Films by Robert Breer, 1957-86
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | September 8, 2008
Thursday, September 11, 6pm | Restored 35mm blow-ups!
- Robert Breer, Fuji (1974). Image courtesy Anthology Film Archives.
Joyous, restless, audacious and witty, Robert Breer’s animated films are like no others. Time and again Breer marries his playful perspective to cutting-edge techniques to create formally innovative, non-narrative films filled with humor and charm. Tonight’s program features a selection of sparkling new 35mm blow-ups, including Breer’s rapid-fire collages (Blazes, 1961; Fist Fight, 1964), gentle line drawing exercises (A Man and His Dog Out for Air, 1957), formal geometric abstraction (69, 1968), and films combining representational action with stylized drawing and fractured continuity (Fuji, 1974; Swiss Army Knife with Rat and Pigeons, 1981). Also featured are Eyewash (1959) 66 (1966), 70 (1970), 77 (1977) and Bang! (1986). Preservation by Anthology Film Archives, with the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Image courtesy Anthology Film Archives. 1957—86, Robert Breer, USA, 35mm, ca 70 min.
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A Man and His Dog Out for Air
1957, 35mm, 2 min.
A funny, farcical line animation. This film was shown as a short before Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad during that film’s initial NY theatrical run.
Eyewash
1959, 35mm, 3 min.
A dizzying array of images flows like water on the screen. Breer hand-painted each print, adding color into particular sections to create different levels of texture.
Blazes
1961, 35mm, 3 min.
“100 basic images switching positions for four thousand frames. A continuous explosion.” (RB)
Fuji
1974, 35mm, 9 min.
“A poetic, rhythmic, riveting achievement…in which fragments of landscapes, passengers, and train interiors blend into a magical color dream of a voyage. One of the most important works by a master who – like Conner, Brakhage, Broughton – spans several avant-gardes in his ever more perfect explorations.” -Amos Vogel
66
1966, 35mm, 6 min.
“Abstract, quasi-geometric study in interrupted continuity.” (RB)
69
1969, 35mm, 5 min.
“It’s so absolutely beautiful, so perfect, so like nothing else. Forms, geometry, lines, movements, light very basic, very pure, very surprising, very subtle.” -Jonas Mekas
70
1970, 35mm, 5 min.
“Made with spray paint and hand-cut stencils, this film was an attempt at maximum plastic intensity…
[P]laces Breer for the first time among the major colorists of the avant-garde.” -P. Adams Sitney
77
1970, 35mm, 7 min.
“Breer is a consummate master of cinematic space. Like Hans Richter, he constantly provokes a sense of depth through changing the scale of his shapes.” -Noel Carroll
Fist Fight
1964, 35mm 9 min.
Created as a component of Allan Kaprow’s 1964 staging of the opera Originale by Karlheinz Stockhausen which featured Charlotte Moorman and many of NYC’s other avant-garde luminaries.
Swiss Army Knife with Rat and Pigeons
1981, 35mm, 7 min.
“Displays sinuous cutting between live action and animated images, rapid-fire associations and transformations, freedom in collaging the everyday with the imaginary in sound and image, and a diabolical moment of synthesis at the climax when the rat trap is sprung.” -Amy Taubin
Bang
1986, 35mm, 10 min.
“Breer sustains ten dense minutes of collagistic mayhem that’s as potent as anything he’s ever done. Television images of a boy paddling a boat and an arena crowd cheering, plus filmed shots of bright pink flowers and a toy phone with the receiver off the hook, are intercut with frenetic drawings in Breer’s trademark heavy crayon, principally of baseball games.” -Katherine Dieckmann
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Robert Breer’s career as an artist and animator spans over four decades, from paintings and early flipbooks to kinetic sculptures and his seminal animated films. He entered film through painting in the early 1950s when he was living in Paris and deeply influenced by Neo-plasticism as defined by Mondrian and Vasarely. Breer channeled his interest in geometric abstraction into his remarkable first group of films, Form Phases (1954-1956), which explored the role of movement in the understanding of form and space. Breer’s wonderful kinetic sculptures also tie directly into the concern for movement, composition and space perception which has remained central to his films. Combining a meticulous attention to form and rhythm with an acerbic wit and talent for satire, Breer provides an important link between the abstract films of Richter, Eggeling and Leger and the lyric and radical traditions of the avant-garde, from Brakhage and Baillie to Kubelka and Sharits. (Biography courtesy Harvard Film Archives)
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Aurora: The Films of Robert Breer
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | August 26, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 6pm | John Gianvito in person!
- John Gianvito, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007). Image courtesy of the artist.
Inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind is a quietly stunning memorial to the lives of America’s radicals, rebels, and everyday freethinkers from colonial times to the present. Filmmaker John Gianvito traveled the country for three years, filming the forgotten landscapes that once served as stages for our nation’s uprisings, rebellions, and strikes, as well as the burial sites of political firebrands like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, Malcolm X, and César Chávez. Weaving his compositions into a poignant visual history of capitalism’s discontents, Gianvito elegantly reminds us of America’s roots in idealism and dissent. Accompanied by Hope Tucker’s Bessie Cohen, Survivor of 1911 Shirtwaist Fire (2000). Co-presented by the Chicago Cinema Forum. 2007, John Gianvito, USA, DigiBeta video, 58 min.
John Gianvito is a filmmaker, curator, and teacher based in Boston, Massachusetts. Born in Staten Island, New York, he studied with directors Alexander Mackendrick and Don Levy at the California Institute of the Arts where he received his BFA in Film/Video, and received a Master of Science in Visual Studies degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied with, and eventually co-taught alongside documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock. As a film curator, he served for five years as the film programmer for the Harvard Film Archive and is currently film curator for the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. In 2001, he was made a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. Gianvito is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. His writing has appeared in Film Quarterly, CinemaScope, Undercurrent, International Documentary, and elsewhere. He is the editor of the book, Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2006).
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Michael Sicinski on Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (CinemaScope)
Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | April 24, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 6pm | Daniel Barrow in person!
- Daniel Barrow, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry (2008). Image courtesy of the artist.
The overhead projector takes center stage in Winnipeg artist Daniel Barrow’s darkly whimsical “manual animation” performances. Layering and drawing directly on a series of Mylar transparencies, Barrow combines his projected illustrations with video, original music, and live narration to spin gothic tales of beauty and despair. His newest performance, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, chronicles the story of a trash collector with a vision to create a kind of independent yearbook for his city, reconstructing each resident’s history from the refuse he collects. His cataloging efforts are derailed, however, when a lunatic begins to hunt down and kill the subject of each entry in his book, forcing the collector to look inward and examine his own story. 2008, Daniel Barrow, Canada, ca. 60 min, various formats.
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Tags: Animation > Canada > Live Cinema > Monographic Shows > Performance
You Don’t Remember the Time You Do: Moments in the Lives of Prisoners
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | April 17, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 6pm | Laurie Jo Reynolds in person!
- Robert Todd, In Loving Memory (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.
Prison has long been a popular setting for motion pictures, from the oft-remade Man in the Iron Mask to recent Oscar-nominated hits Dead Man Walking and The Shawshank Redemption. Rarer is the film that examines the prison system’s complicated impact on individuals, families, and communities. Artists Laurie Jo Reynolds and Robert Todd take on this challenge in a pair of lyrical essays on the experiences of incarcerated men and women. Weaving together pop cultural imagery and prison phone conversations, Reynolds’ collage-like Space Ghost (2007) explores confinement and isolation in the lives of astronauts and the imprisoned. Todd’s In Loving Memory (2005) juxtaposes the reflections of prisoners on their lives with haunting landscape shots of prisons around the country, in a moving meditation on memory and a compelling critique of the death penalty. Presented as part of a series of events organized by the Tamms Poetry Committee marking the ten-year anniversary of the Tamms Supermax prison in Tamms, Illinois. 2005–07, various directors, USA, ca. 90 min, various formats.
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AREA Dialogue: Art on the Outside: Chicago Artists and Prisons (with Laurie Jo Reynolds)
Mock Up on Mu
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | April 10, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 6pm | Craig Baldwin in person!
- Craig Baldwin, Mock Up on Mu (2008). Image courtesy of the artist.
Legendary for his rapid-fire found-footage collage films, underground filmmaker Craig Baldwin returns to the Midwest with a special sneak preview of his latest feature, Mock Up on Mu. A radically hybridized pulp-serial-spy-science-fiction-western-horror mash-up, Mu recounts the intertwined histories of Jack Parsons (inventor of solid-rocket fuel, founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Aleister Crowley acolyte), Marjorie Cameron (artist, beatnik, occultist) and L. Ron Hubbard (pulp-fiction writer, founder of Scientology). Baldwin promiscuously intercuts his own live-action desert footage with archival stock and other found material to weave a dense tale of mind-control, subterranean intrigue, scientific speculation, and the militarization of space. 2008, Craig Baldwin, USA, 115 min, 16mm on Beta SP.
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Falling Out of Time: New Documentaries from the Former Soviet Europe
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | April 3, 2008
Thursday, April 3, 6pm | Curators Oona Mosna and Jeremy Rigsby in person!
- Igor Strembitsky, Wayfarers (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.
Once the home of state-sponsored social realism, the former Soviet Europe has given rise to a new breed of documentary, revising its realist tradition with the observational ambiguities and formal rigor more familiar to experimental cinema. Often produced at historic documentary studios, these films focus on the once-valorized “common man”—the industrial and rural working class—now abandoned in the region’s ongoing economic and cultural transformation. Taken together, they provide a portrait of an area “returning to Europe” and a people “falling out of time.” Curated by Oona Mosna and Jeremy Rigsby, directors of Windsor’s annual film and video art festival, Media City, the program includes Igor Strembitsky’s 2005 Cannes-winning Ukrainian film Wayfarers; acclaimed Russian director Sergei Loznitsa’s haunting Halt (2000); Victor Asliuk’s The Mine (2004, Belarus); and Oksana Buraja’s Mother (2001, Lithuania), among others. Multiple formats. 2000–2007, various directors, various countries, ca. 90 min, various formats.
