Winter 2010 Schedule

Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (Part 4 of 8)

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 10:19:00 -0800

Sunday January 17, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Bodies, Objects, Films: An Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (Part 4 of 8 ) Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1979)
Yvonne Rainer in person! Moderated by Simon Leung.
Over the course of our 2009-2010 seasons, Filmforum is proud to present a full retrospective of the media works of Yvonne Rainer. One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, this is the first full retrospective of her films in Los Angeles. Each appearance by Rainer will feature a Q&A led by a different moderator, to discuss with her varying aspects of her approaches to her art and life.
Tonight we will screen:
Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1979, 125 minutes, 16mm, color)
Featuring Annette Michelson, Amy Taubin, Vito Acconci, Cynthia Beatt, Ilona Halberstadt, Vernon Gabor, Yvonne Rainer and many others.
To explore the ramifications of terrorism, Rainer employs an extended therapy session--in which an American woman speaks to a series of psychiatrists- -to evoke the daily experiences of power and repression.
“Rainer's film questions duplicitous rehabilitation (psychiatric care/control) , the efficacy of radicalism, and conflicted political and personal motivations ... The collage essay technique of Journeys parallels the investigation of these conflicts on a formal level. She weaves the stories of 19th century Russian anarchists; the staging of identity as it occurs in therapeutic analysis, writing a diary or preparing a meal; and the fate of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof gang), which exposed the precarious and enforced nature of West German democratic freedoms in the 1970s.” – Konrad Steiner/kino21
“Journeys from Berlin/1971 is without a doubt the most ambitious, most risk-taking work of Rainer’s cinematic career ... the film is constructed out of a variety of filmic and literary materials. Its two major sections involve a psychoanalysis session, which occupies much of the screen time, and a kitchen conversation, which resembles a radio drama that we hear but never visually witness. The disjunction between the public and the private, always a central focus of Rainer’s work, here is made wider and more explicit through the counterpoint set up between the analysis session and the conversation about terrorism: the one an excavation of innermost fantasies and emotional traumas within an impersonal space, the other a debate of pressing social issues enacted as table-top repartee. The counterpoint weaves in and out of that tricky terrain wherein the individual psyche connects up to the historical body politic.” - B. Ruby Rich, from “Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction” in The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 17)
Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.
Click here to purchase!
About Yvonne Rainer:
When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. 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, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “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.”
Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.
In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO… (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).
Rainer’s films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F.; NuArt-L.A; Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney.
A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO… was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994.
In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
“I love the duality of props, or objects: their usefulness and obstructiveness in relation to the human body. Also the duality of the body: the body as a moving, thinking, decision-making entity and the body as an inert entity, object-like… oddly, the body can become object-like; the human being can be treated as an object, dealt with as an entity without feeling or desire. The body itself can be handled and manipulated as though lacking in the capacity for self-propulsion.” (Rainer, Works 1961-73, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, New York, New York University Press, 1974, p. 134).
About Simon Leung:
Simon Leung is an artist who works across disciplines and mediums. His projects have been exhibited in the Guangzhou Triennial (2008); the Venice Biennale (2003); the Whitney Biennial (1993); the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; and the Generali Foundation in Vienna. In 2008, Leung received a Guggenheim fellowship in post-Studio art and the Art Journal Award for his essay "The Look of Law." In 2009 Leung danced in two versions of Yvonne Rainer's "Trio A"--as a part of "Trio A in ten easy lessons," a group performance at the Barclay Theater; and in "Simon Leung dances Yvonne Rainer," a solo performance for the PERFORM! NOW! Festival in Los Angeles. He has taught in the Studio Art Department at UC Irvine since 2001.

Upcoming in the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective
(four more 2010 screenings):
February 14, 2010 (Part 5 of 8):
Kristina Talking Pictures
February 21, 2010 (Part 6 of 8):
Lives of Performers and Trio A (with Rainer present)
March 28, 2010 (Part 7 of 8):
Privilege (with Rainer in person, Adam Hyman moderating)
DATE TBD
MURDER and murder (with Rainer in person, Catherine Lord moderating)

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.

Circles of Confusion: Hollis Frampton (Part 1)

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:24:55 -0800

Thursday January 21, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Khastoo Gallery
7556 W Sunset Blvd (between Fairfax and La Brea)
FREE ADMISSION!
Los Angeles Filmforum and Khastoo Gallery present
Circles of Confusion: A Five-Screening Series of Films by Hollis Frampton
In conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Pacific Design Center

**NOTE THE CHANGE IN LOCATION AND PRICE**
Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was an American filmmaker, artist and writer who left a legacy of brilliant innovation in avant-garde cinema. His films are challenging and ground breaking explorations in the material properties of the medium, including but not limited to mathematics, the contours of perception and cognition, and the phenomenological nature of the motion picture.
In this retrospective of more than half of his complete catalog of films, audiences are offered an unique glimpse at what made this modernist “thinker” so significant to art history and relevant to contemporary practices in film, from pure celluloid to digital and online technologies.
From January 21 to February 7, 2010, there will be five screenings with guest scholars and artists at each program to discuss his works and their influence on later artists. Among those speaking will be James Welling, artist; Peter Lunenfeld, scholar at UCLA Yvonne Rainer, artist; Erika Vogt, artist; David E. James, film scholar at USC; Alex Klein, artist and curatorial fellow at LACMA.
PART ONE of this series will include a selection of Frampton’s works, followed by a discussion between artist James Welling and Frampton scholar Peter Lunenfeld from UCLA.
Tonight’s films include:
Information (1966, 4 min., silent)
Hypothetical 'first film' for a synthetic tradition constructed from scratch on reasonable principles, given: 1) camera; 2) rawstock; 3) a single bare lightbulb. I admit to having made a number of splices. – H.F.
Manual of Arms (1966, 17 min., silent)
Courtly dances with friends and lovers, in the form of a 14 part drill for the camera, incorporating physiognomic & locomotor evidence related to the lens by 13 artists and an historian, namely: C. Andre, B. Brown, R. Castoro, L. Childs, B. Goldensohn, R. Huot, E. Lloyd, L. Lozano, L. Meyer, L. Poons, M. Snow, M. Steinbrechner, T. Tharp, J. Wieland.
States (1967, 17 min., silent)
'No, not the United States but the conditions, forms in which things exist. Somewhat abstracted, a solid, a liquid and a gas: salt,milk and smoke: falling, pouring and rising are the stars of this classical film. Sheets, streaks and wisps, the protagonists are all white (light). The background, zero place, is black (no light). Silence. The ongoing film reveals the ephemera compartmented in a pattern of temporal proportions in which lengths of salt sheet activity are gradually overtaken by liquid streaks which are in turn overtaken by smoke drifts. But another solid is the sliceable, arrangeable film material itself: the intercutting and the logic of the arrangement introduces something diamond-like,sculptural to the natures presented. There is a profoundly satisfying unity of ends and means that is both "natural" (the way the protaginists behave) and "artificial" ( the artists structure). The sum is cultured, beautiful" -Michael Snow
Winter Solstice (Solariumagelani) (1974, 33 min., silent)
"Shot at U.S. Steel's Homestead Works in Pittsburgh, ... Winter Solstice is full of outpourings of fire, of smoke, of sparks, of molten metal--all erupting against an otherwise black background in an activated pictorial space. The complex abstract compositions that flash upon the screen in full-scale explosions of white light or in the aftermath of effervescent sparks reflect Frampton's painterly handling of the camera (hand-held and fluid) and his rhythmic use of color (blue frames are used to mark each cut). While Winter Solstice pays homage to the work of a number of New York school painters, its steel mill setting represents, as Frampton noted, 'A pretextual locus dearly beloved by our Soviet predecessors.'"--Bruce Jenkins
Film prints for all Frampton shows courtesy of Film-Makers’ Coop in New York. Learn more on their Facebook page, or visit their website.
More on Hollis Frampton:
Although few have seen (or had the opportunity to see) the full extent of Frampton’s catalog, his reputation as a profound thinker and pioneer predicates the broad influence his work has had on both his peers in the 60s and 70s (from Frank Stella to Carl Andre and Lee Lozano) and artists today, from James Welling and Sharon Lockhart, to Jennifer Steinkamp, and many more. The past few years in particular have witnessed a mounting interest in the Frampton, with important symposiums organized in the states and internationally, publications, as well as a new release of (nostalgia) on the DVD American Treasures IV from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
For more information, visit Frampton’s website, read about the Hollis Frampton Collection at Harvard Film Archive, or read the interview with Frampton by Robert Gardner (excerpt).
About Peter Lunenfeld:
Lunenfeld’s books include The Digital Dialectic (MIT, 1999), Snap to Grid (MIT, 2000) USER (MIT, 2005), and The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: How the Computer Became Our Culture Machine (forthcoming). As creator and editorial director of the Mediawork project, he produced a pamphlet series for the MIT Press that redefined the relationship between serious academic discourse and graphic design, and between book publishing and the World Wide Web. He holds a Ph.D. in Film, Television and New Media from UCLA. He is a professor in the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA. For more information, visit Lunenfeld’s website here.
About James Welling:
James Welling is a professor in the UCLA Department of Art. Welling has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. His retrospective exhibition James Welling Photographs, 1974-1999, originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1999 he received the DG Bank-Forder Prize in Photography from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover Germany. Solo exhibitions include Regen Projects, Los Angeles; David Zwirner, New York; Maureen Paley, London; Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris; Wako Works of Art, Tokyo; Donald Young, Chicago, and Galerie Nächst St .Stephan, Vienna. In 2006, Agricultural Works/Insect Chorus, a collaborative project of photographs and music by the artist's brother Will Welling, opened at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY.
More about our co-presenting organizations:
Khastoo Gallery was founded in November of 2008 by Leila Khastoo, a Los Angeles native interested in bringing an international academic perspective to the artistic landscape of the city. Shows at Khastoo emphasize the critical content of art and art making, integrating current global viewpoints with an art historical approach to programming.
For more information on the Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Pacific Design Center, please visit their website here.

