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...
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