CINEMA PROJECT presents SOUND, SOUND, SOUND, SOUND, SCREEN!

Cinema Project closes out their Fall 2012 season on Tuesday and Wednesday night with Sound, Sound, Sound, Sound, Screen!, a selection of short films focusing on the relationship that sound has to image.  Curated by Andrew Ritchey, the program incorporates new works by Sarah RaRa and Robert Todd alongside films reaching as far back as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray's 1926 collaborative experiment Anémíc Cinéma.

Here's what Cinema Project has to say about their final screening at Yale Union until Spring 2013:

Sound, Sound, Sound, Screen! Curated by Andrew Ritchey Cinema Project at Yale Union (YU) At the cinema, sound is all part of the screen. Or is it? What happens between the sounds and screen? It takes time to work it out. From sound to screen, you'll see and hear all of what there is. But what is it? Do you think you know what you're seeing? Is this the cinema as you see it? Sometimes the sound sounds something before you, and you haven't even heard it. And then the screen screens something from you. Do you see it? Is this cinema? In every case it's cinema, because the cinema is all there is. It's all the sounds on screen! When you make sense of it you'll see and hear all of what we were all just pretending to be missing. 

ARSENIC gives you words before images. Do these words make sense? I don't think so. KINO DA! is a bit of Marxist propaganda. Is the poet just an epiphenomenon of film's material base? I guess so! Then, FOUR SHADOWS, each shadow cast from sound and image: a text by Wordsworth, a diagram after Cézanne, a family of Gibbon apes... like constellations wheeling round, a double chain of sight and sound in sixteen permutations. (That's what Larry Gottheim said, anyway.) 

You've seen ANÉMIC CINÉMA, I guess. Some say it goes well with the music of Ravel, played very, very softly, with all the captions translated. That's how we'll do it, and the wheeling words un-Ravel! (Some puns better left unsaid.) Then, THIS IS IT, which is really, really it. A child plays Adam in Eden's suburban housing developments. What could be more this than this? Perhaps A RAY ARRAY, which is all delay, from its beginning before the word. Is this it? All sixteen video chapters, waiting for you. How much time will it take to see it? Is this really, really it?  

Join us for this final event of the season – a program on two nights, curated by Andrew Ritchey. Featuring recent work by Robert Todd and Sarah RaRa (lucky dragons, Sumi Ink Club); and the belated Portland premiere of Larry Gottheim's masterwork of image-sound analysis, Four Shadows (1978), part three in the four-part "Elective Affinities" series.

Cinema Project presents Sound, Sound, Sound, Sound, Screen! on Tuesday, December 11th and Wednesday, December 12th at 7:30pm.  More info on the program available here.


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CINEMA PROJECT presents ALL DIVIDED SELVES

Switching things up a bit this month, Cinema Project hosts All Divided Selves, the new feature-length, experimental documentary on infamous psychiatrist R.D. Laing, blending his life and impressions concerning mental illness into a simultaneously riveting and sometimes alienating piece that at teeters towards evoking the psychosis on which the film's subject was a self-proclaimed expert.

Watching director Luke Fowler's work on Laing doesn't so much invite one into a easily digestible knowledge of the man and his work as much as it conveys the reeling sensation of entering into a position located somewhere between Laing's ideas and the basis for his theories.  All Selves Divided is a fascinating and uniquely discombobulating piece.  By refusing to go the easy route of relaying Laing's story simply, Fowler has arrived at far more impressionistic, intoxicating, and, quite often, more troubling result.

Here's what Cinema Project has to say about the film:

All Divided Selves is a sensorially rich and intellectually engaging visual biography of the charismatic and controversial Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, and his contemporaries. Luke Fowler's feature-length experimental documentary is constructed from countless hours of historical film and video recordings of interviews, television appearances, and instructional documentation. The video loosely follows a historical arc that details Laing’s media-captured transition from popular professional practitioner into something like a cult hero. Scene after scene features Laing explaining the experiential dimension of psychosis in language that is mesmerizing and lucid. The low fidelity archival film footage also provides a gritty, dusty, and anarchic rendering of Laing’s post-war Glasgow punctuated by Fowler’s original and highly personal visual refrains depicting colorful, textured abstract landscapes and poetic, subtle imagery. Fowler further galvanizes the visual dimensions of his high-definition video work with a surround-sound score that features original field recordings and music by Éric La Casa, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Alasdair Roberts. The result is a psycho-phenomenological viewing and listening experience that will emotionally envelop, transport and haunt viewers.

