Many of the films in the last program to run at the place coined THE PIT by a coke usin’ redneck electrician I have previously had only the opportunity to read about. I have been anxious to see them on film for a long long time. Other nights will feature more familiar works that might include a few hits from years past. In addition to the pictures in motion we will have for you vegan delights (though you don’t have to be vegan to be delighted) gingerly prepared by Shana David and, before we kick off each program, there will be a short set of music provided by the who’s wah of the J.A.X. Each event begins at 7:30; the films will start no later than 8:30p.m. 406 Chelsea St.
$5.00 (food and drink extra)
Tuesday May 6th SPACEDISCO ONE & BLOOD OF THE EARTHWORM
short set SHANA does THE GLOVED ONE
Finally…after a long hiatus Damon “Reflections of Evil” Packard returns with his epic sequel to Logans Run and 1984 combined-SPACEDISCO ONE. A fantastic, lamenting portrait of how the celebrative late 70’s changed drastically beginning in the year 1984, crystallizing by the year 1990, freeze framing and leading us to the hideous present day. You are about to enter a world where the unexpected,the unknown, and the unbelievable meet. DVD 2008 47mins.
BLOOD OF THE EARTHWORM
“An anti-climactic barrage of both original footage and extractions from horror, science fiction, and educational films, all of which shed a flickering light on contemporary maladies of civilization. The natural course of evolution has been interrupted producing machine-like people who are alienated, destructive, dissatisfied, lifeless…” – B. Gravely
16MM 2007 32mins.
Tuesday May 13th. LANDSCAPE SUICIDE & CONFEDERATION PARK
short set by WUDUN
“In “Landscape Suicide” Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. Benning has created a script which is a masterpiece of understated colloquial writing, and the actors he employs to re-enact confessional testimony and incidents recounted in trial transcripts perform with a flatly convincing lack of affect reminiscent of Gary Gilmore. The two monologues are embedded in Benning’s characteristic meditations of landscape: long shots of the Wisconsin farmlands, general stores, dirt roads and pick-up trucks, and the carefully tended lawns, swimming pools, sprawling bungalows and malls of the middle-class California suburb. These images are offered in the classically spare mise-en-scene which Benning has perfected in his work as a cinematic poet of the contemporary American environment. Here, in his most accessible film so far, the beautiful, open vistas are dense with the significance of the catastrophes they engendered.”-anonymous
16mm 1986 95min.
“In the voice-over to his most recent film, CONFEDERATION PARK, Texas filmmaker Bill Brown makes reference to ‘the secret languages of exile,’ and while this reflective, even somber film presents a pastiche of places across Canada where Brown has lived, its real subject is the limits of knowledge. Its long takes are accompanied by verbal meditations on the nation’s recent history, including the separatist bombings in Quebec during the 60s, and the battle between English and French becomes a metaphor for the filmmaker’s divided mind. Brown applies stickers with city names to a huge outdoor map of Canada, his voice-over suggesting that ‘we’ve found our place in the universe’ as a result of the ‘Copernican revolution’ – but then the stickers are blown away by the wind. Brown implies that images are insufficient: we need to know their history, their locations, their meaning. But landscapes can’t be fully decoded, nor past events captured on film: in the final shot a woman sings, ‘I don’t know where he’s headin’ for,’ while a car travels in a circle.” – Fred Camper, Reader
16mm 1999 30min
Tuesday May 20th Not 4 Sale- TV SHERIFF & THE TRAILBUDDIES
short set by face eraser
Emerging from the LA underground in year 2000, a self-proclaimed “video band” called TV SHERIFF & THE TRAILBUDDIES hit the scene with their twisted take on performance art and VJ remixing. They have since taken their unique act to venues worldwide, providing animated commentary on the state of mind control in the USA. THE TRAILBUDDIES focus on the banality of television, creating rhythmic collages from appropriated clips of the most absurd broadcast moments. And besides their virtuoso sampling, the madcap ensemble creates original – and hilarious! – karaoke-style melodies on mass-media manipulation. NOT 4 $ALE is the culmination of years of shredded/edited video-music compositions and live performances that lampoon as well as pay tribute to the world of TV commercials, game shows, televangelists, and network news.
“The inimitable manic media dementia dished out by the TV Sheriff and his crazy crew is part radical Dadaist subversion, part spot-on media critique and all parts totally hilarious, outrageous remix mayhem.” - Holly Willis, LA Weekly
“If TV Sheriff was an aroma, it would require all three nostrils to fully intake the exotic coagulation titled, ‘Not For Sale’” - Mark Mothersbaugh, DEVo
Tuesday May 27th Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams
short set by SLOWCODE
BURDEN OF DREAMS is a chilling but finely balanced account of what might ordinarily be considered artistic folly: German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s obsession to complete the painfully plagued jungle shooting of Fitzcarraldo. Disaster after disaster befalls Herzog’s tale of a penniless, opera-mad dreamer (Klaus Kinski) who risks everything to build a grand opera house in the jungle river port of Iquitos. Blank’s film grows into a fascinating (and highly controversial) record of an obsessed genius and his battle to finish his project in the face of plane crashes, torrential rains, attacks by armed, hostile Indians, the loss of several leading actors, and the eruption of a full-fledged border war around him. The obvious irony running through BURDEN OF DREAMS is that creating the movie Fitzcarraldo proved just as dubious and perilous an enterprise as the one on which it was based.
