Outer Ear Festival of Sound: Chris Mann, Danièle Wilmouth, and Morganville
Thursday, November 8, 2007, 8:15pm
The Outer Ear Festival of Sound and CATE present a special two-part evening of films, videos, and performances that mine the relationships between sound, performance, and cinema. A reception and performance by Fred Lonberg-Holm will follow the 6pm show. The Outer Ear Festival of Sound is the only comprehensive interdisciplinary sonic arts festival in the Midwest. For more information visit www.expsoundstudio.org.
2007, Chris Mann and Danièle Wilmouth, Australia/USA, ca. 70 min, various formats
Chris Mann, Danièle Wilmouth, Trevor Martin, and Kym Olsen in person!
Renowned Australian poet, composer, and performer Chris Mann takes advantage of the Film Center’s surround-sound system in boy, what god could’ve done if only he’d had money, a tour-de-force multi-channel audio performance of intelligence and wit. Mann’s performance is paired with SAIC faculty member Danièle Wilmouth’s film collaboration with the performance duo Morganville (SAIC alumni Kym Olsen and Trevor Martin, also SAIC faculty), A Heretics Primer on Love & Exertion: 29 Incidents of Dual Consequence. Scored by Mark Messing and Split Lip Rayfield, Martin and Olsen slip from monologue to dance, trousers to dresses, and male to female as the camera spins around them. “A restless revelation of what film can be” –Goat Island member Matthew Goulish. Co-presented by SAIC’s Department of Sound.
The Films of Bruce Conner
Explosive, elegiac, and ecstatic, the films of Bruce Conner (1933-2008) have had an enormous impact on film and pop culture, echoing through the rhythms of MTV, on-line remixes, and the use of found footage in art and cinema around the globe. Conner began making films in the late 1950s by piecing together scraps of newsreels, stag movies, and Castle novelty films into viscerally edited fever dreams that illuminated the shadow-world of America’s subconscious such as A Movie (1958) and Report (1967), and later, into lyrical assemblages of mystery and nostalgic longing, such as Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977) and Valse Triste (1979). He extended his propulsive approach to editing into innovative collaborations with numerous pop musicians, including the singer Toni Basil (Breakaway, 1966), David Byrne and Brian Eno (Mea Culpa, 1981 and America Is Waiting, 1981), and DEVO (Mongoloid, 1978), as well as with minimalist composer Terry Riley in Looking for Mushrooms (1996) and the monumental Crossroads (1976).
These two programs survey Conner’s 50-year career and include a rare public screening of SAIC’s own print of Marilyn Times Three (1972), an early version of what would eventually become Marilyn Times Five (1973), which is also included in the tribute, affording an extraordinary opportunity to view Conner’s working style and its afterimage.
Filmmaker Michelle Silva, representative of the Conner Family Trust will be present for an audience discussion after Thursday’s screening. Silva and Bruce Jenkins, co-curator for the Walker Art Center’s exhibition, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II, will be present for an audience discussion after Friday’s screening. Special thanks to Jean Conner, Michelle Silva of the Conner Estate, and Bruce Jenkins, Henrietta Zielinski and Thomas Hodge of SAIC.
Thursday, April 16, 6:00 pm
THE FILMS OF BRUCE CONNER, PROGRAM 1
Program includes: Mea Culpa (1981), A Movie (1958), The White Rose (1967), Marilyn Times Three (1972), Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977), Valse Triste (1979), Looking for Mushrooms (1996), Easter Morning (2008). 1958–2008, Bruce Conner, USA, 16mm & DigiBeta video, ca 75 min.
Friday, April 17, 6:00 pm
THE FILMS OF BRUCE CONNER, PROGRAM 2
Program includes: Breakaway (1966), Marilyn Times Five (1973), Vivian (1964), Ten Second Film (1965), Mongoloid (1978), America Is Waiting (1981), Report (1967), Crossroads (1976).1963–81, Bruce Conner, USA, 16mm & 35mm, ca 80 min.
Known for assemblage, drawing, painting, collage, photographs and conceptual events, BRUCE CONNER first attracted public attention in the 1950s with his nylon-shrouded assemblages—complex sculptures of found objects such as women’s stockings, costume jewelry, bicycle wheels, and broken dolls, often combined with collaged or painted surfaces. He turned to short filmmaking in the late 1950s, pioneering a fast-paced collage style that established him as an important figure in postwar independent filmmaking. In the mid 1960s, he collaborated on a number of light shows for the legendary Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. During the 1970s, he became a fixture on the West Coast punk scene, documenting much of it in a series of photographs from the era. His films and artwork are represented in the collections of major museums and archives in Europe and North America, including the Harvard Film Archives, la Cinémathèque Francaise, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Centre Pompidou Museum in Paris. A Movie (1958) was selected for the U.S. National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
Bruce Conner on Wikipedia
2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II (Walker Art Center Archive)
Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S.
