Early Monthly Segments

About EMS

Early Monthly Segments is a monthly film series named after an early film by Robert Beavers, and is inspired by the immediacy, vibrancy and experimentation found in that film. Programmed by Scott Berry, Chris Kennedy, and Kate MacKay this series features historical and contemporary avant-garde 16mm films in a salon-like setting at the Gladstone Art Bar in Toronto, Canada. In this relaxed context with refreshing beverages and food available, we hope to encourage a convivial atmosphere for engaged viewing and post-screening dialogue. We do not receive public funding for our programs. We pay artists from admissions.

Reviews
Jason Anderson teases out a bit more of our ethos in his eye weekly article here.
Thomas Barker reviews Allison Cameron’s live soundtrack to our presentation of Eisenstein’s Strike here.

The Gladstone Hotel is located at 1214 Queen St West. The Art Bar is the eastern-most door of the Hotel.

Thanks to everyone at The Gladstone Hotel and the artists who make the work we show.

For more info, or to join our email list, email earlymonthlysegments (@) gmail.com.

#39 = Monday May 7, 2012 = Nicky Hamlyn in person!

Tobacco Shed

We’re pleased to host a screening of rare films by UK filmmaker Nicky Hamlyn. His work looks at the relationship between the camera and the elements being filmed—object, reflection, colour, light, shadow—resulting in a rigorous reflection on the act of filming itself. The films have a hard-won beauty, but open themselves up to our appreciation through patient observation. This screening focuses on two of his sound films—That Has Been and Tobacco Shed—plus the stunning White Light.

“That Has Been is the last in a series of longer works made in the first half of the 1980s. The film was shot in two adjacent rooms. Outside views are seen in reflection via an aluminum photographic lamp, while some of the imagery is generated from photographs taken in the same spaces. The occasional voice over explores the relationship between places and dreams and that between memories and the physical events that can trigger them.” (Hamlyn)

White Light, made a few years after the short film Minutiae initiated a stylistic epiphany, also focuses on reflections—this time in the chrome-plated faucets of his studio sink. The faucets are shot frame-by-frame while the focus is racked back and forth, creating a shimmering rhythmic experience. The film’s animated quality is further enhanced by rotoscoped sequences (photographic images traced by hand). These animations deepen the enquiry into the abstract and the photographic and into the way that illusions create visual forms.

Tobacco Shed is shot at a tobacco-curing oven in northwest Umbria, Italy. It uses the serial nature of the building (a series of open bays) to construct the film—circling the building and framing each doorway in a consistent manner. This simple set-up allows for the small differences (an open doorway, a car parked askew) and character of the building—soon to be transformed due to changing agricultural priorities—to come through.

Programme:
That Has Been, 1984, 16mm, UK, 40 min.
White Light, 1996, 16mm, UK, 22 min. silent
Tobacco Shed, 2010, 16mm, UK, 11 min.

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday May 7, 2012 | 8:00 pm screening, $5 suggested donation

Upcoming #40 = June = TBA

#38 = 4/23/2012 = Ruth Noack presents Sally Potter + Patricia Gruben

Thriller

As a special post-Images Festival wind-down, guest curator Ruth Noack presents Sally Potter‘s Thriller and Patricia Gruben’s Before it Blows.

“Since its release in 1980, Sally Potter‘s rewriting of Puccini’s opera, La Boheme, has become a classic in feminist film theory. A model for the deconstruction of the Hollywood film, Thriller turns the conventional role of women as romantic victims in fiction on its head. Mimi, the seamstress heroine of the opera who must die before the curtain goes down, decides to investigate the reasons for her death. In doing so, she begins to explore the dichotomy which separates her from the opera’s other female character, the “bad girl” Musetta.” – Women Make Movies

“Patricia Gruben returns with a concise, amusing and telling examination of how we look and how we think. As the camera remains fixed in its gaze at the impending gush of the Old Faithful geyser, voices off-screen express impatience, expectation, uncertainty and awe at the power of nature unleased before them. It is a clever conceit, revealing just how restless North Americans are: we can’t wait for anything! A deceptively simple short film, Before It Blows suggest vast thematic outlines which explore human Gruben’s work, the very foundations of our tenuous knowledge of the world and of ourselves.” – Tom McSorley, Take One

Ruth Noack is a curator and writer living in Vienna. She studied feminist theory, art and audiovisual media in England and the USA and received a degree in art history from the University of Vienna. Noack has worked as a translator, art critic, exhibition organizer and university lecturer. She held the position of president of the Austrian section of the International Association of Art Critics and was a member of the jury for the Chinese Contemporary Art Award in addition to curating documenta 12, working alongside Roger Buergel. She employs an interdisciplinary approach to her work that makes use of principles of film theory and has focused on issues of governmentality, globalization, and exhibition-making. Publications include monographs on Eva Hesse, Alejandra Riera, Danica Dakic, Mary Kelly, and Ines Doujak. Her book on Sanja Ivekovic will be published by Afterall/MIT Press in 2013. Currently, she is working on an exhibition called Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life. More info here.

Programme:

Before it Blows, Patricia Gruben, 1997, 35mm, Canada 9 min.
Thriller, Sally Potter, 1979, 16mm, UK, 34 min.

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday April 23, 2012 | 8:00pm screening | $5 suggested donation

Before it Blows

Upcoming #39 = Mon May 7 = Nicky Hamlyn in person!

#37 = 3/19/2012 = 3rd Anniversary = Gordon Matta-Clark

Day's End

We’re excited to celebrate three years of programming with a special program devoted to the films of Gordon Matta-Clark. Our longtime fans may have spotted a brief glimpse of Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect in the first film we showed in March 2009: Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare. Tonight brings us full-circle, if you will.

Like his peer Robert Smithson, who also died too young, Matta-Clark’s films bring his ideas, performances and anti-architecture antics to vivid life in a way that moves beyond mere documentation. Diagrams, writings and photographs of his work have long preserved him as a pivot point in late 20th century contemporary art, but there’s nothing quite like watching the vertiginous lengths Matta-Clark goes to realize his cuttings in luminous live action—watching him hang from ropes as he carves large openings into the walls of Pier 52 is as heart-stopping as it is gorgeous.

Tonight features a quartet that surveys the range of Matta-Clark’s filmic output. Tree Dance documents an early performance inspired by spring fertility rituals, with Matta-Clark moving through a series of cocoons, ladders and ropes hung throughout a very large tree in Poughkeepsie, New York. City Slivers slices up the New York cityscape in-camera, as he creates a series of super-impositions using the city’s dark cavernous streets as mattes. Day’s End documents one of Matta-Clark’s famous cuttings, the above mentioned Pier 52, which he cunningly transformed from a dark warehouse into an “indoor park”—much to the chagrin of both the Port Authority and those that used the dark corners as a cruising spot. Finally, Fresh Kill features Matta-Clark driving his old truck, christened Herman Meydag, to the Fresh Kills dump to be demolished by a bulldozer. Seeing these films again reminds us of the milieu of which Matta-Clark was a part—one is reminded of Bas Jan Ader, Anthony McCall and John Chamberlain, to name just a few—but also of the fervent influence his work still can have on our conceptions of the built landscape in which we live.

NOTE: The screening takes place in the Gladstone’s Ballroom.

Programme:
City Slivers, Gordon Matta-Clark, 1976, 16mm, USA, 15 min. silent
Tree Dance, Gordon Matta-Clark, 1971, Super 8 on 16mm, USA, 10 min. silent
Fresh Kill, Gordon Matta-Clark, 1972, 16mm, USA, 13 min.
Day’s End, Gordon Matta-Clark, 1975, Super 8 on 16mm, USA, 23 min. silent

@ Gladstone Hotel, Ballroom | 1214 Queen St West
Monday March 19, 2012 | 7:30pm screening | $5 – 10 suggested donation

Special thanks to The Gladstone Hotel and Robert Fiore and Persistent Pictures, Jane Crawford, Maia Carpenter and Aliza Ma for her sourcing skills!

Upcoming #38 = April 23 = TBA

Perfumed Nightmare

Gordon Matta-Clark

City Slivers

#36 = 2/20/12 = Razor’s Edge = Barbara Hammer + Kurt Kren

Sanctus

2/60 48 Köpfe Aus Dem Szondi-Test

This month we pair films by Barbara Hammer and Kurt Kren to draw out some fascinating similarities from both their works. Barbara Hammer, the lesbian filmmaker known for her radical and poetic films on lesbian identity and Kurt Kren, best known for documenting (in a uniquely structural way) the early performances of the Viennese Aktionist movement, may never have shared a stage, but their extensive catalogues share an obsession with interests beyond the radical body.

