Landscape Portraits: Gottheim, Murphy & Pierce

Nov. 16 - 7:30 am

120 NE Russell Street

About This Screening

As film studies began to enter academia and university curriculum in the late 1960s, several established avant-garde filmmakers became professors of film, such as Larry Gottheim, Stan Brakhage and Robert Huot. Partially coinciding with the "Back to the Land" movement of activists and hippies, they relocated to upstate New York, Colorado and Iowa. Much of their time was spent exploring, observing and recording their immediate surroundings‹farms, valleys, mountains and their own homes. This program focuses on three of these landscape portraits. Larry Gottheim's Fog Line consists of a fixed shot of clearing fog in a valley in upstate New York where he lived and worked in the early seventies. To film In Progress, J.J. Murphy and Ed Small set up their camera on a farm in Iowa, using time-lapse to document the changing seasons from September through May. Designating friends at the barn to shoot film in their absence, they took the unedited results and strung them together. Divided into twelve sections, 50 Feet of String was filmed by Leighton Pierce at his home in Iowa, where he took a length of string and only shot subjects within fifty feet from his house.