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SKETCHED IN TIME: EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATED SHORT FILMS [February 15]Ah, Liberty! [March 25 + 26]Continual Repositions: the Art of Celluloid [April 12 + 13]Echoes of Silence [APRIL 28 + 29]Bruce Conner: in Memorium [May 5 + 6]Never Merely Pretty: Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh [May 8]RR [June 6]Visual Poetry: the Films of Amar Kanwar [June 17 + 18] |
Beyond Borders, Cinema Project's eight program international visiting artist and curator series will take place over the next three calendar seasons. In the past we have consistently sought out marginalized moving image work from around the world and have screened a variety of films from countries as close as Canada and as far as Lebanon. The aim of this upcoming series is to push our objective further by inviting more international voices to present their own work, while also diversifying the type, focus, and audience. Non-mainstream international film and video is different not simply because of look or language, but because it is informed by a different culture and set of social rules. We see Beyond Borders as an action toward bringing diversity to Portland, so please join us for this exciting new project. |
SKETCHED IN TIME: EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATED SHORT FILMS
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AH, LIBERTY! THE FILMS OF BEN RIVERS
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CONTINUAL REPOSITIONS: THE ART OF CELLULOID
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ECHOES OF SILENCE - BY PETER EMMANUEL GOLDMANApril 28 + 29 [7:30PM] A silent meditative piece filmed over a three-year period, Peter Goldman's Echoes of Silence explores life from the depth of 1960s New York, capturing a handful of acquaintances as they wander through Greenwich Village, the Met, or down dark alleys and into basement beds. Only in his mid-twenties when he shot Echoes, Goldman displays the despair of youth as it is magnified by a city ill-at-ease. "Echoes of Silence is a world of lonely nightmares," said Goldman. The film is divided into a haunted string of scenes introduced by hand-lettered title cards, the only dialogue available beyond gesture and glance-a silent film with a soundtrack drawn from Goldman's record collection including music of Charles Mingus, Pete Seeger, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Prokofiev. The construction of elegies to NYC and the characters we encounter-a young artist looking for love, the crowds in the streets-describe a certain frustration of existence that populated the city during the social boil of the 1960s. Like other urban-focused film essays, this documentation and reflection on the politics of everyday life are unpacked to reveal a larger political meaning. And in Goldman's work, this surfaces as a graceful yet grainy silent black-and-white image of futility. "Goldman's Saturnine films describe the world's unlivable nature. They represent so many treatises on despair-a despair that is at once documentary, reflective and impulsive in character." --- Nicole Brenez, Rouge "My filmmaking is very documentary in nature because I always experience the personality in relation to the environment. Echoes of Silence could have been shot anywhere in the world, but it would not have been the same as the one shot in New York." --- Peter Goldman, 1968 April 28 + 29Echoes of Silence by Peter Emmanuel Goldman [1965, 16mm, b&w, sound, 75 min.] |
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BRUCE CONNER: IN MEMORIUMMay 5 [7:00PM] [NWFC Whitsell Auditorium | 1219 SW Park ave] Co-presented with the Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival and the Northwest Film Center. A pioneer in the art of sculptural assemblage and found footage collage filmmaking, Bruce Conner is one of the most influential artists of our times. For over 40 years he pushed the boundaries of American avant-garde film, exhibiting his work in museums, festivals, and galleries. This past July Bruce Conner passed away at 74 years of age. Please join Cinema Project in celebrating his life and work with this compiled program of his 16mm film. Our very special thanks to Jean Conner and Michelle Silva for making these personal prints available. "Taking what was at hand he reached into the human subconscious into the heartland into the dreamland into the dark and made a meticulous visionary irreverent metaphysical art. Erotic, mysterious, astute. He is the first filmmaker I would think about and would show when wanting to demonstrate how editing can make, should make, meaning, poetic, consequential meaning." -Mark McElhatten Michelle Silva, representative of the Conner Family Trust, in attendance May 5 - Program I [NWFC]Cosmic Ray [1961, 16mm, b&w/so, 4min.] May 6 - Program II [PDX Fest]Mongoloid [1978, 16mm, b&w/so, 3.5m] |