While Kren’s explosive early Aktionist films have a well-deserved infamy (particularly the Otto Muehl film 7/64 Leda and the Swan and 16/67 September 20th—the eating, drinking, pissing and shitting film), other ‘60s era films had a different definition of “graphic”, basing films like 2/60 48 Heads From The Szondi-Test on images taken from printed matter, flattening the possibilities of film down to a two-dimensional picture plane. In the ‘70s his films moved from the micro to the macro, shifting to large swathes of time that he harnessed by creating long time-exposures, most notably with the stunning 31/75 Asyl, where Kren used a series of masks to re-expose three rolls of film over twenty-one days, creating a landscape fragmented across time.

Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus and Bent Time each tackle similar themes in Hammer’s own particular way. Sanctus takes early x-rays shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson and optically prints them into a remarkable film about the way our bodies are imaged in relationship to medicine and disease. Dr. Watson’s eerie moving x-rays transform the human body into an ethereal, two-dimensional object. Bent Time explores the fourth dimension, time, in her wondrous trip across the continental United States, stopping at ancient places like Chaco Canyon and more recent sites such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Driven by a Pauline Oliveros score, the film maps the energy of time and history in an exciting play of light, movement and sound.

Programme:
2/60 48 Köpfe Aus Dem Szondi-Test (48 Heads From The Szondi-Test), Kurt Kren, 1960, 16mm, Austria, 4.5 min. b&w, silent
10/65 Selbstverstümmelung (Self-Mutilation), Kurt Kren, 1965, 16mm, Austria, 5 min. b&w, silent
Sanctus, Barbara Hammer, 1990, 16mm, USA, 19 min. colour, sound
32/76 An W + B (To W + B), Kurt Kren, 1976, Austria, 7 min. colour, silent
34/77 Tschibo, Kurt Kren, 1977, 16mm, Austria, 2 min. colour, silent
31/75 Asyl (Asylum), Kurt Kren, 1975, 16mm, Austria, 9 min. colour, silent
Bent Time, Barbara Hammer, 1983, 16mm, USA, 22 min. colour, sound
50/96 Snapshots (for Bruce), Kurt Kren, 1996, 16mm, Austria, 5 min. colour, silent

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday February 20, 2012 | 7:30 pm screening, $5 suggested donation

Upcoming #37 = March 19 = 3^rd Anniversary!

31/75 Asyl

Bent Time

10/65 Selbstverstümmelung

Sanctus

#35 = 1/16/2012 = Print Generation by J.J. Murphy

Print Generation

Once the images are brought up to full colour, Print Generation heads back toward abstraction. The viewer, having built a picture from an abstract pattern of dots, now must literally choose what is seen, whether to hold memory’s trace of the representation or swim into the dancing crystalline waters of emulsion.” -Anthony Bannon, Buffalo Evening News

Print Generation by J.J. Murphy is a rarely screened structural gem that harnesses image and sound deterioration to its fullest. Murphy started with sixty one second shots, a one minute film. He then made fifty contact printed copies from each successive version, consciously degrading the film one “generation” at a time. Print Generation is structured so we begin watching obscured images and work toward the original and back again… while the soundtrack of lapping ocean waves does the opposite. The film elegantly addresses the intricacies of memory and time: how we remember, what we remember and how a fleeting ‘home movie’ reveals and recedes. Spoiler alert? Well, not exactly, as with all films, structural and otherwise, the magic of the experience is also in the sharing… so we hope you will join us for this special screening alongside the launch of PUBLIC issue #44 on the 2010 Experimental Media Congress, edited by Peggy Gale. Sneak peak of the issue here.

Print Generation by J.J. Murphy (1974, 16mm, 50 minutes)
@ the PUBLIC #44 Experimental Media launch

Monday 16 January 2012, 6-9 PM
Gladstone Hotel Ballroom (1214 Queen Street West, Toronto)

*NOTE: SCREENING at 6:30 SHARP*

Recently restored archival print courtesy the Academy Film Archive.
Special thanks to Mark Toscano, May Haduong and Canyon Cinema.

Print Generation

Print Generation (JJ Murphy, sitting)

#34 = 12/5/2011 = Hart of London by Jack Chambers

Jack Chambers

Parallel to the exhibitions of Jack Chambers’ artwork at the Art Gallery of Ontario, running until May 13, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, running until January 15, we’re pleased to present a 16mm screening of his breathtaking film, The Hart of London.

Jack Chambers’ 16mm masterwork begins as an elliptical portrait of his hometown of London, Ontario as depicted in footage gleaned from a local TV station. Chambers layers these fragments, bi-packing positive and negative black and white film together, lending a ghostly quality to the city and its inhabitants, including the ill-fated eponymous hart. The Winter city-scape gradually gives way to the Spring thaw, a rebirth and finally the possibility of transcendence, in the form of a gentle accord between his children and deer in a local park. Throughout his career Chambers consistently found extraordinary beauty in ordinary places and things, and many of his paintings and films reveal a depth and profundity in the daily life of a small city.

“The houses were unlit and, without their orange banners of human warmth, the street looked abandoned of life. My feet became numb with the cold as the day darkened, and tough little grey flakes began falling from the sky. I looked around to find what it was that had hurt me, and all I saw were the dumb houses, the glitter of steel through a crack in the closing sky, and the hard snow” – Jack Chambers on The Hart of London

“Jack Chambers’s 80-minute The Hart of London (1970) is a sprawling, ambitious film that combines newsreel footage of disasters, urban and nature imagery, and footage evoking the cycles of life and death. It is one of those rare films that succeeds precisely because of its sprawl; raw and open-ended almost to the point of anticipating the postmodern rejection of “master narratives,” it cannot be reduced to a simple summary, and changes on you from one viewing to the next…” — Fred Camper

Info on the AGO exhibition here; on the McMichael here; and CCCA info on Jack Chambers here.

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday December 5, 2011 | 7:30 pm screening, $5 suggested donation

Special thanks to the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) and our lovely hosts at the Gladstone Hotel.

Upcoming:
#35 = Monday 16 January 2012 = PUBLIC Journal launch of 2010 Experimental Media Congress issue WITH special EMS screening of a recently restored rarely screened avant garde film!

Hart of London

#33 = 11/21/11 = Jack Chambers + Nancy Holt + Robert Smithson

Spiral Jetty

This evening features three films on time and perception by three visual artists who also left their imprints on film. Robert Smithson actively and articulately imagined and wrote about the possibilities of cinema, so it is our pleasure to rescue his film from its usual expository position on a monitor in a museum’s dark corner.

Nancy Holt’s Swamp finds her lost in the reeds of a New Jersey swamp, trying to follow the voice of Smithson as he stays just ahead of her, out of sight. We are confined by her view of the surroundings as she stumbles through the rushes, completely unable to get our bearings in the swirling imagery.

In contrast, Jack Chambers’ Circle stays in one place, the relative placidity of Chambers’ backyard in London, Ontario. The central section of the film consists of a small patch of that yard, filmed every morning for a year. The result vividly marks the changing of the seasons and extrapolates beautifully on the passage of time as an accumulation of mundane moments, each weighted with personal experience.

Finally, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is more than a documentary about the making of the eponymous landscape sculpture. Within the film, Smithson is predominantly interested in the scale of time, mapping the elements of the jetty—the mud, salt crystals, rocks, water—back to their Jurassic beginnings. The film is a necessary companion to the sculpture itself, utilizing cinema to articulate how the jetty elongates time’s passage. The majestic final helicopter shot almost asks the question: might the spiral be built from the bones of the dinosaurs?

