4 new prints from Gordon Ball at Canyon !

Posted November 27th, 2017 in New Acquisitions, News / Events

Sitting (1977 | 2 minutes | COLOR | SILENT)

Sitting meditation study. First work after I laid down camera seven years – thus newskin concentration on breath-body precise rhythm attention.

Awards: Honorable Mention, North Carolina Film Festival, 1977; Third Int’l Avant-Garde Film Festival, London, 1978.

Father Movie (1978 | 10 minutes | COLOR | SILENT )

Made spontaneously with news of my father’s death – I kept a friend’s Instamatic Super 8 in my coat pocket as I headed to Winston-Salem and the rest home where my father died of a sudden stroke overnight. I filmed on highway, in his abandoned rest home room, then drove weeping & filming at the same time, one hand on wheel, one holding camera, past the houses – my sister’s, his own – he and my mother had lived in after retirement from life’s work abroad.

“In his two films about the last days and death of his father and the life and death of his mother, Gordon Ball has accomplished something unique in the autobiographical genre of motion pictures. He has reconciled ‘still’ (as the mind would have it remembering) with ‘movie’ AND ‘document’ (in the form of ‘home movies’) with the ‘myth’ of his voice track.” – Stan Brakhage

This film was originally made on Super 8, a print can be made available upon inquiry.

Georgia (1966 | 4 minutes | COLOR | SILENT)

“A perfect tone poem of a film – within its short time limit, it contains much of the beauty of night and the sensuality of women … perhaps even ‘THE’ woman one sometimes sees dancing in the night, but never touches in the flesh. Dreamlike, beautiful – its brevity compacts its power and renders it haunting.” – William R. Trotter

“GEORGIA is a good example of a new genre of film that has been developing lately, that is, a portrait film. In some cases, like those of Brakhage, Warhol or Markopoulos, there is an attempt at an objective portrait of a man or woman; in other cases, like in the case of GEORGIA, the portrait becomes completely personalized, poetically transposed; it may not be as multi-faceted as, say, Brakhage’s portrait of McClure, but an inspired portrait nevertheless, in the vein of a single-minded lyrical love poem.” – Jonas Mekas

Note: Project at silent speed

Millbrook (1985 | 9 minutes | COLOR | SOUND)

For aeons it’s been the human family around a fire constructing and refiguring its basic myths: it’s our earliest family or tribal “movie.” So MILLBROOK recounts a mythical “true story,” a life-changing event told against fire, the emblem of consumption and renewal: In the enormous forested estate once used by Timothy Leary, a young couple lose individual identity, merge with decaying leaves and are consumed by maggots as entire universe undergoes entropy, revive as it regenerates and are saved from death by a mysterious familiar stranger.

Award: Atlanta Film and Video Festival

These works are also available for purchase in DVD !