Current Schedule

The 2010 Festival of (In)appropriation

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:08:34 -0400

Sunday September 19, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
The 2010 Festival of (In)appropriation - Contemporary Found Footage Filmmaking
Curated by Jaimie Baron, Andrew Hall, and Madeleine Gallagher
Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, detournement, or recycled cinema, the incorporation of previously shot materials into new artworks is a practice that has generated novel juxtapositions of elements which have produced new meanings and ideas that may not have been intended by the original makers, that are, in other words “inappropriate.”
Founded in 2009, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a yearly showcase of contemporary short (20 minutes or less) audiovisual works that appropriate film or video footage and repurpose it in “inappropriate” and inventive ways. In this program, we bring together a selection of 14 recent films that appropriate footage from diverse sources with vastly different results, demonstrating the range of approaches contemporary filmmakers are taking in repurposing found materials. Indeed, these films push the boundaries of the “found footage” film, raising questions about how we define “found footage” filmmaking in an era in which ever more materials are available for reuse in ever more complex ways. We believe that together, these films reveal how (in)appropriation is flourishing at this social and historical moment.
Tonight’s films will include:
Five-Dimensional Vacation 2 (Ryan Lamb, 2010, 2:01 min.)
“Five-Dimensional Vacation 2 is one in a series of videos exploring time through a visual representation of a five-dimensional time stream. The video appropriates amateur 8mm film footage found on the web depicting a 1960’s family vacation. In addition, a musical soundtrack is also utilized (The Smiths, Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want), having been added by an anonymous collaborator who posted the film to the internet…Vacation 2 represents a spatial, rather than a linear, progression in which time is manipulated by allowing each moment in the video to occur and reoccur without end.” (Ryan Lamb)

Voice on the Line (Kelly Sears, 2009, 6:52 min.)
“Voice on the Line is a collage animation made from figures cut out of archival ephemeral films from the late 1950s. This animation mixes the history of these films with events of this era that result in a large-scale secret operation that veers bizarrely off course. The film also reflects on current and troubled relationships between the areas of national security, civil liberties and telephone companies. Voice on the Line explores how technology can be used to shape our fears and desires.” (Kelly Sears)

Ceibas: (we things at play) (Evan Meaney, 2010, 3:21 min.)
“We have come to this place of meaning together, celebrating our un-remaindered completeness. Yet, in our wake endures a long procession of stowaways. We celebrate the lineage of our information as we celebrate one another, not realizing that the loudest affirmations might come from these unacknowledged collaborators. With each generation, they say a little bit more, speaking a little bit louder. Now we share more than just our experience, finding the meaning changed through remediative revisions. Finding more where we have come to recognize less. We revisit these evolving states, recounting our stories and theirs a partnership, over and over.” (Evan Meaney)

Nuke Em, Duke (LJ Frezza, 3:47 min.)
“The film titled The Conqueror starred John Wayne as Genghis Khan. The production took place downwind from a nuclear testing site and close to half the cast and crew developed cancer, including “the duke” himself. Nuke Em, Duke is a reinterpretation of the film, looking at “conquest” in past and present media, fiction and non-fiction, and the “compression” of these experiences into mediated forms ready for consumption.” (LJ Frezza)

Guttae (Marcin Blajecki, 2010, 3 min.)
"There are some questions that can't be answered…" (Marcin Blajecki)

Suspension of Belief (Wago Kreider, 2010, 5:33 min.)
Tarnished Angels (Sirk, ’58) and Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, ’64) remixed. Completed during a residency at the Experimental Television Center.

Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. (Catherine Ross, 2009, 3:05 min.)
“Sourcing footage from American popular movies of the last two decades, Pfft..Pfft..Pfft.. is a sequence of impossible cause and effect pairings. The improvised Vocal Fx by Adam Matta focus the viewer on the connection between the human and mechanical, while reminding us of the magic in everyday interactions.” (Catherine Ross)

Triptych Unrendered (Antonio Mendoza, 2010, 7:33 min.)
Triptych Unrendered is the 2010 remix of several video loops from triptych.tv. that have been resequenced by antonio mendoza. triptych.tv is a pirate glitch video anti-blog that is constantly mashed, sampled and maintained by three media artists from three different parts of the world: jimpunk, abe linkoln, and mrtamale. It has been active since 2008 and has won awards at the Stuttgarter FILMWINTER Festival in Germany, and the Ibiza Biennial in Spain, and the Critical Glitch Artware Festival in the US.

World on Wheels (Tanja Laden, 2008, 2:08 min.)
“Vintage animation from the Prelinger archives (at archive.org) set to music from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at UCSB.” (Tanja Laden)

A Movie by Jen Proctor (Jennifer Proctor, 2010, 11:47 min.)
“A loving remake of Bruce Conner’s epic 1958 film A Movie using online video culled from YouTube and LiveLeak. As a remake, the video provides a parallel narrative that explores the changes in historical and visual icons from 1958 to 2010 – and those images that remain surprisingly, disturbingly, and delightfully the same.” (Jennifer Proctor)

Blow Job (Stuart Sandford, 2009, 1 min. excerpt)
“A tongue-in-cheek homage to Warhol’s film of the same name, Blow Job features a reengineered digital clip depicting teen heartthrob Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s character on Saved by the Bell) on the receiving end of some sort of off- camera pleasuring.” (Stuart Sandford)

Galactic Docking Company (Clark Nikolai, 2009, 2:49 min.)
“The commercialization of space causes new discoveries. Using found and original footage shot on Earth and in near Earth orbit, we find that space wants to have an encounter of the most intimate kind.” (Clark Nikolai)

Thoughts (Julian Krubasik, 2008, 4:51 min.)
“A man gets caught up in his thoughts over a cup of coffee. Homage to Godard’s 2 or 3 things I know about her.” (Julian Krubasik)

The Western Front (Lauren Cook, 2010, 21:21 min.)
“Three narrators are forced to reconcile experiences of senseless violence and cruelty. By juxtaposing intricately handcrafted images and harsh reality, the film examines what we choose to remember and forget in our own lives.” (Lauren Cook)

Total running time: 89 minutes including a 10 minute intermission

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

The Film Registry Show Returns!