Programme:
Swamp, Nancy Holt, 1971, 16mm, USA, 6 minutes, sound
Circle, Jack Chambers, 1969, 16mm, Canada, 28 minutes, sound
Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson, 1970, 16mm, USA, 35 minutes, sound

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday November 21, 2011 | 7:30 pm screening, $5 suggested donation

Circle

Swamp

#32 = 10/17/11 = Robert Banks + Suzanne Naughton

Robert Banks

You Can’t Get a Piece of Mind: a Rockudrama
We’ve finally tracked down that print of Robert Bank’s You Can’t Get a Piece of Mind: a Rockudrama! The 1994 documentary chronicles the musical life of Cleveland musician and eccentric Dan “Supie T” Theman, a Vietnam Veteran-cum-punk rock singer. Shot mostly on expired 16mm reversal film, along with 35mm still photography and super 8mm film, with the sound recorded on salvaged ¼ inch tape, the film was an analogue underground effort to sort fact from fiction regarding the storied “Supie T”. On the film’s release Banks was criticized for making an exploitative and disturbing portrait of a troubled subject, but he was sincere in his appreciation for his subject. “I loved his music. His music is cool. Supie just wanted people to hear his jams and have fun, and I tried to capture that on film.”

Preceded by Suzanne Naughton’s classic tribute to the Sex Pistols: Mondo Punk!

Entranced by the beauty of celluloid from a young age Robert Banks has been making formally inventive independent films for twenty years. His award-winning works have screened at film festivals around the world. A graduate of the Cleveland School of the Arts, Banks has taught film courses at Cuyahoga Community College, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Cleveland State University. He has also worked as a free-lance cinematographer on numerous commercials and music videos, and regularly hosts salon style screenings at his Cleveland studio.

Programme:

Mondo Punk, Suzanne Naughton, 1978, 16mm, Canada, 6 min.
You Can’t Get a Piece of Mind: a Rockudrama, Robert Banks, 1995, 16mm, USA, 58 min.

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Monday, October 17, 2011 | 8:00 PM screening, $5 suggested donation

Dan "Supie T" Theman

#31 = 9/19/11 = Black Audio Film Collective + Paul Winkler

Black Audio Film Collective

Early Monthly Segments is proud to present a rare 16mm print of Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs. The film takes as its point of departure the civil disturbances of September and October 1985 in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in the urban centres of London. Running throughout Handsworth Songs is the idea that the riots were the outcome of a protracted suppression by British society of black presence. The film portrays civil disorder as an opening onto a secret history of dissatisfaction that is connected to the national drama of industrial decline. The ‘Songs’ of the title do not reference musicality but instead invoke the idea of documentary as a poetic montage of associations from British documentarians John Grierson & Humphrey Jennings.

Preceded by Paul Winkler’s Dark, a heavily-abstracted document of Aboriginal Land Claim demonstrations in the 1970s.

Inaugurated in the UK in 1982 and dissolved in 1998, the seven-person Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) included John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and Trevor Mathison and produced award winning film, photography, slide, video, installation, posters, interventions: blackaudiofilmcollective.com

Programme:
Handsworth Songs, Black Audio Film Collective, 1986, 16mm, UK, 60 min.
Dark, Paul Winkler, 1974, 16mm, Australia, 19 min.

@ The Gladstone Hotel Ballroom | 1214 Queen Street West
Monday, September 19, 2011 | 9 PM screening, $5 – 10 suggested donation

Note: later starting time and different room.

Handsworth Songs

Dark

#30 = 8/15/11 = Owen Land Tribute

“Supie T” has gone AWOL.

We are sorry to inform you that due to issues beyond EMS’s control, we are unable to present Robert Banks’s film this coming Monday.

Owen Land

This is not the Culprit. This is Owen Land.

Films by Owen Land (1944-2011)

We’ve decided to substitute with an evening to honour the recently departed Owen Land with a program of 5 or 6 16mm films from his extensive oeuvre. You can expect to see Wide Angle Saxon and New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops and hopefully On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? and definitely A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley California and likely Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present among others. We hope you will join even though “Supie T” won’t be with us (we hope he will make an appearance this fall!).

Thank you.

Special thanks to CFMDC

“By the way, the film was booed at the Cinematheque and it was cut off before its proper time (twenty-two minutes). Someone shouted, and he meant it as a joke: ‘Another genius was born tonight at the Cinematheque!’ But I state it here in all seriousness.”

- Jonas Mekas on George Landow aka Owen Land circa 1965

(thanks to Making Light of It for unearthing this quote)

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Monday, August 15, 2011 | 8:00 PM screening, $5 suggested donation

On the Marriage Broker Joke...

Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present

#29 = 7/18/11 = Jikagenzo!!!

Climax

Japanese filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa presents “Traveling Through A Gate and Liquid”, a screening of recent Japanese hand-processed films (Jikagenzo) that he curated for us. He is in town as an artist-in-residence this month at LIFT.

Traveling Through A Gate and Liquid
“Jikagenzo is a Japanese term for ‘hand-processing.’ In Japan, there are only a handful of personal filmmakers who decide to make films this way, processing films and making prints by themselves—often in their kitchens. They hand-process film in order to control the image and to create special visual or sonic effects. Or, they decide to process and print films to save money on laboratory fees. Traveling Through A Gate and Liquid consists of seven films, which are all hand-processed. Some of them express memories of life, and others focus on the film’s materiality and the various visual effects achieved through hand-processing.

The program begins with Tokunaga’s Ei, which shows a gathering during Obon, a season where families visit ancestors’ graves. Oshima’s Instant Souvenirs displays a series of old Polaroid pictures while Pilg Image of Time shows Ota manipulating time through time-lapse photography. Noto’s France as a Dream is based on his dream when he was coming back from his first trip to France, while in Sueoka’s Sinking Away, a found footage film is re-photographed to obtain visual effects that match the movements of a sailboat. In Fog is an abstract film by Mizuyoshi, creating visual and sound from images that may be considered as mistakes, and the program ends with Tamaki’s Climax, which shows his interests in the materiality of the film medium.” – notes by Tomonari Nishikawa

Programme:

Ei, Saika Tokunaga, 2010, Super 8, Japan, 3 min.
Instant Souvenirs, Keitaro Oshima, 2009, 16mm, Japan, 9 min. silent
PILG IMAGE of TIME, Yo Ota, 2008, 16mm, France/Japan, 14 min.
France as a Dream, Masaru Noto, 2009, 16mm, France/Japan, 6 min. silent
Sinking Away, Ichiro Sueoka, 2005, 16mm, Japan, 3 min. silent
In Fog, Akira Mizuyoshi, 2010, 16mm, Japan, 6 min.
Climax, Shinkan Tamaki, 2008, 16mm, Japan, 3 min. silent

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday, July 18, 2011 | 8:00 PM screening, $5 suggested donation

Sinking Away

In Fog

#28 = 6/6/11 = Jaap Pieters: The Eye of Amsterdam

Jaap Pieters

Dutch artist Jaap Pieters is a stalwart specialist of Super 8mm filmmaking, creating dozens of films on the small-gauge “amateur” medium over the course of three decades. Confining himself to the duration of a 3-minute Super 8 reel, working with minimal equipment and manipulation, most of Pieters’s films are shot from the window of his Amsterdam apartment and concentrate on a single subject – unusual happenings on the sidewalk, or the recurring appearance of peculiar individuals. Well-known in Europe where his films are seen regularly at a bewildering variety of microcinemas and alternative venues as well as at major festivals such as the IFF Rotterdam, Pieters’s ephemeral creations rarely find their way to North American screens. We are pleased to present an extensive selection of Jaap Pieters’s films, chosen by the filmmaker himself to fit the occasion and enlivened by the presence and commentary of the artist. (Notes from Media City catalogue).

Special thanks to Jeremy Rigsby and Oona Mosna, Media City Film Festival.
Jaap Pieters North American tour organized by Media City and presented in co-operation with Double Negative (Montréal) and Early Monthly Segments (Toronto)

Programme:
The Eye of Amsterdam, Jaap Pieters, Super 8, various years, 90 minutes with live narration

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday, June 6, 2011 | 8:00 PM screening, $5 suggested donation

De Blikjesman

Jimmy's Ballet

#27 = 5/16/11 = To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?

And We All Shine On

Co-presented with The Power Plant

Now in the Gladstone Ballroom!

Asked by The Power Plant’s Assistant Curator Jon Davies to respond to the exhibition he has curated, To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?, we assembled a program of 16mm films (old and new) that reinterpret the geometry of landscape and mediate the natural world in distinctive ways. Processing and refracting their surroundings, these filmmakers evoke specters of land, sea and sky through a variety of techniques including hand processing, animation, found-footage montage and dazzling experiments with light and colour. Dynamically poised between representation and abstraction, these landscapes of the imagination chart topographies both external and internal.

