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

De Profundis

De Profundis

De Profundis

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

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

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

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

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

Strike

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

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

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

Daughters of Chaos

Daughters of Chaos

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