Thursday, April 9, 2009, 6pm
Curator Chris Hill in person!
In 1995, the Video Data Bank published “Surveying the First Decade,” a massive, 16-hour anthology of nearly 70 titles from artists and media-makerswho defined the first decade of video art. Curated by Chris Hill, then curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the anthology is widely acclaimed for an expansive and revelatory vision that positions works by grassroots activists alongside those by established artists. This evening, to celebrate the VDB’s re-release of “Survey” on DVD, Hill illuminates the medium’s roots in the tumultuous artistic, cultural, and political practices of the 1970s and her efforts to capture the scene twenty years later. The program includes rare public screenings of the collection’s most revealing videos, including: Switch! Monitor! Drift! (Steina Vasulka, 1976); Queen Mother Moore Speech at Greenhaven Prison (People’s Communications Network, 1973); Boomerang (Richard Serra & Nancy Holt, 1974); The Red Tapes, Part II (Vito Acconci, 1976). Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. 1973-76, multiple artists, USA, Beta SP video, ca 75 min.
CHRIS HILL is a media curator and educator. She served on the Media Arts faculty at Antioch College from 1997 through its close in 2008. Prior to Antioch, she served as Video Curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY where she also presided over the Board of BCAM, the city’s public access cable TV facility. She is currently on the faculty and Executive Collective of the Nonstop Institute, a liberal arts educational project started in the wake of Antioch’s closure. Her recent curatorial work examines documentary media on US prisons, including the lecture/screening “Habeas Corpus: You Have the Body” (2005-07) and a suite of media art projects exploring the information-gathering strategies of honey bees, including “Sweetness and Labor”(2006). Recent publications include an interview with curator/educator Keiko Sei about her work on the Thai-Burma border in RISK (2008) and an essay on artist Barbara Lattanzi’s “idiomorphic” software projects that appropriate the editing strategies of 1970s experimental films, published in Millennium Film Journal (2003) and Performance Research (2004).
A World Rattled of Habit: Films by Ben Rivers (and Karl Kels & Barry Kimm)
Thursday, April 2, 2009, 6pm
In the last three years, UK artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers has produced a series of rich, expressive portraits of people living on the wilderness fringes of Europe and the British Isles. Rivers builds a strong bond with his subjects, often living with them for periods of time, and his hand-crafted films are intimate medleys of the rhythms and mossy details that give shape to their lives. This evening Rivers draws upon his days co-programming the renowned Brighton Cinematheque to present his work. TRT: 70 mins.
Origin of the Species (2008, 16mm, 16 mins)
A film begun as a portrait of S, a 75 year-old man living in a remote part of Inverness-shire. S has been obsessed with Darwin’s works for much of his life. Since a child he has wondered at life on Earth and though he never became an academic, found in Darwin many answers to his questions. The film images concentrate on the mysterious geography of his world; his garden, from the microcosmic to the grand; the contraptions and inventions he’s made; his isolated patch of land where he has built his house after a life of traveling and working around the world. The soundtrack has S heard discussing his take on life on Earth and humans place upon it. The film attempts to span from the beginnings of the world up to an uncertain future. (BR)
Measurements of Oxford (Barry Kimm, US, 1989, 9 mins)
The Oxford of the title is a small town in Iowa; the measurements in question are taken on everything but the kitchen sink, from gas pumps to street signs to the townsfolk themselves. Putting aside their midwestern scepticism, the inhabitants humor the filmmaker in his peculiar project, even acting as his cohorts. (New York Public Library)
Astika (2006, 16mm, 8 mins)
A portrait of Astika, who lives on an island in Denmark. He has lived in a run down farm house for 15 years and his project has been to let the land around him grow unchecked, but now he has been forced to move out by people who prefer more pristine neighbours. (BR)
Ah, Liberty! (2008, 16mm, 19 mins)
A family’s place in the widerness, somehow outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format, but is undercut with a sense of foreboding. There’s no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived. (CUFF) Winner of the Tiger Award for Best Short Film, 2008 Rotterdam Film Festival
Prince Hotel (Karl Kels, Germany, 1987/2003, 8 mins)
A portrait of New York’s Bowery and its time-worn occupants. (Goethe-Institut)
A World Rattled of Habit (2008, 16mm, 10mins)
A day trip to Suffolk, to see my friend Ben and his dad Oleg. (BR)
BEN RIVERS is an artist and filmmaker. He lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited around the world and has received numerous awards, most recently the Tiger Award for Short Film, IFF Rotterdam 2008 and Best Experimental Film, Vila do Conde 2008. He has been the recipient of a number of commissions, including a London Artist’s Film and Video Award, for which he made two new works—ORIGIN OF SPECIES and AH, LIBERTY! Recent exhibitions include; “On Overgrown Paths” solo show, Permanent Gallery, Brighton; “Wild Shapes” Cell Project Space, London; “If—People and Places In Recent Film and Video” Bloomberg Space, London; Artist-in-focus screenings in Courtisane Festival, Ghent 2008; Pesaro International Film Festival 2008; London Film Festival 2008 and Punto de Vista, Spain 2009. Together with US artist filmmaker Ben Russell, he toured New Zealand/Australia in July/Aug 2008 with a two-person show “We Can Not Exist In This World Alone.” In 1996, Ben co-founded and since co-managed/programmed Brighton Cinematheque—renowned for screening a unique program of film from its earliest days through to the latest artists’ film and video.
