Past New Releases: Summer 2009
Posted April 27th, 2010 in New Acquisitions
New Releases from the Summer of 2009.
New Releases
Born 1971 in the boonies of Pennsylvania, now I live in delightfully frightful Baltimore. I’m a self-taught/self-sufficient (thanks to Super 8!) filmmaker. I began making films by cutting up and hand-coloring State Surplus films. While shooting my first roll of Super 8 I was flashed by a trench-coated man in beige lingerie (which I saw as a blessing “in disguise”). I’ve made more than thirty films in the past five years: found footage, spazzumentaries, corrupt collage, puppet animation, etc. …
I delight in the mischievous possibilities of collage animation. From Clinton to cavemen, if it’s an inaccessible star or deceased person I desire, no need to contact their agent/mortician, just hit the news stand or library. And let’s face it, Baboon foot jobs and six-armed organists are rarities and decapitation is normally irreversible. PETA would eat me alive if I switched from paper to flesh performers. I find tons of inspiration in poets/musicians. My soundtracks are concrete mixer, juvenile, happy junk-pop and spastic. I work with International musicians and chaos poet 99 Hooker, and “auctioneer on PCP” Fred Collins. I have six records out of my group the Dramatics, (which I’ve made 5,000 hand-made collaged covers for). With my films/music I’ve toured everywhere from El Paso to Venice, refugee camps to the MoMA. When not exploding with my own ideas, I travel to encourage creative combustion in others, promote Super 8 and meet my Celluloid Soul Mates.
“This is no cold, critical polemic. Her films actually take pleasure in perversity.” – The Austin Chronicle
“Quite possibly the world’s wildest and wackiest wunderkind maker.” –
Craig Baldwin
“Colburn creates noisy portraits of our most simultaneously dreadful and beautiful desires.” – Jeff Lambert
“She need tied up!” – Kooky
“Like her work there’s a certain generosity and exuberance with Martha.” – Jytte Jensen, Museum of Modern Art, NY
What’s On?
A Hyper-Fire Telespazzumentary rendered in orgiastic collage animation, Media Mush and freaky live chunks. Brats, Boobs, Snot-Based Game Shows, First Lady Baboon attacks, cross-dressing amputees, stress, estrogen and more spew and mutate. With star appearances by Michael Jackson, Ronald McDonald, Princess Di, Cher, Oprah (with a black eye) and a cavalcade of your favorite Game Show hosts (warning: public Urination). With a Tele-Smashing Chaos Poetry soundtrack by 99 Hooker and Video game samples by Naval Cassidy.
Blasting you into HELL-A-VISION!
“Her visual spew of punk rock poetry and corrupt collage, rendered in scabrous animation that’s a perfect marriage of Monty Python and Hieronymous Bosch is proof that nobody mixes playfulness and dangerous vision better than a low-tech and virulent underground.”
-Patrick Macias, The San Francisco Bay Guardian
Awards and Exhibition (selected): Over 40 screenings …. Images Independent Film and Video Festival; Rough and Ruined Film Festival; Osnabrück Media Arts Festival; Other Cinema, SF; SF Cinematheque; Judges’ Choice Award, Super Super 8 Film Festival.
1997, 16mm, color/so, 1:45m, $25
Four Films: I’m Gonna, What’s On?, My Secret Shame and I Can’t Keep Up
I’M GONNA (2:02m): A barrage on stuntmen explode in this over-the-top expose of man’s over-ambitiousness. The ambitious will be left feeling ridiculous and the lazy, feeling lazy. Hand-colored/sliced-up found footage (16mm).
Exhibition (selected): Dresden Int’l Film Festival; National Poetry Film Festival; European Underground Film Festival.
WHAT’S ON? (1:45m): See film description above.
MY SECRET SHAME (2:31m): Dedicated to all those who live “enhanced” lifestyles. Coffee Urine sniffers, elbow lickers and chalk chewers will find comfort in this film. An homage to as yet unresearched obsessions. Originally Super 8. Live action, animation (puppet and collage) and more.
