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