Alternative Cinema S15 pstr.indd

ALTERNATIVE CINEMA SPRING 2015:
REMAKES, REENACTMENTS AND
RECYCLED CINEMA
Tuesdays, 7 pm (unless otherwise noted), Golden Auditorium, 105 Little Hall, Colgate University
Open to the Public | Free Admission
1/27/2015
THE ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film
festival in North America, established in 1963. This touring program features recent
festival favorites, including experimental documentaries, short animations and more from
the U.S., Spain, Germany, Poland and The Netherlands.
2/3/2015
BUSTING THE TUBE: EARLY VIDEO ART
TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE (Richard Serra, 6mins, 1973); KISS THE GIRLS
MAKE THEM CRY (Dara Birnbaum, 7mins, 1979); TECHNOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION:
WONDER WOMAN (Dara Birnbaum, 1978, 6mins); POP-POP VIDEO: KOJAK/WANG
(Dara Birnbaum, 1980, 3mins); HOW I GOT INTO TV AND OTHER STORIES (Ilene
Segalove, 10mins, 1983); MORE TV STORIES (Ilene Segalove, 14mins, 1985). Early
video art made with, for, about and against television.
2/10/2015
IMAGE WORLDS
AN IMAGE (Harun Farocki, 25:00, 1983); UNTITLED (PINK DOT) (Takeshi Murata, 5:00,
2007); INTERIORS (Alix Pearlstein, 8:35, 1996); FAMILY TYRANNY and CULTURAL
SOUP (Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, 15:03, 1987). These five works explore staged
image making, using the set as a porous space caught between reality and fiction. In AN
IMAGE Harun Farocki documents the painstaking, deadly serious production of a single
Playboy centerfold photograph. Takeshi Murata’s UNTITLED (PINK DOT) overwhelms the
movie Rambo: First Blood with corrosive, pixelated, abstraction, generated through the
corruption and reprocessing of the original footage. The stylized, psychologically charged
sets of Alix Pearlstein’s INTERIORS externalize the complexities of inner life, while the
collaborative video pieces FAMILY TYRANNY and CULTURAL SOUP by Paul McCarthy
and Mike Kelley, center on the particular intensities of the father-son relationship.
2/17/2015
THE FESTIVAL OF (IN)APPROPRIATION
Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, détournement, or recycled cinema,
the incorporation of already existing media into new artworks is a practice that generates
novel juxtapositions and new meanings and ideas, often in ways entirely unrelated to the
intentions of the original makers. Such new works are, in other words, “inappropriate.”
Founded in 2009, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a yearly showcase of contemporary
audiovisual works that appropriate existing film, video, or other media. This program
features new work from the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Tajikistan, Sweden and Hungary.
2/24/2015
WORK AND OTHER TIMES: KEVIN JEROME EVERSON
COMPANY LINE (30mins, 2009); A WEEK IN THE HOLE (6mins, 2001); “72” (4mins,
2002); 753 MCPHERSON STREET (2mins, 2009); TWO-WEEK VACATION (1min, 2005);
OLD CAT (11mins, 2009). Filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson’s body of work is grounded
in formalism and combines scripted and documentary elements to examine working class
African American life. His films suggest the relentlessness of everyday life – along with its
beauty – and present oblique metaphors for art making. This suite of films is concerned
with the role of work in our lives, determining where we live, what we dream of, and how
we see ourselves.
3/3/2015
NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE: EXPERIMENTAL FILMS AND
THEIR REMAKES with Jennifer Proctor
ARTIST IN PERSON! Like a team of ghost hunters, this program will investigate
films haunted by their pasts. Join us for a screening curated by artist Jennifer Proctor
of classic avant-garde films and their contemporary digital remakes, including Bruce
Conner’s seminal found-footage piece A MOVIE (12mins, 1958) and Proctor’s A MOVIE
BY JEN PROCTOR (12mins, 2010-2), a loving remake using appropriated material from
YouTube and LiveLeak.
