Special
Balagan Program
February 23rd, Friday,
7:30,
Revolving Museum, 288-300 A Str., Boston, tel: (617)
439-8617, $10
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Alla
Kovgan and Jeff Silva, local filmmakers and curators
of Balagan, are pleased to once again be part of the
3rd annual Boston
Underground Film Festival. This year it's our pleasure
to offer you a taste of Balagan. The Balagan Experimental
Film/Video Series began in September 2000, as a regularly
scheduled Thursday night series featuring local and
international experimental films, videos and performance
art. The Balagan series continues to run a diverse range
of experimental programming throughout the year at the
Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline.
Balagan
in the BUFF 2001 represents a sampling from last seasons
amazing works that were presented among 8 experimental
programs that included: Local Masters, Portuguese experimentalists,
Local Animations and Yugoslavian Underground videos
to name just a few. We hope you enjoy the Balagan Experimental
program and if you do, please come visit us on Thursday
nights at 8PM at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
Program:
Lost
and Found
animation 10min, 16mm, 1996
Director: Jeff Sias
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Lost and Found is an experimental puppet animation,
which uses found object constructions as props and
characters. The film follows a timid boy as he is
tempted with the loss of innocence and is drawn
into a small, but symbolic journey through a world
of lost hope and faded memories.
Jeff Sias is a graduate of Rhode Island School
of Design where he majored in Film, Video and Animation.
While there he made several live-action/ special
effects films and then moved into animation and
sculpture. Combining puppets, animation and sculptural
elements, Jeff finished his senior degree project
Lost and Found in 1996. Jeff is currently directing
and animating for a commercial animation studio
in Boston where he works on spots for television
and film. He spends his off-time working with marionette
artist Dan Butterworth and maintaining a studio
in Waltham where he produces sculpture and photography.
With other members of his studio Jeff has several
films and puppet performances in the works for completion
in the near future. |
Fissures
2.5min, 16mm, 1999
Director:
Louise Bourque
A film about forgetting and remembering, about past
presences and the traces they leave. In making this
piece, I literally manipulated and distorted the
film plane through experimentation in doing my own
contact printing of personal home movie images.
The point of contact is continuously shifted so
that the film plane appears warped and the images
fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting
apparitions, like resurfacing memories. The footage
was hand-processed and solorized as well as colored
by hand through toning before a final print was
made at the lab. Louise Bourque is a Canadian
experimental filmmaker living in the Boston
area where she is currently teaching cinema at Emerson
College and has been Visiting Film Faculty at The
School of the Museum of Fine Arts since 1996. Her
films have been widely presented in festivals worldwide
and she has received numerous grants, honors and
awards for her work. |
La
Big Fiesta
animation 8min, 16mm, 1999
Director:
Max Coniglio
La Big Fiesta is a hand drawn animation.
A slice of Neopolitan life through the eyes of an
Italian American. Max Coniglio is a native
from Naples, Italy and has been drawing cartoons
as early as he can remember. Max works from memory
and has used animation as a tool for capturing those
memories and recreating them the way he remembers
them. |
Don't
ask, Don't Tell
7min, video 2000
Director:
James Nadeau
This
film uses Naval training footage to critique the
American Militaries policy on the presence of
Homosexuals within its ranks. Through a juxtaposition
of the training footage with the audio of the
Senate hearings, one can see the failings of the
Military's rhetoric. The film is also presented
as a part of the live performance whithin which
two versions of it are projected both on screen
and the artist. The perfomance aspect brings to
the front (literally) personal iissue of the artist
who, as a child raised in this environment, exists
at once in both the Queer world
and the Military world. James Nadeau is
a BFA candidate at the School of the Museum
of Fine Arts/Tufts University. Working mainly
in the field of Video, his work has most recently
been screened at the Provincetown International
Film Festival and the Amigo Racism show at the
Gallery De La Raza, San Francisco.
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Minotaur
animation 8min, 16mm, 1999
Director:
Dan Sousa
Minotaur is a loose interpretation of the
traditional Greek myth as seen through the beast's
point of view. Abandoned on a cavernous island our
childlike minotaur has as his only friend a mischievous
red ball which leads him into the depths of the
maze. Dan Sousa studied animation, painting
and illustration at RISD where he produced his first
two films. After a brief period of freelancing and
teaching at the School of the Museum of fine Arts
in Boston, he took a position at Olive Jar
Studios where he has directed several commercial
shorts. Currently, Daniel is collaborating on a
variety of multimedia projects and has started pre-production
on his next animated film. |
Fuzzy
Logic
4min, video, 1995
Director:
John Scott
A
video made without a camera. John Scott
is a film/video maker from Canada. He is currently
teaching at Emerson College. His works have been
screened at festivals around US and Canada including
Black Maria, DoubleTake Documentary Festival,
The Midwest Film and Video Fest at Walker Art
Gallery in Minneapolis.
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Chameleon
animation 2,5min, video, 2000
Director:
Zelimir
Zarkovic.
Animation about different approaches to
the heart of a female.