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NEVER MERELY PRETTY: FILMS AND VIDEOS BY PEGGY AHWESHMay 8 [730PM] [Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St.] Cinema Project welcomes filmmaker and video artist Peggy Ahwesh for an evening of work as part of the 2009 PDX Fest. Currently a professor at Bard College in film and electronic arts, Ahwesh, who once worked under George Romero and was taught by Tony Conrad, has been making films for 35 years, often collaborating with friends and colleagues. Starting out under the influence of the Pennsylvania punk scene with hand-held Super-8s constantly running, her approach to her subjects is part home movie, part documentary, and part experimental ethnography-a mix of textures that results in something entirely different and something "gloriously messy." As part of a generation of artists whose work grew out of an anti-art sensibility, Ahwesh's work can seem split between a fascination with the people around her and more academic leanings. Within this dialectical approach, she stages at one end rereadings (both literally and figuratively) of psychoanalytic texts and on the other a certain curiosity about performance-the slow or erratic jouissance of the subject that unfolds before the camera. In Martina's Playhouse and The Scary Movie, which both star the daughter of a friend, she addresses issues of female sexuality and desire, but from a vantage point "outside of male fantasy." On She Puppet, which reappropriates a session of the videogame Tomb Raider, Ahwesh says that it's about "female identity...a riff off one videogame with this virtual superstar from the popular imagination." This program seeks to display Ahwesh's special attention to the various visual media she employs-from 16mm and Super 8, to digital video and computer animation-as it acts as another character that alters the material of the visual field. Also known for her sound and music collaborations, pieces like Beirut Outtakes and The Color of Love are as entrancing and textured in their imagery as they are in their audio. Artist-in-Attendance "Ahweh's is messy work...deeply invested in the luxurious plenitude of the visual field. The films look great and yet are never merely pretty; they frustrate aestheticising, formalist tastes. Likewise, although the films often cite theoretical texts, they are never merely theoretical. They inhabit a strange stretch of territory in the world of experimental film and video, never exhibiting the formal shape of, say, a Hollis Frampton or the precise political clarity of a Su Friedrich. Ahwesh's practice is a porous one, grounded on a radical technique of pastiche and aimed at unsettling categories and hierarchies." -John David Rhodes, Senses of Cinema May 8The Scary Movie [1993, 16mm, b&w, sound, 9 min.] Information about PDX Fest and program show times at www.peripheralproduce.com PEGGY AHWESH WORKSHOP - TECHNIQUES OF IMPROVISATION FOR FILMMAKERS
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RR - BY JAMES BENNINGJune 6 [OUTDOOR SCREENING, details TBA] "RR is a film about trains, American trains, trains moving across the American landscape." - James Benning "Those are modest words for a film as majestic and breathtaking as RR. Taking its title from an abbreviation for "railroad," the latest (and possibly last) 16mm work by the great American independent filmmaker James Benning - whose prolific output over the past five years has placed him at the apex of his four-decade career - is indeed about trains traversing the expansive American landscape. Yet its deceivingly simple schema of forty-three trains chugging through the frame sets the stage for a film rich in historical allusion, articulated structure, surprise and photographic beauty. The American pastoral tradition contains its own fabled history. Benning peppers his synch-sound recording with excerpts and songs that provide a clever counterpoint to the images, obliquely invoking past events including the Vietnam War. The collaged soundtrack, which includes Karen Carpenter singing for a Coca-Cola commercial, Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," Eisenhower's foreboding farewell speech warning about the military-industrial complex and Gregory Peck reading from Revelations, both digs into and participates in the American psyche. RR can be seen as a meditation on nostalgia, the unadulterated joys of waiting, Western over-consumption, and the cinema itself. Train-spotting has never been so rewarding." - Andrea Picard June 6RR by James Benning [2007, 16mm, color, sound, 115 min.] |
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VISUAL POETRY: THE FILMS OF AMAR KANWAR
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