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:06:44 -0400

Sunday September 26, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
The Film Registry Show Returns! Selections from recent picks by the Library of Congress
Filmmaker Janie Geiser, a Filmforum board member, will be present!
“Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act, each year the Librarian of Congress names 25 films to the registry that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant to be preserved for all time. These films are not selected as the "best" American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring importance to American culture.
"Established by Congress in 1989, the National Film Registry spotlights the importance of protecting America’s matchless film heritage and cinematic creativity," said [Librarian of Congress James] Billington. "By preserving the nation’s films, we safeguard a significant element of our cultural patrimony and history." Click here to read more on the National Registry.
**NOTE** Two seasons ago Filmforum held the first show of short films selected for the Library of Congress Film Registry. Due to technical difficulties, the sound 16mm films weren’t able to be screened, so we’ve brought them back, along with several other films selected for the Registry, including a couple of home movie classics and several marvelous experimental films.
Tonight’s films include:
The Sex Life of the Polyp by Thomas Chalmers and Robert Benchley (1928, 11 min., selected in 2007)
A short film written and performed by Robert Benchley, based on a routine he first did in 1922. The short, which was adapted from an essay by Benchley, documents a dim-witted doctor attempting to discuss the sex life of a polyp to a women's club. This was the second of Benchley's 46 comedy short films. The film was made in the then-new Fox Movietone sound-on-film process.

Quasi at the Quackadero by Sally Cruikshank (1975, 10 min., color, selected in 2009)
Quasi at the Quackadero has earned the term "unique." Once described as a "mixture of 1930s Van Beuren cartoons and 1960s R. Crumb comics with a dash of Sam Flax," and a descendent of the "Depression-era funny animal cartoon," Sally Cruikshank’s wildly imaginative tale of odd creatures visiting a psychedelic amusement park careens creatively from strange to truly wacky scenes. It became a favorite of the Midnight Movie circuit in the 1970s. Cruikshank later created animation sequences for "Sesame Street," the 1986 film Ruthless People and the "Cartoon Land" sequence in the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie.
Click here to visit Sally Cruikshank’s website.

Disneyland Dream by Robbins Barstow (1956, 34 min., selected in 2008)
The Barstow family films a memorable home movie of their trip to Disneyland. Robbins and Meg Barstow, along with their children Mary, David and Daniel were among 25 families who won a free trip to the newly opened Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., as part of a "Scotch Brand Cellophane Tape" contest sponsored by 3M. Through vivid color and droll narration ("The landscape was very different from back home in Connecticut"), we see a fantastic historical snapshot of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Catalina Island, Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Disneyland in mid-1956. Home movies have assumed a rapidly increasing importance in American cultural studies as they provide a priceless and authentic record of time and place.

The Lead Shoes by Sydney Peterson (1949, 18 mins, 16mm, b&w, selected in 2009)
"The Lead Shoes issued almost totally without flaw ...." - Parker Tyler
"The Lead Shoes is a dreamlike trance showing the unconscious acts of a disturbed mind through a distorted lens and other abstract visual techniques (such as reverse and stop motion). "Narrative succumbs to the comic devices of inconsequence and illogic," said writer and independent filmmaker Sidney Peterson of his film. Peterson is considered the father of San Francisco avant-garde cinema.

The Red Book by Janie Geiser (1994, 11 mins, 16mm, color, selected in 2009)
Renowned experimental filmmaker and theater/installation artist Janie Geiser’s work is known for its ambiguity, explorations of memory and emotional states and exceptional design. She describes "The Red Book" as "an elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language and identity from the point of view of a woman amnesiac." Sound design by Beo Morales, engineered at Harmonic Ranch. Print from Janie Geiser

“The Red Book (is) Janie Geiser’s beautifully mysterious, animated short. Images appear as in a graceful collage: glimpses of words are written in white vanishing ink; a woman is drawn in outline, as if she were a paper doll made of red construction paper. Everything is red, white, black, or gray in this smashing little film, which has graphic flair and a surrealist edge.” -- Caryn James

Scratch and Crow by Helen Hill (1995, 10 mins, 16mm, color, selected in 2009)
Helen Hill’s student film was made at the California Institute of the Arts. Consistent with the short films she made from age 11 until her death at 36, this animated short work is filled with vivid color and a light sense of humor. It is also a poetic and spiritual homage to animals and the human soul. http://www.helenhill.org
The Helen Hill Collection at Harvard Film Archive

Glimpse of the Garden by Marie Menken (1957, 5 mins, color, sound, selected in 2007)
Soundtrack: birdsong "A lyric, tender, intensely subjective exploration of a flower garden, with extreme magnification, flashing color harmonies." -- Cinema 16 "She deserves the order of the square halo, first class, with harps in diamonds." -- Dwight Ripley (Film-makers Coop)

Think of Me First as a Person by George Ingmire & Dwight Core, Sr. (1960-75, 8 mins, selected in 2006)
Think of Me First as a Person is an astonishing discovery from the Center for Home Movies and its annual Home Movie Day, where once a year people in cities across the nation bring their home movies to screen. This loving portrait by a father of his son with Down syndrome represents the creativity and craftsmanship of the American amateur filmmaker.

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

About Kevin Jerome Everson:
Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965) is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker who lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. Everson’s prolific body of work, 4 feature-length and 70 short films, covers a diverse range of topics in response to the daily conditions, gestures, materials and tasks of people of African descent. Everson combines scripted, archival, documentary, and formal elements to challenge conventional ideas surrounding narrative, drama and ethnographic documentary.
Everson’s films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Armand Hammer Museum, the Sundance Film Festival, and many other museums and festivals worldwide. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two NEH Fellowships, two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, and an American Academy Rome Prize.