Added screenings of Naoyuki Tsuji Fri 3/27 and Sat 3/28!
The Animated Films of Naoyuki Tsuji
Added Screenings!
Friday March 27, Noon
Saturday March 28, 1:30 pm
FREE!
Gene Siskel Film Center (162 N. State / 312-846-2600)
Conversations at the Edge has added two FREE screenings of The Animated Films of Naoyuki Tsuji for Friday, 3/27 and Saturday 3/28 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
The Animated Films of Naoyuki Tsuji
Thursday, March 26, 2009, 6pm
Chicago premieres!
The work of Japanese animator Naoyuki Tsuji hovers between dream and nightmare, fairy tale and psychodrama. Tsuji animates his films with charcoal—drawing, erasing, and redrawing over a single sheet of paper. The erasures remain as ghostly afterimages, creating the sense that Tsuji’s characters are forever haunted by their pasts. The sky comes alive in Trilogy About Clouds (2005); angelic offspring are blinded by fire and water in A Feather Stare at the Dark (2003); and siblings escape their cannibalistic father, only to wander an anxious wilderness in Children of Shadows (2006). This evening’s screening also features, among others, the North American premiere of Tsuji’s latest film, The Place Where We Were (2008). Presented with the support of the Aichi Arts Center, Japan. 1992–2008, Naoyuki Tsuji, Japan, multiple formats, ca 70 min.
NAOYUKI TSUJI is an artist and animator, working in film, sculpture, and illustration. He graduated from the Tokyo Zokei University in 1995 and currently lives and works in Yokohama, Japan. His films have screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the London Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the Yokohama Triennial, among numerous additional festivals and galleries worldwide. He is the recipient of the Yokohama Award for Art and Cultural Encouragement.
Cory Arcangel
Thursday, March 19, 2009, 6pm
Cory Arcangel in person!
Best known for his Nintendo game cartridge hacks, multi-media trickster Cory Arcangel uses new and vintage computers, sound, performance, and the web to recontextualize popular figures (Super Mario Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel) and aesthetic systems (the instructional video, adult contemporary music, the “artist talk”) in subversively comedic ways. This evening, he’ll provide an overview of his practice, possibly including his Super Mario movies, the epic and aptly titled performance piece Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum, and an archetypal “experimental film,” complete with digital scratches and Final Cut Pro countdown. Co-presented by SAIC’s Parlor Room. 1998–2008, Cory Arcangel, USA, multiple formats, ca. 60 min.
CORY ARCANGEL is a computer artist, performer, and curator who lives and works in Brooklyn. His work centers on his love of personal computers and the internet. He co-founded the Beige Programming Ensemble. Recent exhibitions include the Whitney Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Space1026, Philadelphia; the Migros Museum, Zurich; Team Gallery, New York; and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris. His online portfolio and web portal is located at: Cory Arcangel.
Ed Halter Interviews Cory Arcangel (Rhizome)
Watch a clip from Super Mario Movie!
Letters, Notes: Films by David Gatten
Thursday, March 5, 2009, 6pm
David Gatten in person!
