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Parallax Views : : |
: Larry Gottheim |
Robert Todd :: |
: : Rebecca Baron |
Allen Ross : : |
: : Leslie Thornton |
First Person in a Globalized World::: |
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The eight films in our annual collaboration with the Portland International Film Festival represent a diverse group of artists working in equally diverse ways. Rebecca Meyers' Things We Want To See is a beautifully constructed work that looks at Alaskan ice floes and the aurora boealis. Karen Mirza and Brad Butler's The Space Between layers abstract surface manipulations with footage shot in India. Market Street is Tomonari Nishikawa portrait of San Francisco's Market Street shot and edited in camera frame by frame to create a lush geometric abstraction of the sights of a city. Los Caudales is a black and white study of light and movement in rivers, creeks and shorelines by Timoleon Wilkins. Noel is a part of Hope Tucker's ongoing Obituary Project, a series of videos that explore the obituary as a social construction. Juan Manuel Echavarría's Bocas de Cenzia is a sequence of seven songs, each written and sung by an individual who has experienced violence in their native Colombia. Curious About Existence by Emily vey Duke and Cooper Battersby is an episodic short with devoational songs, reflections on entropy, and otters talking about Nietzsche. The program concludes with Phil Solomon and Mark LaPore's Untitled (for David Gatten), a film they made for their friend David Gatten, as a prayer, an offering, a “get well soon” card.
Things We Want to See by Rebecca Meyers [2005,16mm, color, sound, 6 min]
The Space Between by Karen Mirza & Brad Butler [UK, 2005, 16mm, silent 12 min]
Market Street by Tomonari Nishikawa [2005, 16mm, b&w, sound, 5 min]
Los Caudales by Timoleon Wilkins [2005, 16mm, b&w, silent, 17 min]
Noel by Hope Tucker [2004, video, color, sound, 5 min]
Bocas de Cenzia by Juan Manuel Echavarría [Colombia, 2003, video, 17 min]
Curious About Existence by Emily vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
[Canada, 2003, video, color, sound, 11 min]
Untitled (For David Gatten) by Phil Solomon & Mark LaPore [2005, video, 5 min]
Robert Todd has made over twenty films since 1990. His visually stunning body of work, not easily defined or categorized, comes from a deeply personal place, which is quiet, thoughtful, and curious. Cinema Project is excited to have Robert Todd in attendance to present three of his films that look at the personal, political, and social ways in which we choose to live. Todd's most recent film, In Loving Memory uses the common ground of our own mortality as its starting point to explore sovereignty of life and criminal justice in the US. Using narration, dramatic re-enactments, and footage shot at maximum-security penitentiaries across the United States, the film provides a glimpse into the lives of the many men and women who are living out their last days on death row.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
March 7 + 8
Wait [2000, 16mm, color, sound, 8 min]
Evergreen [2005, 16mm, color, sound, 15 min]
In Loving Memory [2005, 16mm, color, sound, 47 min]
Recently preserved by Chicago Filmmakers, The Grandfather Trilogy is Allen Ross' portrait of his grandfather in Bowling Green, South Carolina. Ross was a co-founder of Chicago Filmmakers and long time fixture in the Chicago filmmaking community. A profoundly moving work that attempts to come to terms with death as an event in the living world, The Grandfather Trilogy abounds with images which suggest stasis, absence, silence, horizontality, and oneness with the earth—a catalog of the conditions of death from the point of view of the living. "One of the ways I see the trilogy is as a radical approach to portraiture. Most of Papa was shot without looking through the viewfinder. There were, however, many accidents that happened while the camera was turned on. The film plays for me as a long sustained accident. I am grateful for this photographic record of a divinely shadowed presence. It is a reflection of a kind of space my grandfather generated."
March 28 + 29
Papa, Thanksgiving 1979 & Buriels [1978-81, 16mm, b&w/color, sound, 60 min]
For the final installment in our Critical Cinemas series, we are excited to have Irina Leimbacher, Artistsic Director of the San Francisco Cinematheque, in Portland to present a two-part program of first person essay films and videos.
How does globalization affect the very idea and articulation of self? How can the spatial, temporal, and rhetorical elasticity of film language be used to give form to complex, multi-layered performances of the first-person? These two screenings explore a gamut of approaches to and experiences of self, starting with Kidlat Tahimik’s now classic feature-length essay Perfumed Nightmare and continuing with six short films by multi-cultural and diasporic filmmakers. Exuberant, witty, and politically astute, Perfumed Nightmare moves from Tahimik’s childhood village, where Voice of America, movies and space travel transform his lively imagination, to Paris and Bavaria where he tastes some of the fruits of capitalism alongside an American bubble gum entrepreneur. For Susan Sontag, writing when the film first came out, it "reminds one that invention, insolence, enchantment—even innocence—are still available on film."