More information on the exhibition here.

Programme:
Radio Dynamics, Oskar Fischinger, 1943, 16mm, USA, 4 min.
Hotel Cartograph, Scott Stark, 1983, 16mm, USA, 12 min.
Untitled (Objects 3), Sophie Michael, 2008, 16mm, UK, 3 min.
And We All Shine On, Michael Robinson, 2006, 16mm, USA, 7 min.
Circa 1960, Chris Curreri, 2005, 16mm, Canada, 6 min.
Fuji, Robert Breer, 1974, 16mm, USA, 8.5 min.
Moment Musical, Bruce Checefsky, 2008, 16mm, USA, 6 min.
Calculated Movements, Larry Cuba, 1985, 16mm, USA, 6 min.
The Zone of the Total Eclipse, Mika Taanila, 2006, double 16mm, Finland, 2006, 6 min.

@ Gladstone Hotel, Ballroom! | 1214 Queen St West
Monday, May 16, 2011 | 8:00 PM screening, $5 suggested donation

Untitled (Objects 3)

Circa 1960

Hotel Cartograph

Thanks to Canyon Cinema, Light Cone, Chicago Filmmakers and The Gladstone Hotel.

#28 = Monday 6/6/11 = Jaap Pieters in person!

April Break = Gone Fishin’

Due to post-Images Fest recuperation, EMS has decided to take a break for the month of April.
Our April 18 screening is canceled.

We will be back on Monday, May 16 for a program that ties-in with the To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong? exhibition at the Power Plant. More info on this website shortly.

Enrico Mandirola

For those jonesing for some good ol’ 16mm film, please join us Friday, April 15 in the audience of Enrico Mandirola’s screening and artist talk. The Bogota based filmmaker will be showing new work that he made during his LIFT residency. April 15, 8pm at Cinecycle. More info on the LIFT website.

#26 = 3/21/11 = 2nd Anniversary = Nathaniel Dorsky

A Fall Trip Home

In celebration of our second year of programming we are delighted to focus on the early work of a filmmaker who we have found inspiring as viewers, programmers and artists. This month we turn our attention to the first three films of Nathaniel Dorsky, an artist celebrated for his subtle eye, his attention to film as a language and his meticulous editing. In addition to this early trilogy, we present Ariel, a rare film that finds him using hand-processing as a visual language.

Dorsky’s trilogy on adolescensce was made when he was twenty and twenty-one years of age before he moved from New York to San Francisco. The sensual Ingreen was shot by a twenty-year old Dorsky in his hometown of Milburn, New Jersey and suggests his wrestling with his sexuality and his sense of living in a closed environment. Summerwind and A Fall Trip Home also evoke summer life in Dorsky’s childhood hometown.‘Forgetting its psychological plot, A Fall Trip Home is a fine exponent of the intrinsic magical power of cinema. Its images, which evolve in a rather unmagical sober suburb, are continually transcended and manipulated into a kind of epic haiku of superimpositions and textural weavings.’ –Jerome Hiler

Ariel was made in a period when Dorsky was paying particular attention to the individual qualities of various film stocks (another film from this period, Pneuma, consists of fields of film grain of out-of-date film stocks, processed without being exposed). Under the tutelage of fellow film artist, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Dorsky learned and developed new hand-processing techniques to which he subjected this film. The result is Ariel, one of his more visually abstract but no less vibrant films—lush with colour and motion…a lovely complement to his emotionally compelling early trilogy.

Programme:
Ingreen, Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 16mm, USA, 12 minutes
A Fall Trip Home, Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 16mm, USA, 11 minutes
Summerwind, Nathaniel Dorsky, 1965, 16mm, USA, 14 minutes
Ariel, Nathaniel Dorsky, 1983, 16mm, USA, 16 minutes, silent

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday March 21, 2011 | 7:30pm screening, $5 suggested donation

#25 = 2/21/11 = James Broughton + Sidney Peterson

The Cage

“The connections may or may not be rational. In an intentionally realistic work the question of rationality is not a consideration.” – Sidney Peterson

Early Monthly Segments is excited to present three films from the 1940s by West Coast artists James Broughton and Sidney Peterson. Often called “the father of West Coast independent cinema,” Broughton (1913-1999) considered himself a poet first and foremost, and his films are recognized for their lyrical styles and for mixing poetry with film. Peterson (1905-2000) was a sculptor, writer and painter. Both artists taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (at that time the California School of Fine Arts), where Peterson founded the first filmmaking courses. Mother’s Day opens with a startling image, a send-up of the Pieta with a hapless man being cradled by a statue, one of a multiplicity of strange “mothers” in the film. This anti-tribute to Mother envisions Father as mostly a face in a frame, staring blankly, and children as childlike adults, mindlessly playing hopscotch and shooting squirt guns. Peterson describes The Potted Psalm as “Vertical pans, rhythmic movements, fetishes, but more importantly, freedom, the liberty to see what happens… A film that grows organically, without any rational connections, always human… …Something that is perfectly natural, but beyond anatomy.” “In the neosurreal The Cage an artist (played by two different actors) removes his eye in an attempt to stop seeing conventionally…a deranged romp through SF that includes reverse motion, anamorphic squeezing, inanimate objects that move & narrative ruptures.” – Fred Camper.

“These images are meant to play not on our rational senses, but on the infinite universe of ambiguity within us.” – Sidney Peterson

Programme:
The Potted Psalm, Sidney Peterson + James Broughton, 1946, 16mm, 25 min, B&W, silent, USA
The Cage, Sidney Peterson, 1947, 16mm, 25 minutes, B&W, silent, USA
Mother’s Day, James Broughton, 1948, 16mm, 15 min, B&W, USA

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Monday 21 February 2011 | 7:30 pm screening

Potted Psalm

Mother's Day

#24 = 1/24/11 = Peter Watkins + Brian Frye

Culloden

Note: Early Monthly Segments kicks off the new year with a new night (Monday)!

Peter Watkins’ film Culloden is based on John Prebble’s account of the brief and bloody battle that ended the Jacobite uprising in April 1746. Prebble’s book relies on first person descriptions of the battle by soldiers and officers from both sides, civilian witnesses, and official documents from the time of the battle. He also provides accounts of the subsequent murder, rape and deportation of Scots Highlanders who fought for, or were perceived to be allied with Charles Edward Stuart against William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland.

Made for BBC television and aired in 1964, Culloden was Watkins first feature film and was groundbreaking in its use of non-actors, cinema-verité cinematography and television news style reporting to depict a historical subject. These techniques were to become Watkins’ signature in subsequent projects and are consistent with Prebble’s intention of creating a peoples history written from within the event. The anachronistic interruptions of reporters interviewing participants on both sides of the battle both distance and engage the viewer, enhancing the intimacy of the personal accounts while pointing to the artificiality of the re-enactment. Approaching history the same way as the BBC might then have treated current events allows Watkins to underline persistent truths around the futility and brutality of armed conflict, especially for those who are most likely to suffer the most devastating consequences.

Brian Frye’s film Across the Rappahannock documents a reenactment of a civil war battle. His silent observation is more subtle than polemical, serving as an erie window on a brutal time. Frye writes, “In November 2001, I attended a small and relatively informal reenactment of the battle of Fredericksburg. About a hundred men and women did their best to illustrate the actions of the thousands of young men who offered their lives a century earlier. An air of absurd theater suffused the entire event, which provided the ground for its peculiar truth. Everyone played their part exceedingly honestly and well, and left something on the film I was myself surprised to find there.”

Programme:
Culloden, Peter Watkins, 1964, 16mm, b&w, 75 minutes
Across the Rappanhock, Brian Frye, 2002, 16mm, color, silent, 11 minutes

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Monday January 24, 2011 | 7:30pm screening

Across the Rappahannock

Culloden

#23 = 12/16/10 = Will Munro Memorial Fundraiser

Will Munro

Genet, Hammer, Tartaglia, Cole/Dale, Chomont and special surprises!
A fundraiser for the Will Munro fund for queer + trans people with cancer

Early Monthly Segments is paying tribute to Will Munro, Toronto’s catalyst of queer and underground cultures who died this past May after living two years with cancer. With a keen eye focused on her/histories of queer cultures, Will loved sharing music, film + art through his multitude of interests and non-stop energy, including his own artistic practices, many dance nights and co-ownership of restaurant/club The Beaver. Will is dearly missed.

