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Filmforum
at the Egyptian
Theater
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| February
22 |
Martha
Colburn in person! |
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| Mischievous
and trigger happy with her Super 8 camera, Colburn creates a dazzling
array of rhythmic visual montages as perverse as they are pleasurable.
Utilizing collage images taken from pop culture ephemera, stylishly intermixed
with clips of the grotesque, she transfers a raw, spastic energy onto
film that is filled with both irony and humor to create a unique “Colburn”
aesthetic. "Martha works with raw materials dredged up from her archeological digs into the oozing sub-strata of pop-culture: found films and sounds, old magazine ads ... memories of old TV shows and mass media images imbedded in the brain. She saws into the dead, glossy outer surfaces and reconstructs it all backwards together double-jointed... zapping it all to life with an electric charge juiced up on pure chaos. The humanoid contraptions jerk to life, their body parts at least liberated from the inertia of their original contexts, even if they all seems to be moving in opposite directions. To advocates of avant-garde cinema who attend her shows at high art venues like The Museum of Modern Art in New York, or The Cinematheque in San Francisco, her found footage techniques recall the work of Bruce Conner, while her collage style is somewhat reminiscent of the films of Larry Jordan. To punks and trash rockers who see her films in basement clubs or seedy bars of the type she recently screened in on a tour of out-of-the-way cities like El Paso, Albuquerque and Shreveport, the whole mess rings a more modern bell, and the films would work perfectly as openers to a Gwar or Caroliner Rainbow concert. But from whatever perspective her films are approached, the sum result is something new and fresh, despite the amalgamation of familiar references and styles. A critic at the San Francisco Bay Guardian blessed her "scabrous animation" as a "perfect marriage of Monty Python and Hieronymous Bosch". -- Jack Stevenson, |
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| Screenings
include: Secrets of Mexuality (2003) Groscher Lansangriff: Big Bug Attack (2002 animation) Cats Amore (2002 animation) Skelehellavision (2002 animation and hand-colored film) Spider's In Love (2000 animation and found footage) Lift Off (1998 double projection) A Toetally Solefull Feeture Pedsintation (1998 animation) There's A Pervert In Our Pool! (1998 animation) What's On? (1997 animation and re-filmed television) Evil Of Dracula (1997 animation) I Can't Keep Up (1997 re-filmed TV, home movies, animation) Persecution in Paradise (1997 animation) Asthma (1995 hand-manipulated found footage) |
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