May 1, Monday, 7:30PM, 2006
BIG BALAGAN:
Recent Worls from Local Filmmakers

Night Vision (2min, video, 2005)
America Central (6.5 min, video, 2005)
Director: Alfred Guzzetti (in person)

Night Vision: This experimental vision depicts an apocalyptic landscape.

Through one well-chosen shot, "America Central" lays out the disparity of the global village through the juxtaposition of third world life with the first world's fascination with the news worthy information.

The Osgood Hooker Professor of Visual Arts at Harvard University, Alfred Guzzetti has made both documentary and experimental films and tapes. With the feature-length Family Portrait Sittings (1975) he began an autobiographical cycle that continued with Scenes from Childhood (1979) and Beginning Pieces (1986). He collaborated with Susan Meiselas and Richard Rogers on Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1985) and the feature-length Pictures from a Revolution (1991), and with Ákos Östör and Lina Fruzzetti on two anthropological projects, Seed and Earth (1994) and Khalfan and Zanzibar (2000). Since 1993 he has been at work on a cycle of small-format videotapes, including The Tower of Industrial Life (2000) and Down from the Mountains (2002). He is the author of the book Two or Three Things I Know about Her: Analysis of a Film by Godard (Harvard University Press, 1981).

splendor (2 min, DVCAM, 2005)
Director: Jane Gillooly (in person)

“splendor” is a brief glimpse of an experimental narrative film in progress "The Not Dead Yet Club" that explores the ways that women's identities change as their bodies and minds become less reliable. With both humor and honesty it illuminates the richness of friendship, the importance of self-determination, and the capacity for growth, even as dementia and death approach.

Jane Gillooly is both a non-fiction and narrative film and video maker. Her work has broadcast in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the United States and screened in numerous museums and film festivals internationally. Venues include the Museum of Modern Art’s “New Directors, New Films”, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Robert Flaherty Seminar and most recently the San Francisco International Film Festival (2006) and the Contemporary Film Festival of Mexico City (2006). She is currently in production on “The Gogo Film Project” (working title) a documentary being shot in rural Swaziland focusing on the “grannies” or “gogos” who are caring for children orphaned as a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Jane Gillooly is the current chair of the Film/Animation Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Safety (9min 11 sec, 2005)
Director: David Baeumler (in person)

My fellow Americans…From our disaster-proof Eastern cities, through vast, impenetrable grain fields, to the fortress shores of our Pacific Coast – we are finally safe.- DB

Having received a NY State Film Grant while still in high school, David Baeumler went on to graduate from Bard College with a filmmaking BA in 1992. He has owned a film productions company in California, toured the West Coast in a punk band, sold his soul in Omaha, and worked production in the sweltering heat of the American South. His films had played at numerous festivals around the world. 

Glow in the Dark (6min, 16mm, 2005)
Director: Rebecca Meyers (in person)

Radiators clang while spheres and cypridina phosphoresce. A rubber ball held up to light becomes a snowy crystal. Looking out and up when the sun is down. Home science experiments and other attempts to see with the camera in the dark.

A somnambulant chronicle of night-time luminosity, and the sounds that keep us awake in the lonely twilight.
--Mark Webber, London International Film Festival program notes

Since moving to Boston last summer, Rebecca Meyers, has been working as the coordinator and assistant programmer at the Harvard Film Archive and teaching film production at Emerson College. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in Film/Video Production, after which she lived in Chicago, where she co-curated the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival. Her film work has screened internationally at festivals including Media City, Images, the London International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Oberhausen, the San Francisco International Film Festival, and Third Text: Images and Media Festival in Hong Kong.

