Past New Releases: Winter 2008
Posted April 27th, 2010 in New Acquisitions
New Releases from the Winter of 2008.
- Adam Beckett
- William Farley
- d.a. johnston
- Lawrence Jordan
- Alexis Krasilovsky
- Dominic Angerame
- Suzan Pitt
- Andrej Zdravic
Newly preserved prints of Evolution of the Red Star, Heavy Light, Flesh Flows, Sausage City and Kitsch in Synch courtesy Iota Center and Academy Film Archive.
Dear Janice
Newly preserved print courtesy Iota Center and Academy Film Archive.
What starts off as a simple letter of greeting to the mysterious Janice gradually evolves into a swirling vortex of hearts, breasts, sausages, and other objects, mind-boggling in its visual density. Adam’s first completed and shown work, this film is a hypnotic and fascinating show of his mastery of unconventional animation and printing techniques, and very sharply points the way to later works like Evolution of the Red Star and Sausage City. (Mark Toscano)
1972, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
In Between The Notes
Pandit Pran Nath is the last Raga singer in a long line of North Indian vocal masters in the Kirana style of Indian classical music. This documentary follows Pran Nath back to India and traces his journey. Accompanied by his disciple, the American avant-garde composer Terry Riley, the film celebrates the Indian musician’s life and work. Produced by Jim Newman.
Signed by the filmmaker.
1985-86, color/so, 28m, DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions
Arianna’s Journey: a pilgrimage of faith
Arianna’s Journey: a pilgrimage of faith (2007) is the story of a woman who has the gift of healing, and her travels in pursuit of her spiritual destiny. Arianna lives outside Milan in the small town of Novara, where she was born. Her husband Carlo runs his father’s grocery store.
Since she was 14, Arianna has emanated heat from her hands. Her mother reports that, “sometimes she could even burn you if you touched her.” Not accepting any payment for her healing, Arianna works on people from near and far by laying her hands on them: “I interact with the soul, not with the body. The body is suffering when the soul is suffering.” In the most extreme form of this kind of healing, Arianna performs an exorcism on a local woman who is suffering from severe psychological problems. She explains that “Satan is not the rival of God, but he is helping on this earth to highlight human sins […] though he frightened me at first, I’m not afraid of him now, because I know that evil always brings good.”
Since the age of 6 Arianna has believed that she will give birth to the next Christ-consciousness. She says that she has no free will, and acts only upon an inner compass, through which God directs her journey.
These inner directives take her to ancient sacred caves in the Pyrenees; peyote fields in the high Mexican desert; and holy shrines in Israel and Palestine. The film is a meditation on the sublime and the mundane aspects of a modern day pilgrimage of faith..
Signed by the filmmaker.
2007, color/so, 30m, DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions
John O’Keefe’s Adaptation of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself
“It’s the sort of event that makes you wonder, after sitting through it, how you ever lived without it.”
– Michael Feingold, Village Voice
Signed by the filmmaker.
2007, color/so, DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions
Denah Johnston employs optical printing and hand development in her filmmaking, leaving a certain degree of her process to chance operations. Currently Johnston is exploring various methods of re-photography, sound construction and manipulation in her new works with found footage source materials, in pre-production on a documentary film about Underground movements in music and film 1987-84 in New York City and Berlin and programming a George Kuchar Retrospective for the 2009 San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. Influenced by Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren and the writings of William S. Burroughs, she has most recently screened films in Malaysia, Saint Petersburg, Russia and Berlin. She has also shown work at New Nothing Cinema in San Francisco, California, Offi Cinema Festival in Bologna, Italy, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California and the Athens International Film & Video Festival, where she received a Juror’s Prize for Best Experimental Film (flux). She has been curating film screenings globally for the past two years and the Bay Area for six years. Johnston has exhibited photography works in Italy and the Czech Republic, and collaborates extensively with artists in various fields including DJs, painters, musicians and dancers. Currently an ABD (all but dissertation) PhD candidate at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, Denah has received her M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California in 2004 and a B.F.A. in Photography with a Film Studies Minor from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio in 1999.
flux
the spaces between memory and perception, dream and waking reveal themselves on the film surface. glimpses, impressions, momentary clarity shifts to obscurity and afterimage. this is a film about film, a film that is process-oriented and takes its time. finding a language without speech, communication is possible by other means. how to merge experience with afterimages, ciphers, messengers carrying the weight of meaning that comes from exterior places: it could be that people dream to close the gaps between consciousness and memory. . .
consider this a film about grief, passage and remembering that looking isn’t always seeing.
“a remnant from the future”
– Christian Farrell, SILT collective
2003, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $25
anomie
anxiety fear and waiting.
the resistance to change persists
but the moon will have its way
transforming one form into another
observance of disquiet
the instinct to hold on
when there is no solid ground
2004, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $25
DVD compilation
transubstantiation, anomie, flux
DVD Sale: $35 home; $175 institutions
Lawrence Jordan
Trumpit
Recently restored by Anthology Film Archives
Stan Brakhage stars as the constricted love in this spoof of pseudo-erotic card play.