We will be sharing a program of some of Will’s favourite films including Jean Genet’s seminal Un Chant d’amour (he named his legendary Vaseline club night after Genet’s “The Thief’s Journal”) as well as the rarely screened Ecce Homo by Jerry Tartaglia which uses Genet’s film to explore the criminalization of gay sexuality at the height of AIDS hysteria. Two films by Tom Chomont (who sadly also passed away this summer) selected by EMS compliment Will’s favourites and present lush superimposed scenes of lusty exploration.

Programme:
Un Chant d’amour, Jean Genet, 1950, 16mm, France, 26 minutes, silent, B&W
Ecce Homo, Jerry Tartaglia, 1991, 16mm, USA, 7 minutes, colour
Dyketactics, Barbara Hammer, 1974, 16mm, USA, 4 minutes, colour
Minimum Charge, No Cover, Janis Cole/Holly Dale, 1976, 16mm, Canada, 11 min, colour
Oblivion, Tom Chomont, 1969, 16mm, USA, 6 minutes, silent
Razorhead, Tom Chomont, 1981, 16mm, USA, 4 minutes, silent
** AND OTHER SURPRISES! *

* FOLLOWED BY ARTIST RUN CENTRE HOLIDAY PARTY **

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Thursday December 16, 2010 | 7:30pm, $5-10 suggested donation
All proceeds donated to the Will Munro Fund for Queer + Trans people with cancer

Ecco Homo

Un Chant d’amour

Minimum Cover No Charge

Oblivion

Thanks to CFMDC + Lightcone + the Gladstone Hotel.

#22 = 11/16/10 = Chick Strand

Chick Strand

Early Monthly Segments is excited to be able to present three films by the late great
Chick Strand, a founding figure of the West Coast film scene. Strand, a key figure of truly independent American film who died last year at the age of 77, left a remarkable legacy: in addition to her almost 20 films, she was a co-founder (with Bruce Baillie) of Canyon Cinema and a teacher at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her works range from lyrical film poems to deft documentary explorations of inter-personal and cross-cultural relationships. The three films in this programme display some of the breadth and depth of her skills. Waterfall and Angel Blue Sweet Wings are what Strand called ‘film poems’, celebrating both the human form and the medium of film. Soft Fiction is a series of five film portraits that explore the complicated convergence of sexual desire, pleasure, pain, exploitation and enlightenment. As radical and shocking today as it must have been on its completion in 1979, Soft Fiction is a rare example of a film which shows women not just as passive victims of sexual exploitation, but as critical participants who are able to use the knowledge and understanding gained from extreme experiences to transcend pain with wit and grace.

Programme:
Angel Blue Sweet Wings, Chick Strand, 1966, 16mm, USA, 3 minutes, colour
Waterfall, Chick Strand, 1967, 16mm, USA, 3 minutes, colour
Soft Fiction, Chick Strand, 1979, 16mm, USA, 54 minutes, B&W

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday November 16, 2010 | 7:30pm screening, $5 suggested donation

Angel Blue Sweet Wings

Soft Fiction

Angel Blue Sweet Wings

Special thanks to Irina Leimbacher, Canyon Cinema and the Gladstone Hotel.

#21 = 10/19/10 = Paul Sharits + Peter Gidal

Volcano

Paul Sharits and Peter Gidal are the most iconoclastic of filmmakers, reducing the image to pure swathes of color, motion or grain. However their work still resonates with powerful statements on the possibilities and problems of the moving picture.

Sharits’ dynamic and monomaniacal S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED, made after the color field flicker films that he’s most famous for, moves from the atomistic patterns of those films to a vivid conceptualization of visual flow. In S:S:S:S:S:S, the dissolving images of a bubbling river are slowly obliterated by random horizontal tape splices (dams) and vertical emulsion scratches that run along the whole film. The film frame that we hold as a static reference point for vision gives way to the primacy of the constant motion of the filmstrip through the projector. “A conceptual lap dissolve from “water currents” to “film strip current” / Dedicated to my son, Christopher.” – Paul Sharits

Peter Gidal’s Volcano is a late period reassertion of the focus of much of his filmic concerns: the problem of representation, recognition and identification. Gidal uses a trip to Hawaii to further deconstruct what it means for a viewer to view. Using the natural tendency towards abstraction that the shifting of rock and lava create, Gidal asks us how we can construct coherence from the limited picture his camera provides of the scene. By reducing the visual context, he forces us to ask ourselves how we construct a sense of place out of cinematic cues.

Programme:
Volcano, Peter Gidal, 2002, 16mm, UK, 25 min.
S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED, Paul Sharits, 1968-1970, 16mm, USA, 42 min.
@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday October 19, 2010 | 7:30pm screening, $5 suggested donation

Volcano

S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED

Volcano

Special thanks CFMDC and the Gladstone Hotel. Volcano images courtesy Peter Gidal and LUX.

#20 = 9/21/10 = Lawrence Brose’s De Profundis

De Profundis

A FUNDRAISER FOR THE LAWRENCE BROSE LEGAL DEFENSE FUND

Buffalo-based filmmaker, curator and arts advocate Lawrence Brose’s landmark De Profundis is a 65-minute meditation on gay desire based on Oscar Wilde’s infamous prison letter presented via lush hand-processed imagery. The film utilizes vintage erotica, home movies, radical faerie gatherings, pagan rituals and drag shows alongside a piano score by Frederic Rzewski which incorporates Wilde’s text as a means of exploring assimilation and sexuality through hand painted frames and manipulation. The result is an exploding utopia of colour and a layered but equally privileged soundscape. A simply haunting work of terrifying beauty.

Recently the film has come under scrutiny by the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Justice Department as Brose now faces serious charges for allegedly possessing illicit digital images. One hundred of the listed images in the charges are film frames from De Profundis. The fact that he is under indictment for using images made by others to examine the taboos that such laws are meant to prevent is as overreaching as it is disturbing. This prosecution should be viewed as a challenge to artistic freedom, brought by a U.S. Attorney’s office that previously unsuccessfully prosecuted Critical Art Ensemble founder Steve Kurtz.

This screening is a fundraiser for Brose’s legal defense fund.
If travel restrictions are lifted we look forward to welcoming him in person at the screening.
For more information and to donate please visit lawrencebroselegaldefensefund.com

Programme:
De Profundis, Lawrence Brose, 1997, 16mm, 65 minutes, USA
Music: Frederic Rzewski, with additional compositions by Lawrence Brose and Douglas Cohen

@ Gladstone Hotel, 2nd Floor | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday September 21, 2010 | 8:00pm screening, $5-10 suggested donation

De Profundis

#19 = 8/17/10 = Robert Flaherty + Kevin Jerome Everson

Half On Half Off

Louisiana Story

Five months and an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled since the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, Early Monthly Segments presents two distinct visions of the impact of the oil industry to the region and its inhabitants. Louisiana Story is Robert Flaherty’s 1948 feature narrative film in which a boy and his pet raccoon serve as witness to the risks and benefits of exploratory drilling to his bayou home. Compromised from the start—the film was a commission for the Standard Oil Company—the film nonetheless provides glimpses of truth beneath the gloss. Shot on location by a young Richard Leacock using local inhabitants as actors, the film contrasts the lush biodiversity of the region, with the mechanical might of the rig and its machinery, finding formal beauty in both. The film is also notable for it’s masterful editing by Helen van Dongen, and Virgil Thompson’s Pulitzer Prize winning score.

Kevin Jerome Everson’s Half On Half Off shows a team of workers on Pensacola Beach, Florida dealing with the aftermath of the recent Deepwater Horizon Spill. Everson shot the film one frame at a time, compressing hours of work onto a single 3-minute roll of film. The title refers to the work schedule of the cleaners, who work in half-hour shifts punctuated with rests of the same length. In both films work and life continue after the drilling stops, as does the question of the hidden price of the lifestyle we’ve come to take for granted.

Programme:
Half On Half Off, Kevin Jerome Everson, 16mm, 2010, USA 3 min.
Louisiana Story, Robert Flaherty, 16mm, 1948, USA 78 min.