“Remarkable … one of the most candid, most fascinating portraits ever made of a motion picture director at work. … There’s never been anything else like it.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Time
1982 16mm 94min
Tuesday June Three by Ernie Gehr
short set by TUFFY
Serene Velocity-1970,16mm 23mins
“SERENE VELOCITY is one of the few really unique films I have seen during the last few years. It is so emphatically single-minded and complete in its exploration of the various ironies and multiple levels of its imagery that it leaves one stunned. Just when you have settled into a one-groove visual interpretation of the given space you are viewing, Gehr transforms this space in such a way that your awareness of it becomes something entirely different.” – Bob Cowan, Take One, 1974
“A literal ‘Shock Corridor’ wherein Gehr creates a stunning head-on motion by systematically shifting focal lengths on a static zoom lens as it stares down the center of an empty, modernistic hallway. Without ever having to move the camera, Gehr turns the fluorescent geometry of his institutional corridor into a sort of piston-powered mandala. If Giotto had made action films, they would have been these.” – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Shift-1972-1974 9min
“For Gehr, SHIFT broke new ground, hence perhaps a pun in its title. The film is his first to employ extensive montage. The actors are all mechanical – a series of cars and trucks filmed from a height of several stories as they perform on a three-lane city street. Gehr isolates one or two vehicles at a time, inverting some shots, so that a car hangs from the asphalt like a bat from a rafter, using angles so severe the traffic often seems to be sliding off the earth, and employing a reverse motion so abrupt that the players frequently exit the scene as though yanked from a stage by the proverbial hook. A sparse score of traffic noises accompanies the spastic ballet mecanique. Not only the action but Gehr’s deliberate camera movements are synced to the music of honking horns, screeching brakes, and grinding gears. The eight-minute film is structured as a series of obliquely comic blackout sketches: trucks run over their shadows; cars unexpectedly reverse direction or start up and go nowhere.” – J. Hoberman
SIDE/WALK/SHUTTLE-1991 16mm 41min
“The initial inspiration for the film was an outdoor glass elevator and the visual, spatial and gravitational possibilities it presented me with. The work was also informed by an interest in panoramas, the urban landscape, as well as the topography of San Francisco. Finally, the shape and character of the work was tempered by reflections upon a lifetime of displacement, moving from place to place and haunted by recurring memories of other places I once passed through.”-Gehr
Tuesday June10th Mary Jane is Not a Virgin Anymore w/ 30s bathtub processed porn w/ live music & foley score provided by AUDIENCE PORNTICIPATION
short set by heavy flow & fruit machine
Jane is a high school student who works at the local arthouse movie theater who learns about life, love, masturbation and sex. Especially sex.
1997 16mm 90min
“I fell for Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, a first feature that’s as awkward, raucous and eager as its protagonist.” – Amy Taubin, Village Voice
“All teen movies should be as realistic as this semi-autobiographical journey into the joys and horrors of adolescence.” Christina Kelly, Bust
Before the screening of Mary Jane…(regrettably Jacobsen’s last film) we will have two crunchy gems from the basement of a former worker at the George Eastman House. One is titled THE BABYSITTER and the other if my memory serves, THE GROCER’S BOY…These two shockingly naughty and frank shorts that are struggling to hang on to it’s celluloid base will be enhanced by you the audience. Each member will be handed a instrument or other noise maker to create a collective and cacaphonous soundtrack for each of these groundbreaking(?) works.
Tuesday June 17th- MIXED BAG
short set by kuwait
CANCELLED!!!
90minutes of short surprises from the depths of the archive to YOU
.
Tuesday June 24th- THE FLICKER, BLACK AND WHITE TRYPPS #3,RAY GUN VIRUS
short set by wolfdick!
CANCELLED!!!
The Flicker-Tony Conrad1966 16mm 30min
This is a notorious film; it moves audiences into some space and time in which they may look around and find the movie happening in the room there with them. Much has been written about THE FLICKER. It is a library of peculiar visual materials, referenced to the frame-pulse at 24 frames per second. WARNING!!! All flickering light is potentially hazardous for photogenic epileptics or photogenic migraine sufferers
Black and White Trypps # 3- Ben Russell 2007 16mm 8min
A shared communion with the followers of LIGHTNING BOLT.
Ray Gun Virus- Paul Sharits 1966 16mm 14min
Although affirming projector, projection beam, screen, emulsion, film frame structure, etc., this is not an “abstract film”/projector as pistol/time-colored pills/yes=no/mental suicide and then, rebirth as self-projection. “… just colors and strobe … ‘light-color energy patterns (analogies of neural transmission systems) generate internal color-time shape and allow the viewer to become aware of the electrical-chemical functionings of his own nervous system’ … It’s true.” – David Curtis, International Times
“RAY GUN VIRUS is a work in which no images appear yet one can get pure identity on film. … projected film itself makes the viewer aware of where he stands. RAY GUN VIRUS is not so-called ‘Psychedelic Cinema’ but even more and goes beyond it through Sharits’ bright clarification of the media.” – Takahiko Iimura, Film Art Exhibition: Fourth Int’l Experimental Film Competition, Knokke-Le-Zoute; “Twenty Years of American Personal Film” anthology, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1966.
Saturday June 28th-WIZARD PEOPLE/DEAR READER
short set SHANA does FLOOR & short set by after the bomb, baby!
CANCELLED!!!
We close this series with two hits from the pit. Brad Neely’s mind-boggling narration/interpretation to HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCEROR’S STONE and the sounds of FLOOR who played at the pit a time or two. Since Floor is no more the songs will be cooked up by Shana David and maybe a guest or two who will transform the sounds of the Florida swamp from geetar to an amplified and thunderous sounding keyboard.