Upcoming in the Frampton series:
Sunday January 24: At the Egyptian Theater, moderated Yvonne Rainer and Erika Vogt
Saturday January 30: At the Pacific Design Center, moderated by Alex Klein and David James
Sunday January 31: At the Egyptian Theater, moderators TBA
Sunday February 7: At the Egyptian Theater, moderated by David James

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.

Circles of Confusion: Hollis Frampton (Part 2)

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:49:25 -0800

Sunday January 24, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum and Khastoo Gallery present
Circles of Confusion: A Five-Screening Series of Films by Hollis Frampton
In conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Pacific Design Center

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was an American filmmaker, artist and writer who left a legacy of brilliant innovation in avant-garde cinema. His films are challenging and ground breaking explorations in the material properties of the medium, including but not limited to mathematics, the contours of perception and cognition, and the phenomenological nature of the motion picture.
In this retrospective of more than half of his complete catalog of films, audiences are offered an unique glimpse at what made this modernist “thinker” so significant to art history and relevant to contemporary practices in film, from pure celluloid to digital and online technologies.
From January 21 to February 7, 2010, there will be five screenings with guest scholars and artists at each program to discuss his works and their influence on later artists. Among those speaking will be James Welling, artist; Peter Lunenfeld, scholar at UCLA Yvonne Rainer, artist; Erika Vogt, artist; David E. James, film scholar at USC; Alex Klein, artist and curatorial fellow at LACMA.
PART TWO of this series will include a selection of Frampton’s works, followed by a discussion with Yvonne Rainer and Erika Vogt.
Tonight’s films include:
Prince Ruperts Drops (1969, 7 min., silent)
Two repetitive, banal rhythmic acts -- as it were from the observe and reverse of a phenakistiscope disk -- factored and expanded into a cinema filmstrip. Note: Prince Ruperts Drops are not a confection or a nose candy, but a physical demonstration of extreme internal stresses in equilibrium.
Critical Mass (Hapax Legomena III) (1971, 25.5 min., sound)
As a work of art I think [Critical Mass] is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war). It is war!... It is one of the most delicate and clear statements of inter-human relationships and the difficulties of them that I have ever seen. It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear." -- Stan Brakhage
Public Domain (1972, 14 min., silent)
"In Public Domain ...(Frampton) recapitulates cinema's infancy in a series of direct quotes from such notable primitive works as Record of a Sneeze (Fred Ott’s Sneeze) and Sandow Flexing His Muscles, two 1894 Edison kinetoscopic shorts, as well as literal pieces of cinematic juvenilia (child wading at the beach, another throwing a tantrum at home, three women merrily blowing bubble pipes, and the finale, a melodramatic weighing of a newborn attended by an anxious father, doctor, and nurse)--all readily retrievable/quotable fragments from our finite federal version of the 'infinite film,' the paper print collection at the Library of Congress."--Bruce Jenkins Matrix (1977, 27.5 min., silent)
Film prints for all Frampton shows courtesy of Film-Makers’ Coop in New York. Learn more on their Facebook page, or visit their website.
More on Hollis Frampton:
Although few have seen (or had the opportunity to see) the full extent of Frampton’s catalog, his reputation as a profound thinker and pioneer predicates the broad influence his work has had on both his peers in the 60s and 70s (from Frank Stella to Carl Andre and Lee Lozano) and artists today, from James Welling and Sharon Lockhart, to Jennifer Steinkamp, and many more. The past few years in particular have witnessed a mounting interest in the Frampton, with important symposiums organized in the states and internationally, publications, as well as a new release of (nostalgia) on the DVD American Treasures IV from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
For more information, visit Frampton’s website, read about the Hollis Frampton Collection at Harvard Film Archive, or read the interview with Frampton by Robert Gardner (excerpt).
About Yvonne Rainer:
Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking. From the beginning of her film career, Yvonne Rainer has 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, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “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.” **Please note that Filmforum is also presenting an eight-part retrospective on Rainer’s work. See the Current Schedule for more details on screenings**
About Erika Vogt:
Vogt has exhibited her film and video work at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2006), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2006), The Artists Cinema at Frieze Art Fair, London, UK (2006). Works have also been exhibited at The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2006). She will be exhibiting in the Whitney Biennial in 2010. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Read about Vogt on Artslant.
More about our co-presenting organizations:
Khastoo Gallery was founded in November of 2008 by Leila Khastoo, a Los Angeles native interested in bringing an international academic perspective to the artistic landscape of the city. Shows at Khastoo emphasize the critical content of art and art making, integrating current global viewpoints with an art historical approach to programming.
For more information on the Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Pacific Design Center, please visit their website here.

Upcoming in the Frampton series:
Saturday January 30: At the Pacific Design Center, moderated by Alex Klein and David James
Sunday January 31: At the Egyptian Theater, moderators TBA
Sunday February 7: At the Egyptian Theater, moderated by David James

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.

Circles of Confusion: Hollis Frampton (Part 3)

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:04:44 -0800

Saturday January 30, 2010, 2:00 pm

At the Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Avenue (at San Vicente)
FREE ADMISSION!
Los Angeles Filmforum, Art Los Angeles Contemporary Fair and Khastoo Gallery present
Circles of Confusion: A Five-Screening Series of Films by Hollis Frampton

**NOTE THE CHANGE IN PRICE, TIME AND LOCATION**

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was an American filmmaker, artist and writer who left a legacy of brilliant innovation in avant-garde cinema. His films are challenging and ground breaking explorations in the material properties of the medium, including but not limited to mathematics, the contours of perception and cognition, and the phenomenological nature of the motion picture.
In this retrospective of more than half of his complete catalog of films, audiences are offered an unique glimpse at what made this modernist “thinker” so significant to art history and relevant to contemporary practices in film, from pure celluloid to digital and online technologies.
From January 21 to February 7, 2010, there will be five screenings with guest scholars and artists at each program to discuss his works and their influence on later artists. Among those speaking will be James Welling, artist; Peter Lunenfeld, scholar at UCLA Yvonne Rainer, artist; Erika Vogt, artist; David E. James, film scholar at USC; Alex Klein, artist and curatorial fellow at LACMA.
PART THREE of this series will include Poetic Justice and (nostalgia), followed by a panel with Alex Klein, David James, Madison Brookshire and Michael Ned Holte.
Tonight’s films include:
Poetic Justice (Hapax Legomena II) (1972, 31 min., silent)
"In [Poetic Justice], Frampton presents us with a 'scenario' of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are 'projected' in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale--again it is the first person singular speaking, however, in the present tense and addressing the characters as 'you,' 'your lover,' and referring to an 'I.' We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table...and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind."--Annette Michelson.
(nostalgia) (Hapax Legomena I) (1973, 36 min., sound)
"(nostalgia)...is a film to look at and think about, not a film that seizes your mind and forces its sensations on you. It liberates the imagination rather than entrapping it. It raises questions about the nature of film, the tension between fact and illusion, between now and then. It advances our understanding of film magic, and for this I am grateful."--Standish Lawder
"In (nostalgia) the time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton's films."--P. Adams Sitney.
Film prints for all Frampton shows courtesy of Film-Makers’ Coop in New York. Learn more on their Facebook page, or visit their website.
More on Hollis Frampton:
Although few have seen (or had the opportunity to see) the full extent of Frampton’s catalog, his reputation as a profound thinker and pioneer predicates the broad influence his work has had on both his peers in the 60s and 70s (from Frank Stella to Carl Andre and Lee Lozano) and artists today, from James Welling and Sharon Lockhart, to Jennifer Steinkamp, and many more. The past few years in particular have witnessed a mounting interest in the Frampton, with important symposiums organized in the states and internationally, publications, as well as a new release of (nostalgia) on the DVD American Treasures IV from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
For more information, visit Frampton’s website, read about the Hollis Frampton Collection at Harvard Film Archive, or read the interview with Frampton by Robert Gardner (excerpt).
About David James:
David James teaches in the School of Cinema-Television at USC. He is the author or editor of several books on independent American film. His most recently published is the acclaimed The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles.
About Alex Klein:
Alex Klein is an artist based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from UCLA, her MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and her BA in Art History from Columbia University, New York. In Spring 2007 she co-organized with James Welling the conference Around Photography at the Hammer Museum. Her photographs and writing have appeared in numerous exhibitions and publications. She has served as a visiting lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design and UCLA. She is currently the Ralph M. Parsons Curatorial Fellow in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and an adjunct faculty member at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts. She is also the editor of Words Without Pictures.
About Madison Brookshire:
Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, videos and music. He has exhibited his work widely, including a residency at the Hammer Museum. He studied cinema at the California Institute of the Arts and Binghamton University and currently works as an educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
About Michael Ned Holte:
Michael Ned Holte is a writer, critic, and independent curator based in Los Angeles. He writes regularly for Artforum International and has contributed to print periodicals such as Afterall, Area Sneaks, Domus, Frieze, Interview, North Drive Press, and X-Tra. He has previously been a part-time lecturer and MFA adjunct faculty member at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts and is currently Visiting Artist Faculty at CalArts. To view Michael Ned Holte's work, please visit his website.