I CAN’T KEEP UP (3:20m): Keep the lid on the turpentine, the cat indoors and your daughter in chains for this flight or stumble into the all-too-familiar problem of trying to keep up. A mash of collage animation, found footage, puppet animation and home movies. Originally Super 8.
Awards: Winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award at the Cin(E) Poetry Film Festival.
All of the above feature sampling of Naval Cassidy.
1997, 16mm, color/so, 11m, $45
Lift Off
An interstellar Sex Capade of Astro-Porno-O-Naughts strobing and sucking through the Outer Limits. Nasty NASA Nymphets float through the Galaxies … insinuating rocket blow jobs and releasing their Planetary Pleasures, ending in the dispersion of a capsule/parachute.
Originally a double-projection of 16mm color space footage and animated, hand-colored collage animation Super 8. With an incredibly Spaced-Out-Dementia-Dirty-Tech soundtrack by Jad Fair and Jason Willett. Man’s desire to fornicate with the entire Universe is finally fully realized.
“Her orgiastic collages of found footage and animation pirate the images from the unceasing onslaught of our mass media era and turn them inside out, revealing the perversity we all expect is there.” –
The Austin Chronicle
1998, 16mm, color/so, 3:06m, $25
There’s a Pervert in Our Pool!
Watch OUT! Because the underwater Cops are too busy with a rear entry in the deep end to help you if you decide to jump into this pool. It’s overflowing with notorious perverts throughout History … dunking, diving and splashing with giraffes in bondage, penguins with breast implants and a pack of dildo-fetching dogs. “Life Guards are being scratched by someone else’s fingernails!” “Help! My shadow is Jerking Off Under ME!” “Trunks are being Pulled!” … Just a few lines from the brilliantly written and crooningly delivered poem by Fred Collins (an auctioneer on PCP) which is the soundtrack for this film, with perverted pool sound effects by Martha Colburn and Jason Willett. There’s no coming up for air once you’re in this film of OFF-THE-DEEP-END Collage, puppet and painted animation. Originally Super 8. Bursting Color!
“Short-burst-spazz-junk Super 8 animation guaranteed to aerate your brain for the free flow of visual play and perverse humor.” – Craig Baldwin, Other Cinema
1998, 16mm, color/so, 2:09m, $25
Spiders in Love: An Arachnorgasmic Musical
2000, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $35
A Toetally Soleful Feeture Pedsintation
2000, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $40
Bruce Conner
A MOVIE
“… a montage of found materials from fact (newsreels) and fiction (old movies). Cliches and horrors make a rapid collage in which destruction and sex follow each other in images of pursuit and falling until finally a diver disappears through a hole in the bottom of the sea – the ultimate exit. The entire thing is prefaced by a girl from a shady movie lazily undressing. By the time A MOVIE is over she has retrospectively become a Circe or Prime Mover.” – Brian O’Doherty, The New York Times
“Using only found footage, Conner has created one of the most extraordinary films ever made. One begins by laughing at the juxtaposition of cowboys and Indians, elephants and tanks, but soon the metaphor of association becomes serious, as we realize we are witnessing the apocalypse.” – Freude
1958, 16mm, b&w/so, 12min, $60
COSMIC RAY
“COSMIC RAY seems like a reckless collage of fast moving parts: comic strips, dancing girls, flashing lights. It is the dancing girl – hardly dressed, stripping or nude – which provides the leitmotiv for the film. Again and again she appears – sandwiched between soldiers, guns, and even death in the form of a skull positioned between her legs. And if the statement equates sex with destruction, the cataclysm is a brilliant one, like an exploding firecracker, and one which ends the world with a cosmic bang. Of course, the title also refers to musician Ray Charles whose art Conner visually transcribes onto film as a potent reality, tough and penetrating in its ability to affect some pretty basic animal instincts. But if such is the content of the film – that much of our behavior consists of bestiality – the work as a whole stands as insight rather than indictment.”
– Carl Belz, Film Culture
Frame enlargement by Dominic Angerame.
1961, 16mm, b&w/so, 4min, $40
BREAKAWAY
Music by Ed Cobb. Dance and vocal by Toni Basil (Antonia Christina Basilotta).