1955, 16mm, b&w/so, 7m, $30
Spectre Mystagogic
Recently restored by Anthology Film Archives
This films is about the illusion of existence, and the migration of human qualities through light and shadow, as are all my films of the 1950’s. Poet Michal McClure and his then wife, Joanna, and poet Kenneth Rexroth’s daughter, Mary, exist only as figments of black and white photography. The real story lies in the permutations of light and shade as human shapes move through them. This is probably my best effort from that period.
1957, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $30
The Miracle of Don Cristobal
For a long time I have wanted to construct a melodrama (animated) from the funky engravings of the 19th century which illustrated “young peoples” adventure stories. Eventually, through a great deal of selection, such a film fell into place. I have attempted to present the high emotional overlay of very mundane events in this “alchemical melodrama.” To that end, Puccini combines with blatent sounds of police sirens and old door buzzers on the sound track, while “real” and nightmare images compete for screen time.
2008, 16mm, color/so, 11 min. $35
Alexis Krasilovsky
SOME WOMEN WRITERS KILL THEMSELVES: Selected Videopoems and Poems of Alexis Krasilovsky
Winner: BEST OF THE FEST Literary Award, 2008 Austin Woman’s Film, Music and Literary Festival
Some Women Writers Kill Themselves: Selected Videopoems and Poems of Alexis Krasilovsky (Rafael Film, 2008) is a DVD that allows the viewer to navigate between the videopoems and between poems of several illustrated collections. The DVD’s videopoems include What Memphis Needs, screened in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Between Word and Image”; Exile, aired nationally on PBS, and Inside Story, an ode to a cervix — the first experimental film using endoscopic camerawork. Also included are three previously published chapbooks of poetry (Some Women Writers Kill Themselves, Some Men, and Abuse of Privacy), and Self-Portrait as a Geisha, a collection of new poems.
2007, digital video, color/b&w/so, 35m
Signed DVD Sale: $75 Home, $225 Institutions
Jennifer Reeves (b. 1971, Ceylon) is a New York-based filmmaker working primarily on 16mm. Her films have shown extensively, from the Berlin, New York, Vancouver, London, Sundance, and Seoul Film Festivals to many Microcinemas in the US and Canada, the Robert Flaherty Seminar, Princeton University, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2007 Reeves performed her double-projection films LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER and HE WALKED AWAY (with music by Anthony Burr) at Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center, AFI Fest, Diapason Gallery in New York, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Strasbourg. Jennifer has been the proud recipient of a 2007 Wexner Center Capital Residency Award, which made it possible for her to complete production and post-production on her LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER, as well as do some shooting for her in-progress WHEN IT WAS BLUE.
Reeves has made experimental films since 1990 (or since 1986 if you consider high-school video-making). She does her own writing, cinematography, editing, and sound design. Her subjective and personal films push the boundaries of film through optical-printing, film stock “mis-use”, and direct-on-film techniques (including hand-painting and sewing 16mm film). Reeves has consistently explored themes of memory, mental health and recovery, feminism and sexuality, landscape, wildlife, and politics in her work since the early 90s.
Reeves also teaches part-time at Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts, The Cooper Union, and Millennium Film Workshop. She’s also teaching a short course at the School of Visual Arts in the Photography and Related Media MFA program.
The Time We Killed
THE TIME WE KILLED is a lush black & white experimental feature that portrays the life and imaginings of a writer unable to leave her New York City apartment. Robyn Taylor tries to comprehend and fight her growing agoraphobia by looking into her own past and confronting the world events of the present (from a murder-suicide next door to the war in Iraq). Robyn’s obsessive ruminations threaten to drive her deeper into the solitude of an illusory world, until a personal encounter with death prompts her to leave the safety of home once again.
The film won the FIPRESCI Critics prize at the Berlin Film Festival (International Forum for New Cinema), Outstanding Artistic Achievement at OUTFEST, and Best NY, NY Narrative Feature at Tribeca Film Festival (receiving an abstract painting by Christopher Walken, sponsored by Post Factory) and the film screened at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The Village Voice Film Critic’s poll (2005) honored THE TIME WE KILLED with votes from six film critics for categories including: Best Film, Best Cinematography, and Best Performance. THE TIME WE KILLED had an Art-House run at Anthology Film Archives in New York, alongside a retrospective of her short films. THE TIME WE KILLED was also shown in New York’s 2006 Summer River to River Festival, where the fabulously talented Joan Allen introduced and interviewed Jennifer Reeves to the outdoor audience before the screening.