Cinema Project presents All Divided Selves on Tuesday, November 27th and Wednesday, November 28th at 7:30pm.  More info on the program available here.


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CINEMA PROJECT presents THE SUPER-8 DREAMS OF SAUL LEVINE

Over the coming days, Cinema Project welcomes experimental filmmaker Saul Levine to town for a two-night presentation of his unique, mostly analog-based film work.  Dubbed The Super-8 Dreams of Saul Levine, the program's title is rather apt, as the pieces I've been fortunate enough to view have the feel of subconscious narratives arrived at during slumber; Levine's editing style operates in an additive mode, exposing and/or building connections instead of being purposed primarily toward erecting rhythms.  Levine points to his exposure to Maya Deren and Viking Eggling's work as a freeing moment, one that helped him stop "making editing decisions based on story and start making them based on shape, memory, and association."

No matter how he reached the underlying principles that inform those editing choices, he's created an impressive body of mysteriously associative work in his decades long dedication to experimental form.  At this week's event, Levine and Cinema Project will be highlighting over twenty works (each night is an entirely different set of films) and that doesn't even begin to cover his full output.  I've embedded three of Levine's works below, none of which are a part of The Super-8 Dreams of Saul Levine.  Why not check those out for a small inkling of what to expect at Monday and Tuesday's retrospective.

And what might the organizers of Cinema Project have to say about their booking?  Let's see:

Saul Levine has been making films for over 35 years, most of them in the small-guage formats of 8mm and Super8mm. His films record the extraordinary in the ordinary, making timeless images from daily events. His parents become your parents, a couple walking on the beach could be any couple, from any time. The intensive editing process provides a rhythm that gives even the silent films a sense of sound, while the sound films become masterpieces of noise and light. In Notes of an Early Fall, a melted record skips on the turntable providing the beat for a jumble of shots that in the end finds unity. Splice tape is a texture on the film landscape, lengthening and defining the time between shots, many of which are single frames. 

The Notes series celebrates the breathtaking beauty of daily life: children playing in the snow, romance in the afternoon light, a joke told in Hebrew, smoke curling in front of an open window. Note to Colleen cuts so quickly between the faces of people having their portraits drawn on the street and the portrait being drawn that the two become indistinguishable. His Light Licks series is a more formal tampering with the film frame and the relationship between space and image, light and darkness. Over two nights, Cinema Project shows a broad sweep of Levine’s work, from the 1960s to current films, to highlight his important and ongoing contributions to the American avant-garde.

Cinema Project presents The Super-8 Dreams of Saul Levine on Monday, November 12th and Tuesday, November 13th at 7:30pm.  More info on the program available here.


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CINEMA PROJECT presents TWO WORKS BY CHRIS MARKER

The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (image courtesy of Icarus Films)

Just three months after his passing, Cinema Project has arranged for a special screening of two of Chris Marker's (La Jetée, Grin Without a Cat) lesser seen works.  Made during the time during which he was engaged in political collective filmmaking with SLON, The Sixth Side of the Pentagon documents the October '67 march on the Pentagon by anti-war activists.  Marker provides his usual sometimes acerbic, sometimes playful commentary over images of Vietnam protesters gathering and then clashing with government forces outside the world's largest symbol of military power.

The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (image courtesy of Icarus Films)

A bientôt j'espère (Be Seeing You) captures a 1967 workers strike at a textile factory in Besançon, France.  The film offers a view of what is essentially a precursor to the larger protests of May 1968, as the factory workers incorporated non-economic demands into their action.  A bientôt j'espère is the rarer of the two works being shown this week; trust me, even the internet can't help you see this one with English subtitles (CP's screening of the film, however, will be subtitled in English).

A bientôt j’espère (image courtesy of Icarus Films)

Here's what the good folks at Cinema Project have to say about this Tuesday and Wednesday night's showcase:

Pioneer of the essay film, photographer, artist, and cat lover, Chris Marker will be missed. From 1967 to 1976, Marker was a member of the film cooperative SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles / Society for the Production of New Works), which was dedicated to activist film production, based on the idea that cinema should not be thought of solely in terms of commerce. 