“Influenced equally by Stan Brakhage and Ludwig Wittgenstein.”—Ed Halter, Village Voice
For more than ten years, filmmaker and SAIC alum David Gatten’s serenely beautiful handmade films have employed experimental techniques—cellophane tape ink transfers and optical printing—to explore the relationships between text and image. Gatten transforms type into sensual topographies of time and place. The bulk of his work has centered around the books, journals, and letters of the William Byrd II family of 18th century Virginia to express the family’s ideas, secret passions, and public lives in poetic and expansive ways. This evening, Gatten will screen three of these films, including Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002), The Great Art of Knowing (2004), and How to Conduct a Love Affair (2007), along with the instructional Advanced Typing Tips Part 5 (anonymous, circa 1940) and sublime Film For Invisible Ink, Case No. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter [Diminished by 1, 794] (2008). Co-presented by the University of Chicago Arts Council, which will present a second program of Gatten films on Friday, March 6 at the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. 1940–2008, Multiple artists, USA, 16mm, ca 85 min.
DAVID GATTEN—filmmaker, Henry James fan, recent Guggenheim fellow, and aspiring audio book producer—makes bookish films about letters and libraries and lovers and ghosts that are filled with words, some of which you can read. His work has shown around the popular planet Earth in museums, festivals, biennials, galleries, archives, access centers, elementary schools, storefronts, on sides of buildings and once on a barge that was floating down river. You can find his films in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago but only rarely can he find his glasses. He lives and works by the water in Red Hook, Brooklyn and on Seabrook Island, South Carolina and teaches 16mm filmmaking/Wallace Stevens appreciation at The Cooper Union in New York City.
DDR/DDR
Thursday, February 26, 2009, 6pm
Director Amie Siegel in person!
The latest feature by artist, filmmaker, and SAIC alum Amie Siegel (Empathy, 2003) is a multi-layered and disarmingly beautiful essay on the German Democratic Republic and its dissolution, which left many of its former citizens adrift in their newfound freedom. Featured at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, DDR/DDR weaves together mundane Stasi surveillance footage, interviews with psychoanalysts, East German “Indian hobbyists,” and lolling shots of derelict state radio stations into an extended and self-conscious assemblage to meditate on history, memory, and the shared technologies of state control and art. 2008, Amie Siegel, Germany/USA, HDCAM video, 135 min.
AMIE SIEGEL works variously in 16mm and 35mm film, video, sound and writing. Born in Chicago, she currently lives and works in New York and Berlin. She received her BA from Bard College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions and screenings include the 2008 Whitney Biennial, “The Russian Linesman,” Hayward Gallery, London; “Forum Expanded,” KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Austrian Film Museum, Berlin International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Andy Warhol Museum, BFI Southbank, London; Frankfurt Film Museum and Film Forum in New York. Her first book of poetry, The Waking Life (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA) was published in 1999. Siegel has been an artist-in-residence of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and is a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Dance Camera: Locked & Loaded
Thursday, February 19, 2009, 6pm
Curator Daniele Wilmouth in person!
Read the Chicago Reader capsule by Andrea Gronvall here.
In an effort to dispel the notion that the dance film is largely a decorative and apolitical genre, The Dance Camera: Locked & Loaded is an international collection of films and videos that confront the camera’s power to manipulate identity, create celebrity, and automate the viewer’s gaze. Curated by filmmaker and SAIC faculty member Danièle Wilmouth, these charged works serve as compelling activist documents against a range of global injustices, including sexism, xenophobia, and colonialism. Works include: Je Suis Une Bombe (Elodie Pong, Switzerland, 2006), You Made Me Love You (Miranda Pennell & John Smith, UK, 2005), Dansons (Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Algeria/France, 2003), Element (Amy Greenfield, USA, 1973), Tattoo (Miranda Pennell, UK, 2001), Black Spring (Heddy Maalem, Algeria/France/Nigeria, 2002), Familie Tezcan (Nevin Aladag, Turkey/Germany, 2001), Elegy (Douglas Wright & Chris Graves, New Zealand, 1993). Special thanks to Kali Heitholt, who assisted with this program. 1973–2006, multiple artists, multiple countries, multiple formats, ca 80 min.
DANIÈLE WILMOUTH creates hybrids of performance art, dance, installation and cinema, which exploit the shifting hierarchies between live and screen space. Her works—Curtain of Eyes (1997), Tracing a Vein (2001), Round (2002), Hula Lou (2007), and A Heretic’s Primer on Love and Exertion (2007), have screened in festivals, museums, galleries, and on television worldwide. In 1990 she began a six-year residency in the Kansai region of Japan, where she cofounded “Hairless Films,” an independent filmmaking collective. While in Japan, she also studied the Japanese contemporary dance form Butoh under Katsura Kan, and performed with his troupe “The Saltimbanques.” She is currently on faculty in the film and video departments of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College. More info at Hairless Films.