Additionally, the film was supported by the following: New York State Council on the Arts Grant, 2003. Andrea Frank Foundation Grant, 1999. Princess Grace Award, 2000. Recipient of the John H. Johnson Film Award (Princess Grace Foundation). Fiscal Sponsor: Women Make Movies, Inc.
2004, 16mm, b&w/so, 94m, $200
City Symphony Series: Continuum, Deconstruction Sight, Premonition, In the Course of Human Events, Line of Fire
Limited edition DVD compilation, signed and numbered.
DVD Sale: $100 individuals, $400 institutions
Pixiescope, Waifen Maiden, Consume
Limited edition DVD compilation, signed and numbered.
DVD Sale: $75 individuals, $300 institutions
William Farley
Of Men and Angels
Screenplay by Deborah Rogin, William Farley and Marjorie Berger.
This film centers on one week in the lives of three strong-willed individuals. Mike (Jack Byrne) is a taxi driver and unrequited Irish-American writer in the post-beat tradition. Mike lives with Maria (Theresa Saldana), a beautiful cultured Salvadorian who is carrying his child and expects him to live up to his responsibilities of fatherhood. When Irish literary maverick Padric Reilly (John Molloy) falls into their lives, the three are confronted with the struggle for control of their own dreams – and of each other.
DVD signed by the filmmaker.
1989, 35mm, color/so, 88m, $135 rental
DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions
Citizen
Featuring: Stoney Burke, Bob Carroll, Bob Ernst, Whoopi Goldberg, Darryl Henriques, Murray Korngold, John O’Keefe and Michael Peppe.
The film follows a group of anonymous young people on an apparently random journey through a disjointed San Francisco cityscape. As they travel, the group encounters a succession of madmen and eccentrics, portrayed by various West Coast performance artists, whose impassioned monologues and improvisations satirize the institutions of contemporary American society. Surrounded by images of mass media, the performers appear as manifestations of the wise man or holy fool, bizarre individuals at the fringes of society who offer guidance to the group on their Pilgrim’s Progress through the streets, subways, cemeteries, and highways of America.
“Farley has most ingeniously fused the performers and their audience into a beautifully crafted piece of filmmaking.” – Willard Van Dyke, Santa Fe Winter Film Exposition
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour; Honors, Whitney Museum of American Art; Honors, Florence Film Festival; Honors, Eighth Deauville Festival of American Cinema; Honors, 29th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.
1980-1982, 16mm, color/so, 80m, $135
DVD Sale: $50 individuals, $175 institutions
End of the Art World
With Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Michael Snow.
“With a quality of humor possible only with depth of understanding, Alexis Krasilovsky presents a catalogue of interviews with modern artists in which the shooting style as well as the aural material’s format rehearses the personal style, the aesthetics, and the assumption of each artist about the nature of his art.” – Joan Braderman, Artforum
“The interviews with the individual artists vary from gala opening with Warhol’s superstars at the Whitney Museum … to the creation of actual art work in the studios of Rauschenberg and Snow.” – Howard Guttenplan, Millennium Film Journal
“With ferocious wit, Ms. Krasilovsky sends up New York’s art scene in END OF THE ART WORLD. In essence, Ms. Krasilovsky uses the sounds and images of the usual art documentary to create her own work of art.” – Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
1971, 16mm, color/so, 35m, $100
VHS Sale: $39.95 Home; $150 Other
Signed DVD Sale: $75, home use; $225, institutions
Mr. Boogie Woogie
Starring Mose Vinson, Memphis Slim and Ma Rainey II. Produced by Ann Rickey. Directed by Alexis Krasilovsky.
“A straightforward look at blues pianist Mose Vinson – the interviews from his boyhood home in Mississippi intercut with the man at his piano, singing in his soulful wail, which is where he really shines.” – LA Weekly
“‘We called him Mr. Boogie Woogie,’ Memphis Slim explains, in his affectionate tribute to his less successful colleague …. Vinson’s Holly Springs boyhood as the son of a Saturday Night musician, his failure as a sharecropper, his involvement with the Baptist church, his lonely life now … all are captured with striking visuals …. The intimacy that the small-format video medium can provide is displayed here to its fullest extent … Vinson’s world is beautiful, troubled, and important.” – Film Library Quarterly
1978, VHS, color/so, 30m, $39.95 Home; $100 Institutions
Signed DVD Sale: $50 Home; $150 Institutions
Beale Street
Co-directed by Alexis Krasilovsky, Ann Rickey and Walter Baldwin.
Beale Street is where W.C. Handy wrote the blues, where Boss Crump abused his power, and where Martin Luther King marched days before his death in 1968. In the making of our oral history, we went to the Beale Streeters who knew and loved it best, including B.B. King, the Hooks Brothers, Bobby Blue Bland, Prince Gabe, Maurice “Fess” Hulbert and Rufus Thomas, and we included rare footage of King’s march.
