garde       2000 Views from the Avant Garde       1999 Views from the Avant Garde       1998 Views from the Avant Garde       1997 Views from the Avant Garde      About Views from the Avant Garde


THE 42ND NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL IS SPONSORED BY DIET COKE, HSBC BANK USA, N.A., & THE NEW YORK TIMES


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