Shadows, Specters, and Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film – From the Pole to the Equator
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | December 8, 2005
Thursday, December 8, 2005, 6pm | Jeffrey Skoller in person!
The last part of a trio of screenings related to the release of the Department of Film, Video and New Media’s Jeffrey Skoller’s book Shadows, Specters, and Shards: Making History in Avant-garde Film. The Flow of Blood and Life From the Pole to the Equator is a monumentally unique documentary. Drawing on the film archives of pioneer documentary filmmaker Luca Comerio (1874-1940), Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi use turn-of-the-century footage from regions that were then fabulously exotic – the Arctic, India, Africa and less remote but equally striking settings in the Dolomites and the Caucasus – and assembled it at a sleepwalker’s pace, with changeable color tints and a humming electronic score. The result offers haunting glimpses of a world in the process of being conquered. There’s no moralizing commentary to point up the contradictions that inevitably arise here—each viewer is left to dream his/her way through a phantasmagoria that extends the definition of Empire—building to the act of photography itself (Janet Maslin). 1987, Angela Ricci Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Germany/Italy/West Germany, 96 min, 16mm.
Video Remains
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | December 1, 2005
Thursday, December 1, 6pm
Alex Juhasz in person!
In observance of World AIDS Day we’re glad to welcome documentarian Alex Juhasz with her recently completed video about the intersection between AIDS, the deterioration of video documentation and the complicated nature of collective and individual memory. Like much of Juhasz’s work, this tape is part homage, part criticism, part activism. In 1993, Juhasz shot an interview with her best friend Jim as he tried to recount his life as he was dying. In 2004, she re-worked this haunted video, playing it in real-time but letting bleed in a host of present day interviewees (including FVNM faculty-member Gregg Bordowitz) who also reflect upon AIDS, death, activism, and video. What remains is a woman’s contemplative, loving memorial to one gay man lost to AIDS that also marks what changes and lasts after death, across time, and because of videotape (KJ Mohr). 2005, Alex Juhasz, USA, 54 min, video.
Films of Timoleon Wilkins
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 17, 2005
Thursday, November 17, 2005, 6pm | Timoleon Wilkins in person!
In the words of critic Brecht Andersch, “Timoleon Wilkins has fashioned a mytho-poetic vision of his own resolutely in the American grain. His stunning Kodachrome imagery, redolent of home-movies, educational films, the specter of Hollywood arcane Americana, frames a world of memory and experience.” Wilkins remains faithful to a classicist avant-garde film practice, influenced greatly by Brakhage, Anger, Conner, Baillie, Schofill, and his beloved Will Hindle. This retrospective of the last decade of Wilkins’ work includes the Chicago premiere of his latest film, Los Caudales (2005); the gorgeously saturated and nostalgic Blue Sun Western (1995); the somber, farcical and stunning MM (1996); the unslit regular-8 critique of gay culture, Gay Pride4 (1995); Starry Skies of Absolution (2003); and Lake of the Spirits (1998, 7 min.), which Brakhage called, “The most successful metaphoric envisionment of the desert that I’ve seen in many years.” In the words of Nathaniel Dorsky, “Timoleon is not only in love with film, but is the love of film” (KJ Mohr). 1995-2005, Timoleon Wilkins, USA/Mexico, ca. 62 min, 16mm.
Shadows, Specters, and Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film – Chile, Obstinate Memory & Cooperation Of Parts
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 10, 2005
Thursday, November 10, 2005, 6pm
Daniel Eisenberg & Jeffrey Skoller in person!
This program is part two of three screenings celebrating FVNM faculty-member Jeffrey Skoller’s recently released book, Shadows, Specters, and Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. Patricio Guzmán explores collective political amnesia in Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997). Twenty-five years after The Battle of Chile, his seminal documentation of the 1973 coup, Guzmán visits with Chileans who experienced the coup first-hand. Survivors reminisce as they watch that film, recognizing lost comrades and recalling their courage, gaiety and love of life. FVNM Department Chair Dan Eisenberg`s Cooperation of Parts (1987) is a journey of questions — through signs, landscapes, memories and fixed meanings. Eisenberg traveled through France, Germany, Poland in order to examine and document the traces and the history of his most recent film story and the shadows of the holocaust. The film explores the territory of the recent past with a second-generation perspective, distanced through time and reflection. With the visual field as a touchstone for a complex set of narrative associations, the film spins a tight web of memory, history, and experience (KJ Mohr). 1987-1997, various directors, USA/Chile, ca. 100 min, 16mm.
Web Work Of Mendi+Keith Obadike
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 3, 2005
Thursday, November 3, 2005, 6pm
Mendi and Keith Obadike in person!
Mendi+Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists whose music, performances, and conceptual Internet artworks have been exhibited and commissioned internationally. Their critical writing has been widely published. The couple eschews the notion that the Internet can mask identity by using the web instead to explore, celebrate and broadcast their work, which involves innovative investigations of personal identity, using their messages to encourage audiences to think in new ways. Their work generated much discussion on and offline when they offered Keith’s blackness for sale on eBay in 2001. Tonight they share with us The Pink of Stealth, a flash-based online game story about two characters who attempt to hide something about their identities through different forms of “passing” and whose distinctive qualities are in some way related to pinkness. Pink is a way of accessing ideas around health, wealth, race, gender, and sexuality. Also screening, three works in progress: 4-1-9 (Or You Can’t View a Masquerade By Standing in One Place; Taronda, Who Wore White Gloves; and Four Electric Ghosts (KJ Mohr). 2003-2005, Mendi+Keith Obadike, USA, 75 min, computer projection.