“The memories that we have – we older ones that’s been around – the contributions that, you know, have gone out to the world from this place – they sure shouldn’t be left to die.” – B.B. King
1981, VHS, b&w/so, 28m, $39.95 Home; $100 Institutions
Signed DVD Sale: $50 Home; $150 Institutions
Exile
“EXILE portrays the filmmaker’s own compelling journey behind the Iron Curtain to retrace her origins. Beautiful scenery and often haunting music accompanied her sojourn from Czechoslovakia into Prague and Austria where the film captures what it meant to be Jewish and survive during those dark Hitler years.” – Josh Baran
“Remarkable.” – Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
“Such films do more than increase East-West understanding and reduce tensions; they also serve to emphasize that we are all essentially one people.” – Barbra Streisand
“Watching it, we can realize how at times we have felt both blessed and cursed by the fate that caused our parents and grandparents to leave their homelands and settle in America, the fate which enables most of us to be alive today.” – The Jewish Journal
1984, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $90
VHS Sale: $49.95 Home; $135 Institutions
Signed DVD Sale: $65 Home; $195 Institutions
Epicenter U.
A first-hand account about healing from natural disaster, EPICENTER U. is also a multi-cultural portrait of a university which suffered $350 million in damages.
“From gripping testimonials to comic relief, the new film EPICENTER U. chronicles the impact of the Northridge Earthquake on the people of California State University, Northridge.” – Daily News
“I have never been in a earthquake. While watching the film I really felt, for the first time, the costs to both the individual and the community of such a disaster. … Drawing on her own original filmmaking style developed over years of notable filmmaking, she uses a collage of techniques (cinema verité, direct camera address interviews, slow motion, essayist documentary, poetry) to explore the film’s complex and elusive subject matter. More importantly, perhaps, is her collaboration with her students. She gives them a real voice.” – Dr. Michelle Citron, Radio-TV-Film Dept., Northwestern University
1995, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $90
VHS Sale: $24.95 Home; $150 Institutions
Signed DVD Sale: $65 Home; $195 Institutions
Asparagus
This compelling portrait of the artist as a young women is a cell animation that was four years in the making. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice wrote, “Pitt’s subject matter, a magicienne’s relation to her art (daringly visualized as asparagus turns to phalluses) occasions some astonishing effects: at one point the heroine stages a 2-D Kandinsky-patterned light show for an audience of 3-D puppets. Pitt has a powerful graphic style, her cells are detailed and picture-book sumptuous. More than any other animator she has the gifts that could sustain a feature-length work.” The film placed Pitt at the forefront of independent American animation artists.
1978, 16mm, color/so, 19m, $45
DVD Sale: $35 Home; $85 Institutions
Joy Street
A depressed woman and her imagined counterpart, a tiny cartoon mouse, create metaphorical opposites in a luscious animated tale of despair and rescue. Two states of mind swing dangerously up and down throughout the length of JOY STREET. These opposing forces which play against each other in a series of scenes set in a moody apartment in the middle of the night, conclude in a primordial rainforest. Five years in the making, Suzan Pitt traveled throughout the rainforest of Guatemala and Mexico to paint studies for this film. Skillfully animated and set to a brilliant score performed by the Jazz Passengers with an original title song sung by Debbie Harry, JOY STREET represents the best of American independent animation.
“Vivid, intriguing, and bizarre.” – Caryn James, The New York Times
“A dazzling new animated film by one of America’s premiere animators.” – Richard Pena, New York Film Festival Awards and Exhibition (selected): Golden Globe Award, SF Int’l Film Festival, 1996; First Prize, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1996; London Film Festival, 1996; Sundance Film Festival, 1996.
1995, 35mm, color/so, 24m, $75
DVD Sale: $50 Home; $125 Institutions
Riverglass: A River Ballet in Four Seasons
Production, script, camera, editing, sound recording and composition by Andrej Zdravic.
Through the liquid lens of crystalline water we perceive, perhaps for the first time, the magical underwater world of turquoise volumes, flying bubbles, pulsating sun membranes, dancing stones …. Four years in the making, RIVERGLASS is not a documentary about the river Socca. It is a poetic river ballet to the music of natural sounds.
RIVERGLASS is the result of the author’s everlasting fascination with the forces of movement in nature that contain universal principles of life and a great potential for a new, different kind of narrative cinema. Socca flows in the Julian Alps, Slovenia. The author devised a special tool to capture the river from unique, as yet unseen perspectives.
Awards: Preseren Fund Award, Slovenia, 1999; Grand Prix, Third Int’l Festival of New Film & Video, Split ’98; Best Art Video, First Slovenian Film Festival, 1998.
Note: Contains some material used in Secrets of Socca – Time Horizon installation. – A.Z.
1997, DVD or VHS, color/so, 41m, $70 Home; $325 Other