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday August 17, 2010 | 8:00pm screening

UPCOMING: Our September 21 program will feature De Profundis by Lawrence Brose, based on Oscar Wilde’s prison writings. It will be a fundraiser for the Lawrence Brose Legal Defense Fund (http://lawrencebroselegaldefensefund.com). More info soon.

Louisiana Story

Half On Half Off

Louisiana Story

#18 = 7/20/10 = Babette Mangolte

Babette Mangolte’s The Sky on Location

The Sky on Location

French-born Babette Mangolte is perhaps best known for her work as a cinematographer for Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer during their notable run of experimental narrative films produced in the Seventies. Mangolte’s firm camera placements contributed to an aesthetic of long-takes and stylistic minimalism designed to counter the male subjectivity, or gaze, of commercial narrative cinema. Mangolte’s The Sky on Locationfurther explores the subjectivity of vision with a personal essay on the American landscape of the West, attempting to see how our cultural constructs shape the way we see the natural world.

“The landscape is not seen in its postcardish grandeur as captured in the photographs of Ansel Adams, nor through its shapes as in paintings by Cezanne or Constable, but rather the film captures the mood of the landscape as in a Turner painting. The film attempts to construct a geography of the land from North to South, East to West and season-to-season through colors instead of maps”. – BM

Programme:
The Sky on Location, Babette Mangolte, 16mm, 1982, USA 78 min.

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday July 20, 2010 | 8:00pm screening

The Sky on Location

#17 = 7/6/10 = Naomi Uman in person!

Kalendar

We are very please to welcome Naomi Uman to town to present films from her recent series, The Ukrainian Time Machine. These films developed out of her decision to return to her ancestral home in the Ukraine to live. The films follow her process of assimilation into a small aging community in rural Ukraine—a process that includes learning the language and customs and connecting across very different cultural experiences. As revealed in her previous films Leche and Mala Leche, which focused on Mexican immigrants in California’s Central Valley, Uman has an eye for the agrarian labour practices that are often unknown parts of a country’s economy. Her life in Legedzine, Ukraine reveals an even more localized food chain and her films follow the labour of the harvest, the necessary pickling to withstand the winter season, and the social occasions of the meal. As a result, the films in The Ukrainian Time Machine are beautiful portraits of the process of creating a home amongst new neighbors and the traditions of village life in modern Ukraine.

Programme:
Selections from The Ukrainian Time Machine:
Kalendar, Naomi Uman, 16mm, 2008, Ukraine/USA 11 mins
The Unnamed Film, Naomi Uman, 16mm, 2008, Ukraine/USA 55 mins
On This Day, Naomi Uman, 16mm, 2008, Ukraine/USA 4 mins
Clay, Naomi Uman, 16mm, 2008, Ukraine/USA 15 mins

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West

Tuesday July 6, 2010 | 8:00pm screening

The Unnamed Film

#16 = 6/14/10 = Robert Gardner + David Rimmer

Robert Gardner

The films of Robert Gardner have a controversial place in the genre they are most often situated – that of the ethnographic film. This is largely due to the poetry that he injects into a field that favours scientific methodology over aesthetic qualities. Indeed, Gardner’s lush and detailed camerawork owes as much to his desire for precise documentation as it does to his commitment to film as an art form (a commitment he most notably publicized in his longstanding Boston television series, The Screening Room, which featured hour-long discussions with film artists like Hollis Frampton, Jonas Mekas and Yvonne Rainer).

Dead Birds is perhaps his most challenging film, both in its production and reception. Made in the heart of the Cold War, Gardner and his small crew of anthropologists (including the ill-fated Michael Rockefeller) engaged with the Dani people of Dutch New Guinea to study the ritualized warfare practice they had developed in isolation over thousands of years. Perhaps overburdened with the weight of a culture threatened with nuclear annihilation and looking for clues amongst the stone age it may return to, Dead Birds is an investigation suffused with a graceful formal beauty, from the way in which Gardner maps out the space of a battlefield to his focused attention on the intimate spaces where we encounter the more lasting rituals of day to day life.

Programme:
Treefall, David Rimmer, 16mm, 1970, Canada, 5 min.
Dead Birds, Robert Gardner, 16mm, 1964, USA, 83 min.

@ Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West

NOTE: Monday night screening

Monday, June 14, 2010, 8:00pm screening

Dead Birds

Treefall

#15 = 5/18/10 = Eisenstein Accompanied

Sergei Eisenstein

We celebrate the month of May with a special screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike, a classic work of modernist montage, accompanied by local composer and musician Allison Cameron.

@ Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West

NOTE: Screening is on the 2nd Floor Landing

Tuesday May 18, 2010
8:00pm screening

Strike

#14 = 4/12/10 = Ellie Epp in person!

trapline

We’re extremely excited to be able to host filmmaker Ellie Epp in person to present her films. These four films are classic touchstones of Canadian filmmaking, with a formal beauty that enhances their sense of landscape, vision and place. From trapline, her stunning portrait of an indoor swimming pool (inspired in part by her own immersion in the London Experimental Film Congress of 1972) to bright and dark, an alchemical look at her trip south to San Diego where she now lives, her films resonate with an exacting elegance.

“…Close attention is intensely active. Receiving a touch is as active as giving it – sometimes more active, more skilled and more consequential. Erotic attention isn’t an empty bowl touch is poured or pushed into; it is more like a living antenna with a million fibers actively searching the space of the touch for its shape and meaning.” – Ellie Epp

Programme:
trapline, Ellie Epp, 16mm, 1976, Canada, 18 min.
current, Ellie Epp, 16mm, 1986, Canada, 3 min.
notes in origin, Ellie Epp, 16mm, 1987, Canada, 15 min.
bright and dark, Ellie Epp, 16mm, 1996, Canada/USA, 3 min.

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Monday April 12, 2010 8:00pm screening, $5

notes in origin

bright and dark

current

#13 = 3/16/10 = 1st Year Anniversary = Robert Beavers

Robert Beavers, in Early Monthly Segments

In celebration of a year’s worth of programming we are delighted to present an evening of films by Robert Beavers, the artist from whom we borrowed our name. None of Beavers films are distributed in North America, so this is a rare opportunity to view these works.

Early Monthly Segments is composed of a series of short films and fragments shot between 1967 and 1970. These films lay the foundation for Beavers’ film practice over the subsequent decades in terms of structure and technique as well as content. The physical nature of the camera, its optical elements and the nature of the filmstrip itself are as much a part of the work as its images of places, autobiographical elements and portraits.

In The Painting, Beavers juxtaposes shots of Martyrdom of Saint Hippolytus altarpiece, by an unidentified Flemish artist with an intersection in Bern and images of Gregory Markopoulos and himself. He describes the film as using “the theme of tearing as an emblem of intense emotion” to illustrate “the unity of destruction and unity.” This could also serve as a description of the filmmaking process in which images are taken apart then reconstructed in the process of editing.

Pitcher of Colored Light, Beavers’ most recent film is a portrait of his mother and her surroundings. This film shows remarkable refinement in its construction, the structure and logic combined seamlessly with the photography and subject of the film. “Pitcher alights on various motifs (sun-dappled grass, household ceramics, a cat on a couch, silvery hair) only to pan, fade, lurch, or glide off subject in a continuous act of readjusted attention…. Beavers’ mesh of images are impelled by emotional, not just formal, necessity.” Nathan Lee (Village Voice)

Check out the advance review at Toronto Film Scene!

Programme
Early Monthly Segments (1968-2002,16mm, color, silent, 33 minutes)
The Painting (1972/1999, 16mm, color, sound 13 minutes)
Pitcher of Colored Light (2007, 16mm, color, sound, 23 minutes) Canadian Premiere!

