A Stark View of the World – An Evening With Scott Stark

BLOOM

Scott Stark in person! Scott Stark’s films, videos and installations are kinetic revelations that can be shocking, mesmerizing and narratively rich. We’re delighted to welcome Scott to Los Angeles again. We last featured him at Filmforum in 2002, and over two nights in November, he will present a wide array of new work created since then, along with a few earlier works. On Sunday, the works display a consistent remaking of the screen, rendering past into present, and colliding spaces in ways that find new political and narrative meaning.

Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members. Available by credit card in advance from Brown Paper Tickets or at the door.

Scott Stark has produced more than 60 films and videos since 1980. Additionally, he has created a number of gallery and non-gallery installations using film and video, and elaborate photographic collages using large grids of images. Born and educated in the midwest, he has always been interested in aggressively pushing his work beyond the threshold of traditional viewing expectations, challenging the audience to question its relationship to the cinematic process; yet he also tries to build into the work elements of humor and incongruity that allow the viewer an entryway into the work while maintaining a critical distance. Both a passionate purist and a cynical skeptic, he likes to emphasize the physicality of film while cross-referencing it to the world outside the theater, attempting to lay bare the paradoxes of modern culture and the magical nature of the perceptual experience. Scott has worked in a variety of motion picture media, including 8mm, super-8mm, 16mm and video. Scott makes his living as a computer programmer and support specialist for a large multi-national corporation. He currently lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the Flicker pages. Lots more on Scott at http://www.scottstark.com/ and http://www.hi-beam.net/mkr/ss/ss-bio.html

Scott Stark will be doing a different show at REDCAT on Monday, November 25, at 8:30 pm.

The Real and the Hyper-Real: Films and Videos by Scott Stark will include Hotel Cartograph (1983); More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda (2001/06); Speechless (2008); Traces (2012; and the Los Angeles premiere of his masterful The Realist (2013) http://www.redcat.org/event/scott-stark-0

Special thanks to Steve Anker, Bérénice Reynaud, REDCAT and Cal Arst for making Scott Stark’s visit possible.

Air

(1986, 16mm, color, silent with sound on CD, 8 min.)

Shot in an airline terminal, Air studies the movements of people and airplanes across and through the "planes" of the film's surface. An obsessive geometric structure is formed with camera angles and tracking shots.

Acceleration

(1993, super 8mm, color, sound, 8 min.)

A snapshot taken in a moment of human evolution, where the souls of the living are reflected in the windows of passing trains. The camera captures the reflections of passengers in the train windows as the trains enter and leave the station, and the movement creates a stroboscopic flickering effect that magically exploits the pure sensuality of the moving image.

The Sound of His Face

(1988, 16mm, color, sound, 5 min.)

A "filmed biography" of Kirk Douglas -- literally. Pages of a book -- the lines of text, and the tiny dots comprising the half-tone photographs -- create odd musical notes, which are edited into a pounding rhythm. This film examines the molecular fabric of Hollywood superficiality.

I'll Walk With God

(1994, 16mm, color, sound, 8 min.)

Using emergency information cards surreptitiously lifted from the backs of airline seats, I'll Walk with God pictorially charts an airline flight attendant's stoic transcendence through and beyond worldly adversity. Through an elaborate system of posturing and nuance that evokes an almost ritualistic synergy, the female protagonist(s) are shuttled toward a higher spiritual plane, carried aloft on the shimmering wings of Mario Lanza's soaring tremolo. First Prize (Director's Choice), Black Maria Film Festival, 1995

Shape Shift

(excerpt) (2004, DV, color, sound, 2 min.)

A simple technique with two opposing cameras reveals a body transposed upon itself, confounding the limits of its own physical space.

To Love or To Die

(2003, DV, color, sound, 5 min.) Los Angeles premiere!

Made with two parallel cameras, To Love or To Die is a brief binocular odyssey through a suburban wonderland of desire and fulfillment.

Right

(2008, DV, color, sound, 10 min.) Los Angeles premiere!

A playful study of one of the U.S.A.'s most ubiquitous symbols, and an attempt to re-invent it as a thing of problematic beauty. Overlayed on top of the imagery are snippets of an email exchange I had with a person who was and remains a staunch apologist for the Bush administration's hundreds of lies leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as for the administration's many other crimes, corruptions and failings.

Longhorn Tremolo

(2010, DV, color, sound, 14 min.) Los Angeles premiere!

Excited football fans move through a visually kinetic space in slow motion toward their goal.

BLOOM

(2012, DV, color, sound, 11 min.) Los Angeles premiere!

Industrial penetrations into the arid Texas landscape yield a strange and exotic flowering. Using images from the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, based on oil drilling footage from the first half of the 20th century..