Thursday, October 18, 2007, 6pm One of the most significant members of New York’s underground film scene in the 1950s and 1960s, Marie Menken inspired a generation of filmmakers—from Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga to Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas. Celebrated for her lyrical sensibility and improvisational style, Menken, according to Mekas, “filmed […]
Thursday, October 11, 2007, 6pm Betzy Bromberg in person! For twenty years, Betzy Bromberg straddled the worlds of experimental film and Hollywood, where she worked as a special effects supervisor and cameraperson on blockbusters like The Terminator (1984), The Abyss (1989), and Strange Days (1995) while also crafting her own visually striking, politically-charged films. Currently […]
Thursday, October 4, 2007, 6pm Amy Lockhart in person! Nothing is quite right in animator and SAIC visiting faculty member Amy Lockhart’s hallucinogenic, hyper-colored world. Siamese-hearts pump hamburgers and butterflies, voracious Pac-Men hunt flocks of weeping eyeballs, and frogs belch Smurf-like red-and-white mushrooms. Funny and tragic by turns, Lockhart’s films mix knowingly-naïve hand-drawn characters with […]
Read More… from The Devil Lives in Hollywood: Amy Lockhart & Friends
Thursday, September 27, 2007, 6pm Michael Robinson in person! The films and videos of Michael Robinson are a deft mix of stunning beauty and nervy wit. He combines lush, often optically-printed imagery with the electric fuzz of video-games, old movie footage, and dusty magazine layouts in pop song–scored cine-ballads that are at once cynical and […]
Read More… from Nothing Compares 2 U: Films & Videos by Michael Robinson
Thursday, September 20, 2007, 6pm Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, and Chip Lord in person! The 1970s gave rise to a network of radical video makers who set out to create a feisty alternative to broadcast television. Decades before the so-called media democratization offered by YouTube, cell phone cameras, and hundred-channel cable, these artist-activists turned their […]
Thursday, September 13, 2007, 6pm Tom Palazzolo in person! For over four decades, Chicago legend and SAIC alum Tom Palazzolo (“Tommy Chicago”) has documented the unorthodox rituals of the Windy City with genuine affection and wonder. From frantic deli owners to the unveiling of the Picasso sculpture, Palazzolo’s work is suffused with mischievous humor and […]
Read More… from Tommy’s Chicago: Newly Preserved Films by Tom Palazzolo
Thursday, September 6, 2007, 6pm For nearly a century, Indian filmmakers have drawn on the country’s rich aesthetic traditions to craft radically original works. Despite the international popularity of Bollywood, the country’s “Cinema of Prayoga” (which loosely translates as cinema of “experiment” in Sanskrit) remains largely unknown. Curated by Brad Butler and Karen Mirza of […]
Read More… from Cinema of Prayoga: Indian Experimental Films
Thursday, May 3, 2007, 6pm Tonight’s program is a cinematic toast to the semester’s end with a cross-section of current work by students in the department of Film, Video & New Media. All Stars Jodie Mack, 2006, 0:24 min, 16mm Colored acetate + star punch + tape = this mini-movie. (JM) Bird Song Trilogy, Part […]
Read More… from SAIC Film, Video & New Media Department Year-End Show
Thursday, April 26, 2007, 6pm | Peggy Ahwesh in person! Peggy Ahwesh, Nocturne (1998). Image courtesy of the Video Data Bank. Since the early 1980s, Peggy Ahwesh has created “a kind of renegade arte povera ethnography of the everyday” (Mark McElhatten). Drawing from horror films, psychoanalysis, and the writings of Bataille, her films and videos […]
Thursday, April 19, 2007, 6pm Sharon Lockhart in person! Los Angeles photographer and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart’s latest project is an exquisite, meditative portrait of youth in Pine Flat, a small community of three hundred in the foothills of central California’s Sierra Nevadas. Shot over the course of two years and made up of twelve ten-minute […]