More about our co-presenting organizations:
Khastoo Gallery was founded in November of 2008 by Leila Khastoo, a Los Angeles native interested in bringing an international academic perspective to the artistic landscape of the city. Shows at Khastoo emphasize the critical content of art and art making, integrating current global viewpoints with an art historical approach to programming.
For more information on the Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Pacific Design Center, please visit their website here.

Upcoming in the Frampton series:
Sunday January 31: At the Egyptian Theater, moderators TBA
Sunday February 7: At the Egyptian Theater, moderated by David James

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.

Circles of Confusion: Hollis Frampton (Part 4)

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:07:55 -0800

Sunday January 31, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum and Khastoo Gallery present
Circles of Confusion: A Five-Screening Series of Films by Hollis Frampton
In conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Pacific Design Center

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was an American filmmaker, artist and writer who left a legacy of brilliant innovation in avant-garde cinema. His films are challenging and ground breaking explorations in the material properties of the medium, including but not limited to mathematics, the contours of perception and cognition, and the phenomenological nature of the motion picture.
In this retrospective of more than half of his complete catalog of films, audiences are offered an unique glimpse at what made this modernist “thinker” so significant to art history and relevant to contemporary practices in film, from pure celluloid to digital and online technologies.
From January 21 to February 7, 2010, there will be five screenings with guest scholars and artists at each program to discuss his works and their influence on later artists. Among those speaking will be James Welling, artist; Peter Lunenfeld, scholar at UCLA Yvonne Rainer, artist; Erika Vogt, artist; David E. James, film scholar at USC; Alex Klein, artist and curatorial fellow at LACMA.
PART FOUR of this series will include a selection of six films, followed by a discussion with Frampton scholar Peter Lunenfeld from UCLA.
Process Red (1968, 3:30, silent)
A first attempt to approximate more than one visual modality in a single brief work. Sightings from the retina, optic nerve, cortex. With this small film, I felt that I had got the bit in my teeth.
Carrots and Peas (1969, 5.5 min., sound)
A 'traditional' side-dish of mixed vegetables inhabits a succession of 'traditional' art-styles. The sumptuous, sometimes tiresome paradox of the static image in film, is rudely presented in the form of an art historian's slide-lecture... for which genre of discourse the spoken commentary is of about average relevance to the image.
Lemon (1969, 7.30 min., silent)
As a voluptuous lemon is devoured by the same light that reveals it, its image passes from the spatial rhetoric of illusion into the spatial grammar of the graphic arts.
Surface Tension (1968, 10 min., sound)
"The influence of minimal art (rather the aesthetic of minimal art) on the avant-garde cinema is very great. Most of the important young filmmakers, especially on the East Coast, might be considered minimalists. Certainly Hollis Frampton's Surface Tension is from that milieu. The film itself has three parts: a comic static shot emphasizing the passage of time; a fast motion tour through a city with fractured German commentary; and a slow seascape with fish floating midscreen. In this last section phrases translated from the German commentary are printed over the image. Of all the films seen in this festival, Surface Tension is technically and spiritually the newest." - P. Adams Sitney, Program note, Maryland, 1969.
Palindrome (1969, 22 min., silent)
The menacing latin palindrome 'In Girvm Imvs Nocte Et Consvmimvr Igni' (By night we go (down) into a gyre/and we are consumed by fire) serves as epigraph to this animated film. Anima is imparted to 12 variations on each of 40 congruent phrases, metamorphosed from the chemically mutilated flesh of color film itself. "Hollis, clearly this one of your greatest films! Absolute perfection." -- Stan Brakhage. Internationales Forum des Jungen Films, Berline, 1972
Cadenzas I & XIV (Completed Pts The Birth of Magellan: 14 Cadenas) (1980, 11.25 min,, sound)
"Cadenza I offers up multi-layered references to the primordial, to birth, and to Creation. Cadenza XIV: the laugh track...variously suggests a partially displaced relation to the silent comedy in Cadenza I, a reaction to the blatancy of the sexual symbolism and perhaps even an irreverent reflection on the emotion-laden symbological practice of the poetic tradition of personal filmmaking."--Bruce Jenkins.
Film prints for all Frampton shows courtesy of Film-Makers’ Coop in New York. Learn more on their Facebook page, or visit their website.
More on Hollis Frampton:
Although few have seen (or had the opportunity to see) the full extent of Frampton’s catalog, his reputation as a profound thinker and pioneer predicates the broad influence his work has had on both his peers in the 60s and 70s (from Frank Stella to Carl Andre and Lee Lozano) and artists today, from James Welling and Sharon Lockhart, to Jennifer Steinkamp, and many more. The past few years in particular have witnessed a mounting interest in the Frampton, with important symposiums organized in the states and internationally, publications, as well as a new release of (nostalgia) on the DVD American Treasures IV from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
For more information, visit Frampton’s website, read about the Hollis Frampton Collection at Harvard Film Archive, or read the interview with Frampton by Robert Gardner (excerpt).
About Peter Lunenfeld:
Lunenfeld’s books include The Digital Dialectic (MIT, 1999), Snap to Grid (MIT, 2000) USER (MIT, 2005), and The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: How the Computer Became Our Culture Machine (forthcoming). As creator and editorial director of the Mediawork project, he produced a pamphlet series for the MIT Press that redefined the relationship between serious academic discourse and graphic design, and between book publishing and the World Wide Web. He holds a Ph.D. in Film, Television and New Media from UCLA. He is a professor in the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA. For more information, visit Lunenfeld’s website here.
More about our co-presenting organizations:
Khastoo Gallery was founded in November of 2008 by Leila Khastoo, a Los Angeles native interested in bringing an international academic perspective to the artistic landscape of the city. Shows at Khastoo emphasize the critical content of art and art making, integrating current global viewpoints with an art historical approach to programming.
For more information on the Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Pacific Design Center, please visit their website here.

Upcoming in the Frampton series:
Sunday February 7: At the Egyptian Theater, moderated by David James

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.

Circles of Confusion: Hollis Frampton (Part 5)

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:12:04 -0800

Sunday February 7, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum and Khastoo Gallery present
Circles of Confusion: A Five-Screening Series of Films by Hollis Frampton
In conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary at the Pacific Design Center

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was an American filmmaker, artist and writer who left a legacy of brilliant innovation in avant-garde cinema. His films are challenging and ground breaking explorations in the material properties of the medium, including but not limited to mathematics, the contours of perception and cognition, and the phenomenological nature of the motion picture.
In this retrospective of more than half of his complete catalog of films, audiences are offered an unique glimpse at what made this modernist “thinker” so significant to art history and relevant to contemporary practices in film, from pure celluloid to digital and online technologies.
From January 21 to February 7, 2010, there will be five screenings with guest scholars and artists at each program to discuss his works and their influence on later artists. Among those speaking will be James Welling, artist; Peter Lunenfeld, scholar at UCLA Yvonne Rainer, artist; Erika Vogt, artist; David E. James, film scholar at USC; Alex Klein, artist and curatorial fellow at LACMA.
PART FIVE of this series will include Process Red, Gloria! and Zorns Lemma, introduced by David James.
Process Red (1968, 3:30, silent)
A first attempt to approximate more than one visual modality in a single brief work. Sightings from the retina, optic nerve, cortex. With this small film, I felt that I had got the bit in my teeth. -- H.F.

