REDCAT film series spring 2007
FILM AT REDCAT UNVEILS
ITS WINTER-SPRING 2007 SEASON
WITH AN ALLURING LINE-UP OF WORKS
FROM THE UNITED STATES AND ABROAD
AND A WOMEN’S FILM SERIES
Los Angeles – December 18 – The Winter-Spring 2007 program of “Film at REDCAT” starts with a bang with the world theatrical premiere of Day is Done, the new video by Los Angeles multi-media artist Mike Kelley (January 22) and continues with an impressive array of groundbreaking film and digital works. Beijing-based documentarist Wu Wenguang shows an original collaboration with Chinese peasants (January 29). New York experimental filmmakers Jeanne Liotta (February 12), Bill Morrison (March 5) and Su Friedrich (March 19) reveal a combination of old and new pieces. From Virginia, Kevin Jerome Everson brings to REDCAT the Sundance Film Festival critical favorite, Cinnamon (April 9). Larry Gottheim presents the highlights of his exceptional avant-garde career (April 30). Two tributes are devoted to filmmakers who have marked our times and have passed away recently: Marc Lapore (April 23) and Danièle Huillet (May 7). Where Did Our Love Go?, a series of films directed by women celebrates the opening of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (March 8-11).
Mon Mar 5 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series–Alpert Artist
Bill Morrison’s Theater of Decaying Memories
Noted for his poetic reworking of decaying archival footage, the Alpert Award winner shows a selection of shorts, ranging from the early Footprints (1992, 6 min., b/w and color, 16mm) to The Highwater Trilogy (2006, 31 min., 35mm)—a collage of ancient newsreel footage of storms, floods and icebergs. The program also includes The Film of Her (1996, 12 min., 35mm), in which archival footage is reinterpreted through fictional elements to evoke “an unrequited celluloid romance”; Light Is Calling (2004, 8 min, color, 35mm), widely recognized as a masterpiece; the exhilaratingly rhythmical Outerborough (2005, 9.5 min, 35mm); Ghost Trip (2000, 23 min, 35mm); and The Mesmerist (2003, 16 min, color, 35mm).
In person: Bill Morrison
Program funded in part by a generous grant from The Herb Alpert Foundation.
“Bill Morrison’s films are as much celebrations of the sometimes-frightening beauty of decomposing film as laments for vanishing relics of cinema’s origin.” –Senses of Cinema
Thur-Sun Mar 8-11 | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
Where Did Our Love Go?
Following the opening of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, this film series examines the impact of the 1970s and 1980s on women filmmakers since. A slate of new films charts the evolution of directors who began their careers in that era (Chantal Akerman, Nina Menkes, Zeinabu irene Davis) and shows a young artist drawing inspiration from the aesthetics of the 1970s (Anna Biller). Emily Tang’s Conjugation is an elegiac portrait of the post-Tiananmen Square generation. Completing the lineup is a long overdue revival screening of Barbara Loden’s legendary Wanda (1970).
Thurs Mar 8 | 8 pm
Chantal Akerman: Là-bas (Down There)
“It is a film about the relationship of somebody from the Diaspora to Israel – an imaginary Israel, maybe… A film both within the world and cut off the world – in which one can guess the faint outline of a Jewish family’s past.” – Chantal Akerman
Los Angeles premiere
Grand Prix, International Competition, FID Marseille
“Chantal Akerman is one of the greatest exponents of the modern dialectic of insignificance.” – Cahiers du cinéma
Fri Mar 9 | 8 pm
Barbara Loden: Wanda
Now in its first Los Angeles screening in 30 years, this remarkable film was written, directed and produced by Barbara Loden—who also gave the performance of a lifetime as its eponymous antiheroine.
FIPRESCI Prize, Venise Film Festival
In person: Marco Joachim, Barbara Loden’s son
“A small, forgotten masterpiece.” – Raymond Carney
Sat Mar 10 | 6:30 pm
Anna Biller: Viva
Premiered in Rotterdam, Viva sassily reworks vintage sexploitation movies from a woman’s point of view – offering up the lurid promises of the genre, while exploring female sexual trials and fantasies.
Los Angeles premiere
In person: Anna Biller
“An endearing camp travesty musical. Sweet, funny, with marvelous costumes and sets, a kind of innocent homage to Maria Montez with color and décor worthy of Kenneth Anger.” – Kevin Thomas
Sat Mar 10 | 9:30 pm
Nina Menkes: Phantom Love
Premiered at Sundance, this long-awaited new feature by award-winning experimental filmmaker Nina Menkes is a surreal drama about a troubled family, in which violence is percolating under the surface.