To inspire new activist filmmaking and to pay tribute to this prolific and influential figure, we bring two SLON produced works. A bientôt j’espère depicts workers at a textile factory on strike in pre-May 1968 France and The Sixth Side of the Pentagon chronicles the 1967 Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam protest march on the Pentagon.

Cinema Project presents Two Works by Chris Marker on Tuesday, October 23rd and Wednesday, October 24th at 7:30pm.  More info on the program available here.


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CINEMA PROJECT presents PETITS POÈMES FLEURIS - THE FILMS OF ROSE LOWDER

This event crept up on me in a BIG way.  I've been pretty distracted while working the hustle and bustle of Video Verite's going out of business sale and (somehow) I lost all track of when the Rose Lowder retrospective was going down.  That being said, the Cinema Project folks certainly did their part to keep me up to date with their plans, delivering multiple essays and e-mails my way.  Sometimes, it seems; I can be a slacker, despite all the furious multitasking I do.  But enough excuses, what about the show?

Monday and Tuesday night brings a special evening of cinematic works by the French experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder.  The program is packed with thirteen shorts of deeply saturated, frame-by-frame magic, all of which, as is Cinema Project's curatorial forte, are difficult to see anywhere else.

Here's what the good folks at "the Project" have to say about the lineup:

Focusing on the colors, lines, and textures of the natural environment--flowers are a frequent subject--many of French filmmaker Rose Lowder’s films are quite literally composed frame by frame. Trained as a painter and sculptor, and having worked as a film editor, Rose is a continual experimenter in incamera editing. The technique she developed for her film Les tournesols (Sunflowers) involves adjusting the focus for each individual frame of film, moving to the next subject rather than using a zoom. The effect is a simultaneous feeling of movement and stability, creating a series of jumps and overlaps of bright sunflowers. In Voiliers et coquelicots (Poppies and Sailboats), one sees a surprising cross between Impressionism and Structuralism where colors are forced side by side, like the deep orange of the poppies in one frame and the cobalt blue of the water in the next. At times the frames seem to multiply onto the image and at other times they seem to divide. Then suddenly for a moment the sailboats are gliding among the poppy fields. 

Portland will be Rose’s first stop on her West Coast tour this fall. Join us for two unique nights of her work, including discussion with the filmmaker herself. Rose will also be at the Northwest Film Center School of Film on Sunday, October 7th for the free event “A Conversation with Rose Lowder” starting at 4pm. For more information, check nwfilm.org/school.

Cinema Project presents Petits Poèmes Fleuris: The Films of Rose Lowder on Monday, October 8th and Tuesday, October 9th at 7:30pm.  More info on the program available here.


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CINEMA PROJECT presents TORSE

Cinema Project's fall season opens this coming Saturday and Sunday night with an extremely rare showing of a collaborative piece by Charles Atlas and Merce Cunningham.  Torse is a split-screen dance performance prepared for the stage and committed to film in late 70s by the duo.  The program kicks off Cinema Project's year-long residency at Yale Union.


Here's a description of the film from the Cinema Project website:

Merce Cunningham’s dance “Torse” focuses on the flexibility of the back, expanding on five basic positions (upright, arch, tilt, twist, and curve) into 64 possible movements, the total number of symbolic hexagrams in the I Ching. Steps and phrases are arrived at not by instinct or a sense of flow, but through a methodical approach that also happens to be chance driven. The stand-alone filmed version, Torse (1977), from long-time Cunningham collaborator Charles Atlas, continues mathematically. 

Shot at the University of Washington with three 16mm cameras—two mobile and manned by Cunningham and Atlas to capture close-ups and a third stationary—Atlas edited the piece to appear on two screens side by side. This strategy allows viewers to see the dance from various vantage points at once. From Einstein’s theory of relativity, Cunningham took the idea that there are no fixed points in space, therefore no intended perspective point, no preferred seat from which to watch. 

This recent HD restoration also includes the original soundtrack by composer Maryanne Amacher. As with many of Cunningham’s works, the music is created completely separate from the dance. In Torse, then, rhythm is felt then not through musical timing, but through the speed of and weight change from one position to the next. 

Cinema Project presents Torse on Friday, September 29th and Saturday, September 30th at 9pm.  More info on the program available here.


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