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

To Do Better…Films by Kevin Jerome Everson

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 15:04:43 -0400

Sunday October 3, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
To Do Better…Films by Kevin Jerome Everson
Kevin Jerome Everson in person! Los Angeles premieres!
“I guess to do better…I guess”
--Curley Lanier
“Everson rejects the role of cultural explainer in his work, opting instead to place the burden of understanding on the audience and its own labor. In this way, he has carved a place for himself outside both the typical expectations of documentary and the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else.” –Artforum
“Grounded in historical research and a strong sense of place, Kevin Jerome Everson’s films and videos combine documentary and scripted elements with a sparse, rugged formalism. His ongoing subject matter is the lives of African Americans and other people of African descent, often working class, but he eschews standard realism in favor of strategies that abstract everyday actions and statements into theatrical gestures: archival footage is re-edited or re-staged, real people perform fictional scenarios based on their own lives, historical observations intermesh with contemporary narratives. His films suggest the relentlessness of everyday life—along with its beauty—but also present oblique metaphors for art-making.
Many of his works return to Mansfield, Ohio, where Everson was born and raised. The community's past is examined in Company Line, in which city employee Curley Lanier explains why he and his family left Alabama in the late 1950s to migrate North: “To do better…I guess.” The remarks betray a sense of deep ambivalence about the promises of upward mobility in America that runs through this collection of recent projects; fifty years later, the people of Mansfield still aren’t sure what “better” means.”
–Ed Halter and Thomas Beard May 2009
Please note that Kevin Jerome Everson’s Erie will be screening at REDCAT, October 4, 2010. Click here for details.
Tonight’s screening of To Do Better… includes:
Old Cat (2009, 16mm, 11:25, black and white, silent) will eventually and pleasantly get to a destination.

Lead (2009, 16mm, 3:00, black and white) is a story of an early 20th Century Robin Hood.

Company Line (2009, 30:00, black and white, color) is a film about one of the first predominately Black neighborhoods in Mansfield Ohio. The title, Company Line, refers to the name historically used by residents to describe their neighborhood, located on the north side of town close to the old steel mill. The Company Line began during the post-war migration of Blacks from the south to the north in the late forties. The neighborhood was purchased in the early seventies and its residents were scattered throughout Mansfield. City employees and former residents of the Company Line narrate the film.

Home (2008, super-8, 1:30, black and white) is about disappointment in northern Ohio.

Undefeated (2008, 16mm, 1:30, black and white) is about mobility and immobility, or just trying to stay warm.

The Citizens (2009, 16mm, 5:45, color and black/white) includes Mohammad Ali talking about life, Althea Gibson returning home as a champion, Fidel Castro playing baseball and three gentlemen being escorting into court all under the watchful eye of the media.

The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin (2007, 16mm, 3:30 minutes, black and white) is about the art of the cut-away.

North (2007, HD, 1:30 minutes, color) is about trying to find one’s way.

A Week in the Hole (2001, mini DV, 6:00, color) is a film about a factory employee’s adjusting to materials, time space and personal during his first day of work.

Second and Lee (2008, 16mm, 3:00, black and white) is a cautionary tale about when not to run.

Ike (2008, 16mm, 2:30, black and white) is about a person showing their special gift - if pushed.

Playing Dead (2008, 16mm, 1:30, color) is a film about lying still to stay alive.

Something Else (2007, 16mm, 2:00, color) is a film about the found footage as subject matter and Miss Black Roanoke, Virginia 1971 expressing her thoughts about the upcoming Miss Black Virginia 1971 Pageant.

Ninety-Three (2008, 16mm, 3:00, black and white, silent) is a wonderful age to celebrate.

Total running time: 89 minutes including a 10 minute intermission

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

About Kevin Jerome Everson:
Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965) is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker who lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. Everson’s prolific body of work, 4 feature-length and 70 short films, covers a diverse range of topics in response to the daily conditions, gestures, materials and tasks of people of African descent. Everson combines scripted, archival, documentary, and formal elements to challenge conventional ideas surrounding narrative, drama and ethnographic documentary.
Everson’s films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Armand Hammer Museum, the Sundance Film Festival, and many other museums and festivals worldwide. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two NEH Fellowships, two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, and an American Academy Rome Prize.

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Assorted Morsels: New Films by Amy Halpern

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 18:36:27 -0400

Sunday October 10, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, 6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
ASSORTED MORSELS: New 16mm Films by Amy Halpern
Amy Halpern in person!
On November 12-14, Filmforum and USC Visions & Voices will present the symposium Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980 at USC. In the weeks leading up to it, Filmforum will host evenings with long-time Los Angeles-based filmmakers in evenings of old and new works. We’re starting with Amy Halpern, whose sensitive visions of texture, movement and light are entrancing. Halpern’s films are consistently full of life, celebrating the possibilities of cinema art. And she has created a new set of films, several of which will receive their World Premieres at this screening!

Amy Halpern is a filmmaker and artist who works with light, camera and movement. She has been making abstract films since 1972.

Halpern moved to Los Angeles in 1974, where in 1975 with a handful of other filmmakers she founded (and named) the Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis, devoted to presentation of avant-garde film work, and completed a graduate degree in film at UCLA. She has worked on many Hollywood and independent feature films as gaffer and/or cinematographer, including Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding, Pat O’Neill’s Decay of Fiction and David Lebrun’s Breaking the Maya Code. In 1975 she was one of the founders of the Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis, devoted to presentation of avant-garde film work. She has also had a long career as a teacher of film and writing at U.S.C., Otis-Parsons Art Institute, Cal State L.A., and Cal State Northridge. Born and raised in New York City, Halpern studied & performed in modern dance with Anna Sokolow & Lynda Gudde, worked in the early 1970s in 3-D shadow-play with Ken Jacobs’ New York Apparition Theatre and co-founded New York’s Collective For Living Cinema.

his Los Angeles Times review Kevin Thomas called Halpern’s feature length Falling Lessons (1992) “a stunningly sensual, life-affirming experience from a major experimental film artist.” Falling Lessons will be showing at USC Cinematheque 108 on Thursday October 7 at 7:00 pm. with Halpern in person as well!