Los Angeles Premiere
In person: Nina Menkes
“Menkes’s achievement in deploying the qualities of Maya Deren’s vision of the personal film in feature length is without parallel.”
– David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde
Sun Mar 11 | 5:00 pm
Emily Tang (Tang Xiaobai): Conjugation (Dong Ci Bian Wei)
Completed in 2001, Tang’s masterful debut was the first underground Chinese film to give an intimate representation of the grey months following the June 4th massacre.
Special Jury Prize, Locarno Film Festival
FIPRESCI Prize, Hong Kong Film Festival
“A missing poet, a love affair gone stale, a passion for things Parisian and five idealists get lost in the shadows of Tiananmen Square.”
– Asian Week
Sun Mar 11 | 7:30 pm
Zeinabu irene Davis: Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant
A documentary about a black woman who, against all odds, became a legendary jazz trumpet player.
Preceded by: Zeinabu irene Davis: CYCLES
USA, 1989, 17 min, 16mm, b/w – music played by Clora Bryant
In person: Zeinabu irene Davis and Clora Bryant
“Zeinabu irene Davis’s films explore and celebrate the black female body and female experiences not treated by mainstream cinema.” – Literature Film Quarterly
This program is organized in conjunction with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on the occasion of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Mar 4–July 16).
See www.moca.org for additional information and schedule.
Program curated by Bérénice Reynaud with input from the faculty of CalArts School of Film/Video.
Special thanks to Connie Butler, Cory Peipon, Aandrea Stang and Christine Wertheim.
Mon Mar 19 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
An Evening with Su Friedrich
Los Angeles premieres
Recently honored with a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Su Friedrich pays a rare visit to the West Coast to showcase a selection of old and new works, including two Los Angeles premieres. In Seeing Red (2005, 27 min, DigiBeta), one of her most deeply personal films to date, Friedrich takes a look back at her evolution both as a woman and as an artist, tackling her own insecurities via several on-camera diary entries. The Head of a Pin (2004, 21 min, DigiBeta) casts a droll eye on the wonderment of city dwellers faced with nature… in the form of a country spider.
In person: Su Friedrich
Program Presented in collaboration with Outfest.
See www.outfest.org for additional information.
(More films by Su Friedrich on Wed. Mar 21 at Outfest!)
Mon Mar 19 | 8 pm
$8 [Student $6, CalArts $4]
“Su Friedrich’s unique synthesis of formal structures and human experience solidifies her position as one of the most important contemporary experimental filmmakers in America.”
– Senses of Cinema
Mon Apr 9 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
Kevin Jerome Everson
Cinnamon
Los Angeles premiere
USA, 2006, 71 min., color and b/w, Beta SP
Documentary footage and conventionally scripted narrative alternate in this engrossing and lush portrait of African American drag racing as Kevin Jerome Everson lovingly tracks the meticulous routine kept by Erin, a mortgage loan officer who races on weekends, and John, her ace mechanic and coach. An ode to the beauty of repetition as much as to the thrill of automobile and racetrack, Cinnamon is also an intimate celebration of African American craft.
In person: Kevin Jerome Everson.
“Making something beautiful out of the grime, labor and noise of the dragster circuit, Kevin Jerome Everson continues his string of fascinating doc-dramatic hybrid films.” – Robert Koehler, Variety
Mon Apr 23 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
The Intimate Distance: A Tribute to Mark LaPore
Guest curator: Mark McElhatten
Mark McElhatten, co-founder and co-curator of the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde series, presents a selection of rarely shown works by Mark LaPore, the daring experimental documentarian who died in 2005. “LaPore, though deeply influenced by the practices of the Lumière brothers, Andy Warhol and Robert Bresson, expanded a tradition of experimental documentary filmmaking practiced by Calvacanti, Wright, Rouch, Gardner, the Macdougals, Hutton and Gehr, conducting profoundly cinematic, highly distilled personal investigations into the nature of cultural flux and reverie,” notes McElhatten. “This particular program, The Intimate Distance, spirals in time from 2005 to 1989 and back to 2005 to reveal some of the tributaries and hidden resonances within a body of work that continuously revisited ideas and locations to mine for deeper meaning.”
In person: Mark McElhatten
“[LaPore’s films] should be seen by anyone who cares about the cinema and who cares about the way this image machine can display the world we have made and, especially, the aspects we prefer to ignore or forget. Their courage matches their beauty and their growing despair.” – Tom Gunning
Mon Apr 30 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
A Quest of Origins: Films by Larry Gottheim
This program surveys the trailblazing career of one of America’s foremost avant-garde masters. Best known for the cycle Elective Affinities, a series of four feature-length films started in the early 1970s and completed in 1981, Gottheim has carried out an absorbing exploration of the relationship of images to sound and time, examined issues of racial, cultural and personal identity, and considered the theme of nature in art. He is also the founder of the influential Department of Cinema Studies at SUNY Binghamton. The program this evening includes Mouches Volantes (Elective Affinities II, 1976, 69 min., 16mm) and other works that prefigure and develop this mode of working with repetition and variation.