Gloria! (1979, 9.5 min, sound)
"In Gloria!, Frampton juxtaposes nineteenth-century concerns with contemporary forms through the interfacing of a work of early cinema with a videographic display of textual material. These two formal components (the film and the texts) in turn relate to a nineteenth-century figure, Frampton's maternal grandmother, and to a twentieth-century one, her grandson (filmmaker Frampton himself). In attempting to recapture their relationship, Gloria! becomes a somewhat comic, often touching meditation on death, on memory and on the power of image, music and text to resurrect the past."--Bruce Jenkins
Zorns Lemma (1970, 60 min, sound)
"In his most important work to date, and the most original new work of cinema I have seen since Brakhage's Scenes From Under Childhood: Part IV. Frampton's film is an exercise in mathematical logic in cinema. Or is it a mechanical logic?... It's about alphabet. It's about the unities of similarities. It's about sameness in a confusion. It's about logic in chance. Its about structure and logic. It's about rhythm. Ah, what a difference between Zorns Lemma and all the 'serious' commercial movies that I occasionally praise!" -- Jonas Mekas, Village Voice
"... the ultimate Frampton film, so far... he looks back on several of the dialogues his earlier films rehearsed: the tension between words on the screen and concrete images arose in Surface Tension, it explodes here; the cyclic repetitive variations of Artificial Light, are less repetitive, less varied, than the alphabetic cycles here; Zorns Lemma exaggerates the fixed rhythms of Palindrome and insists upon the pulse of one second with incredible obdurance... ... At a time when radical uniqueness seems progressively less probable, Hollis Frampton has made a film that is absolutely one of its kind." -- P. Adams Sitney, 1970
Film prints for all Frampton shows courtesy of Film-Makers’ Coop in New York. Learn more on their Facebook page, or visit their website.
More on Hollis Frampton:
Although few have seen (or had the opportunity to see) the full extent of Frampton’s catalog, his reputation as a profound thinker and pioneer predicates the broad influence his work has had on both his peers in the 60s and 70s (from Frank Stella to Carl Andre and Lee Lozano) and artists today, from James Welling and Sharon Lockhart, to Jennifer Steinkamp, and many more. The past few years in particular have witnessed a mounting interest in the Frampton, with important symposiums organized in the states and internationally, publications, as well as a new release of (nostalgia) on the DVD American Treasures IV from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
For more information, visit Frampton’s website, read about the Hollis Frampton Collection at Harvard Film Archive, or read the interview with Frampton by Robert Gardner (excerpt).
About David James:
David James teaches in the School of Cinema-Television at USC. He is the author or editor of several books on independent American film. His most recently published is the acclaimed The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles.

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.

Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (Part 5 of 8)

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:06:08 -0800

Sunday February 14, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Bodies, Objects, Films: An Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (Part 5 of 8 ) Kristina Talking Pictures (1976)

Over the course of our 2009-2010 seasons, Filmforum is proud to present a full retrospective of the media works of Yvonne Rainer. One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, this is the first full retrospective of her films in Los Angeles. Each appearance by Rainer will feature a Q&A led by a different moderator, to discuss with her varying aspects of her approaches to her art and life.
Tonight we will screen:
Kristina Talking Pictures (1976, 90 min, 16mm, color)
Rainer continued her preoccupation with the contradictions between public and private personas with this story of a female lion tamer from Budapest who comes to New York to become a choreographer.
“I was pretty happy doing the lion act for a while. But I’m afraid Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf ruined me for the circus. Dominating brute beasts…How can that compare to what they did?... Now that I’m thinking about it, Martha Graham and Jean-Luc Godard were as responsible for my leaving the circus as anybody.” – from the screenplay of Kristina Talking Pictures, in The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 100)
Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.
Click here to purchase!
Below, watch an excerpt of the show Screening Room, featuring Yvonne Rainer with Robert Gardner and including a clip from Kristina Talking Pictures:

NOTE - this video is also available for personal and instructional use, for more information click here.
About Yvonne Rainer:
When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. 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, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “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.”
Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.
In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO… (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).
Rainer’s films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F.; NuArt-L.A; Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney.
A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO… was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994.
In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
“I love the duality of props, or objects: their usefulness and obstructiveness in relation to the human body. Also the duality of the body: the body as a moving, thinking, decision-making entity and the body as an inert entity, object-like… oddly, the body can become object-like; the human being can be treated as an object, dealt with as an entity without feeling or desire. The body itself can be handled and manipulated as though lacking in the capacity for self-propulsion.” (Rainer, Works 1961-73, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, New York, New York University Press, 1974, p. 134).
Upcoming in the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective
(three more 2010 screenings):
February 21, 2010 (Part 6 of 8):
Lives of Performers and Trio A (with Rainer present)
March 28, 2010 (Part 7 of 8):
Privilege (with Rainer in person, Adam Hyman moderating)
May 16, 2010 (Part 8 of 8):
MURDER and murder (with Rainer in person, Catherine Lord moderating)

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.

Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (Part 6 of 8)

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:20:59 -0800

Sunday February 21, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Bodies, Objects, Films: An Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (Part 6 of 8 ) Trio A (1978) and Lives of Performers (1972)
Yvonne Rainer in person! Followed by discussion with Francesca N. Penzani
Over the course of our 2009-2010 seasons, Filmforum is proud to present a full retrospective of the media works of Yvonne Rainer. One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, this is the first full retrospective of her films in Los Angeles. Each appearance by Rainer will feature a Q&A led by a different moderator, to discuss with her varying aspects of her approaches to her art and life.
Tonight we will screen:
Trio A (1978, 10:30, video)
"I worked on Trio A alone for six months in 1965. The dance consisted initially of a 5-minute sequence of movement that would eventually be presented as The Mind is a Muscle, Part I at Judson Church on January 10, 1966. There it was performed by me, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton simultaneously but not in unison. In an interim version of The Mind is a Muscle (Judson Church, May 22, 1966), it was performed by William Davis, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton. In the final section, called “Lecture,” Peter Saul executed a balletic solo version, i.e. with pirouettes and jumps. In the final version (Anderson Theater, April 11, 1968), Trio A was performed by me in tap shoes in its original version at the end of the evening, while Paxton, Gordon, and Davis performed it as a trio at the beginnin
“The individual sequences last from 4 1/2 to 5 minutes, depending on each performer's physical inclination. Two primary characteristics of the dance are its unmodulated continuity and its imperative involving the gaze. The eyes are always averted from direct confrontation with the audience via independent movement of the head or closure of the eyes or simple casting down of the gaze.
“Since its completion Trio A has undergone many incarnations. In 1967 I performed it solo as a Convalescent Dance (Angry Arts Week, Hunter Playhouse); in 1968 Frances Brooks, the first of many untrained dancers who have learned it, performed it during a lecture-demonstration at the NYC Library of Performing Arts; in 1969 it was performed by a half-dozen dancers to the Chambers Brothers' In the Midnight Hour on the stage of the Billy Rose Theater in NYC. At the Connecticut College American Dance Festival of 1969, fifty students who had been taught Trio A by members of the group with whom I was in residence there, performed it for over an hour in a large studio for an audience that was free to roam to other events in the same building…” -Yvonne Rainer
Lives of Performers (1972, 90 min, 16mm, b&w)
A stark and revealing examination of romantic alliances, Lives of Performers examines the dilemma of a man who can’t choose between two women and makes them both suffer. Originally part of a dance performance choreographed by Rainer.
“The title evidences what is to come. While the performances of the preceding years had often been rehearsals for themselves, enacted on stage before an audience, the film offers, in place of such a rehearsal of a performance, rather a performance of a rehearsal. Rainer plays off that deception on the soundtrack, as the characters’ voices challenge the illusory spontaneity of her dialogue with “Yvonne, were you reading those questions” Her response introduces he problem of directorial authority (which cinema can so smoothly mask). The title also questions the autonomy of art from daily life, by mixing modes in its very phrasing (of the “lives” as “melodrama”) and by keeping the performers’ names and seeming identities as the data for the characters as well. If the performer could not be separated from the performance, nor the performance (with its “ordinary” movement) from daily life, then how to sort the dancer from the dance? Thus rehearsal time was now screen time, the private now public, and emotion – so long off-limits for ascetic modernists – now itself a form of melodrama, expressed via a vocabulary of cliché and banality in place of drama. The unity of the film derives from its constant themes of artifice and deception, as variously manifested in dance or film, product or process, story or image, male or female, art or life. The “melodrama” of daily life and artistic process is still very much with Rainer, and with us.” -- B. Ruby Rich, from “Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction” in The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 4)
Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.
Click here to purchase!
About Yvonne Rainer:
When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. 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, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “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.”
Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.
In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO… (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).
Rainer’s films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F.; NuArt-L.A; Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney.
A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO… was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994.
In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
“I love the duality of props, or objects: their usefulness and obstructiveness in relation to the human body. Also the duality of the body: the body as a moving, thinking, decision-making entity and the body as an inert entity, object-like… oddly, the body can become object-like; the human being can be treated as an object, dealt with as an entity without feeling or desire. The body itself can be handled and manipulated as though lacking in the capacity for self-propulsion.” (Rainer, Works 1961-73, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, New York, New York University Press, 1974, p. 134).
About Francesca N. Penzani:
Francesca N. Penzani started her studies in theatre at Teatro Viaggio and Comuna Baires in Italy. She moved to London in 1983 where she studied mime with Ronald Wilson and graduated from London Contemporary Dance School in 1991. She performed with independent contemporary choreographers in U.K. Italy and Switzerland (Nikky Smedley, Victoria Marks, Aletta Collins, Andy Papas, Michelle Levi, Pietro D’Amico, Marie Luise Kind, Anna Pons, Stewart Arnold, Paul Henry, Wolfang Stange among others). She danced in the musical Alice and toured Europe with the opera Carmen and 4D dance Company. She taught modern dance and choreography at The Young Place; The Evening School and Independent Dance at The Place in London. In 1991 she was one of the 5 British Choreographers selected for a Residency for Choreographers and Composers lead by Wim Vandekeybus and Thierry de Mey at the Royal Academy of Music in Glasgow; (Founded by the Arts Council of Scotland). In 1992 she was one of the selected choreographers for “ Residency for Choreographers and Composers” at Royal Festival Hall at South Bank Centre in London lead by Glynn Perrin (Founded by the Arts Council of England); “Poetry Dance Intermix” at South Bank Centre. In 1996 she was assistant to director/choreographer Lloyd Newson of DV8 in London.
Francesca started her video work for The Place Theatre in 1990 as camera operator, editor and director for live performances. She made documentaries for choreographers: Peter Badajo, Emilyn Claid, Yolande Snaith, Shobana Jayasingh, Royston Maldoon, Matthew Hawkins, Mark Baldwin, Laurie Booth and Rosemary Butcher. In 1992, she was awarded a trainingship for "Dance for the Camera" by BBC2 and the Arts Council of England, and worked with directors Ross MacGibbon and Terry Braun. (Producers Bob Lockyer, Wilson) In 1999 she received an MFA from the Schools of Dance and Integrated Media at Calarts. From 2000 til 2005 she was lecturer in "Dance Perceptions" and "Creative Dance for Children" at California State University Dominguez Hills (Division of Performing Arts and Digital Media, Dance Department) Her video works have been screened exhibitions, at festivals and in television programs all over the world. Since 1999, Francesca teaches at CalArts “Video for Dance”, “Video Dance Production Seminar” for the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance and she is faculty for the Center of Integrated Media at CalArts. For more information visit her CalArts faculty page.