All films on 16mm unless indicated

Invocation (1982, 2 min., silent)  Injury on a Theme (2010, 5 min, sound) For Lynda Gudde.
World Premiere. Pouring Grain (2008, 2 min, silent) World Premiere.
By Halves (2010, 7 min, silent) World Premiere Palm Down (2010, 7 min, silent) World Premiere Access to the View (2000, 2 min., sound)  Cat Dreaming (2001, 1 min, sound, digital video)  Cheshire Smile (2010, 5 min, sound) World Premiere 3 Minute Hells (2010, 14 min, sound) World Premiere  1 – DETENTION  2 – HOLLYWOOD HILLS   3 - REPTILE  4 – BESTIARY  5 – ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE  6 – DOORWAY OCCUPATION  7 – SIDEWAYS
 58 minutes total

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Peter Mays: Tantras and Sutras

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:10:06 -0400

Sunday October 17, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, 6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Peter Mays: Tantras and Sutras
Peter Mays in person!
On November 12-14, Filmforum and USC Visions & Voices will present the symposium Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980 at USC. In the weeks leading up to it, Filmforum will host evenings with long-time Los Angeles-based filmmakers in evenings of old and new works. Peter Mays has been actively making films and paintings in Los Angeles since the 1960s, a key person of the experimental film scene. We’re delighted to host him with some of his early works and several new ones.

Tonight’s films include:
Death of the Gorilla (1965, 16 min., 16mm film or SD) A sight/sound combine of exotic imagery shot semi-randomly in superimposition off a TV and then cut to make a fast moving but extremely ambiguous "story.”  
The Star Curtain Tantra (1966/69, 18 min., 16mm film or SD) A trance film originally released in 1966 as The Star Curtain about the settling and relaxation of the senses after a climax. "Sentences" of cosmic imagery were added in 1969 to form the vision glimpsed in the trance.
 Light Show (1970, 4 min., SD) The SINGLE WING TURQUOISE BIRD was active in Los Angeles from 1968-73. Initially the house light show for rock concerts at the Shrine, we developed it further in various locations, backed by Sam Francis. In 2005 the film was in the Visual Music exhibitions at MOCA and the Hirshhorn.  Arrival of the Purple Legions (2003, 8 min., video) This short story, illustrated with Viking artifacts, is a metaphor, based on a dream, about death. It is dedicated to Jon Greene.   Dark Island (2009, 24 min., video) This film, three years in the making, is an exploration of an imaginary dark island of the mind. It might be about religious activity in the jungle, especially dancing. Featuring King Kong, the Buddha, Siva and Shakti, and a tree spirit.   Yoga-Sutras (2010, 16 min., video) Using material originally intended for a light show, this three part film interweaves Tibetan Buddhist yantras and western magic to invoke a faustian new age.

About Peter Mays:

Peter Mays grew up in Los Angeles and attended UCLA where he majored in painting and minored in mathematics. He made his first experimental film while in graduate school, for which he constructed a printer and developing tank. Pat O’Neill and Bob Abel were on a similar course in the design division.
 Mays made several experimental shorts in 16mm in the middle 60’s. This was a very exciting period for the avant-garde film, as well as for the art cinema in Europe. Inspired by the emerging counter-culture, Mays shot a 16mm feature film in 1967. This movie made extensive use of color gels for lighting, inspire by Warhol's Chelsea Girls; it was structured as a mass dream. In 1968 Mays was a founding member of the Single Wing Turquoise Bird light show, which performed with 4 to 7 members until 1973.
 In 1975 Mays premiered his feature, Sister Midnight, at the Fox Venice Theater, but it did not play well.
 Mays reinvented himself in the early 80s. He wrote a program for the Atari microcomputer to portray large chapters of history through computer animation of geography, spending eight years on a prototype on World War One. Today he has four “experimental” educational films with Discovery Education. During this time (the structuralist period), he made several long avant-garde films that gave greater weight to the sound track and "meaning." Perhaps the most important is Astral Man, an investigation into the past, shot in the 60s but completed in 2000.
 In the 21st century Mays returned to experimental shorts and produced four digital shorts using the extensive effects available in Premiere and After Effects, and based on the artifacts of lost civilizations, including those of the Vikings, Egypt, and the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Here: Films and Videos by Vincent Grenier

Thu, 9 Sep 2010 19:28:21 -0400

Sunday October 24, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Echo Park Film Center
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Here: A Survey of Films and Videos by Vincent Grenier
Vincent Grenier in person!
**NOTE THE CHANGE IN LOCATION!**
Grenier has visited Filmforum several times in the past, and we’re delighted to host him again.

Vincent Grenier is a pioneering North American film-and-video artist who has left his distinctive mark on the San Francisco, Montreal and New York avant-gardes. Grenier’s work evinces a keen photographic eye and a subtle sense of how images combine to create feeling. With influences as disparate as Eastern painting, Dryer’s Jeanne d’Arc and Ernie Gehr, Grenier has charged his cinema with an electric self-reflexivity whose energy does not preclude moments of absolute clarity and even meditative stillness. The evening will range widely in terms of technique, form and format, but each work achieves a unique poetry that can be at once tough, tenuous and tender. – Madison Brookshire

Vincent Grenier will have another screening at REDCAT with different films on Monday, October 25. Click here for more information.