In person: Larry Gottheim
“The profoundness of Gottheim’s art is to elaborate a body of work outside of fashion and within a search for an authentic language of cinematic discourse.”– John Hanhardt
Mon May 7 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
Danièle Huillet: The Last Resistance
Class Relations: Amerika
Germany/France, 1983, 127 min, b/w, 35mm. Preceded by:
En Rachâchant, France, 1982, 7 min, b/w, 35mm.
French filmmaker Danièle Huillet died last October, putting an end to her remarkable collaboration with Jean-Marie Straub. Working together between 1962 and 2006, the duo completed 27 shorts and features. Self-proclaimed materialist filmmakers, Straub-Huillet made films around the concept of “resistance: the resistance of texts to bodies, of location to texts, of bodies to locations” (Serge Daney). In Class Relations, the resisting body is that of a young German bourgeois “packed off” to America by his parents for misbehaving with a female servant; the resisting text is Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, in which the Statue of Liberty is described as brandishing a sword…
Program introduced by Thom Andersen
“Who else, in the history of world cinema, has done such a work, which is first respect for the languages that humans speak, respect for the voices of actors, for the meanings of words, and for the identity of spectators? The answer is simple: no one.”– Cahiers du cinéma
REDCAT is located at 631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 - at the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Parking is available in the Walt Disney Concert Hall parking structure and at adjacent lots.
Tickets are $8 for the general public, $6 for students with valid ID. Tickets may be purchased by calling 213.237.2800 or at www.redcat.org or in person at the REDCAT Box Office on the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets (30 minutes free parking with validation). Box Office Hours: Tue-Sat | noon–6 pm and two hours prior to curtain
For more information, go to www.redcat.org
The Jack H. Skirball Series is curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud.
As CalArts’ downtown center for innovative visual, media and performing arts, REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in the Los Angeles region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT is a center for experimentation, discovery and charged civic discourse.
-REDCAT-
Link
ITS WINTER-SPRING 2007 SEASON
WITH AN ALLURING LINE-UP OF WORKS
FROM THE UNITED STATES AND ABROAD
AND A WOMEN’S FILM SERIES
Los Angeles – December 18 – The Winter-Spring 2007 program of “Film at REDCAT” starts with a bang with the world theatrical premiere of Day is Done, the new video by Los Angeles multi-media artist Mike Kelley (January 22) and continues with an impressive array of groundbreaking film and digital works. Beijing-based documentarist Wu Wenguang shows an original collaboration with Chinese peasants (January 29). New York experimental filmmakers Jeanne Liotta (February 12), Bill Morrison (March 5) and Su Friedrich (March 19) reveal a combination of old and new pieces. From Virginia, Kevin Jerome Everson brings to REDCAT the Sundance Film Festival critical favorite, Cinnamon (April 9). Larry Gottheim presents the highlights of his exceptional avant-garde career (April 30). Two tributes are devoted to filmmakers who have marked our times and have passed away recently: Marc Lapore (April 23) and Danièle Huillet (May 7). Where Did Our Love Go?, a series of films directed by women celebrates the opening of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (March 8-11).
Mon Mar 5 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series–Alpert Artist
Bill Morrison’s Theater of Decaying Memories
Noted for his poetic reworking of decaying archival footage, the Alpert Award winner shows a selection of shorts, ranging from the early Footprints (1992, 6 min., b/w and color, 16mm) to The Highwater Trilogy (2006, 31 min., 35mm)—a collage of ancient newsreel footage of storms, floods and icebergs. The program also includes The Film of Her (1996, 12 min., 35mm), in which archival footage is reinterpreted through fictional elements to evoke “an unrequited celluloid romance”; Light Is Calling (2004, 8 min, color, 35mm), widely recognized as a masterpiece; the exhilaratingly rhythmical Outerborough (2005, 9.5 min, 35mm); Ghost Trip (2000, 23 min, 35mm); and The Mesmerist (2003, 16 min, color, 35mm).
In person: Bill Morrison
Program funded in part by a generous grant from The Herb Alpert Foundation.
“Bill Morrison’s films are as much celebrations of the sometimes-frightening beauty of decomposing film as laments for vanishing relics of cinema’s origin.” –Senses of Cinema
Thur-Sun Mar 8-11 | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
Where Did Our Love Go?