Upcoming in the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective
(two more 2010 screenings):
March 28, 2010 (Part 7 of 8):
Privilege (with Rainer in person, Adam Hyman moderating)
May 16, 2010 (Part 8 of 8):
MURDER and murder (with Rainer in person, Catherine Lord moderating)

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.

Bjørn Melhus: Out of the Blue

Sat, 9 Jan 2010 10:44:18 -0800

Sunday February 28, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Bjørn Melhus: Out of the Blue
Bjørn Melhus in person!

Bjørn Melhus has developed a singular position, expanding the possibilities for the critical reception of cinema and television. His practice of fragmentation, destruction, and reconstitution of well-known figures, topics, and strategies of the mass media opens up not only a network of new interpretations and critical commentaries, but also defines the relationship of mass media and viewer anew. Melhus visited Filmforum in the late 1990s while doing time at Cal Arts, and we’re delighted to show some work form that period and of more recent vintage…

“Born in 1966 and since 2003 Professor of Virtual Realities at the Kassel School for the Fine Arts, Bjørn Melhus has become Germany’s foremost experimental filmmaker and is internationally renowned … Most of his work is in English and addresses the global pervasiveness of American television and Hollywood cinema. Melhus grew up as one of the first generations in Germany watching television as a child, which at the time meant dubbed versions of popular American TV series, such as Lassie, Flipper, Fury, and Bonanza, as well as reruns of classic Westerns and The Wizard of Oz. It is here important to stress that for Melhus Hollywood films are always mediated via other reproductive technologies of sound and image (such as television, VCR, and vocal recordings), which is why, although the Hollywood imaginary plays an immense role in his work, he is a phenomenon of a post-cinematic age.” – Alice A. Kuzniar, in After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film, edited by Randall Halle and Reinhild Steingröver (Camden House, 2008)

Tonight we will screen:
Blue Moon (1997, Video, 4:00)
Mickey went to Europe, the Smurf went to America – this is called cultural exchange.
Out of the Blue (1997, Video, 6:24)
Autobiography from a paper bag
The Oral Thing (2001, Video, 8:00)
“The best video, and perhaps the best in the show, is The Oral Thing, where Melhus plays a cast of weird characters in a disturbing spiritual self-help parody using game and talk show sound bytes. The "host" offers redemption, while the "guests" confess terrible secrets in front of an "audience" of hooded clones. Melhus channels everything from Heaven’s Gate to The Running Man in this unsettling 8-minute Loop. The narrative is punctuated by pseudo commercial breaks where the show’s logo is redrawn on the screen and the set glides into view, all done in low grade computer graphics that don’t feel dated so much as completely alien. While the sound effects and voices sound familiar, they aren’t recognizable, which gives the strangeness of the videos authenticity.” -- William Powhida, The Brooklyn Rail
Auto Center Drive (2003, 16 mm film on video, 28:00)
By quoting the most diverse identification models from the memory bank of 20th century Pop culture and its embodiment by Melhus himself, a completely new contextualization of known roles is provoked. In a psychic sense the film's creatures are animated by the voices of the non-dead dead (James Dean, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison), who achieved eternal youth and media immortality only through their early death.
“In Auto Center Drive, in particular, the regression signified by the invocation of former icons of the popular imagination operates on a transpersonal level and serves to elucidate contemporary Western society. (...) Melhus stages Americans' sense of a betrayed adolescence, their regressive desire for juvenility, and the missed encounter with their dead icons. It is because of the impossibility of retrieving such youthful rebelliousness and because of one's sense of entitlement to it that--to speak in terms of the Lacanian mirror stage--one yearns nostalgically for these images to the point of wanting to copy them. The exposure to life's fullness, including the danger of death, that these rebels represent leads the contemporary anaesthetized spectator to want to live vicariously through them. Thus Melhus adopts their poses, their gestures, and their phrases, which are now, however, rehearsed safely, as they are emptied amnesiacally of their time-specific political and cultural meaning.” – Alice A. Kuzniar, in After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film, edited by Randall Halle and Reinhild Steingröver (Camden House, 2008)
The Meadow (2007, video, 29:40)
“The Meadow is a moved personality profile of stagnancy in the form of an endless rite through the night. In the course of the journey Jimmy continually leaves for excursions into the woods, but after diverse confrontations, returns quickly to the questionable shelter of the car.” – Bjørn Melhus
Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.
Click here to purchase!
Short preview clips of several films are available at Melhus’ website
Special Thanks to the Goethe Institut for their assistance.
About Bjørn Melhus:
Bjørn Melhus (born 1966) studied at the Brauschweig School of Arts in Germany and 1997/1998 with a DAAD grant at CalArts filmschool. In 2001/2002 he participated in the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP in New York). Since 2002 he lives and works in Berlin. His works have been shown and awarded at numerous international film festivals and he has held screenings at Tate Modern and the LUX in London, the Museum of Modern Art (MediaScope) New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris - amongst others. His work has been exhibited in shows like The American Effect at the Whitney Museum New York, the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, solo and group shows at FACT Liverpool, Serpentine Gallery London, Sprengel Museum Hanover, Museum Ludwig Cologne, ZKM Karlsruhe, Denver Art Museum - to name just a few. For more information visit Melhus’ website.

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.

