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Welcome to 2013! Filmforum starts with
two great screenings this week. We'll be at MOCA on Thursday night at
7 pm with a show of classic works of filmic destruction and manipulation.
One film featured that night is Fuses" by Carolee Schneemann, whom
we will be hosting IN PERSON on Sunday night with a variety of her other
works, mostly new videos!
Thursday,
January 10, 2013, 7:00 pm
Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents:
Breaking the Plane
At MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles 90012
Tickets: $12, FREE for members of MOCA or Los Angeles Filmforum (present
your membership card at the box office to claim tickets; no free tickets
will be issued without membership card). For tickets, go to moca.org
and click on calendar.
In response to the exhibition Destroy the Picture:
Painting the Void, 1949-62, Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents
an international program of radical films that puncture the image, three-dimensionalize
the film surface, or otherwise challenge the traditional cinematic experience.
Each work in the program unleashes an energy unseen in ordinary cinema
by transforming the strip of film from an unbroken "window on the
world" into a turbulent contest of individual frames.
Just as post-war painters challenged the continued legitimacy of the
picture plane, artists working in film sought to push past the "realistic"
representations of time and space typified by the hegemonic Hollywood
studio productions. Breaking with accepted forms of cinematic representation–often
by physically altering the film itself–these works appear to fulfill
Lucio Fontana's prescient call for the discovery of a "luminous
malleable substance" that would allow for an art of speed to be
created in four dimensions. Politically, sexually, and formally radical,
these transgressive works from 1959-67 still retain their power to shock.
The result is a visceral cinema, both literally and metaphorically full
of holes.
Jane Conger Belson Shimane, Odds and Ends (1959,
16mm, color, 4 min.)
Though frequently described as a parody because of its monotonous, rambling,
bongo infused soundtrack, Odds and Ends, is also a beautifully dense
compendium of moving image-making and -editing techniques. Sensitively
painted and scratched film is rapidly intercut with other abstract animations
and disparate imagery... –Madison Brookshire
Takahiko Iimura, On Eye Rape (1962, 16mm, color,
10 min)
(Co-produced with Natsuyuki Nakanishi) A found educational film about
the sex of plants and animals was punched with big holes in almost every
frame throughout the film by myself and an artist friend Natsuyuki Nakanishi
who found the film in a garbage. At several points there are inserts
of a few frames of a pornographic photo (which would work on a subliminal
sense) in which the sex part was covered by black. The film is an irony
and at the same time a protest against sex censorship in Japan at the
time in which pornographic scenes had to be covered by black. At the
end we even punched holes in these subliminal pictures, thereby “censoring”
the censored image. –TI
Stan Brakhage, Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961,
16mm, color, 9 min.)
Only at a crisis do I see both the sense as I've been trained to see
it (that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic,
colors as we've been trained to call a color a color, and so forth)
and patterns that move straight out from the inside of the mind through
the optic nerves - spots before my eyes, so to speak - and it's a very
intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I've seen that every time
a child was born .... Now none of that was in Window Water Baby Moving;
and I wanted a childbirth film which expressed all of my seeing at such
a time. –SB
Stan Brakhage, Mothlight (1963, 16mm, color,
4 min)
Essence of lepidoptera re-created between two strips of clear mylar
tape: an anima animation. What a moth might see from birth to death
if black were white and white were black. –SB
Carolee Schneemann, Fuses (1967, 16mm, color,
23 min.)
“The red heat baked into the emulsion suffuses the film, a concrete
emblem of erotic power.” –B. Ruby Rich , on Fuses
Rather than make metaphors that either obscure or romanticize physical
love, in Fuses Schneemann depicts it graphically. Rejecting the temporal
model that is based on the male orgasm, Schneemann flatly refuses to
create a climax in her film, offering us instead a plateau of sustained
activity. Our world may be oversaturated with images of sex, but very
few of them are actually erotic. This film, however, celebrates bodies
in general and these two people in particular, reclaiming sex from pornography
and advertising for the profound yes, yes to life that it is. –Madison
Brookshire
Aldo Tambellini, Black Trip (1965, 16mm, black
and white, 5 min.)