Following the opening of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, this film series examines the impact of the 1970s and 1980s on women filmmakers since. A slate of new films charts the evolution of directors who began their careers in that era (Chantal Akerman, Nina Menkes, Zeinabu irene Davis) and shows a young artist drawing inspiration from the aesthetics of the 1970s (Anna Biller). Emily Tang’s Conjugation is an elegiac portrait of the post-Tiananmen Square generation. Completing the lineup is a long overdue revival screening of Barbara Loden’s legendary Wanda (1970).
Thurs Mar 8 | 8 pm
Chantal Akerman: Là-bas (Down There)
“It is a film about the relationship of somebody from the Diaspora to Israel – an imaginary Israel, maybe… A film both within the world and cut off the world – in which one can guess the faint outline of a Jewish family’s past.” – Chantal Akerman
Los Angeles premiere
Grand Prix, International Competition, FID Marseille
“Chantal Akerman is one of the greatest exponents of the modern dialectic of insignificance.” – Cahiers du cinéma
Fri Mar 9 | 8 pm
Barbara Loden: Wanda
Now in its first Los Angeles screening in 30 years, this remarkable film was written, directed and produced by Barbara Loden—who also gave the performance of a lifetime as its eponymous antiheroine.
FIPRESCI Prize, Venise Film Festival
In person: Marco Joachim, Barbara Loden’s son
“A small, forgotten masterpiece.” – Raymond Carney
Sat Mar 10 | 6:30 pm
Anna Biller: Viva
Premiered in Rotterdam, Viva sassily reworks vintage sexploitation movies from a woman’s point of view – offering up the lurid promises of the genre, while exploring female sexual trials and fantasies.
Los Angeles premiere
In person: Anna Biller
“An endearing camp travesty musical. Sweet, funny, with marvelous costumes and sets, a kind of innocent homage to Maria Montez with color and décor worthy of Kenneth Anger.” – Kevin Thomas
Sat Mar 10 | 9:30 pm
Nina Menkes: Phantom Love
Premiered at Sundance, this long-awaited new feature by award-winning experimental filmmaker Nina Menkes is a surreal drama about a troubled family, in which violence is percolating under the surface.
Los Angeles Premiere
In person: Nina Menkes
“Menkes’s achievement in deploying the qualities of Maya Deren’s vision of the personal film in feature length is without parallel.”
– David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde
Sun Mar 11 | 5:00 pm
Emily Tang (Tang Xiaobai): Conjugation (Dong Ci Bian Wei)
Completed in 2001, Tang’s masterful debut was the first underground Chinese film to give an intimate representation of the grey months following the June 4th massacre.
Special Jury Prize, Locarno Film Festival
FIPRESCI Prize, Hong Kong Film Festival
“A missing poet, a love affair gone stale, a passion for things Parisian and five idealists get lost in the shadows of Tiananmen Square.”
– Asian Week
Sun Mar 11 | 7:30 pm
Zeinabu irene Davis: Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant
A documentary about a black woman who, against all odds, became a legendary jazz trumpet player.
Preceded by: Zeinabu irene Davis: CYCLES
USA, 1989, 17 min, 16mm, b/w – music played by Clora Bryant
In person: Zeinabu irene Davis and Clora Bryant
“Zeinabu irene Davis’s films explore and celebrate the black female body and female experiences not treated by mainstream cinema.” – Literature Film Quarterly
This program is organized in conjunction with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on the occasion of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Mar 4–July 16).
See www.moca.org for additional information and schedule.
Program curated by Bérénice Reynaud with input from the faculty of CalArts School of Film/Video.
Special thanks to Connie Butler, Cory Peipon, Aandrea Stang and Christine Wertheim.
Mon Mar 19 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
An Evening with Su Friedrich
Los Angeles premieres
Recently honored with a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Su Friedrich pays a rare visit to the West Coast to showcase a selection of old and new works, including two Los Angeles premieres. In Seeing Red (2005, 27 min, DigiBeta), one of her most deeply personal films to date, Friedrich takes a look back at her evolution both as a woman and as an artist, tackling her own insecurities via several on-camera diary entries. The Head of a Pin (2004, 21 min, DigiBeta) casts a droll eye on the wonderment of city dwellers faced with nature… in the form of a country spider.
In person: Su Friedrich
Program Presented in collaboration with Outfest.
See www.outfest.org for additional information.
(More films by Su Friedrich on Wed. Mar 21 at Outfest!)
Mon Mar 19 | 8 pm
$8 [Student $6, CalArts $4]
“Su Friedrich’s unique synthesis of formal structures and human experience solidifies her position as one of the most important contemporary experimental filmmakers in America.”