Fable (7min, 35mm, 2005)
Director: Daniel Sousa (in person)

A cyclical fairy tale in which a man and a woman are cursed to be forever apart. But when they are transformed into animals their passions are overshadowed by their predatory instincts.- DS

Dan was bon in Cape Verde in 1974 and grew up just outside Lisbon, Portugal. He moved to the States with his family in 1986. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Dan worked for Boston's Olive Jar, directing commercials and TV programs for PBS, Cartoon Network, among others. Dan helped to form Handcrankedfilm, a filmmakers collective long with Jeff Sias, Bryan Papciak, and Jake Mahaffy. Since 2001, Dan has been teaching at RISD and has continued to freelance for commercial project for Global Mechanic and Cartoon Network.Among Dan's films are Carnal Ground (1994) and "Minotaur" (1999). "Fable" premiered at Sundance Festival this year.

 

 

Dem Bones Wiggle (1min, video, 2005)
Director: Lorelei Pepi (in person)

Boom shakalaka shhhhh shhhhh shhhhh. -LP

Lorelei Pepi received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Experimental Animation and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Illustration. She’s teaching in Harvard University’s Visual and Environmental Studies, where she is an instructor in animation studio arts. She also currently holds a Harvard College Fellowship as she works on her current animation film project, "Happy & Gay." Her work has received numerous awards and been screened internationally, including Sundance, Los Angeles, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Leipzig, Hong Kong, Croatia and Montreal and Ottawa.

"L'éclat du mal/The Bleeding Heart of It" (8min, 35mm, 2005)
Director: Louise Bourque (in person)

The house that bursts; the scene of the crime; the nucleus. A universe collapses on itself: all hell breaks loose.- LB

Louise Bourque is an Acadian French Canadian filmmaker living in the Boston area where she teaches cinema. Her films have been presented in forty countries in five continents. Screenings at international festivals include Sundance, Rotterdam, Toronto, Tribeca, San Francisco, Kerala, São Paulo, Hong Kong, Melbourne, and London. US broadcasts include PBS and the Sundance Channel. Bourque’s work was presented at the 50th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and is currently being screened as part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

Tutor (12min, video, 2006 - work in progress)
Director: Joe Gibbons in collaboration with Emily Breer

Joe Gibbons has been working in film and video, making features and shorts since mid-70s. His work has been shown at numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and included twice in the Whitney Biennial, and is regularly included in the NY Video Festival and the Rotterdam Film Festival. His last feature The Genius, starring Karen Finley and himself, had a month-long run in NYC at Anthology Film Archives and was included in such festivals as New Directors/New Films, AFI and Rotterdam. He lives in Boston and teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Evergreen (15min, 16mm, 2005)
Director: Robert Todd (in person)

"nature:artifice, endurance:durability"...

If all limits we set upon ourselves can be overcome, and there is no endpoint to growth in the human sense of production, how does that leave the face of the environments we continually insist upon reshaping, or lives beyond our own?

This film looks at the nature of viewing nature and the problems we've created for ourselves in defining useful space: the contemporary act of viewing "landscape" requires an effort of willful ignorance of our own position as present and influencial, and what it takes to get to the point of being in a position to view it.

The culture that has developed to support our physical needs stands in direct counterpoint to the world that struggles to thrive without it. In fact the forms of that culture seem defiantly resistant to natural impulses, just as humanity seeks, if not proximity to that Nature, certainly an echo of an aesthetic that does not include an awareness of artifice ("civilization") or their practical needs.

This paradox in our modern culture's design is resolved by the perpetuation of our hegemonic violence that continues to lead to certain death for the world we live in, preservationists and advocates of "sustainability" not withstanding. -RT

Black and White Trypps Number One (7:00, 16mm, B/W, silent, 2005)
Director: Ben Russell

A theory of origins, a film for the stars and planets exploding all around our heads. Hypnosis is imminent.
A psychedelic op-art film that references the traditions of hand-painted Avant-Garde cinema by replacing it with something entirely different.

Ben Russell is a Providence-based experimental film/videomaker whose works have screened at the Museum of Modern Art and in such exotic locales as Tokyo, Cologne, Rotterdam, and Iowa City. Ben runs a microcimena called Magic Lantern (www.magiclanterncinema.com), and he has made films about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the exploration of Easter Island, and the end of the world. His most recent film is an hour-long experimental narrative about the uncertain mythology of Billy the Kid.

and others...