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Bruce McClure : : |
: Owen Land |
Sung Hwan Kim + Nina Yuen :: |
: :Soon-Mi Yoo |
Bill Daniel + Vanessa Renwick : : |
: : Mona Hatoum |
Peter Kubelka ::: |
: Nathaniel Dorsky |
Simultaneously using multiple16mm projectors, Brooklyn-based filmmaker and architect Bruce McClure is re-envisioning the tradition of "expanded cinema." Intervening in the trajectory of light from the source to the spectator, McClure creates on-screen cinematic projections that really only exist in the uniqueness of each individual performance. For his first Portland exhibition, McClure will present two programs of his most recent work, including the Crib and Sift series: a four-part project devoted to an original ink sneeze printed on four film strips and projected with four modified projectors using brass plates, colored gels, focus manipulations and sound effects pedals. "It’s a study that devotes itself to the process of disintegration in highly developed structures. After all, wreckage is often more interesting than structure."
McClure's newest piece, Christmas Tree Stand is a piece for film loops using a combination of two and four 16mm projectors retro-fitted with punched metal plates and mesh grids installed at variable angles between the lens and gate. The use of obstructions to the light path and filtering the sound with guitar effects pedals transforms the flicker loops of three black frames to one clear frame into an immersive atmosphere of color, motion and sound.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
September 10
Crib and Sift Series [Parts 1-4] [2002-04, 16mm x 4, color, sound, 60 min]
September 11
Christmas Tree Stand: Preamble & Parts I-III [2002, 16mm x 4, color, sound, 80 min]
Both currently based in Amsterdam, Sung Hwan Kim and Nina Yuen met in Boston where the two began making video and performance work. In only a few years, Kim and Yuen have amassed a stunningly original body of work focusing on themselves as their own subjects/performers. These humorous, bizarre, and sometimes troubling vignettes address the complexities of identity and biography, investigating our underlying conceptions of fiction and truth. Translating and transforming each other’s perspectives, Kim and Yuen create tangled portraits of the frailty of human relationships and emotions. Yuen and Kim will screen a selection of their own videos as well as their recent collaborative pieces (created under the name, Sung Hwan Kim and a Lady from the Sea) including the World Premiere of 12 Minutes.
—ARTISTS IN ATTENDANCE—
SEPTEMBER 14
Solstice by Nina Yuen [2003, DV, color, sound, 27 min]
So This is the Problem With My Mother by Nina Yuen [2003, DV, color, 11 min]
A-DA-DA by Sung Hwan Kim [2002, DV, color, sound, 20 min]
Green Lotte by Sung Hwan Kim [2005, DV, color, sound, 6 min] *WORLD PREMIERE
SEPTEMBER 15
12 Minutes [2003, DV, color, sound, 13 min] *WORLD PREMIERE
Flat White Rough Cut [2003, DV, color, sound, 9 min] *US PREMIERE
Her by Sung Hwan Kim [2003, DV, color, sound, 30 min]
My Name is Not Paul F Barrett by Nina Yuen [2003, DV, color, sound, 11 min]
Bill Daniel and Vanessa Renwick have been making documentary and experimental films for over 20 years. We are honored to have both artists in attendance for this double premiere—two studies of occupational folklore on the unlikely subject of railworker graffiti.
Who is Bozo Texino? is the culmination of Daniel‚s twenty-plus year investigation into the century-old folkloric practice of boxcar graffiti. Daniel rode freight trains across the west carrying a Super-8 sound camera and a 16mm Bolex, interviewing tramps and brakemen in a quest to find the originator of an ubiquitious graffiti. The recently-completed film functions both as a subcultural documentary and a stylized fable on wanderlust and escape.