You Made Me Love You
Miranda Pennell & John Smith (UK), 2005, 3.5 min
Twenty-one dancers are held by your gaze. Losing contact can be traumatic.
“…On the one hand, this is like looking at a group of aliens who have never seen anything like the camera (or you) before. The concentration of the faces on what is before them takes away their self-consciousness, and like a series of Thomas Ruff portraits, they have an unsettling air of insouciance. But ultimately, the thought one is drawn to, and the allegory the title suggests, concern the contemporary obsession with becoming visible through some sort of brush with celebrity, however brief, demeaning or meaningless that might be.” — Dr. Stephen Riley
Je Suis Une Bombe
Elodie Pong (Switzerland), 2006, 6:12 min.
A figure in a panda bear costume performs an erotic pole dance. On removing the panda’s head, a woman is revealed, and she addresses the camera. She delivers her own praises of a complex image of woman, simultaneously strong and vulnerable—a potential powder keg. Performer: Carine Charaire. Music: Michael Hilton
Element
Dir: Hilary Harris, Choreography/Performer: Amy Greenfield (USA), 1973, 12 min
“Element raises issues of the active image of a woman’s body on film. Greenfield’s body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle, which is both birthlike and deathlike, and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal concept of female sensuality.” — Canyon Cinema
Elegy
Dir: Chris Graves, Choreography/Performer: Douglas Wright (New Zealand), 1993, 10 min
Douglas Wright is an openly gay dancer and choreographer from New Zealand. He danced with Limbs Dance Company of New Zealand (1980-1983), the Paul Taylor Company of New York (1983-87) and DV8 Physical Theatre of London (1988) before forming the Douglas Wright Dance Company in Auckland in 1989. In 2004, his first book Ghost Dance was released, part love story, part memoir, a deeply felt meditation on the art of performance. The 2006 season of his stage work Black Milk was accompanied by the publication of his second book Terra Incognito. In October 2007 a poetry collection, Laughing Mirror was published, at which time Wright announced his retirement from dance.
“The self-confident innovator, the prime mover with an incredible athletic ability, Douglas Wright, in the late 1980s and early 90s established himself as possibly the best—the most profound—choreographer New Zealand has ever produced. Certainly, he is the most visceral, the most gutsy, creating dance works that combined a kind of unstoppable callisthenic zest with philosophical ideas done out as images: dance as an articulation of the human condition.” — David Eggleton
“Anger is not just mine, anger is like petrol if somebody gets angry someone nearby will catch fire. It’s about exploring the way energy can be transformed through art. I’m lucky, I’ve been given more than my share of anger, so I’ve got a lot of it to transform.” — Douglas Wright
Tattoo
Miranda Pennell (UK), 2001, 9 min
Trees, insects and birds look-on as the countryside is invaded by a lost regiment of soldiers engaged in a repetitive display. The senseless beauty of a military drill dwarfed by the landscape, is by turns absurd and disturbing. The choreography of military drill here is entirely drawn from the tradition of the Light Division of the British Army. Soldiers and band of the Light Division filmed on Salisbury Plane. Music for military-band scored for the film by Graeme Miller.
Dansons (Let Us Dance)
Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Algeria/France), 2003, 5:35 min
The brilliantly concise Dansons shows in a single take the midriff of a woman belly-dancing to La Marseillaise. It is a startlingly clear image of the clash of colonialism with indigenous culture. The military relentlessness of the anthem is in deep contrast to the sensuousness of the body wrapped in the colours of the French tricolour.
Familie Tezcan (The Tezcan Family)
Nevin Aladag (Turkey/Germany), 2001, 6:40 min
A video portrait of a German family with Turkish heritage, practicing breakdance and singing in four different languages.
“Aladag, born in 1972 in Van in eastern Turkey and now living in Berlin, often focuses on foreignness and self-determination as they are experienced by young people of Turkish origin in Germany today. Demarcation and amalgamation, the search for cultural roots and social connection: Aladag is trying to create individual meaning within the larger context of the production of identity.” — Harald Fricke, Artforum
Black Spring
Dir: Benoit Dervaux, Choreographer: Heddy Maalem (Algeria/France/Nigeria), 2002, 26 min
“Born in Algiers to a French mother and Algerian father, now living in Toulouse and creating tribal-infused contemporary choreography for dancers from Francophone African countries, Heddy Maalem creates stark investigations of race and identity. — Sharon Hoyer