In the program of shorts, Michelle Dizon’s My Child (Anak), Anita Chang’s Mommy, What’s Wrong?, Shashwati Talukdar’s My Life as a Poster and Nguyen Tan Hoang’s PIRATED! all explore narratives of displacement and trauma, but from wildly different perspectives and voices. In each case, the narrating self and the narrative itself are de-stabilized, but while two of the pieces remain anchored in movies of ‘home’ and familial relation, the other two project fantasies—theirs, ours, and others’—till we are mired in their complex cultural mirroring. Finally, Tran T. Kim-Trang’s Operculum and Dizon’s Calibrate examine notions of norms and normativity, the former with regard to hegemonic ideas of beauty and sanity, and the latter with regard to race and capitalism. (Irina Leimbacher)
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
April 13
Perfumed Nightmare by Kidlat Tahimik [Philippines, 1978, 16mm, b&w, 91 min]
April 14
PIRATED! by Nguyen Tan Hoang [2000, USA video, color, sound, 11 min]
My Child (Anak) by Michelle Dizon [2001, USA, video, color, sound, 27 min]
Calibrate by Michelle Dizon [2004, USA, video, color, sound, 8 min]
My Life as a Poster by Shashwati Talukdar [1996, USA, video, color, sound, 7 min] Operculum by Tran T. Kim-Trang [1993, video, 14 min]
Mommy, What’s Wrong? by Anita Chang [1997, 16mm, 13 minutes]
Since the late 1960s Larry Gottheim has been deeply involved with cinema, teaching himself 16mm filmmaking then developing the Department of Cinema at SUNY-Binghampton. This extremely influential department attracted the most talented artists, academics, and filmmakers of the day including Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, and Ernie Gehr. Over the past few years several of Gottheim’s early films have been restored in connection with an “Avant Garde Masters” grant through the Donnell Media Center of the NY Public Library. Elective Affinities is a series of four feature-length films Gottheim started in the early 1970s and completed in 1981 with Tree of Knowledge; the series explores not only images and their relationship to sound and time (a recurring theme in his work), they also examine issues such as family, psychology, education, freedom, and the theme of nature in art. Gottheim describes his newer work, Our Television Traveler, as “The history of space, the place of mystery, the mystery of trace, the space of history.” Larry will also be teaching a workshop at the Northwest Film Center on April 29th. Please check www.nwfilm.org for more details.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
April 27
Tree of Knowledge (Elective Affinities IV) [1981, 16mm, color, sound, 58 min]
Our Television Traveler [1991, 16mm, color, sound, 17 min]
Cinema Project is delighted to have Rebecca Baron, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and professor of film and video at the California Arts Institute, in Portland to present two evenings of film. Her most recent piece, How Little We Know of Our Neighbours, is an experimental documentary about Britain’s Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy. Balancing conventional documentary strategies with forms of narrative this film investigates the multiple roles cameras have played in public space. The Idea Of North, based on photographs taken a century ago by three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe, presents the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past. okay bye-bye takes its title from the phrase shouted by Cambodian children to the U.S. Ambassador as he fled Phnom Penh in 1975. A film essay that combines found Super 8mm footage, photographs, journalistic accounts, letters and narration, okay bye-bye explores the relationship of history to memory and the effectiveness of using traditional forms to analyze the horrors of genocide.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
May 7
The Idea of North [1995, 16mm, b&w, sound, 14 min]
Spare Time by Humphrey Jennings [1939, 16mm, b&w, sound, 15 min]
How little We Know of Our Neighbours [2004, video, color, sound, 50 min]
May 8
okay bye-bye [1998, 16mm, color, sound, 39 min]
How Little We Know of Our Neighbours [2004, video, color, sound, 50 min]
“Thornton’s place in cinema history has already been assured for the sole reason that she is the author of Peggy and Fred in Hell."—Bill Krohn, Cahiers du Cinéma
Over the span of thirty years, Leslie Thornton has created one of the most stunningly original bodies of media arts work. Constantly evolving, her films and videos explore issues of feminism, representation, semiotics, history, and colonialism. Her work is steeped in a thoughtful and conceptual analysis of images, how they are made, and why we look at them. Technically she is an astute editor, culling much of her material from a vast library of found footage; she uses this material to turn the narrative on end, to make new meanings and contexts. This three-part retrospective will present a cross-section of Leslie’s work across a period spanning more than twenty years.
Night one features two works about the life Isabelle Eberhardt, a 19th century writer who converted to Islam and traveled throughout North Africa passing as a man. Thornton uses this figure to examine the notion of biography and the contradictions inherent in history and documentation. The second night focuses on work that employ the found image as their main material. These films address Orientalism, the ethnographic gaze, terror, and war. The last night of the retrospective features the current incarnation of her life-long project Peggy and Fred in Hell. This piece is an ongoing and ever changing sequence of work that maps the journey of two children through artifacts from history, culture and media amidst a backdrop of a post-apocalyptic landscape.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
May 22
There was an Unseen Cloud Moving [1988, video, color, sound 60 min]
The Haunted Swing [1998, video, color, sound, 16 min]
May 23
Adynata [1983, 16mm, color, sound, 30 min]
Oh China Oh [1983, 16mm, color, sound, 12 min]
Another Worldy [2000, video, b&w, sound, 22 min]
Chimp For Normal Short [1999, video, b&w, sound, 7 min]
Let Me Count the Ways Minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 [2004-5, video, color, sound, 22 min]
May 24
Peggy and Fred in Hell [1985-2005, 16mm/video, color, sound, 95 min]