Blast Phemy 2: A Midweek Music/Media Mashup

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 18:36:42 -0800

Wednesday March 10, 2010, 8:00 and 10:15 pm

At the Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N Fairfax
Los Angeles Filmforum, Newtown and Cinefamily present
Blast Phemy 2: A Midweek Music/Media Mashup
Featuring Text of Light (including Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth, Ulrich Krieger, and Alan Licht); and Parallel with the band Languis
**NOTE THE CHANGE IN PRICE, TIME AND LOCATION**

Join Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, collaborating live with saxophonist Ulrich Krieger and guitarist Alan Licht, as he goes to the blasphemous extreme with live scores to the films of Stan Brakhage and other mid-century American cinema avant-gardists. According to Licht, Text of Light "does not perform soundtracks to the films of Stan Brakhage. Rather, it uses the films as a further element for improvisation, almost as [another] performer. While Brakhage intended for these films to be screened silently as films...[here] they are juxtaposed with the music, in a kind of real-time performance, mixed-media collage." But the evening doesn't stop there! The night also includes a screening of Parallel, an animation tour-de-force by mediamaker Huckleberry Lain, featuring music by Argentinean-born, L.A.-based electronic duo Languis.
Two performances! 8:00 pm and 10:15 pm. $17 general; $13 for Cinefamily, Newtown, and Filmforum members
Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.
Click here to purchase tickets for 8:00pm.
Click here to purchase tickets for 10:15pm.
Watch a clip of Text of Light:

Watch a clip of Parallel by Huckleberry Lain:

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.

Who Was Walter Ruttman?

Thu, 7 Jan 2010 13:39:41 -0800

Friday March 12, 2010, 8:00 pm

At the Echo Park Film Center, 1200 N Alvarado (at Sunset)
Los Angeles Filmforum and the Echo Park Film Center present
Who Was Walter Ruttman?
A Presentation by Stefan Droessler, Director of the Munich Film Museum
With a screening of Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927)
**NOTE THE CHANGE IN DATE, TIME AND LOCATION**

Tonight we’re delighted to host Stefan Droessler of the Munich Film Museum, which has an ongoing program of restoration of film works and issuing exemplary DVD editions through the Edition Filmmuseum label. Droessler will present the issues and process involved in their restoration of Walter Ruttmann’s work, followed by a presentation of the classic poetic documentary masterwork Berlin: Symphony of a City. The presentation will include photos, scans of paintings, and his short films Opus I-IV, and will last about 60-80 minutes, followed by intermission and the screening of Berlin.
This visit by Mr. Droessler made possible by the Goethe Institut Los Angeles.
Tonight’s films include:
Lichtspiel Opus 1 (1921, Germany, 11 minutes)
Opus 2 (1922, Germany, 3 minutes)
Opus 3 (1924, Germany, 3 minutes)
Opus 4 (1925, Germany, 3 minutes)
Directed, written and photographed by Walther Ruttmann
“Walther Ruttmann's Light-Play Opus Nr. 1, was shot in 1919 and 1920, had a musical score composed for it, and premiered in April 1921. It makes brilliant use of color. Ruttmann had been a painter and his last abstract canvases were characterized by many delicate nuances of painterly brushstrokes and fine gradations of unmixed colors.
In moving to film, Ruttmann tried to capture some of the same variety and dynamics by using three coloring techniques: tinting, toning and hand-tinting, that is, coloring the emulsion so dark areas have a hue, dying the film strip so the light areas have another color, and adding touches of other colors to specific shapes by painting directly on each film frame. This meant that each individual scene had to be printed separately (from black-and-white negative pieces), and each projection print of the film had to be assembled from a hundred fragments ...
Ruttmann limited the imagery to a confrontation between hard-edged geometric shapes and softer pliant forms, and allowed the colors not only to characterize certain figures, but also to establish mood, as in the long blue "nocturne" of the second movement. When Ruttmann followed this with subsequent abstract Opus films, he avoided the complex color effects of his first film. He gave general orange and green tints to scenes in Opus 2 and Opus 3, but the all hard-edged, optically-vibrating Opus 4 remained black-and-white for maximum contrast.” -- William Moritz, Color Music: Integral Cinema at iotaCenter.org.
Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927, Germany, 65 minutes)
“Filmed less than 20 years before the Nazi occupation, Ruttman’s influential silent documentary Berlin: Die Sinfonie einer Großstadt is an invaluable photographic record of life in Weimar Berlin. A timeless demonstration of the cinema’s ability to enthrall on a purely visceral level, the film offers a kaleidoscopic view of a single day in the life of the bustling metropolis. Carl Mayer (The Last Laugh), influenced by the naturalistic Kammerspiel movement, envisioned “a melody of pictures” sprung from daily reality instead of the stylized artificiality of the studio-bound expressionist film.” -- Holly Wallace, UCLA press release, 2007.

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.
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About Stefan Droessler:
Stefan Droessler was born in 1961. Since 1977 he has been the director of several film clubs, film festivals and film seminars. From 1986 to 1998 he founded and directed the Bonner Kinemathek and since 1999 he has been the director of the Filmmuseum Munich. He has published several books and articles about film history, and film techniques. The museum focuses on German silent films, the “New German Cinema,” and Munich film productions. The archive also holds a collection of Russian films and the estate of Orson Welles.
About Walter Ruttman:
Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941) is a pioneer of modern multimedia art. His first short films are unique experiments with forms, colors, and rhythm, his innovative commercials connected abstract animation art with concrete messages. The symphonic documentary Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt is one of the most famous silent classics, the travelogue Melodie der Welt became the first German sound feature film. With the radio play Weekend Ruttmann created the first "sound film without images" while his short In der Nacht transforms music to images and is a prototype of modern music videos. The 2-disc DVD by Edition Filmmuseum combines for the first time all surviving works by Walther Ruttmann from 1920-1931 in newly restored and reconstructed versions, often with original scores.
About the Munich Film Museum:
The Munich Film Museum was founded in 1963 as part of the City Museum. A centre for research in cinematic history, it is where important works of German and international film history are collected and restored. Additionally, its cinema shows a different film every day; silent films are often accompanied by live piano and/or violin music, especially composed for the occasion. The programme includes classics as well as relatively unknown films and recent productions. Newcomers in film making have a forum here just like established producers. Regular retrospectives document the work of a particular person or films on a certain topic. Directors, actors and film historians are often invited to give an introductory talk to a showing or to discuss the film with the audience. All films are shown in their original version with German or English subtitles.

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.

David Finkelstein: Marvelous Discourse

Wed, 6 Jan 2010 11:23:45 -0800

Sunday March 14, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
David Finkelstein: Marvelous Discourse
David Finkelstein in person!
Filmforum is delighted to host David Finkelstein, visiting from New York, whose exuberant videos explore both the limits of video and of performance, in ongoing dialogue with the viewer’s perceptions. He is the founder of the Lake Ivan Performance Group.

Since 1982, Lake Ivan Performance Group has presented their poetic montages of words, music, and images in performance venues throughout New York, such as Here, Symphony Space, Theater for the New City, PS 122, Dixon Place, and many others. Now, they are making their work more widely available through a series of innovative videos, which combine meticulously crafted computer-generated imagery with improvised text and music. The videos have been shown on Public Access television, and have been screened at a variety of public venues, including Experiments in Cinema, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, Artists' Television Access, the Light Factory, the Berkeley Video and Film Festival, and many others.

In these wholly improvised pieces, performer/director David Finkelstein and performers Ian W. Hill, Cassie Terman, and Agnes de Garron take the viewer on a journey into an inner landscape of surprising and poetic juxtapositions of words and images. The results are both ironically humorous and emotionally resonant. Multiple layers of overlaid imagery and text help the viewer to make sense of the complex sound track, which consists of two simultaneous monologues plus music, by bringing out the emotional and musical threads which run through the piece, while highlighting key phrases of text.