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Mike Hoolboom on Victor Asliuk
Tags: Canada > Curators and Programmers > Europe > Experimental > Group Programs
CameraLESS Films / Movies without Cameras
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 27, 2008
- Thorsten Fleisch, Kosmos (2004). Image courtesy of the artist.
For over one hundred years, filmmakers have found ways to emancipate themselves from advanced photographic processes and make films without cameras—by drawing, painting, scratching, or adhering figures and objects directly onto filmstrips. Whether produced meticulously frame-by-frame or playfully in long strips, cameraLESS images possess an inimitable urgency, each frame trembling as it passes through the projector’s light. The Brahmin and the Butterfly (Georges Melies, 1901); Altitude Zero (Lauren Cook, 2004); 32.37 (a.k.a TB TX Dance) (Roger Beebe, 2006); The Garden of Earthly Delights (Stan Brakhage, 1981); Kosmos (Thorsten Fleisch, 2004); Leaf (Charlotte Taylor, 2004); Dots (Norman McLaren, 1940); Scream Tone (Jo Dery, 2002); Zig Zag (Richard Reeves, 1993); Hand-Eye Coordination (Naomi Uman, 2002); Particles in Space (Len Lye, 1979); 1:1 (Richard Reeves, 2001). Organized by Jodie Mack. 1901–2006, various directors, various countries, ca. 60 min, various formats.
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Tags: Animation > Experimental > Non-Fiction > SAIC Alumni > SAIC Faculty > Visual Music
Films by Gordon Matta-Clark
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 13, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 8pm | Jane Crawford in person!
- Gordon Matta-Clark, Eric Convents, and Roger Steylaerts, Office Baroque (1977).
Renowned “anarchitect” Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) sliced through the walls, floors, and facades of abandoned buildings, staged socially engaged street performances, and documented much of it in radical photographic collages, films, and videos. Matta-Clark’s films, writes curator Steven Jenkins, are “fascinating cinematic explorations… characterized by the same creative provocation, rough aesthetic beauty and intellectual insight that informed [his] famous cuttings.” Documentary filmmaker and Matta-Clark’s widow Jane Crawford will present a selection of the artist’s films, including Clockshower (1973) in which Matta-Clark channels Harold Lloyd on top of Manhattan’s Clock Tower Building; the experimental cityscape City Slivers (1976); and Office Baroque (1977), an illuminating documentary of Matta-Clark at work on one of his last major cuts. Presented in conjunction with the Betty Rymer Gallery’s series, “Meta Matta-Clark.” 1973–77, Gordon Matta-Clark, Belgium/USA, ca. 90 min, 16mm.
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Gordon Matta-Clark at David Zwirner Gallery
Interzone
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 12, 2008
Thursday, March 6, 6pm | Anne Quirynen in person!
- Anne Quirynen, Interzone (2007). Image courtesy of the artist.
Video artist and SAIC faculty member Anne Quirynen has long worked at the intersection of performance and the moving image, collaborating with the likes of choreographers William Forsythe, Thomas Hauert, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker on videos, installations, and theatrical pieces. Her latest video, the stunning Interzone, was originally commissioned as an opera by the Berliner Festspiele. Featuring music by the German composer Enno Poppe, the piece takes up William S. Burroughs’ novel of the same name, using his cut-up method as a structural guide. Writes curator Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, “Streets, cars, and high-rises appear kaleidoscopically…from the bright whiteness of sunlight, arias ring out. Just as sentences become sound collages, images become structures of color and light.” 2007, Anne Quirynen, Germany/India/USA, ca. 60 min, video.
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Watch Interzone and read more about Anne Quirynen on her website.
Prisoners of War
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 28, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 8pm | Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi in person!
- Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, Prisoners of War (1995). Image courtesy of the artists.
Milan-based filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi are renowned for their haunting archival films. Assembled from rare early 20th-century footage, the duo slow down and hand-tint the original film to emphasize the fleeting expressions and gestures from a time long since passed. In the mid-90s, the couple began an extraordinary trilogy on World War I, beginning with Prisoners of War. Comprised of military footage shot by cameramen in Czarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (much of it for propaganda purposes), the film centers on the ordeals of fallen soldiers, child POWs, and civilian refugees. “One of the last scenes depicting a mass grave,” writes curator Kathy Geritz, “is a troubling reminder that the beginning of the century does not look so different from its closing.” Presented with the assistance of Northwestern University’s Department of French and Italian in conjunction with the symposium, Archives of Cinema / Memories of War. 1995, Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, Italy, 67 min, 16mm.
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Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