“The camera captures her movements in gestural, expressive light smears. Intercut rhythmically with strophes of black leader, she gyrates in graceful, stroboscopic accelerations. Conner’s editing is consummate as he alternates angles of her figure from different shots into a kinesthetic, flowing continuity.
“Basically a two-and-a-half minute film, this ‘module’ of image and sound is then reversed. Everything goes ‘backwards’ to the ‘original’ beginning. The sound track with Basilotta singing the title song is run in reverse as an aural analogue to the visual abstraction of photography. It resembles a paradigm for those high school physics demonstrations of gravitation where we saw a ball, once thrown straight up into the air, loyally retrace its trajectory to Earth.”
– Anthony Reveaux
A dance film viewed twice (once forward, once backward) in five minutes. The film was shot at single frame exposures as well as 8, 16, 24 and 36 frames per second.
1966, 16mm, b&w/so, 5min, $40
TELEVISION ASSASSINATION
Filmed from TV set 1963-1964 by Bruce Conner – Patrick Gleeson music: 1995 – Lee Harvey Oswald – View from window, Texas School Book Depository – Eternal Flame, Arlington National Cemetery – President Kennedy – Funeral Flowers at Dealey Plaza, Dallas – Kennedy Inaugural Parade – PT 109 Official Warren Commission Report – Texas School Book Depository – Kennedy Motorcade – Mail Order Bolt Action Rifle – Oswald in custody – Jack Ruby shoots Oswald – TV roll bars – multiple exposures – Lincoln Memorial – chalk board diagrams – White House – military guard at Kennedy grave – Baked Turkey commercial for Thanksgiving Day Dinner – Oswald – et cetera.
“A remarkable film. The score by Patrick Gleeson is every bit as effective as his pieces for earlier Bruce Conner films and transforms the experience of seeing these familiar – but also transfixing – images. The humor that leavens the genuine sadness of the material is given gentle boosts here and there acoustically.”
– Bruce Jenkins, Director, Film/Video, Walker Art Center
1963-1995, 16mm, b&w/so, 14min, $65
THE WHITE ROSE
Frame enlargement by Dominic Angerame.
Jay De Feo started painting THE WHITE ROSE in 1957. When the unfinished painting was removed eight years later it weighed over 2300 pounds.
“The images selected and the order constructed become a formal mystic service. We see the altar, the penitence, the cross, the investiture, the descent, and finally, the mourning. The men in garments from Bekins seem to draw strength from touching the surface. The respect they render the painting appears as worship.” – Camille Cook
“… a fine, brief, tongue-in-cheek ‘documentary’ of a huge painting being removed from an artist’s studio, carried onto a Bekin’s moving van with a combination of cold efficiency and all the lugubrious solemnity of a state funeral. It has remarkable timing and pace, and an ‘artless’ style which can only come from a deep sense of what the art is all about.” – Tom Albright, Rolling Stone
1967, 16mm, b&w/so, 7min, $45
MONGOLOID
A documentary film exploring the manner in which a determined young man overcame a basic mental defect and became a useful member of society. Insightful editing techniques reveal the dreams, ideals and problems that face a large segment of the American male population. Educational. Background music written and performed by the DEVO orchestra.
Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, happier than you and me.
Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, and it determined what he could see.
Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, one chromosome too many.
And he wore a hat, and he had a job
And he brought home the bacon so that no one knew
(c) 1977 DEVO
1978, 16mm, b&w/so, 3.5min, $35
LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (Long Version)
Music by Terry Riley: “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band,” 1968 – BMA – Publisher: Ancient Word Music.
This is the same film footage as edited in the earlier short version of LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS released in 1968 with a Beatles soundtrack. It is made longer with five frames for each original frame but still remains the same edit (but with a new soundtrack by Terry Riley) and nothing added, nothing lost, always the same, never ending ….
Award: Best Experimental Film, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1997
1996, 16mm, color/so, 14.5min, $70
Hours For Jerome, Part 1 & 2
Newly preserved print available courtesy Pacific Film Archive
Please request this print specifically when ordering, if interested.