Tonight’s films include:
Interieur Interiors (to AK) (1978, 15 min., Silent, black and white16mm)
With special assistance from Ann Knutson.
A photographic, yet abstract painting-in-time whose ambiguous (but unchanging?) space is at times claustrophobic, at others infinite. Cleverly timed shifts in the representation of space give rise to philosophical questions about perception itself and the foundations of knowledge. —MB

“... And although we may repeatedly be laced back through the spatial ambiguities and the similarities of light reflection (a kind of sensuous and tendentious voyage), what Grenier leaves us with is finally not the realization that lines and shapes become objects, nor that objects deliquesce into abstraction, but that both object and abstraction can be accessible at the same moment.”— Martha Haslanger, Downtown Revue, Winter 1980

Tremors (1984, 13 min., Color, 16mm film with sound)
Grenier writes that “the Kinemacolor process was used in 19l5 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, red and green filters.” In Tremors, Grenier pushes this mimetic technology beyond the limits of verisimilitude into pure poetry. It is at once familiar and uncanny, representational and yet at a striking distance from ordinary vision. The contrasting colors assault first the world then the audience, rending time and space; the result is a strange and quiet calm. It is, in a word, sublime.—MB

“Sturdiness jousts with fragility, past with present, alienation with tenderness, abrasiveness with sensuality, red with green.”—VG

Shade/Toile (1975, 16 min., Silent, color 16mm)
“Shade is a near exhaustion of the possibilities between camera (aperture, focus) and nature (sun, wind). It is a beautiful study-poem on the undying presence that renders the world perceptually. In this minimal area, the variations are pursued with quiet doggedness, each frame revealing the secret of the next.” - Mike Reynolds, Berkeley Barb

Travelogue (2010. 8 min., Color HD video with sound)
“This video was taken using a small digital still camera on multiple bus trips between New York City and Upstate NY. The buses’ many large windows afforded dramatic reflections to this perched passenger feeling as if floating through the landscape. Lulled by the noises of the tires on the road, the incessant tremors, muffled conversations and trying to keep the digital camera steady while being thrown from side to side, visual wedges kept uncannily intersecting and gesturing.” —VG

Burning Bush (2010, 9 min., Color HD video with sound)
“In Eastern Orthodoxy a tradition exists that the flame Moses saw was God's Uncreated Energies/Glory , manifested as light, thus explaining why the bush was not consumed. Hence, it is not interpreted as a miracle in the sense of an event, which only temporarily exists, but is instead viewed as Moses being permitted to see these Uncreated Energies/Glory, which are considered to be eternal things; the Orthodox definition of salvation... .” — New World Encyclopedia

“The Euonymus’ mid-fall, ‘natural’ leaves are startling, their colors so saturated as to appear unreal, their purity so uniform as to appear manufactured. It has long been a fascination of mine to activate shared qualities living in parallel universes; always, that which is present in the make up of the digital cinema image and that of the physical world it is representing. Assumptions we make about the real world, the way it is recorded, or more appropriately translated, are cultural constructs.” —VG

You (Talking Portraits, Part 1) (1990, 16 min., Color, 16mm with sound)
Another confrontation of audience expectations, the ambiguous space in YOU is psychic as well as visual—a further, development of the purely perceptual ambiguities in Interieur Interiors. This film uses unquestioned conventions of narration to create a poetic space, something between documentary and, not quite fiction, but allusion that—unlike so many films that came after—does not rely on either cleverness or trickery. The potential for slippage—just who is this “you”?—is medium specific, not simply capricious. The film itself is about the beauty of anything that resonates within us, even things that leave a bad residue. —MB

“I had been looking for someone's unnerving encounter, that conversation that one just couldn't get out of their head, the kind of event that leaves one still debating out loud while walking in the streets or doing one's tidies in the bathroom. After interviewing a few people, I found Lisa Black who obliged with one of her own and became the film's main character.”—VG

This, and This (2006, 10.5 min., Color video with sound)
“The image is a pure creation of the mind, it cannot be born from a comparison, but comes from the bringing together of two distant realities … An image is not powerful because it is brutal and fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant and true.” —Pierre Reverdy, as quoted by Jean-Luc Godard

This, and This may be the culmination of a long series of films and videos by Grenier that push the limits of associative montage. The tenuous connective tissue loosely binding these shots together threatens to dissolve, allowing the images to just drift away. And yet the edits are sharp enough to reclaim the term “cut.” Far from meek and mild, This, and This derives energy from its interstices. Its generosity, sense of space and evocative power all come from the cuts, giving it the thrill of Cassavetes’ comedies and the clarity of Haiku. —MB

World in Focus (1976, 20 min., Silent, color 16mm film)
In World in Focus, the screen becomes the two dimensional support of an amazingly versatile three-dimensional object (the Atlas) which contains, in turn, two-dimensional pictures of other three-dimensional objects. The physicality of the book offers an area no less real than its language. (i.e. text, pictures, etc.) which is itself presenting a dislocated image of “the world.” To look at the objectness of the book is in fact to look at the real thing, something which is contained in what it portends to describe. The film inventories and builds [on a] number of camera/book affinities and the ramifications of the resulting deconstruction of the book's “language.” —VG
 “An homage to the primitive cinema of the flip-book, and the ultimate armchair travelogue, World in Focus was a deserved prize winner at this year's (1978) Ann Arbor Film Festival and is a beautiful idea, beautifully realized.” —J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

About Vincent Grenier:

Vincent Grenier is a North American artist born in Quebec City who now resides in the US. As well as being a vital member of the New York avant-garde, he was also a frequent contributor to the San Francisco and Montreal Art scenes of the 1970’s and 1980’s. He also did pioneering film programming first for Canyon Cinema (later renamed the San Francisco Cinematheque) and then the Collective for Living Cinema in New York City. Grenier made over two dozens films and, in 1990, was one of the first of a wave of experimental filmmakers to move to video. Grenier's films and videos have earned myriad awards and have been shown all over North America, Europe and China at major museums and festivals, including perennial appearances at the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde. His work was recently the subject of major retrospectives at Media City in Windsor, Ontario and the Images Film & Video Festival's Canadian Images Spotlight in Toronto. In 2010, he received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He currently lives in Ithaca, New York and teaches cinema at Binghamton University. —Madison Brookshire & Vincent Grenier