Vanessa Renwick‚s Lovejoy focuses on Portland's fabled Lovejoy Columns—a series of fanciful paintings on concrete freeway columns made by Greek immigrant Tom Stefopoulos who, in 1948, began painting while working as a switchman for the rail yard. Renwick chronicled the turbulent efforts to save and restore the columns: a series of events that could only happen in Portland and a redevelopment story with a happy ending! Renwick will also be premiering her new short Portrait #1: Cascadia Terminal, a mesmerizing stare at a grain terminal at the port of Vancouver, B.C. with music by Tara Jane O'Neil
—ARTISTS IN ATTENDANCE—
SEPTEMBER 28
Who is Bozo Texino? by Bill Daniel [2005, DV, color, sound, 55 min]
Lovejoy by Vanessa Renwick [2005, DV, color, sound, 15 min]
Portrait #1: Cascadia Terminal by Vanessa Renwick [2005, DV, color, sound, 6 min]
Cinema Project and the Northwest Film Center are pleased to welcome Austrian filmmaker and theoretician Peter Kubelka for three nights of lectures and screenings. Kubelka's program is the first in a three part series, Critical Cinemas: Past, Present, and Future which has been generously funded by a grant from the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Peter Kubelka [b. 1934] has been a leading exponent of international avant-garde film since the 1950s, co-founding the Austrian Film Museum and NYC’s Anthology Film Archives. Later, Kubelka began pursuing his lifelong goal of "de-specialization" by practicing and teaching not only film but also cooking, archaeology, music, and cultural history. This will be touched on in his lecture on the 9th, The Edible Metaphor which establishes cooking as the first communicative art. Kubelka’s film programs will include his entire body of work over the past fifty years. The Metric Films are based upon exploring precise adaptations and deviations from the standard in projected film of 24 still images per second. Constructed from the most basic of elements, these films aim to strip cinema down to its essentials, making way for the films to relate to the essential aspects of existence. This program also includes Poetry and Truth, Kubelka’s first film after a 26 year hiatus, an accumulation of unedited originals from advertising films.
His Metaphoric Films center on the filmmaker as archaeologist, examining the detritus of society (found images and sounds) and re-worked to point toward a cumulative and collective cultural legacy. Unsere Afrikareise presents a series of relationships organized from the records of an Africa hunting trip. Kubelka’s first film Mosaik im Vertrauen is a finely crafted image and sound collage aiming to exploit the fullest potential of cinema’s possibilities.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
OCTOBER 9 • The Edible Metaphor [Lecture]
OCTOBER 11 • THE METRIC FILMS
Adebar [1956-57, 35mm, b&w, sound, 1.5 min]
Schwechater [1957-58, 35mm, color, sound, 1 min]
Arnulf Rainer [1958-60, 35mm, b&w, sound, 6.5 min]
+ Dichtung und Wahrheit/Poetry and Truth [2003, 35mm, color, sound, 13 min]
OCTOBER 13 • THE METAPHORIC FILMS
Mosaik im Vertrauen [1954-55, 35mm, color, sound, 16.5 min]
Unsere Afrikareise [1961-66, 16mm, color, sound, 12.5 min]
Pause! [1977, 16mm, color, sound, 12 min]
Owen Land, formerly known as George Landow, was one of the most original and celebrated American filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. The works he made during this period fuse together reason with irreverent wit. His early materialist works anticipated "structural film," the subsequent definition of which provoked his rejection of film theory and convention. Presented in conjunction with LUX U.K. and produced in association with Österreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna, Cinema Project is proud to present two nights of recently restored prints of Owen Land's work. Each night features a different selection of work with 15 films in all.