This footage was shot from 1966 to 1970 and edited over a two year period ending in July 1982. HOURS FOR JEROME (as in a Book of Hours) is an arrangement of images, energies, and illuminations from daily life. These fragments of light revolve around the four seasons. PART ONE is spring through summer; PART TWO is fall and winter.
“HOURS FOR JEROME is simply the most beautifully photographed film that I’ve ever seen; here we enter the realm of the compassionate and the full achievement of what film can do cinemagraphically is achieved. It is a privilege to experience the thoughtful unfolding of these images.” – Warren Sonbert
Note: Part 1 should be projected silent, at 18fps. Part 2 should be projected silent, at either 18fps or 24fps.
1980-1982, 16mm, color/si, 45m total, Part 1 (21m) $85 rental and Part 2 (24m) $96 rental
Robert Huot
Third One Year Movie
“..Third One Year Movie–1972.. seems to reflect an increased commitment to teach by example. As is true in Rolls: 1971, Third One Year Movie–1972 uses an unusual editing strategy to fuse disparate sorts of imagery into a coherant form. The film includes several lovely single-shot mimimal rolls (one amusing roll of cows nudging each other for trough space, framed so that they seem to be fight to be center scrren and photographed with a beautiful soft clarity; and a magnificient roll of a woman walking dramatically toward the camera through a barn– at first she’s in a cape but as she approaches, she drops the cape revealing her naked body– photographed in black and white, in slow motion and with such intense grain that that when she nears the camera and looks into it, she appears to be a kind of filmic phantom come to haunt us)…
[…]
“By presenting a visual world in which filmmaking is an integral part of nearly every situation, while demystifying the actual process of creation, Huot is able to suggest the importance of art without implying that the excitement and pleasure of making it need be restricted to an elite.”
–Scott MacDonald, excerpted from “The Films of Robert Huot,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Summer 1980.
1972, 16mm, color/si, 24fps, 60 minutes, $260 rental
George Kuchar
Power of the Press
Newly preserved print courtesy Harvard Film Archive
A radio workshop play meant to train students of the time in broadcasting
techniques. The plot concerns teacher/student crushes.
1977, 16mm, B&W/sound, 28 minutes, $120 rental
The Asphalt Ribbon
Newly preserved print courtesy Harvard Film Archive
Adapted from a pamphlet of “sentimental essays.” This film uses original text from the book, cuts it with sex, violence, rock n’ roll, an actor driving a fake truck, and footage of actual trucks. The story is an ode to American truck drivers. This film has original music by the students.
1977, 16mm, B&W/sound, 19 minutes, $100 rental
One Night A Week
Newly preserved print courtesy Harvard Film Archive
The story was written for a radio workshop in 1947. Parents make their
teenagers stay in one night a week. That one night turns into an orgy.
With ONE NIGHT A WEEK my main concern was to create beautiful close-ups of the students and to short circuit the wholesome quality of the original material. The students in that class were mainly all girls and they wanted to have a good time shooting the guys in 16mm. I remember the utter joy one gal had in panning down the bare body of a male member. One young guy was on acid and the girls wanted to get him on the set for a nude, fudge party.
He was glad to oblige them in his condition. I was sick one time and Curt McDowell, a friend and ex-student, came in to shoot a sequence in my absence.
His interest in pornography is very evident in the scenes he got the class to do. One of the girls in the class was a stripper and that’s how she paid the school’s tuition. They were all very sweet people and several had punk rock bands.(GK)
1978, 16mm, B&W/sound, 27 minutes, $120 rental
Motel Capri
Newly preserved print courtesy Harvard Film Archive
Mother Superior commits murder to save a soul from eternal damnation.
MOTEL CAPRI was original material improvised as we went along. Scenes were concocted to suit the individual members of the class and my Catholic upbringing plus immersion in horror movies helped mold the plot. The class also was populated by students interested in splatter and macho cycle gear.
Joyce Wieland, the Canadian artist and film maker is featured here as the mother superior. She was reading her lines in the Marlon Brando technique (they were pasted onto the face of her student co-star).
1986, 16mm, B&W and color/sound, 18 minutes, $75 rental