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Michael Scroggins in person

Wed, 8 Sep 2010 19:51:28 -0400

Sunday, November 7, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
6712 Hollywood Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90028
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Michael Scroggins: What Are You Looking At?
Michael Scroggins in person!
On November 12-14, Filmforum and USC Visions & Voices will present the symposium Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980 at USC. In the weeks leading up to it, Filmforum will host evenings with long-time Los Angeles-based filmmakers in evenings of old and new works. Michael Scroggins has been a pioneer in animation performance and video art since the early 1970s, a member of the legendary light show group Single Wing Turquoise Bird, and a teacher at Cal Arts since the late 1970s. We’re delighted to host him with a survey of his work from the 1970s to a brand new world premiere!
“Michael Scroggins is one of the most important artists currently working in the tradition of abstract or 'absolute' video, an art form related more to painting and music than to drama or photography.... He employs a wide range of state-of-the-art computer/video tools to produce the visual equivalent of musical composition. Words like elegant, graceful, exhilarating or spectacular do not begin to articulate the evocative power of these sublime works, characterized by lyric fluidity, mathematical precision, and a complex layering of many visual 'voices.' Scroggins' award-winning work seems particularly suited as the visual counterpart to contemporary composers like Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Steve Reich or Philip Glass.” - Gene Youngblood
Tonight’s films include:
What Are You Looking At? (1970/1973, 11:30, NTSC)  A young child directs the gaze of the videographer --and thus the video viewer. A synchronicity of developing events unfolds in a dance of subjective and objective relationships revolving around the key question.

Destiny Edit (A linked set of Lose Yr Jobs, 1972 -- Corrigan/Lund, 1974 -- Sangsara, 1975, NTSC) Lose Yr Jobs consists of a fragment from a TV interview with President Nixon that is looped via the very physical act of repeatedly playing and rewinding the tape via the control lever on a ½ inch video player. In Corrigan/Lund the intuitive wandering of the videographer’s gaze reveals a situation that appears to precipitate a disrupting moment in the ritual passing of the reins of institutional power. The final piece, Sangsara, alludes to the preceding segments via an image generated in a particularly numinous real-time videographic performance.

Recent Li (1980, 5:00, NTSC)  In defining the Chinese term “li”, Joseph Needham has written, "In its most ancient meaning, it signified the pattern in things, the markings in jade or fibers in muscle . . .” The forms in Recent Li originate from the “li” generated in the layered real-time performance of a video feedback quaternity figure.

Saturnus Alchimia (1982, 3:22, NTSC)  Study No. 13 (1983, 0:20, NTSC)  Study No, 6 (1983, 4:31, NTSC)  Study No. 7 (1983, 2:27, NTSC)  Study No. 14 (1983, 2:58, NTSC)  Study No. 16 (1983, 4:36, NTSC)  This series of absolute videographic compositions were created via the multitracking of improvised real time performance with a standard video switcher. The intention was to explore the affect made possible through the architectonic structuring of the basic elements of color, shape, texture, and rhythm.

Power Spot (1986, 8:12, NTSC)  As in the preceding series of absolute animation studies, the video images in Power Spot were created through a process of live improvisation. The simultaneous and successive deviation of recurring visual elements lends formal meaning to the work.

Solaire (1986, 7:00, NTSC)  In contradistinction to the relentless rhythms and dense structures that perpetually fill the screen space in Power Spot, Solaire is composed with an open spatial flow that employs simpler and more clearly discrete elements.

Adagio for Jon and Helena (2009, 5:00, HD 1080p)  A continuous take digital recording from a live solo liquid light projection performance utilizing a technique I developed in 1968. This piece is dedicated to my liquid light teachers Jon Greene and Helena Lebrun. As with much of my absolute animation performance work, it is the affective power found at the edges of gestural control and indeterminate chaos that interests me.

Limn (2010, 6:30, HD 1080p) World Premiere!  This work is another in a series of continuous take high definition digital recordings of live solo liquid light projection performances. Limn incorporates a dark field technique to enhance the detailed structures derived from the chemical reactions employed in the performance

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

About Michael Scroggins:
MICHAEL SCROGGINS is Director of the Computer Animation Labs at CalArts where he has been on the faculty of the School of Film/Video since 1978. Scroggins is a pioneer in the field of absolute animation performance. His absolute animation works have been widely exhibited internationally, including screenings at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Union of Filmmakers, Moscow; Seibu Ginza, Tokyo; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. He is involved in an ongoing investigation of the potential of gesture capture in the creation of real-time absolute animation in fully immersive VR. He has continued to perfect liquid projection techniques, most recently in the film Limn, which will have its world premiere at Filmforum on November 7.

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour (16mm Program)

Tue, 7 Sep 2010 13:37:20 -0400

Sunday November 21, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, 6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
The 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour: The 16mm Program
Filmmakers Laida Lertxundi and Alexandra Cuesta in person!
Here’s your chance to see the latest and greatest in independent film work from around the world, as we present highlights from the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2010. Filmforum will host two of three touring program, this first night including works on 16mm film, including two by local filmmakers Alexandra Cuesta and Laida Lertxundi. The next program will be December 12, 2010.

View a preview trailer here on Vimeo!

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is pleased to present a full touring program of 16mm films after a four-year hiatus. This program will present rare, contemporary short 16mm films across the U.S. Featuring award-winning films from the 48th AAFF, this international program presents genre-defying short films from Japan, Canada, Australia, and the U.S. Included are new animated hand-drawn works from Naoyuki Tsuji and Jim Trainor, along with exquisite observational films by Laida Lertxundi and Alexandra Cuesta.

Beginning in July 2010 and continuing through February 2011, the Ann Arbor Film Festival 48th AAFF Tour will visit galleries, art house theaters, universities, media arts centers and cinematheques throughout the world. The tour offers several distinct programs of recent independent and experimental short films from the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival across all genres: experimental, documentary, animation, narrative and hybrids.