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday March 16, 2010 | 7:30 pm screening, $5

#12 = 2/16/10 = Marjorie Keller

Marjorie Keller

Marjorie Keller’s Fallen World

Experimental filmmaker, author, activist, film scholar, and cultural worker Marjorie Keller (1950-1994) created a uniquely personal and feminist body of work for twenty years beginning in the early 1970s. Keller also served on the board of directors of the Collective for Living Cinema, was the founding editor of their journal, Motion Picture from 1984 to 1987 and was Director of the New York Filmmakers Cooperative in the late 1980s. Writer J. Hoberman called her “an unselfish champion of the avant-garde.” Her films deftly combine home movie and diary styles through a potent politicized lens. Herein (1991), Keller’s final film, charts the movement from political activism to filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman’s autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side, street prostitution & drug addiction, all inflect the sense of place, space & history. The Fallen World (1983) is an elegy for a Newfoundland dog named Melville and a portrait of his owner. Daughters of Chaos (1980) “…deals simultaneously with girls becoming women and a woman looking back on her childhood. It is pervaded with voluptuousness, with longing: the woman, disappointed in love, looking for lost innocence, the girl yearning for the power of her sex.” -Anne Becker

Programme:
Daughters of Chaos, Marjorie Keller, 16mm, 1980, USA, 20 minutes
The Fallen World, Marjorie Keller, 16mm, 1983, USA, 9 minutes
Herein, Marjorie Keller, 16mm, 1991, USA, 35 minutes

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday February 16, 2010 | 7:30 pm screening, $5

Daughters of Chaos

#11 = 1/19/10 = James Benning + Nicky Hamlyn

James Benning

A transitional film at the end of his first decade of filmmaking, James Benning’s Grand Opera introduces a degree of storytelling to his previously more formalist devices. Benning calls the film his “first attempt at writing my own kind of history” and, in a sense, it also serves to write himself into history, acutely measuring his place as a Midwestern experimental filmmaker, then based in Oklahoma, in relationship to the avant-garde scene situated in New York. The film thus features homages to the prominent experimental cinema of the time, including a spoof of Wavelength, as well as cameos from Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and Yvonne Rainer. Woven with these sequences are other characteristic Benning gambits – a compilation of every house he ever lived in, a preoccupation with the history of Pi, and the looming threat that a building will explode.

Programme:
Grand Opera: An Historical Romance, 16mm, 1979, USA, 84 mins, colour
Film by James Benning
featuring Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton,
George Landow, Sadie Benning and Yvonne Rainer

Screened with: Poles Apart, Nicky Hamlyn, Regular 8mm, 1990, UK, 4 minutes

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday January 19, 2010 | 7:30 pm screening, $5

Grand Opera

Michael Snow in Grand Opera

#10 = 12/15/09 = Chris Marker + Stan Brakhage + Joyce Wieland + Joseph Cornell

Chris Marker

Cats, Birds and the Cosmos

This cinematic 24-hours starts at dawn in Beijing in 1956 and winds up with sunrise in Ontario in 1972. In Sunday in Peking (1956) Chris Marker describes a day in the life of the city that he had dreamed of since childhood. Reflecting on the exotic, the ordinary, and his own role in interpreting the place, this 16mm postcard is an early example of the form for which Marker was to become known. By Night With Torch and Spear, Joseph Cornell’s uncanny collage of educational films, explores the industrious nature of both man and moth. Discovered after Cornell’s death and preserved by Anthology Film Archives in 1979 it is a classic of perplexing power. Stellar (1993) is Stan Brakhage’s evocation of outer and inner space. The optical printing of Brakhage’s long time collaborator Sam Bush further animates the painted frames to creating movement in new directions. Back on earth, Los Angeles alley cats are the subject of Brakhage’s rarely screened Night Cats (1956). Shot in 1972 and completed in 1986, Joyce Wieland’s Birds at Sunrise is a subtle study of the birds at her backyard feeder one winter morning. Wieland was moved by the creatures’ ability to survive the extreme elements, and communicates the feeling through her sympathetic camera work and deft editing.

Additional cosmic surprises await!

Programme

Dimanche à Pekin (Sunday in Peking), Chris Marker, 1956, 22 min, 16mm
By Night With Torch and Spear, Joseph Cornell, preserved 1979, 9 min, 16mm
Stellar, Stan Brakhage, 1993, 3 minutes, 16mm
Night Cats, Stan Brakhage, 1956, 8 min, 16mm
Birds at Sunrise, Joyce Wieland, 1972/1986, 16mm, 10 min

***NOTE EARLIER START TIME***
@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen West
Tuesday December 15, 2009 | 7:00 PM screening, $5

Birds at Sunrise

By Night With Torch and Spear

#9 = 11/17/09 = Robert Todd in person

Rose

Robert Todd is the most prolific of filmmakers, completing forty films in the last ten years alone. Trained as a painter, Todd carefully observes his Boston surroundings and re-presents them to us with an astute sense of form. His films are works of magnification, employing macro-focus lenses, and an eye for detail that bring us closer to levels of reality we often miss. His films can reveal the forgotten beauty of the natural world or the hidden stillness in busy parts of the city. The works in this program date from the last three years and wrestle with themes such as the corporeal elements of the body; places and moments of passage; and the fleeting glimpses of, or hauntings by, spirit.

Special thanks to Ben Donaghue and LIFT for helping to make this event possible*.

Programme:
Interplay, Robert Todd, 16mm, 2006, USA, 6.5 min.
Qualities of Stone, Robert Todd, 16mm, 2006, USA, 11 min.
Dig, Robert Todd, 16mm, 2007, USA, 3 min.
Passing, Robert Todd, 16mm, 2008, USA, 4 min.
Antechamber, Robert Todd, 16mm, 2008, USA, 12 min.
Rose, Robert Todd, 16mm, 2008, USA, 9 min.
Repair, Robert Todd, 16mm, 2009, USA, 15 min.

+ night side, Rebecca Meyers, 16mm, 2009, USA, 4.5 min. (invited by Robert Todd)

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday November 17, 2009 | 7:30pm screening, $5

Repair

Interplay

Qualities of Stone

*Robert Todd’s Stable will be showing at a LIFT screening November 21 at Trash Palace,
89-B Niagara Street (Just West of Bathurst). More info at www.lift.on.ca

#8 = 10/20/09 = Brent Coughenour in person + Bruce Baillie + Kenneth Anger

Brent Coughenour

Tuesday 20 October 2009 = 7:30 PM
**NOTE EARLIER start time**

In an effort to improve its image for the nationwide attention brought to the city by the hosting of the 2006 Super Bowl, the city of Detroit began demolishing long-vacant buildings, hastening the natural slow decay caused by decades of industrial collapse. As the city dismantles itself, clues to its past resurface. Collections of scraps sifted from rubble—an archeology of unanswered questions—combine to tell a surrogate narrative filled with missing pieces and forgotten motives, old letters, photographs, and home movies. Fractured moments occurring on one summer day echo events from thirty years earlier. The day is sunny, but it is humid, and clouds are gathering. It is going to rain. – Brent Coughenour

“Like the pieces of a puzzle, I PITY THE FOOL gradually accrues more elements as it goes on: fragments of narrative combine with other fragments that at first have no obvious connection. As opposed to story-lines in many feature-length films that gradually tie up and resolve their different threads, the focus of the film continues to broaden and expand, becoming more complex, open-ended and mysterious. Undertaking a kind of archaeological search for things nearly recent and long past, the film attempts to re-capture the marginalized and defiantly minor histories of [the city’s] forgotten tenants . . . . I PITY THE FOOL is essential viewing to anyone interested in, among other things, urban space, post-industrial landscapes, psychogeography, found objects, DIY filmmaking, super 8, experimental narrative, and radical film form.” — Luke Sieczek, Northwest Film Forum

Brent Coughenour is a film-and videomaker whose work has dealt largely with various attempts at exploring narrative cinematic language outside the boundaries of a traditional dependence on drama and plot. He has presented his work at a variety of festivals and venues throughout the U.S. and internationally, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Media City Film and Video Festival, Antimatter Underground Film Festival, Onion City Film and Video Festival, Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. His most recent work incorporates computer programming for audio and video manipulation into projects designed for live performance.
He is also an occasional member of the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra (MiLO).

Programme:

I Pity The Fool, Brent Coughenour, 2007, 83 mins, Super 8 [presented on video]
Director in person.

Castro Street, Bruce Baillie, 1965, 10 mins, 16mm
Kustom Kar Kommandos, Kenneth Anger, 1966, 4 mins, 16mm

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West
Tuesday 20 October 2009, 7:30pm screening

I Pity the Fool

Kustom Kar Kommandos

Castro Street

#7 = 9/29/09 = Marlon Riggs + Warren Sonbert + Nikolai Ursin

Marlon Riggs

Made by Marlon Riggs in 1989, Tongues Untied has lost none of its power since its original release 20 years ago. Immediately reviled and repudiated by white fundamentalists and black activists alike and more or less rejected by the broadcasters for whom it was made, the film has nonetheless become a milestone in independent cinema. As uncompromising in form as it is in content, Tongues Untied combines dance, poetry, performance, interviews and historical reenactment in its exploration of how it is to be both black and gay. While the film’s enduring beauty is the result of Riggs’ intelligence in the handling of his medium, its continuing political relevance is a sad testament to the intransigence of both racism and homophobia, even in these supposedly more progressive times. Sadly, Riggs succumbed to AIDS in 1994 but not before delivering a body of work that, in his own words “delivers a frank, uncensored, uncompromising articulation of an autonomously defined self and social identity.”