Beginning in 1965 with Black Is, Tambellini launched a series of politically
charged experimental films that explore the expressive possibilities
of black as a dominant color and idea. For the most part Tambellini’s
seven “black films” are made without the use of a camera
but rather by carefully manipulating the film itself by scorching, scratching,
painting and treating the film stock as a type of sculptural and painterly
medium. –Harvard Film Archive
Kurt Kren, 3/60: Baume im Herbst (Trees in Autumn)
(1960, 16mm, black and white, 5 min.)
Kurt Kren, 6/64: Mama und Papa (Materialaktion
Otto Mühl) [Mom and Dad (An Otto Muehl Happening)] (1964,
16mm, color, 4 min.)
Based on Otto Muehl's Mama und Papa, Kren's film departments from straight
documentation by using editing as both a constructive and destructive
force.
Ken Jacobs, Blonde Cobra (1963, 16mm,
black and white, 33 min.)
Featuring Jack Smith. Images gathered by Bob Fleischner, sound-film
composed by Ken Jacobs.
"[Jacobs'] work opens your ears and mind, and, simply put, has
no like in the multiplex, the art house or even most festivals."
–Manhola Dargas, The New York Times
This program is supported by a generous donation from Catherine Opie;
the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County
Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles;
the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Mike Kelley Foundation
for the Arts, and the Metabolic Studio.
--------------------------
Sunday, January
13, 2013, 7:30 pm
Los Angeles Filmforum presents:
Carolee Schneemann: New videos of the Performing
Artist
At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los
Angeles CA 90028
Carolee Schneemann in person!
Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.
Available by credit card in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/315189
or by cash or check at the door.
Filmforum is delighted to start 2013 with a visit from the influential
and fantastic artist Carolee Schneemann. Schneemann, multidisciplinary
artist, has transformed the definition of art, especially discourse
on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized
by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive
taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship to the social
body. Schneemann has never ceased to cross mediums and boundaries to
make work that resonates with raw poetic power. From her collaged war
or diary films and provocative performances to her photos, paintings
and installations, Schneemann's varied creations deconstruct our ingrained
preconceptions and everyday assumptions. In words, images and actions,
her art is deeply personal, sharply critical, intensely expressive,
and always innovative. Tonight we are primarily looking at recent video
works that draw from or document some of her performances.
Her classic film Fuses will be included in the screening Breaking the
Plane, presented by Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA, on Thursday January
10 at 7:00 pm. For more information and tickets, see www.moca.org
Currently in Los Angeles, her early painting/constructions are exhibited
in a group show at THE BOX, "Painting" (how painting became
performance). http://www.theboxla.com/
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Screening:
Plumb Line (1968-71, color, sound, Super
8mm film on video, 14:58)
The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural
equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers
in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as
16mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film
bursts into flames, consuming its own substance. Sound: Carolee Schneemann
Ask the Goddess (1991, color, sound, 7
min.)
Unedited document of performative lecture, videotaped by Tim Howe at
Owen Sound, Ontario Canada.
Ask the Goddess is a provocative performance in which Schneemann interacts
with the audience by responding to sexual and psychic dilemmas read
from cards they have submitted.
A continuous relay of randomly projected slides comprises an iconography
of Goddess symbols, taboo and sacred, as Schneemann reacts spontaneously
to the questions. She channels cogent answers triggered by the unpredictable
images and finds herself physically activated, turning into a howling
wolf or crawling across the projection area, meowing like a cat.
Snows (1967-2011, color and b&w, silent,
16 mm film on video, 20:30 min.)
Los Angeles premiere!
This is a newly restored version of documentation of the 1967 group
performance "Snows¨
"... [Snows] was build out of my anger, outrage, fury and sorrow
for the Vietnamese. The performance contained five films whose related
content triggered juxtaposition of a winter environment and Vietnam
atrocity images."
Pinea Silva (2011, color, sound, 10 min.)
Los Angeles premiere!
Hidden and suppressed origins of the iconic Christmas tree are here
analyzed as
Schneemann reconstructs the archaic gender attributes of the winter
tree. A normative
hetero Christmas card is juxtaposed with a gay Santa squeezing down
a chimney, a
Palestinian Santa Claus presenting one skinny tree in Jerusalem, the
ancient nordic
Goddess affiliation with the tree as vulvic fecundity, and of course
including a domestic
Cat dressed as Santa Claus. Pinea Silva is a lecture which deconventionalizes
all aspects of
The Christian Christmas tree-- its archaic and sacred aspects invite
appreciations by all.