3/10/2015
SONG AND DANCE: TWO STORIES
Two stories of teenagers living their lives, sometimes imagining other lives, in postindustrial Ohio. In A MILLION MILES AWAY (28mins, 2014) filmmaker Jennifer Reeder
listens in on the bedroom conversations of teenage girls as they forge bonds over absent
parents and bad friends. The film culminates in a stunning school-choir rendition of Judas
Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’.” IN THE AIR (22mins 2009) by Liza Johnson
is a quasi-documentary portrait of a place that has endured a state of economic crisis for
decades. The film, made in collaboration with a clown school in Johnson’s hometown,
features real people acting out scenes from everyday life and examines the force they are
capable of in their deindustrialized world.
3/24/2015
CENTER JENNY
CENTER JENNY (53mins) is one of four crazy movies completed in 2013 by Ryan
Trecartin, first shown as a work in progress at the Venice Biennale. Since settling in
Los Angeles in 2010, Trecartin has designed and built a modular maze of sets on a
soundstage with the help of Hollywood technicians who have rigged the space with lights
and hydraulics enabling it to move and change for different projects. CENTER JENNY
explores the fusion of dramatic and sculptural spaces that activate one another. The plot
concerns a large cast of actors, most belonging to one of several groups of uniformed girls
who are all named Jenny. One duo of Jennys wears earmuffs and pink hoodies branded
“AUDITION”; another posse dons khaki shorts and tank tops covering up greenscreengreen bikinis; grittier Jenny’s are in sweats that read “W4$T3;” another bunch in neutral
tones are nameless proto-Jenny’s, held in limbo as they wait for character assignments.
Monday, 4/6/2015
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA with The Alloy Orchestra
ARTISTS IN PERSON! Note: this event is Monday night at 7pm.
The Alloy Orchestra performs an exhilirating live score for MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
(80mins), Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film about urban life in the Soviet Union. From dawn to
dusk, citizens are shown at work and at play, interacting with the machinery of modern life.
The film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented or pioneered,
such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split
screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop
motion animations and a self-reflexive style. In the 2012 Sight and Sound poll, film critics
voted MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA the 8th best film ever made, and in 2014, Sight and
Sound also named it the best documentary film of all time. Presented in collaboration with
CORE 152.
4/7/2015, 4:30 pm
ARARAT with Atom Egoyan
ARTIST IN PERSON! Note: film screening at 4:30 pm, followed
by reception and panel discussion. Academy Award-nominated director
Atom Egoyan presents ARARAT (115mins, 2002), an acclaimed cinematic masterpiece
about a tragic historical event, a country in denial, and a people yearning for the truth.
For the estranged members of a contemporary family, the tangled relationships of their
present are only complicated by their catastrophic past. And what begins as a search
for clues becomes a determined quest for answers across a vast and ancient terrain of
deception, denial, fact, and fears. This stunning and passionate motion picture explores
the pursuit of identity through the intimate moments shared by lovers, families, enemies,
and strangers. Presented as part of a week of events commemorating the centennial of
the Armenian Genocide in collaboration with the departments of English, History, Peace
and Conflict Studies and Film and Media Studies.
4/14/2015
SAUERBRUCH HUTTON ARCHITECTS
Celebrated artist-filmmaker Harun Farocki’s latest “direct-cinema film” SAUERBRUCH
HUTTON ARCHITECTS (72mins, 2013) results from three months spent in an architectural
firm in Berlin, following partners Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton as they and their
team wrestle with ideas and their articulation. Farocki’s typically minimalist study provides
a fascinating and often humorous perspective on architects and designers at work, giving
tangible expression to a creative process that is both fleeting and abstract.
4/21/2015
(NON)FICTION: THE FILMS OF SERGIO OKSMAN
In Brazilian filmmaker Sergio Oksman’s short films NOTES ON THE OTHER (13mins,
2009) and A STORY FOR THE MODLINS (26mins, 2012), the lines separating fiction from
nonfiction and personal history from social history are delightfully blurred. NOTES ON
THE OTHER concerns an Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest, while A STORY FOR THE
MODLINS tells the story of the Modlin family, whose personal effects were discovered in
a box after their mysterious deaths. The two films also explore one another, with NOTES
acting as an essay about reenactment and fictionalization, while A STORY is a product of
the filmmaker’s own artistic process of reenactment and fictionalization.
5/5/2015
STUDENT SCREENING
Curated by Penny Lane, Wenhua Shi, Mary Simonson and Lakshmi Luthra.
This series is made possible by the Department of Art and
Art History, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Colgate
Arts Council and a generous grant from the New York
Council on the Arts Electronic Media and Film Program.