My Land Zion
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 27, 2005
Thursday, October 27, 2005, 6pm
Yulie Cohen Gerstel in person!
A sixth generation Israeli, Yulie Cohen Gerstel has been directing and producing poignant documentaries over the span of three decades and is the Head of the Forum of Israeli Documentary Filmmakers. In this courageous and provocative personal essay Gerstel challenges the myths of Zionism and questions her own decision to return and raise her family in war-torn Israel, after working in film in the US in the 1980’s. With rare candor and emotional complexity, Gerstel goes straight to the heart of Israeli national identity, and her probing spares no one. As she wonders about the future that awaits her daughters in a country embroiled in continuous war, she stretches a connecting thread from the murder of Jews in the Holocaust to the War of Independence to the rise in settlements and the condition of Palestinian refugees in Israel today. Compelling and confrontational, My Land Zion is an example of personal documentary at its best and demonstrates an unflinching commitment to life, morality, justice and love. 2004, Yulie Cohen Gerstel, Israel, 57 min, video.
Kristina Talking Pictures
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 20, 2005
Thursday, October 20, 2005, 6pm
Part of a series of three films co-sponsored with halo projects, here is an early film by dancer and choreographer-cum-filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, the woman who in 1986 the Village Voice called “the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.”
From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often-controversial subject matter is leavened with a quirky humor. In this early dance film, Rainer examines the contradictions of public and private personas through the story of a lion tamer from Budapest who comes to New York to become a choreographer. 1976, Yvonne Rainer, USA, 90 min, 16mm.
The program will be introduced by Jonathan Walley, a film scholar and professor in the Cinema Department at Denison University in Ohio. His current work is on a book about radical new conceptions of the film medium in the avant-garde during the sixties and seventies and the role of avant-garde filmmakers in the “expanded arts” activities of that period. Co-sponsored by halo projects.
This project is supported in part by a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
Filme De Amor (Love Film)
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 13, 2005
Thursday, October 13, 2005, 6pm
Distant Parallels curator Ana Luisa Beraba in person!
One weekend, friends Hilda, Matilda and Gaspar meet up in a run-down old house in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. They drink, fool around, seek out pleasurable experiences and completely break out of the monotony of their daily routines. Introducing the film will be curator and Rio de Janeiro native Ana Luiza Beraba, who has coordinated the Rio International Film Festival since 2003. Beraba studied at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television in Cuba and recently completed a book examining the interconnectedness of art communities across Brazil and Latin America during WWII. This program is part of the second edition of The Nineteenth Step series which presents Distant Parallels: Views of Sexuality and Gender from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, four countries whose recent cinematic offerings are dealing with this subject in exciting and eye-opening ways. Co-presented with The Nineteenth Step. 2004, Júlio Bressane, Brazil, 90 min, 35mm.
Shadows, Specters, and Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film: El Dia Que Me Quieras & Eureka
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 6, 2005
Thursday, October 6, 2005, 6pm
Author and filmmaker Jeffrey Skoller in person!
To celebrate the release of FVNM faculty member Jeffrey Skoller’s new book Shadows Specters Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, we are delighted to offer this first of three evenings of films discussed in the book. Yvonne Rainer calls Shadows, Specters and Shards, “A passionate and close reading of a body of previously neglected avant-garde films…revealed to be at the cutting edge of some of the most significant social and intellectual debates of the last three decades.”
Tonight’s films: Leandro Katz’s El dia que me quieras (1998), a meditation on the photograph of Che Guevara’s corpse that was transmitted around the world upon his death, and Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974), in which the filmmaker acts as an archeologist using footage depicting Market Street, San Francisco around the turn of the century. 1974-1998, various directors, Argentina/USA, ca. 60 mins, 16mm.
The Animated Paul Bush
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | September 29, 2005
Thursday, September 29, 2005, 6pm
Paul Bush in person!
UK-based artist Paul Bush is an award-winning experimental filmmaker whose life changed when he discovered animation in the early 1990’s. “Within the animation community there was an understanding of a purely visual language, not one borrowed from the theatre (as in drama) or journalism (as in documentary). Commissioners, distributors and exhibitors of animation were interested in films that explored new forms and suddenly I could earn a living from making experimental films.” This retrospective of his work includes his seminal first animation His Comedy (1994), the racy Busby Berkeley’s Tribute to Mae West (2002), structure imitating story in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2001), a slice of Tokyo in Shinjuku Samurai (2004), and the mescaline dream-like vision of While Darwin Sleeps (2004). Film critic Leslie Dick comments, “What is so extraordinary about this body of work is the passionate clarity of the ideas that fuel it and the formal precision of the narrative and cinematographic structures which allow the viewer in.” 1994-2004, Paul Bush, UK, 86 min, various formats.
Co-presented with the Video Data Bank.
Tags: Animation > Europe > Monographic Shows > Retrospective > Video Data Bank
About
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.