Programme:
Tongues Untied, Marlon Riggs, 1989, 16mm, colour/B&W, sound, 55 minutes
Short Fuse, Warren Sonbert, 1992, 16mm, colour, sound, 32 minutes
Behind Every Good Man, Nikolai Ursin, 1965, 16mm, B&W, sound, 8 minutes

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West
Tuesday 29 September 2009, 8:00pm screening

Short Fuse

Tongues Untied

#6 = 8/18/09 = Warren Sonbert + Claude Lelouch + Caroline & Frank Mouris

Warren Sonbert

Time Travels

“Carriage Trade … is about travel, transportation, anthropological investigation: 4 continents, 4 organized religions, customs; about time with its 6 years in the making and cast of thousands; about how the same people age and grow and even change apartments over 6 years.”
–Warren Sonbert

The elegant and elegiac Carriage Trade anchors this very fitting August program on travel with three diverse films each exploring spaces and places through montage, time lapse and, in Lelouch’s case, high speed cinema vérité through the early morning streets of Paris. Lelouch’s C’était un rendezvous has been somewhat of a legend amongst car racing enthusiasts and filmmakers [how many films can you say that about!?] for its thrilling high speed nine-minute single-take adrenalin rush. Coney by Caroline and Frank Mouris is filled with their customary cut-up animation–this time with a year-round time lapse portrait of Coney Island with a mesmerizing calliope-induced soundtrack–all shot through a lovely pink ‘cotton candy’ filter.

Programme:
Carriage Trade, Warren Sonbert, 1971, 61 minutes, 16mm, colour, silent
Coney, Caroline & Frank Mouris, 1975, 5 minutes, 16mm, colour, sound
C’était un rendezvous, Claude Lelouch, 1975, 8 minutes, 16mm, colour, sound

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West
Tuesday August 18, 2009. 8:00pm screening

Carriage Trade

Coney

C'était un rendezvous

#5 = 7/21/09 = Ute Aurand + Gibbs Chapman + Keewatin Dewdney

In Die Erde Gebaut

How It Works: Function, Form and Film

These films offer three different approaches to quotidian mysteries that often go unnoticed. While their styles are distinct, the works are linked by their humour and humanity as they explore the mechanics of the world around us. In Die Erde Gebaut (Building Under Ground) is Ute Aurand’s documentation of the expansion of Zurich’s Museum Rietberg from the initial groundbreaking in 2004 to it’s opening in 2007. Aurand’s camera work and editing turn the construction site into a playground for the eye while providing insight into how a building gets made. Push Button – A History of Idleness and Ignorance by Gibbs Chapman is a dryly funny exposé of how little we know about the workings of the things we use everyday. Keewatin Dewdney’s 1967 classic The Maltese Cross Movement, is a poetic demonstration of how film works, both mechanically and mentally.

Programme
In Die Erde Gebaut*, Ute Aurand, 16mm, 2008, Germany, 40 min. silent
Push Button – A History of Idleness and Ignorance*, Gibbs Chapman, 16mm, 2004,
USA, 16 min.
The Maltese Cross Movement, Keewatin Dewdney, 16mm, 1967, Canada, 8 min. Restored Print!

*Toronto Premieres

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen West
Tuesday July 21, 2009 | 8:00pm screening, $5

Maltese Cross Movement

#4 = 6/16/09 = Notes in Origin: Ellie Epp + Vanessa O’Neill + Rebecca Meyers

notes in origin

This month’s Early Monthly Segment focuses on the work of three filmmakers whose attention to their surroundings harbours a deep sense of presence and concentration. Ellie Epp’s notes in origin, a quiet classic of the Canadian fringe, returns us to Northern Alberta where Epp grew up and presents us with ten shots of the land—shots which resonate with a stillness that places us strongly in relationship to the act of seeing. With burren, Vanessa O’Neill rearticulates the pain of return. By subjecting her super 8 footage of an Irish shoreline to harsh chemical processes, she mirrors the erosive power of wave and wind on rock and the emotional pull of a distant landscape. The two films of Rebecca Meyers draw the natural world in to colour her gaze. night light and leaping treats her cat as her muse, re-envisioning her home from a feline perspective and things we want to see attends to the grand scale of our environment, picturing the larger natural cycles that often only serve as a remote background to the brief path of our own lives.

Programme:
notes in origin, Ellie Epp, 16mm, 1987, Canada, 15 min.
night light and leaping *, Rebecca Meyers, 16mm, 2001, USA, 22 min.
burren *, Vanessa O’Neill, 16mm, 2007, USA, 12.5 min.
things we want to see, Rebecca Meyers, 16mm, 2003-4, USA, 7 min.

*Toronto premieres

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West, Toronto
Tuesday June 16, 2009 | 8:00pm screening, $5

burren

things we want to see

#3 = 5/5/09 = Vera Chytilová + Len Lye

Vera Chytilová

The third installment of the Early Monthly Segments film series brings us one of the pinnacles of the Czech New Wave. Vera Chytilová’s first film Daisies follows the adventures of two precocious young roommates as they careen and cavort through life. Their response to a no good world is to resolve to be even worse. Chytilová makes sure the visual style is as energetic as her young (dis)ingénues—cutting wildly between film-stocks, inserting pixilated collage sequences and propelling it all along with a bopping soundtrack and a keen sense of humour. Unsurprisingly, the Czech censors were not amused; the seduction of sugar daddies, sequences of unbridled dance and wanton waste of food caused the film to be immediately banned, as all good things are.

Programme:

Daisies (Sedmikrásky)
16mm, 1966, 76 mins, color/b&w
Directed by Vera Chytilová, Cinematography by Jaroslav Kucera
starring Ivana Karbanová & Jitka Cerhová
Music by Jirí Slitr & Jirí Sust

Screened with: Free Radicals, Len Lye, 16mm, 1958, 5 minutes

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday May 5, 2009 | 7:30pm screening

Daisies

Free Radicals

Daisies

#2 = 4/21/09 = Mary Ellen Bute + Hollis Frampton

Mary Ellen Bute

The second installment of the Early Monthly Segments film series features the only live action feature film by the legendary pioneer of American abstract filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute. In Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Bute transforms Joyce’s language into cinema in a truly oneiric film style. Surreal and dense with allusion the work echoes the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure, while remaining true to its wit and uncanny beauty. With Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut. – Notes adapted from Greylodge.org

Programme:
Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
16mm, 1965,92 mins, b&w
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute, Screenplay by Mary Manning
Cinematography by Ted Nemeth, Music by Elliot Kaplan
Print courtesy the archives of York University’s Sound and Moving Image Library

Screened with: Gloria!, Hollis Frampton, 16mm, 1979, 9 minutes

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel | 1214 Queen St West
Tuesday April 21, 2009 | 7:30pm screening

Gloria!

#1 = 3/24/09 = Kidlat Tahimik + Marie Menken

Kidlat Tahimik

The first installment of the Early Monthly Segments film series debuts with Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare. A sensation upon its debut at the Berlinale in 1977, the film has gone on to achieve legendary status. In this strikingly engaging hybrid, Tahimik himself stars as a Jeepney driver who sets out from the Philippines in search of rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Instead of America, he finds himself in Munich, Paris and in a series of adventures he could never have imagined upon departure, observing the clash of cultures and the seductive dreams of technological modernization along the way. Werner Herzog once declared, “Kidlat, you are best in your detours,” and this film is full of them, as Tahimik’s wit and penchant for observable ironies makes this film an insightful adventure into the heart of cultural imperialism.

Programme:
Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare)
A film by Kidlat Tahimik, Philippines, 16mm, 1977, 91 minutes
Thank you to the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.

Screened with Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, Marie Menken, 16mm, 1961, 4 mins.

@ the Art Bar, Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen Street West
Tuesday March 24, 2009
7:30pm screening