Sunday February 20, 2011, 7:30 pm

At the Echo Park Film Center

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Fred Worden: Illusions and Altercations

Fred Worden in person!

**NOTE THE CHANGE IN LOCATION!**

Los Angeles is proud to welcome one-time Angeleno Fred Worden with the first of two programs of his work in film and digital video, spanning four decades of moving image making.  Worden's films develop out of his interest in intermittent projection as the source of cinema's primordial powers. How a stream of still pictures passing through a projector at a speed meant to overwhelm the eyes might be harnessed to purposes other than representation or naturalism.  Come view multiple possibilities.

Please join Fred for another completely different program of films at REDCAT in Downtown L.A. on Monday February 21 at 8:30.  www.redcat.org

Lure

1986, 16mm, 7min.

“An accident on a frozen lake. A story spread across a visual matrix in parallel with the spread across the breaking ice of the hero/victim. Gambling and luxuriating on nature's thin ice mandates a payback, no? Welcome to that sinking feeling.” (FW)

If Only

2003, 16mm, 7min.

“The bubble shaped orb of the human head, perched atop its touchy-feely transport system has seven moist openings through which everything outside comes in: two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth and two ears. Inside the bubble head, bubble universes spawn ad infintum and the only passable direction is directly into the steady headwinds of an ever-advancing infinity of veils. A high wire bobbing and weaving just to stay upright. These artful if endless veil penetrations are at once the human job description as well as nature’s shot at vindicating the transient in the face of the impassive infinite. Nature makes the orifices moist so things can stick, at least momentarily.

“And so the intoxicated camera operator shoots the moon slipping through the barren trees. The rabbit hole’s light shadow appears and he obliges, head first, no looking back. His cranium (like yours) is packed with illusions, but down the rabbit hole they treasure the same just so long as they’re custom fabricated, hand tooled and conscious. Down this hole, stalking the unforeseen non-translatable is all. Join in here.” (FW)

Everyday Bad Dream

2006, DV, 6min.

“Like picking shards of broken glass out of pile carpet on a hangover morning.” (FW)

“A hilarious and disarming piece that threatens meaninglessness and achieves transcendence.” (Brian Belovarac)

Time’s Arrow

2007, DV, 11min.

“Out on my freeway, directionality is elusive. The faces in the windows appear and then disappear, some moving out ahead, some falling behind, some moving so fast as to be beyond registering, others sliding by so languidly you’d  think they want something from you. What’s irreversible is the plain fact that once they disappear from view, they’re gone forever. No amount of freeway jostling is ever likely to bring them by again. Each time I think to myself: one more person I’ll never know.” (FW)

North Shore

2007, DV, 11min.

“Where the big ones break and the undercurrents push-pull an ancient, silent tune.” (FW)

“Worden's latest might be a sort of semi-homage to Ken Jacobs, since it uses many of the techniques (strobing, left / right oscillation, rotating forms) that characterize the Nervous System, particularly in its video incarnation. But Worden has been working for years now at exploring the tension between surface and depth in the abstract image, the cognitive zone where the push and pull of masses and voids across the screen prompts discrete phenomena to coagulate into an all-over activation of the picture plane. North Shore takes this approach in a bizarre new direction, since (as was the case with Worden's last Views entry, Everyday Bad Dream) it is nearly impossible to discern just what one is looking at until the very last. (And even then, I'm not 100% sure.)” - Michael Sicinski

When Worlds Collude

2008, DV, 13min.

“Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?” (Virginia Woolf, The Cinema, 1926)

“An experimental film structured as a kind of specialized playground in which highly representational images are freed from their duties to refer to things outside of themselves. The images run free in their new lightness making unforeseeable, promiscuous connections with each other and developing an inexplicable, non-parsable plot line that runs along with all the urgency of any good thriller. When worlds collude, something outside of description is always just about to happen.” (FW)

How the Hell I Ripped Jack Goldstein’s Painting in the Elevator

1989, 16mm, 23min.

“A more or less true story from my days as an art handler in 1980s New York City.” (FW)

The After Life

2007, DV, 6min.

“I made The After Life using images out of a tiny mini-camcorder called a Flip that I bought on amazon.com for $98.00.  All I did with the material was work with arrangements of frames along a timeline to setup what Eisenstein called “collisions” (for him a colliding of shots, for me, a colliding of frames).  On rare occasions, Eisenstein substituted the word “copulation” for the word “collision” in describing the dynamics of his montage theory.  In The After Life, it’s all copulation all the time.  Bodies attract, bodies intersect and new creatures stream forth. In The After Life uninhibited promiscuity is what makes the world go round.  It can’t be all bad.” (FW)

About the Filmmaker:

Fred Worden has been making experimental film since the mid 1970s. His films have been shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art , The Centre Pompidou, The Pacific Film Archive, The New York Film Festival, The London Film Festival, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival, The Hong Kong International Film Festival and numerous other experimental film venues. Fred Worden is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  http://www.fredworden.com/

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; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.

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