Touring program curated by AAFF Program Director, David Dinnell, and AAFF Executive Director, Donald Harrison

Role
Denise Oleksijczuk | Vancouver, Canada | 9 min
U.S. premiere at 48th AAFF
Based on a reconsideration of Robert Bresson’s 1967 film Mouchette (after Georges Bernanos’ 1937 novella of the same name), this film presents a new end to the story. Casting herself as a grown-up Mouchette, the director reinterpret’s Bresson’s depiction of a child’s impoverished solitude, her Christ-like suffering, and the ultimate control she assumes in her own drowning.

TUSSLEMUSCLE
Steve Cossman | Brooklyn, NY | 5 min
World premiere at 48th AAFF
“The work presented explores humanity’s ecological relationship and the ritual of restoration. The violent pulse speaks with a sense of urgency and chaotic struggle, while the hypnotic arrangement keeps us in blinding awe to its condition. This dynamically animated piece is composed of 7,000 single frames which were appropriated/‘recycled’ from view-master reel cells and hand-spliced to create a linear filmstrip. Original score by Jacob Long.” —S.C.

Piensa en Mi
Alexandra Cuesta | USA/Ecuador | 15 min
Jury Award 48th AAFF
“Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative meditation on public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.” —A.C.

Zephyr
Naoyuki Tsuj | Yokohama, Japan | 6 min
Continuing from where Tsuji’s charcoal animation The Place Where We Were leaves off, “Zephyr refers to the Greek god of the west wind. Zephyr in Tsuji’s work comes to a baby and takes the baby into the inside of the sun. What kind of experience is waiting for the baby?” —Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto

Gesturings
Peter Herwitz | Ann Arbor, MI | 7 min
World premiere at 48th AAFF
“This film represents the apotheosis of my handpainted film style and the belief that in the materiality of film everything is a kind of gesture: color, rhythm, texture, splice marks, funky tape splices, fingerprints, and dirt. I worked on and off on the film for seven years. Reprinting each frame twice, my hope was the slowing down would echo Baudelaire's 'Lux, Calme, et Volupte' (luxury, calm and pleasure). The film is dedicated to Bill Brand.” —P.H.

The Presentation Theme
Jim Trainor | Chicago, IL | 14 min
The Stan Brakhage Film at Wit's End Award
“A Peruvian prisoner of war finds himself outmaneuvered by a hematophagous priestess. Based on a true story.” —J.T.

Collide-a-Scope
Gregory Godhard | Sydney, Australia | 3 min
“On the 10th September 2008, in the city of Cern,Switzerland, physicists began experiments using the most powerful ‘atom-smasher’ ever built, the Large Hadron Collider. In these experiments, scientists hoped to find the theoretical Higgs-Boson Particle, the so called ‘God Particle’. This film contains secret footage of those results.” —G.G.

Golden Hour
Robert Todd | Boston, MA | 17 min
No Violence Award 48th AAFF | World premiere at 48th AAFF
“What if the Looking Glass were, at the same time, a window and a mirror, if the window was the mirror, the mirror the window? And your projection through this transparent/reflective plane brings you to a world that is as externally rich as the self, with its internal churnings shifting through dark and light, directs it to be – the self and the world open to each other, if but for a moment? And that window offers itself to you as a space in your life, held shimmering in your being and your vision throughout that sustaining moment, that golden hour.” —R.T.

My Tears Are Dry
Laida Lertxundi | Spain/USA | 4 min
Most Promising Filmmaker Award 48th AAFF
“A film in the three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land’s song is played and interrupted as guitar makes sound, two women, a bed, an armchair, and the beautiful outside. The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises.” —L.L.

80 minutes total

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

There’s Something Else (Recent Spanish Cinema)

Mon, 6 Sep 2010 18:49:14 -0400

Sunday December 5, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, 6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
There’s Something Else
(Or, some titles of recent Spanish Experimental Cinema)
Garbiñe Ortega, film curator of the program, and Luis Berdejo, filmmaker based in LA, in person!
The Spanish Experimental cinema comes to Los Angeles to present some of the most well-known filmmakers including Laida Lertxundi, León Siminiani and Isaki Lacuesta.

THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE
Curated by Garbiñe Ortega
Films that think, images that beat, sounds which play ping-pong. This program represents an intense capsule reflecting diverse and exciting talents in contemporary Spanish avant-garde cinema. Coming from darkness, animation, found footage and the exploration of visual and sonic textures describe the illness and cure of the individual in the present, the opening of other spaces and dimensions, luminous new landscapes, paranormal events. “They are already here. Or maybe they are just in our imagination. One way or another, unexpected things happen…”

A second program in this film series, Inner Geography, will be presented by CalArts on Tuesday, December 7. For further information visit: www.calarts.edu

Hezurbeltzak. Una Fosa Común, by Izibene Oñederra (2007, 4 min.)
The Basque word hezurbeltzak does not appear in dictionaries. It is a non-existing word used to describe socially invisible groups. Its literal translation would be "black bones".

Copy Scream, by Oriol Sánchez (2007, 3 min.)
As if we took the word shout and repeat it many times: a kind of exhaustion would occur, no meaning would last, hardly even its acoustic from and musical variation. As if the shout were not a sudden vibration in the air and should find its existence on the surface of its own meaning. A scream repeated until its disintegration due to the movement of surfaces: texture, page, printing, sheet and screen.

The end, by Fernando Franco (2008, 6 min.)
“This piece explores the concept of “limit” attached to the notion of death; the limits of all the limits, the most incomprehensible thing that it only can be tackled from the second person”. Blogs &Docs.

Tabla aeróbica Nº4. Estudio para pintores, by Gonzalo de Pedro (2007, 9 min.)
Five steps set any painting apart from the screen of a small local cinema... X rays, vinegar and Super 8 used to measure the distance between oil paintings and celluloid.

Kinky hoodoo voodoo, by Velasco Broca (2004, 8 min.)
It is the year 1997. Pre-human Saturnians have recreated a work camp for Spanish preteens. A Saturnian trade union decides to check the items produced in the site. In the meantime, an Anglo-Saxon community in the Earth receives increasingly perplexing reports. Historians from both civilizations are bewildered by the situation.