Ode
to New York
1,5min, video, 2000
Director:
Milos
Gojkovic
A
Serbiam in New York.
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I WANNA BE A PRESIDENT OF SERBIA
3min, video, 1999
Director:
Milan Rasic
A
young man takes to the streets of Serbia
in a humorous attempt to win the presidency
while making a witty commentary on Serbian
politics and the current state of the country.
In the Fall of 2000 Balagan was fortunate
to present a program curated by LOW-FI
VIDEO (Belgrade, Yugoslavia). LOW-FI
VIDEO is a project with no expiry date,
its mission being the advancement of the
aesthetics of non-pretencious cinema and
the subversion of elitism on film. The project
considers video-technology boom a very useful
ally in the struggle for the above mentioned
goals. LOW-FI VIDEO is based in Serbia.
Owing to the current situation in the country,
the project now works under very difficult
conditions, but the faith in its cinematic
mission still keeps the project participants
active.
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Silence
13min, 16mm, 2001
Director:
Vanessa O'Neill
An
idea of white. Vanessa O'Neill's films
have screened at film festivals and many venues
in the Boston Area. She is a graduate of the School
of the Museum of Fine Arts, and is the Associate
Director of the Boston Jewish Film Festival.
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Final
Exit
5min, pixel vision video, 2000
Director:
Joe Gibbons
Final
Exit an aged one is confronted with his options
in blunt terms. Does he want to drag out his existence,
increasingly infirm and a burden to his caretakers,
or go quietly, before resentment overcomes sentiment?
Does he wish to go on living with the quality
of his life increasingly diminished, or euthanized?
Would he prefer cremation or burial? This tape
confronts the issues of mortality and advancing
decrepitude facing even the friskiest of us. Joe
Gibbons works in film and video, making features
and shorts. 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 New York and Boston and teaches
at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
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Surface
9min, s8/video, 2000
Director:
Alla Kovgan, Alissa Cardone
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Surface
was inspired by "The Diary of a Young Girl" by
Anne Frank. The quality of images and shifting
sound divide the inside and the outside. It is
a journey of spirit through the struggle between
forces of isolation and connection, oppression
and release, the hidden and the revealed.
Alla Kovgan is a film and video maker from
Moscow (Russia) who has live and worked in Boston
since 1996. Her 16 mm films have been screened
at the film festivals around the
US, Canada, and Europe including Boston Underground
Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival (Victoria,
BC), East Art Gallery (Hungary), EuroUnderground
(Poland), Dance on Camera (US), Napolidanza (Italy).
Alla's mediums of expression and exploration encompass
short films, multimedia performances, interactive
video projections and other image/sound/body installations
in collaboration with dancers and musicians. Alissa
Cardone loves to sing, dance, play guitar
and make things. She has danced with choreographers
Nicola Hawkins, Anna Myer, and currently Marjorie
Morgan, Christine Bennett and Paula Josa-Jones/Performance
Works, whom with she has toured internationally.
Alissa collaborates with different musicians,
film makers, dancers and other artists to manifest
interactive performances of various kinds through
the Outside Art Collective that she co-founded
in 1999. She's performed in France and Russia
as well as in the subway, the Boston Public Gardens,
and in the street in Harvard Square. Her work
has been influenced by the study with Min Tanaka
on Body Weather Farm, Japan.
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In
the Fall of 2000 Balagan was fortunate to present
a program curated by Manuel Henriques from
Galeria Ze Dos Bois (Lisbon, Portugal).
ZDB is a creation, programming, confrontational
and experimental structure run by a group of people.
Born in 1994, ZDB has affirmed itself as
a privileged space for confrontation, experimentation
and promotion of emerging proposals that deal
with contemporary aesthetics and technologies.
ZDB has made a place for itself as a promoter
of a series of different activities that have
in common the assertion of emerging art in face
of institutionalised proposals. As a creation,
production and promotion structure of emerging
art, ZDB
presents its own projects, and at the same time
functions as a space of programming, producing
and confrontation of proposals that are a long
way away of institutional circuits. Two sets of
work represent this show - Paulo Abreu and Dub
Connections
Four 1 minute animations (S8, 1999/2000)
by Paulo Abreu
- Ball
- The
Gibles
- Freak
Scene
- Fatima
Trance
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Ball

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The Gibles
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DUB
VIDEO CONNECTION 5min, video,
1999/ 2000
Director: Dub Video Connection
(Rui Valerio + Joao Carrilho)
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The
DUB VIDEO CONNECTION exists since 1997.
This project was originally founded
by Joao Carrilho, Rui Toscano and Rui
Valerio and is currently composed of
Joao Carrilho and Rui Valerio. This
project explores the possibilities of
video as live act show. The types of
exhibits range from installations and
isolated projections of audio visual
themes, to the interaction with various
other artists and disciplines from the
world of show. The most used exhibit
model is Video Jam. Images created by
DUB VIDEO CONNECTION (sometimes with
sound) are mixed and projected live
as a visual support to the performance
of DJs creating a dance floor multimedia
show.
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