Land constructs "facades" of reality, often directly addressing the viewer using the language of television, advertising or educational films, and by featuring characters that are often the antithesis of those we might expect to see, such as podgy middle aged men and religious fanatics. He sometimes parodies experimental film itself, by mimicking his contemporaries and mocking the solemn approach of theorists and scholars. —Mark Webber
OCTOBER 25 • Fleming Faloon [1963, color, sound, 5 min]
Remedial Reading Comprehension [1970, color, sound, 5 min]
Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. [1965-66, silent, color, 4min]
Bardo Follies [1967-76, 16mm, color, silent, 25 min]
What's Wrong With This Picture 1 [1971, b&w/color, sound, 5 min]
What's Wrong With This Picture 2 [1972, b&w/color, sound, 7 min]
Institutional Quality [1969, color, sound, 5 min]
On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? [1977-79, color, sound, 18 min]
OCTOBER 26 • Diploteratology [1967-78, 16mm, color, silent, 7 min]
The Film that Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter [ b&w, sound, 9 min]
“No Sir, Orison!” [1975, color, sound, 3 min]
Wide Angle Saxon [1975, color, sound, 22 min]
Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present [1973, b&w/color, sound, 6 min]
A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California [1974, coloor, sound, 12 min]
New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops [1976, color, sound, 10 min]
*all films 16mm
Korean filmmaker Soon-Mi Yoo's work investigates peripheral histories of Korea. Working with archival footage and original material, her videos poetically connect to the personal with themes of alienation, death and the horrific atrocities of war. Ssitkim: Talking to the Dead is a thoughtful essay on the human process of grieving and loss as well as an historical investigation into the little known role of 320,000 Korean soldiers who fought in Vietnam for the United States and, more specifically, carried out mass civilian killings. Isahn uses documentation of the stereoscopes at Imjingak (a town near the North Korean border where exiled North Koreans can look back at state approved photographs of their "home") to dwell on the difficulties of displacement and the pain of being separated across borders.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
Isahn [2003, video, color, sound, 17 min]
Ssitkim: Talking to the Dead [2004, video, color, sound, 34 min]
Faith [1999, video, color, sound, 12 min]
Working across a wide variety of mediums, British artist Mona Hatoum’s work draws on her cultural identity as a Lebanese immigrant forced to leave her country due to the outbreak of war. Over the approximate span of twenty years, Hatoum has traveled freely between performance, video, photography, drawing, sculpture and installation. Cinema Project will be screening several of Hatoum’s early video work including Changing Parts, a video inter-cutting imagery from her parents’ house with the documentation of a performance in which the artist was trapped inside a plastic walled container; and Measures of Distance, a video that focuses on Hatoum’s separation and isolation from her family in Beirut. This screening is part of a series of public events surrounding her solo show at the Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College (November 1—December 23) including an Artist’s Talk with Hatoum on November 2. An installation of her work at The Affair at the Jupiter Hotel can be viewed October 1 and 2. More information can be found on our website or at web.reed.edu/gallery.
Measures of Distance [1988, video, color, sound, 16 min]
Changing Parts [1984, video, color, sound, 24 min]
Variations on Discord and Deviations [1984, video, color, sound, 28 min]
Nathaniel Dorsky's name is associated with a sublime and precise vision. For over fourty years he has made his own personal films out of tender encounters with the minute and the vast, whose delicate works meditate on the intangible wonder of everyday life. For the second part of our Critical Cinemas series, Dorsky will screen four of his films and read selections from his book Devotional Cinema, which pays homage to the films of Rossellini, Ozu, Antonioni, and Bresson, and celebrates cinema as a form of religion, a "metaphor . . . for our being."
The devotional doesn’t require the embodiment of religious form.... Devotional art subverts temporal compulsion. It’s there to inspire the verticality of one’s psyche.... From a Buddhist’s point of view the idea of trying to resolve yourself within the relative world is considered futile...This is not a new idea. When we view Egyptian pieces they disrupt verticality. Art at its wildest best is so vertical that it suggests that death is as present as life. Metaphorically this could be like seeing a film in a dark room, or seeing the world out of our own darkness.
—Nathaniel Dorsky
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
DECEMBER 6 • Alaya [1976-87, 16mm, color, silent (18fps), 28 min]
Arbor Vitae [1999-2000, 16mm, color, silent (18fps), 28 min]
DECEMBER 7 • The Visitation [2002, 16mm, color, silent (18fps), 18 min]
Threnody [2004, 16mm, silent (18fps), 25 min]