Tonight we will screen:
Earth and Moon in Love (2004, 21 minutes)
At the climax of Percy Shelley's lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound, Mankind is delivered once and for all from tyranny, and the Universe celebrates his new-found freedom and self-mastery. As part of this celebration the Earth and the Moon fall rapturously in love. This musical setting for acclaimed countertenors Randall Wong and John Collis places the amorous planets among floating panels of scenery which illustrate almost every line of the text, creating a visual/ musical feast which is at once silly, mystical and delirious.
Earth and Moon in Love won "Best of Fest: Experimental" at the Putnam County Film and Video Festival, "Best Experimental Short" at the Brooklyn Arts Council Film Festival, "Best of Festival: Experimental" at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival, and the Silver Medal of Excellence at the Park City Film Music Festival. It has also screened at the Big MiniDV Festival, the Outer Festival, Free Form Film Festival, Video Bardo in Argentina, and Exground in Germany.
"Earth and Moon in Love is lovely. Steeped in rich classical imagery; baroque...rococo...an absolute delight of flamboyant beauty." --Mike Kuchar
Terrifying Blankness (2008, 30 min)
Based on a completely improvised performance, Terrifying Blankness examines the dilemma of choice. Paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong move, the two protagonists find themselves either trapped on the wheel of desire or else trying to escape from the fear of choice entirely by withdrawing into an empty blankness. Lemons, snakes, and swans are among the curious images which play a part in this existential drama. Will they finally locate the inner voice which will guide them in their decisions?
"Terrifying Blankness is a remarkably deft performance on all accounts. I loved the recurrence of themes, both conceptual and musical, that ties this piece together; the impossible objects, the wonderful integration of music, and the dense, contradictory visual spaces that arise from the layering." --Peter Rose
Burning Arc (2009, 10 min)
The mechanics of male sexual arousal are revealed as the hidden source of the form of a familiar musical composition. Music by Samuel Barber.
Marvelous Discourse (2010, 21 minutes, video)
"Marvelous Discourse is just that! The artistry of visual decor along with the lyrical invention of dialogue flowing musically with a resonating clearness of tone, flavored with wit in a stream of consciousness is captivating and lovely...a free-spirited sort of poetry in visual attire and mental trance.” --Mike Kuchar
Language passes through the body, meaty, corporeal, and breathing. Do you adopt the stereotypically "male" strategy of verbally lunging at your opponent, trying to skewer him rhetorically, or do you adopt the "feminine" approach, like the Oracle of Delphi, and open your body to allow voices from the beyond to speak through you? Marvelous Discourse uses cave art, shadow puppets, and a visit to a café in the Israeli town of Endor, among many other images, to explore the gendered experience of language-in-the-body. The text for the video is completely improvised by the actors, as a spectacular example of language unfolding from an intuitive physicality.
Marvelous Discourse was screened by the Gemini CollisionWorks in New York, at Pura Vide in North Carolina, and at CRS New York.
Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.
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More on David Finkelstein:
Finkelstein has been making performances since 1982. He has been developing a style of improvised performance work since 1993, which he has performed at Here, Theater for the New City, the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Movement Research at the Judson Church, PS 122, The Knitting Factory, New York Improvisation Festival, and many other venues. He has taught Improvisation Technique for 3 years at Movement Research, where he was Artist in Residence in 1997. His work has been funded by The Fund for Creative Communities, The Field, Movement Research, meet the Composer, The Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BACA, and many individual donors.
His video work has been featured in the Brainwash Film Festival, Les Inattendus, Instants Video, Denver Underground Festival, Experiments in Cinema, CRS New York, Outer Film Fest, Artist Television Access, Free Form Film Festival, Ybor Festival, Rubric Video, WRO (Poland) Festival, New Vision Cinema, Athens (Ohio) Film Fest, Dahlonega Film Festival, VideoBardo, Exground, Valleyfest, Big MiniDV Festival, Park City Film Music Festival, the Puget Sound Cinema Society, the Downstream Film Festival, the Silver Lake Festival, EXP2, New Filmmakers, Bearded Child Festival, X-Fest, SinCiné, and the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema. Altogether, his video works have won nine awards at four different Festivals, including the Grand Festival Award from the Berkeley Video and Film Festival for "Born in Mid-Flight" and "Best of Festival: Experimental" from the Brooklyn Arts Council Film Festival for "Earth and Moon in Love." He has been commissioned three times to create videos for the Outmusic Awards, and these videos were subsequently shown on the PrideVision cable network and the PBS series "Under the Pink Carpet." His work has been funded by The Fund for Creative Communities, The Field, Movement Research, Meet the Composer, The Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BACA, and other sources.
“Finkelstein, who makes his living as a rehearsal pianist for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, has worked for years to create an improvisational acting style - not the kind where performers agree in advance on a topic or story line, but one where "we access our intuition about what's going on in the piece at each moment and turn that into language and silences. We discover as we're doing it what the themes and structures are." (He works with few actors and says most need a year's training or more.) Yet there is a structure to these short films, he avers, and it's one viewers can tap into:
"The throughline is one of emotions, of moods and energy. These pieces are filled with ideas; you don't stop thinking while you're watching, but the intellect doesn't run the show. If you get inside the feelings of these films, they make sense." - Lawrence Toppman, Charlotte Observer
Micro-Film wrote that Lake Ivan Exists #21 is "a tight example of how to make a successful experimental video." The Village Voice wrote that Lake Ivan's performance "derived a powerful emotional current from de Garron's wounded, clownlike persona," while Theatre Journal called Finkelstein's direction "revelatory," and de Garron's performance "riveting."

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!

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 14:39:37 -0800

Sunday March 21, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
The Film Registry Show! Selections from the 2009 picks by the Library of Congress
Janie Geiser and Chuck Workman in person!

You’ve never seen a show like this! All classics, selected by the Library of Congress for its film registry in 2009.
Two of the makers are Filmforum members who will be present at the show - Janie Geiser and Chuck Workman!
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."
“Annual selections to the registry are finalized by the Librarian after his review of hundreds of titles nominated by the public and extensive discussions with members of the National Film Preservation Board, as well as the Library’s motion-picture staff. The Librarian urges the public to make nominations for next year’s registry at the Film Board’s website.
Tonight we will screen:
Little Nemo (Winsor McCay, 1911, 11 minutes, b&w)
This classic work, a mix of live action and animation, was adapted from Winsor McCay’s famed 1905 comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland." Its fluidity, graphics and story-telling was light years beyond other films made during that time. A seminal figure in both animation and comic art, McCay profoundly influenced many generations of future animators, including Walt Disney. Print courtesy of the iotaCenter and the Academy Film Archive. See below for an excerpt of Nemo from YouTube.
Quasi at the Quackadero (Sally Cruikshank, 1975, 10 min., color)
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 see a clip from Quasi on YouTube.
The Lead Shoes (Sydney Peterson, 1949, 18 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
"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 (Janie Geiser, 1994, 11 minutes, 16mm, color)
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."
The Red Book was shown as part of the 1996 New Directors / New Films Festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The New York Times critic Caryn James wrote: âThe Red Book (is) Janie Geiserâs 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. Print courtesy of Janie Geiser.
A Study in Reds (Miriam Bennett, 1932, 18 min, 16mm to DVD)
This polished amateur film by Miriam Bennett spoofs women’s clubs and the Soviet menace in the 1930s. While listening to a tedious lecture on the Soviet threat, Wisconsin Dells’ Tuesday Club members fall asleep and find themselves laboring in an all-women collective in Russia under the unflinching eye of the Soviet special police.
The Jungle (Charlie “Brown” Davis and Jimmy “Country” Robinson, 1967, 22 minutes, documentary, screened from video)
With the guidance of Temple University social worker Harold Haskins, a group of African-American teenage boys in Philadelphia made this hybrid documentary/dramatization of their lives in the 12th and Oxford Street gang. Shot in an original and natural style, this 22-minute film was recognized with festival awards, but was never theatrically released. In 1968, Churchill Films distributed the film in 16mm for the educational market. The production led several of the gang members to earn high school and college degrees.
“The Jungle looks different from other filmed depictions of gang life, there is a reason: Every aspect of its creation, from the script to its photography, editing and acting was manned by the young members of a real Philadelphia street gang. Project director Harold Haskins was an eager young social worker when he approached the 12th & Oxford Street Gang and convinced them they should try to make a movie. The result is a completely inside view of this usually hidden world, with authentic depictions of their unique social codes, activities, fashion and music (the soundtrack includes an early street-corner rap about the joys of cheap wine). Soon the gang was transformed into the 12th & Oxford Film Makers Corporation, presenting their work around the world and committed to positive change in their community. Yet, their cameraman, specially trained for this project, was later slain by a rival gang jealous of their filmmaking success.” - Program Notes, Secret Cinema.
Scratch and Crow (Helen Hill, 1995, 10 min., 16mm, color)
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. -- Helen Hill website. To read more about the Helen Hill Collection at Harvard Film Archive, click here.
Precious Images (Chuck Workman, 1986, 8 min., color)
Chuck Workman’s legendary compilation film to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Directors Guild of America is also a dazzling celebration of the first near-century of American cinema. The pioneer of rapid-fire film history montages, Precious Images contains in the space of seven short minutes nearly 500 clips from classic films spanning the years 1903-1985. It became the most influential and widely shown short film in history. Workman is known for creating the montages shown during the annual Academy Awards broadcast. The film won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film during the 1987 ceremony. In 1996, the film was reissued with new scenes from more contemporary films up to that point. Click here to see a list of films included in Precious Images. Film print courtesy of Chuck Workman.
Little Nemo on You Tube:

