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Tonight! Wednesday April 16 @7:30pm

Dr. Terri Francis | Penn Cinema Studies

presents 

The Avant-Garde Film, Part I 

 

Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967, 45 min, 16mm)

WAVELENGTH was shot in one week in December, 1966, preceded by a year of notes, thoughts, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May, 1967. From the Director: I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of "illusion" and "fact," all about seeing. The space starts at the camera's (spectator's) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind). The film is a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field. 

 

Road Film (Standish Lawder, 1970, 2 min, 16mm)

Music by the Beatles. A spectacularly silly film of animated outrageousness. Why not do it in the road? Award: Ninth Foothill Int'l Independent Filmmakers' Exposition, 1970  

 

Dangling Participle (Standish Lawder, 1970, 18 min, 16mm)

Organ Music by Bruce Lieberman. Made entirely from old classroom instructional films, DANGLING PARTICIPLE offers a wealth of practical advice on contemporary sexual hang-ups and where they come from. "The funniest underground film I've ever seen." - Sheldon Renan Dynamite!" - Gene Stavis. Award: Honorable Mention, Bellevue Film Festival  

 

Necrology (Standish Lawder, 1971, 12 min, 16 mm)

 "In NECROLOGY, a 12-minute film, in one continuous shot he films the faces of a 5:00 PM crowd descending via the Pan Am building escalators. In old-fashioned black and white, these faces stare into the empty space, in the 5:00 PM tiredness and mechanical impersonality, like faces from the grave. It's hard to believe that these faces belong to people today. The film is one of the strongest and grimmest comments upon the contemporary society that cinema has produced." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice 

 

A Miracle (Robert Breer, 1954, .5 min, 16mm)

 A collage film in which Pope Pious XII does a juggling act. 

 

Recreation (Robert Breer, 1956, 2 min, 16mm)
A frame by frame collision of totally disparate images. "I haven't felt as good in a long time as when I stood in the Bonino Gallery looking at Breer's constructions and movies. The amazing thing is that all this goodness and happiness is caught so simply and so effortlessly. It's done through abstract lines, through the play of plastic elements, through movements and rhythms. The happiness has its own rhythm, and Breer seems to have caught and recreated it in his work. We look at Breer's work and we begin to smile - lightly, inside, a happy sort of smile, a happy feeling like when you see anything beautiful and perfect. It's through an amazing control and economy of his materials that he achieves this; through the elimination of all the usual emotional, personal, biographical material; not by giving in to temptations." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice. Award: Creative Film Foundation 

 

A Man and His Dog Out For Air (Robert Breer, 1957, 3 min, 16mm)

 ... a brilliant and astonishing ballet with unprecedented virtuosity! -- Burch, Film Quarterly

 

Jamestown Baloos (Robert Breer, 1957, 6 min, 16mm)
Bergamo Award Mixing photographs, newspaper clippings, and quickies paintings of an insolent taschime, he ran them together as fast as racing cars. The eye absorbs them imperturbably, as if they constituted a coherent sequence. It is a succession of different images itself which comes to constitute an illusory form, comparable to that of solids in movement, and which reduces every attempt at analysis to a simple impression. -- Benayoun, Positif

 

Blazes (Robert Breer, 1961, 3 min, 16mm) 

100 basic images switching positions for four thousand frames. A continuous explosion. 

 

69 (Robert Breer, 1968, 5 min, 16mm)

"It's so absolutely beautiful, so perfect, so like nothing else. Forms, geometry, lines, movements, light, very basic, very pure, very surprising, very subtle." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice. "A dream of Euclid." - Donald Richie. Awards: NY Film Festival; London Film Festival; Tours Film Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival.  

 

Fuji (Robert Breer, 1974, 8 min, 16mm)

 "A poetic, rhythmic, riveting achievement (in rotoscope and abstract animation), in which fragments of landscapes, passengers, and train interiors blend into a magical color dream of a voyage. One of the most important works by a master who - like Conner, Brakhage, Broughton - spans several avant-gardes in his ever more perfect explorations." - Amos Vogel, Film Comment. Awards: Oberhausen Film Festival, 1975; Film as Art, American Film/Video Festival.  

 

Rubber Cement (Robert Breer, 1976, 10 min, 16mm)

"It seems fitting that one of the central 'characters' in RUBBER CEMENT is a bottle of film editing glue which collects and trails behind it a chain of colorful fragments. For through the collagist potential of frame-by-frame construction and the adhesive possibilities of the editing process, Breer has created a highly eclectic and brilliant cinematic work." - Lucy Fischer, UFSC Newsletter  

 

 

The Avant-Garde, Part II on April 23:

http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/events/2014/April/ScreeningsAvantGardeFilmPartII

 

Admission is FREE

 

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