– Senses of Cinema
Mon Apr 9 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
Kevin Jerome Everson
Cinnamon
Los Angeles premiere
USA, 2006, 71 min., color and b/w, Beta SP
Documentary footage and conventionally scripted narrative alternate in this engrossing and lush portrait of African American drag racing as Kevin Jerome Everson lovingly tracks the meticulous routine kept by Erin, a mortgage loan officer who races on weekends, and John, her ace mechanic and coach. An ode to the beauty of repetition as much as to the thrill of automobile and racetrack, Cinnamon is also an intimate celebration of African American craft.
In person: Kevin Jerome Everson.
“Making something beautiful out of the grime, labor and noise of the dragster circuit, Kevin Jerome Everson continues his string of fascinating doc-dramatic hybrid films.” – Robert Koehler, Variety
Mon Apr 23 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
The Intimate Distance: A Tribute to Mark LaPore
Guest curator: Mark McElhatten
Mark McElhatten, co-founder and co-curator of the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde series, presents a selection of rarely shown works by Mark LaPore, the daring experimental documentarian who died in 2005. “LaPore, though deeply influenced by the practices of the Lumière brothers, Andy Warhol and Robert Bresson, expanded a tradition of experimental documentary filmmaking practiced by Calvacanti, Wright, Rouch, Gardner, the Macdougals, Hutton and Gehr, conducting profoundly cinematic, highly distilled personal investigations into the nature of cultural flux and reverie,” notes McElhatten. “This particular program, The Intimate Distance, spirals in time from 2005 to 1989 and back to 2005 to reveal some of the tributaries and hidden resonances within a body of work that continuously revisited ideas and locations to mine for deeper meaning.”
In person: Mark McElhatten
“[LaPore’s films] should be seen by anyone who cares about the cinema and who cares about the way this image machine can display the world we have made and, especially, the aspects we prefer to ignore or forget. Their courage matches their beauty and their growing despair.” – Tom Gunning
Mon Apr 30 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
A Quest of Origins: Films by Larry Gottheim
This program surveys the trailblazing career of one of America’s foremost avant-garde masters. Best known for the cycle Elective Affinities, a series of four feature-length films started in the early 1970s and completed in 1981, Gottheim has carried out an absorbing exploration of the relationship of images to sound and time, examined issues of racial, cultural and personal identity, and considered the theme of nature in art. He is also the founder of the influential Department of Cinema Studies at SUNY Binghamton. The program this evening includes Mouches Volantes (Elective Affinities II, 1976, 69 min., 16mm) and other works that prefigure and develop this mode of working with repetition and variation.
In person: Larry Gottheim
“The profoundness of Gottheim’s art is to elaborate a body of work outside of fashion and within a search for an authentic language of cinematic discourse.”– John Hanhardt
Mon May 7 | 8 pm | $8–6
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
Danièle Huillet: The Last Resistance
Class Relations: Amerika
Germany/France, 1983, 127 min, b/w, 35mm. Preceded by:
En Rachâchant, France, 1982, 7 min, b/w, 35mm.
French filmmaker Danièle Huillet died last October, putting an end to her remarkable collaboration with Jean-Marie Straub. Working together between 1962 and 2006, the duo completed 27 shorts and features. Self-proclaimed materialist filmmakers, Straub-Huillet made films around the concept of “resistance: the resistance of texts to bodies, of location to texts, of bodies to locations” (Serge Daney). In Class Relations, the resisting body is that of a young German bourgeois “packed off” to America by his parents for misbehaving with a female servant; the resisting text is Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, in which the Statue of Liberty is described as brandishing a sword…
Program introduced by Thom Andersen
“Who else, in the history of world cinema, has done such a work, which is first respect for the languages that humans speak, respect for the voices of actors, for the meanings of words, and for the identity of spectators? The answer is simple: no one.”– Cahiers du cinéma
REDCAT is located at 631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 - at the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Parking is available in the Walt Disney Concert Hall parking structure and at adjacent lots.
Tickets are $8 for the general public, $6 for students with valid ID. Tickets may be purchased by calling 213.237.2800 or at www.redcat.org or in person at the REDCAT Box Office on the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets (30 minutes free parking with validation). Box Office Hours: Tue-Sat | noon–6 pm and two hours prior to curtain
For more information, go to www.redcat.org
The Jack H. Skirball Series is curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud.
As CalArts’ downtown center for innovative visual, media and performing arts, REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in the Los Angeles region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT is a center for experimentation, discovery and charged civic discourse.
-REDCAT-
Link