Alone, by Gerard Freixes (2008, 4 min.)
The heroic characters in mainstream fiction always show individualist attitudes. Here, that hero’s individualism is taken to its complete extreme.

Digital, by León Siminiani (2005, 7 min.)
A perceptive analysis of the digital world and its influence in our daily life.

For(r)est in the des(s)ert, by Luis Berdejo (2006, 12 min.)
Found-footage, animation, a forest and Forrest, who doesn’t live here any more.

Cómo dibujar animales tristes o cuaderno de todas las cosas vivas y muertas que imaginé la noche que te fuiste para siempre. (How to draw sad animals or a notebook of all the living and dead things I thought of the night you left for ever), by Laboratorium (2009, 7 min.)
A Project that plays at being a bestiary, but also a diary, but also a tragic tale. Film made by manipulating super8mm footage, Cinexin tapes and drawings without fate nor destiny.

This screening is supported by Dirección General de Política e Industrias Culturales of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, Consulate General of Spain in New York and Consulate General of Spain in San Francisco.

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour (Video Program)

Sun, 5 Sep 2010 18:57:55 -0400

Sunday December 12, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, 6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
The 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour: Video Program One
Filmmaker Lewis Klahr in person!
Here’s your chance to see the latest and greatest in independent short film work from around the world, as we present highlights from the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2010. Filmforum will host two shows of three, this second night including works on video. This program presents memorable and award-winning short films from artists around the world. Included are stunning new works by established experimental makers Lewis Klahr, Semiconductor and Inger Lise Hansen. Emerging Spanish maker Chema Garcia Ibarra's narrative portrait reveals a story both funny and tragic. Acclaimed animators Joanna Priestley and David O'Reilly's share their latest, dynamic creations. Films by Stephen Wetzel, Duke & Battersby and Kent Lambert offer provocative visions through sampling, song and hybrid styles that defy classification.

View a preview trailer here on Vimeo!

Beginning in July 2010 and continuing through February 2011, the Ann Arbor Film Festival 48th AAFF Tour will visit galleries, art house theaters, universities, media arts centers and cinematheques throughout the world. The tour offers several distinct programs of recent independent and experimental short films from the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival across all genres: experimental, documentary, animation, narrative and hybrids.

The AAFF is a pioneer of the traveling tour concept, having launched tour shows in Paris, Los Angeles & Berkeley in 1964. Since that time, the tour has presented hundreds of influential works, including films by Barbara Hammer, Gus Van Sant, Sally Cruikshank, Don Hertzfeldt, Bill Brown, Ross McLaren, Paul Winkler, James Duesing, Martha Colburn and Jay Rosenblatt.

Touring program curated by AAFF Program Director, David Dinnell, and AAFF Executive Director, Donald Harrison

Wednesday Morning Two A.M.
Lewis Klahr | Los Angeles, CA | 6 min
“This is the first completed film of a new series entitled ‘Couplets’. These will generally, but not exclusively, organize themselves around the pairing of various pop songs and just as in these songs’ lyrics, the theme of love.” —L.K.

Attack of the Robots from Nebula-5
Chema García Ibarra | Elche, Spain | 7 min
Funniest Film Award 48th AAFF
“Almost everybody is going to die very soon.” —C.G.I.

Missed Aches
Joanna Priestley | Portland, OR | 4 min
“Have you ever worked very horde on a paper for English clash, just to get a very glow raid? Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence! Missed Aches demonstrates how the shortcomings of spell check can result in unexpected double entendres.” —J.P.

From the Archives of an Inventor
Stephen Wetzel | Milwaukee, WI | 20 min
Jury Award 48th AAFF
Invention and America seem inseparable. The country has a restless image of itself as a work in progress; and the character at its core is the inventor — equal parts entrepreneur and crackpot, path-setter and outsider. This is a found-footage exploration of one such character, a Midwestern inventor whose house has been transformed into a playful model of the future with mechanized armchairs and a domestic robot.

Please Say Something
David O’Reilly | Berlin, Germany | 10 min
Best Animated Film Award 48th AAFF
A troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future.

Black Rain
Semiconductor | Brighton, England | 3 min
Sourced from images collected by the twin satellite, solar mission, STEREO, this film shows the HI (Heliospheric Imager) visual data as it tracks interplanetary space for solar wind and CME's (coronal mass ejections) heading towards Earth. Working with STEREO scientists, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt) collected all the HI image data to date, revealing the journey of the satellites from their initial orientation, to their current tracing of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.

Travelling Fields
Inger Lise Hansen | Oslo, Norway | 9 min
Most Technically Innovative Film Award 48th AAFF | N. American premiere at 48th AAFF
Moving between different topographies and locations in the Kola Peninsula, Northern Russia, this film explores sections of the landscape by moving the camera upside/down, one frame at the time, along a track. The work focuses on a particular phenomenon occurring through a change of perspective and animated camera movements, as a way of redefining a place and its geography.

Portrait #3: House of Sound
Vanessa Renwick | Portland, OR | 11 min
Feeding the Soul Award 48th AAFF
Radio reminiscences and a photography-driven visit to the neighborhood of record shop "House of Sound" long after the wrecking ball, this film reflects the heart of a pre-digital era of music. Renwick's latest in her ongoing Portrait series of stories in Portland, Oregon.

Fantasy Suite
Kent Lambert | Chicago, IL | 7 min
“A meditation on mainstream American heterosexual romance.” —K.L.

Beauty Plus Pity
Duke & Battersby | Syracuse, NY | 14 min
Best of Festival Award 48th AAFF
“Presented in seven parts, Beauty Plus Pity considers the potential for goodness amidst the troubled relations between God, humanity, animals, parents and children...(it) contemplates the shame and beauty of existence; it is part apologia, part call to arms.” —D&B

91 minutes total.

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets. Click here to purchase!

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.