Americana I-Ching Apple Pie (2007, 16:37
min, color, sound, 16:37)
"The `Americana I-Ching Apple Pie' recipe was first enacted in
my Belsize, London kitchen in 1972. Unfortunately, the original footage
disappeared with the man doing the documentation who may have been working
for the CIA. The next presentation was May '77, as a cooking event for
the Heresies Magazine performance and jumble sale benefit. With the
exception of a dozen apples, flour, maple syrup, and eggs, which I brought,
all the cooking `material,' utensils, and props were discovered in the
jumble. Objects that functionally approximated actual cooking utensils
were used: nails, hammers, an arrow, a flower pot, ball bearings, rags,
a watering can. The cook's apron was a ripped mini skirt with which
I covered my hair. As I state in the performance, `traditionally you
need an apron, but it doesn't matter where you put it.'" - CS
Devour (2003-04, color, sound, 8:40)
Devour is a single-channel version of the artist's multi-channel video
projection installation of the same name. Schneemann writes that this
work features "a range of images edited to contrast evanescent,
fragile elements with violent, concussive, speeding fragments…
political disasters, domestic intimacy, and ambiguous menace."
In this dense montage, the title comes to stand for both the voraciously
synthetic head-on rush of contemporary media, and the corresponding
near-addictive impulse of its consumers.
More on Carolee Schneemann:
Carolee Schneemann's pioneering work ranges across disciplines, encompassing
painting, performance, film and video. Her early and prescient investigations
into themes of gender and sexuality, identity and subjectivity, as well
as the cultural biases of art history, laid the groundwork for much work
of the 1980s and '90s. Her bold challenges to taboo and tradition can
be seen as inspiring and influencing artists as varied as Paul McCarthy,
Valie Export, the Guerrilla Girls, Tracy Emin and Karen Finley.
While she is often described as a performance artist, Schneemann first
studied painting, and that training informed the course of all her subsequent
work. It can be seen in her continuing identification as a painter and
a formalist, in her attention to art-historical figures such as Cézanne,
and in the hand-coloring and mark-making to which she subjected the surface
of some of her films. However, the effect of her early experience with
painting was also reactive and negative; she recognized, as a woman in
the early 1960s working in a male-dominated medium, that "the brush
belonged to abstract expressionist male endeavor. The brush was phallic."
This realization coincided with an explosion of new artistic forms, and
while Schneemann would never give up painting, she turned her attention
to the downtown New York avant-garde's locus of film, dance, theater,
and performance. – more at eai.org
The Millennium Film Journal Number 54 Fall 2011 was devoted to the film
works of Schneemann, with special essays by Bruce Elder, David James,
Sarah Paulson, and Kenneth White. It includes unpublished notes and sketches
for Kitch's Last Meal.
Paule Anglim Gallery in San Francisco has just presented a solo exhibit
of her video and photography works;
The Museum of Modern Art in NYC recently featured her installation Up
To And Including Her Limits in the exhibit "On Line: Drawing Through
the Twentieth Century". Her multidisciplinary work has been shown
at innumerable venues around the world. A retrospective including film,
video installations, kinetic sculptures has recently traveled from the
Dorsky Museum of Art, NY to the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle to the Krannert
Museum, Champaign-Urbana (February – April 2012). Her letters are
the subject of Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee
Schneemann and Her Circle, edited by Kristine Stiles (Duke University
Press, 2010). Additional publications include Imaging Her Erotics –
Essays, Interviews, Projects (MIT Press 2003, 2004) and More Than Meat
Joy: Complete Performance Work and Selected Writing (McPherson & Co.
1979, 1997). More at http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/
---------------
This program is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors
through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural
Affairs, City of Los Angeles; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts; the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, and the Metabolic Studio.
Coming soon to Filmforum:
Jan 20& 21 - Co-presenting The Art of Vision: A Brakhage Celebration,
at REDCAT
Jan 27 - Jean Rouch: Horendi
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city's longest-running organization screening
experimental and avant-garde film and video art, documentaries, and experimental
animation. 2012 is our 37th year
Memberships available, $70 single, $105 dual, or $50 single student
Contact us at lafilmforum@yahoo.com. www.lafilmforum.org
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