About Janie Geiser:
Janie Geiser is an internationally recognized visual/performance artist and experimental filmmaker, whose work is known for its investigation of the emotional power of inanimate objects, its sense of ambiguity, and its strength of design. One of the pioneers in the renaissance of American avant-garde object performance, Geiser has, for two decades, created innovative, hypnotic works which integrate puppets and performing objects with film and video. She was recognized in the LA Weekly’s 2006 State of the Arts as one of 100 significant Los Angeles Artists.
A Guggenheim Fellow, Janie Geiser’s performances have been presented nationally and internationally, and she has been recognized with an Obie Award, two Bessie Awards, NEA Fellowships, a Rockefeller Media Artisi Fellowship, a Pew/TCG grant, and funding from Creative Capitol, the Henson Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. Her work has been presented at the Walker Art Center, Arts at St. Ann’s, Dance Theater Workshop, the Public Theater, Redcat, MOCA, PS122, HERE, and at the Henson Festival of Puppet Theater. She received a 2006 City of Los Angeles Visual Artist Fellowship for her installation The Spiders Wheels. Her peepshow/installation/performance The Reptile Under the Flowers was presented as a work-in-progress at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in August 2008, and premiered in May 2009 as a co-presentation of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Automata in Los Angeles.  Geiser is Co-Artistic Director of Automata, a Los Angeles nonprofit dedicated to the creation, incubation, and presentation of experimental puppet theater, experimental film, and other contemporary art practices centered on ideas of artifice and performing objects. Geiser is also the Director of the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at CalArts, one of the rare programs in the US for the study of experimental object performance and installation. Read Geiser’s full biography on her website.
About Chuck Workman:
Chuck Workman has been involved in filmmaking and theater for over twenty-five years as an award-winning director, writer, and producer. Workman's theatrical short, Precious Images, made for the Directors Guild of America, won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short and has become the most widely shown short in film history, appearing in schools, museums, international conferences, numerous film festivals and over 1000 theaters worldwide. It is one of five of his films circulating in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Workman created several short films and opening sequences for ten Academy Awards presentations and two Emmy Award shows, and in 1992 he was nominated for an Emmy for Directorial Achievement for his work on the Oscar show, and has also been nominated six times for editing on the Oscar show. Chuck Workman is a former President of the International Documentary Association, and was a former Commissioner of the Santa Monica Arts Commission. He was on the faculty of the USC Film School, is a lecturer in filmmaking at many major media arts centers, and has contributed articles on filmmaking to several magazines. Read more about Workman on his website.
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 West Coast Premiere of Worse Than War

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 19:27:56 -0800

Wednesday March 24, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Aero Theater, 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica
Los Angeles Filmforum and The American Cinematheque present
The West Coast Premiere of Worse than War
Co-produced by JTN Productions & Thirteen/WNET
Discussion following with director Mike DeWitt, producers Jay Sanderson, Adam Hyman, and Eve Marson and editor Jason Rosenfield
**NOTE THE CHANGE IN DATE, PRICE AND LOCATION**

In the spring of 2008, renowned Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen took a camera crew with him on a worldwide journey to explore the roots of genocide in our time. This documentary is the unforgettable filmed record of that trip, following Goldhagen as he travels to Rwanda, Bosnia, Ukraine, Guatemala, Germany - sites of some of the worst mass slaughters in the past century - and encounters an extraordinary array of people who provide powerful insights into why genocide continues to plague our planet. Filmforum is very proud to co-present the west coast premiere of this amazing documentary, especially since one of the film’s producers is our very own Executive Director, Adam Hyman!
Worse Than War, directed by Mike DeWitt (2010, 105 mins)
The phrase “never again” – intoned repeatedly after the Holocaust, and after every genocide since the Holocaust – has proved to be a hollow one. In the past century, there have been more innocent victims of genocides than there have been combat deaths in all the wars fought everywhere in the world. The numbers are staggering: the Turks killed more than a million Armenians during World War I; the Japanese killed millions across Asia during the 1930s and 40s, the estimated death toll in the Soviet gulags and beyond is more than 8 million; the Germans killed 6 million Jews and millions more during World War II; the Communist Chinese killed an estimated 30 million in the 1950s and 60s; and the Khmer Rouge wiped out fully 20% of Cambodia’s population during the 1970s. Today, genocides are underway in Darfur (Sudan) and Congo with hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – dead or displaced. As a society, we understand little about why genocides have happened in the past, why they continue to happen, and how they can be stopped.   Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is determined to change that. In the spring of 2008 – as he completed his groundbreaking book WORSE THAN WAR: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity – the renowned Holocaust scholar (author of the #1 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners) took a camera crew with him on an extraordinary around-the-world journey to explore the roots of genocide in our time. This documentary is the unforgettable filmed record of that trip. The documentary follows Goldhagen as he travels to Rwanda, Bosnia, Ukraine, Guatemala, Germany – sites of some of the worst mass slaughters in the past century. In the film – itself a groundbreaking film, the first to juxtapose and analyze so many of these mass atrocities – Goldhagen encounters an extraordinary array of people including killers, survivors, witnesses, journalists and political leaders whose personal stories and commentary provide powerful insights into why genocides continue to plague our planet.   The questions Goldhagen asks are the fundamental ones: how can neighbors turn against neighbors as they so often do in these mass slaughters? Why do the killers kill? Are they “just following orders” as many later claim, or are they willing killers who believe they are doing the right thing? Why does the world so often stand by – even as they see and read reports of the bodies piling up? Does the international community not have enough information? Or political will? Or do we simply not care enough to do something?
Advance ticket purchase available through Fandango, $11 General, $7 for Filmforum members. 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.

Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (Part 7 of 8)

Sun, 3 Jan 2010 12:01:34 -0800

Sunday March 28, 2010, 7:30 pm

At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Bodies, Objects, Films: An Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (Part 7 of 8 ) Privilege (1990)
Yvonne Rainer in person! Moderated by Martin Kersels
Over the course of our 2009-2010 seasons, Filmforum is proud to present a full retrospective of the media works of Yvonne Rainer. One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, One of the most significant artists in dance and film of the last fifty years, this is the first full retrospective of her films in Los Angeles. Each appearance by Rainer will feature a Q&A led by a different moderator, to discuss with her varying aspects of her approaches to her art and life.
Tonight we will screen:
Privilege (1990)
Privilege begins with a documentary style exploration of the taboo subject of menopause and goes on to explore the historical medicalisation and trivialisation of women as they move beyond their child bearing years.

Clearly ageism is a factor in this, but Privilege doesn't take on a pat victim mentality in it's exploration, rather widening it's gaze to consider the many competing forms of discrimination that exist in our society.

Privilege ingeniously shifts from documentary to fiction and back as it plays the effects of ageism, sexism and racism off against one another.
The effect of this is an extremely broad ranging and compelling social critique that goes to the core of the competing power relations that we all negotiate every day. In this, Rainer presents us with an image of a power infused world where all of our possibilities in life are mediated by different levels of social privilege largely determined by arbitrary social stereotypes.

This subject matter demands an active audience as viewers realise that the real-world applications of the ideas that Rainer raises are endless.
Rainer's work takes under the skin key cultural theories such as Julia Kristeva's writings on abjection and Michel Foucault's theories on power and heirarchy. Yet thankfully in doing this, this rhizomatic film does not befall the same overly preachy or less than engaging fate that some of the feminist collective films of the past have. You do not have to be a convert of feminist or cultural theory to appreciate this film. Privilege's powerful performances, beautiful visuals and compelling subject matter really do stand alone.

Privilege's marriage of cultural theory, documentary, and the highest level of poetic drama creates an extremely thought provoking film that demands consideration as one of the most important cinematic social critique of the 1990's. A thoroughly fascinating film.
Excerpt is from the review of Privilege on Film Optimist

About Yvonne Rainer:
When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. 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, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, “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.”
Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D’Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking.
In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO… (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996).
Rainer’s films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F.; NuArt-L.A; Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney.
A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO… was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994.
In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.
“I love the duality of props, or objects: their usefulness and obstructiveness in relation to the human body. Also the duality of the body: the body as a moving, thinking, decision-making entity and the body as an inert entity, object-like… oddly, the body can become object-like; the human being can be treated as an object, dealt with as an entity without feeling or desire. The body itself can be handled and manipulated as though lacking in the capacity for self-propulsion.” (Rainer, Works 1961-73, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, New York, New York University Press, 1974, p. 134).
About Martin Kersels:
Martin Kersels, co-director of the Program in Art at California Institute of the Arts, is a Los Angeles-based artist who works with sculpture, audio, photography and performance. He has had one-person shows in New York, Los Angeles, Bern and Paris. In September 2008 Martin Kersels' retrospective exhibition, Heavyweight Champion, was shown in the Santa Monica Museum of Art and at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He recently won a Guggenheim Fellowship Award for 2008/09. Martin Kersels' work has been shown in numerous group shows such as Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty, Young Americans 2 at the Saatchi Collection, and The 1997 Whitney Biennial. His work is held in various collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Norton Family Foundation.
Upcoming in the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective
(one more 2010 screening):
May 16, 2010 (Part 8 of 8):
MURDER and murder (with Rainer in person, Catherine Lord moderating)

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.