JON JOSTPERSONAL CINEMA FALL SERIES 2008
OPEN SCREENING
Sept. 26, Oct. 24, Nov. 28, Dec. 12 (Fridays)
DVD, Mini-DV, Videotape, 16MM, S8MM. All works are shown on a first-come-first-served basis. Bring films, videos and/or come as a viewer. (Finished works only, limited to a maximum of 20 minutes per person). Refreshments will be available. Doors open at 7pm. Screening begins at 8pm and ends at 10:30pm. Admission by contribution.
OCT 25 (Sat.) JON JOST
LA LUNGA OMBRA (THE LONG SHADOW) 77 min.-2006), and an installation/ film piece, AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD (NEBRASKA) (23 min.) Jon Jost returns to the Millennium with a program of recent works, all NY premieres. He is that most independent of independents, outspoken, controversial, traveling the world, continuously producing substantial films and digital videos, often with limited funds.
On LUNGA OMBRA (premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival) - This work is more a tone poem narrative, in which the real subject, the impact of 9/11 on European and Italian intelligentsia, is never mentioned, but lays in the background invisibly distorting the characters. Whatsoever, only a vague thought to address the disquiet which pervades Europe in the wake of 9/11, a disturbance which works unacknowledged and of which little is ever said.
"On the surface, Jon Jost's austere, somber, and uncompromisingly caustic improvisational rumination on the pall cast by the aftermath of 9/11 on the European consciousness, LA LUNGA OMBRA seems an anachronistic departure from the intractable consciousness of middle America that pervade his his early films – a post tragedy portrait that converges more toward claustrophobic, Bergmanesque angst rather than the transformative, post-apocalyptic, loss of innocence grief that its conceptual framework would seem to suggest. Loosely structured around the lives and mundane gestures of a trio of close knit friends – a literary figure (Eliana Miglio) (whose agency appears to be in the process of publishing a photo-essay journal on the faces of colonial-era terrorism) and a television producer (Simonetta Gianfelici) who retreat to a remote, off-season seaside cabin in order to tend to a mutual friend, Anna's (Agnes Nano) emotional crisis and ensuing depression after being unexpectedly abandoned by her cruel (and perhaps abusive) husband – the film is also a provocative, broader exposition on the intangible, often corrosive collateral damage of psychological warfare and demoralization." - ACQUARELLO
NOV 1 (Sat.) NEW VISION CINEMA
The Millennium is pleased to present another program of the New Vision Cinema series organized by MICHAEL PARK. In recent years Michael Park has presented these programs at a variety of venues in New York City. He is a video artist in his own right and a long-time staff member of the Millemnnium Film Workshop. His New Vision Cinema program grew out of the Invisible Cinema Series which was co-programmed by Jennifer MacMillan which was held at Millennium. The program, for the most part, features new work by NYC-based film/ video makers and refreshments for all.
NOV 8 (Sat.) CAPTURED - The Documentary on
CLAYTON PATTERSON
CAPTURED (75 min.-2007) By BEN SOLOMON, DANIEL LEVIN & JENNER FURST. For more than 25 years, Clayton Patterson has been a ubiquitous presence on the streets of the Lower East Side and the East Village. He has produced a singular archive of photographs and video images of this ever changing, notorious area of New York City.
CAPTURED is the story of one man's commitment to chronicling the legendary Lower East side, and the individuals who define it. Since the early 1980s Clayton Patterson has been fully dedicated to documenting the final era of this historic and eclectic neighborhood long known for its humble streets, revolutionary minds and creative influence. He has obsessively recorded its many faces, from drag to hard core, heroin to homelessness, political chaos to gentrification. CAPTURED profiles Patterson's odyssey from voyeur to provocateur, and from activist to renegade archivist. This fast-paced documentary includes Patterson's rare and renowned footage of the Tompkins Square police riots, and provides a close-up look at a fascinating character and chapter of urban culture. Patterson first became known through his TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK RIOT videotape which documented the explosion of violence in the famous East Village park. The controversial videotape that has been the focus of the court battle between the authorities and its maker. The tape was first shown at a special showing at the Millennium on September 19th to an overflowing crowd. "It wasn't a cliffhanger, but few fell asleep last night at a public screening of a videotape of the Tompkins Square Park riot… Patterson said he wanted to show the tape to the public so that 'the people would be the grand jury. It was military action in the streets of New York and you get to see that.'" - Sharon Broussard (DAILY NEWS, Sept. 20, 1988).NOV 15 (Sat.) ROBERT ATTANASIO
THE COUNTERFEIT MUSIC VIDEO SHOW - 20 Anti-Music Video Music Videos (70 min.-1996-2008). Robert Attanasio first appeared at Millennium during the 1970s with film-performance programs. This show of music videos features tracks by Ween, Patti Smith, Belle and Sebastian, the Notwist, Butthole Surfers, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Babybird, Reiko Kudo and the many more of the best and worst songs in recorded history, including several world premieres.
"The COUNTERFEIT MUSIC VIDEO SERIES began with the idea of making sound-based video works, where the focus would be on listening. To avoid literal depictions of the song's narrative or the retinal bombardment, typical of the genre and to allow the sound to be the focus. Although the perfect music video is probably imageless. I want to find a way to assert this belief with minimal image triggers and have them function as springboards to the mind's eye/screen. Each work attempts to find ways to use an image, usually one shot, in real time, while, simultaneously, wanting to negate its presence or need to exist with the music." - R.A.
NOV 21 (Fri.) WILHELM HEIN / OTTO MUEHL
YOU KILLED THE UNDERGROUND FILM OR THE REAL MEANING OF KUNST BLEIBT…BLEIBT (Reel 5- 55 min.-2001-2008) by WILHELM HEIN and the early films of OTTO MUEHL - FUNEBRE (6 mn.-1966), GRIMUID (9 min.-1966), ZOCK EXERCISES (12 min.-1967), PYSCHOMOTORISCHE GERAUSCHAKITION (12 min.-1967), AMORE (3 min.-1967) and other films.
WILHELM HEIN, a pioneer figure of German experimental cinema since the 1970s comes to the Millennium from Berlin to screen and discuss his own work and some of the masters of European radical cinema- Otto Muehl and in the November 22nd show- Kurt Kren. As a filmmaker and organizer, he, along with his former wife, Birgit Hein, has had a considerable influence in the development of the experimental film movement in Europe.
"Asembled from over 10 years of footage he shot and collected, Wilhelm Hein's new film is a fascinating and challenging example of what it means to make politically relevant underground film in an increasingly rented world. The film's title is partly taken from a text of a performance by Jack Smith at the 1974 Cologne Art Fair that Hein documented and uses here in the film's prologue. On the sound track we hear Smith's familiar, almost comforting, nasal drone bemoaning museums, the art market, artists whose images suck the life out of their subjects, and the thinning of art. Images of Hein next to various public sculptures and monuments in Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia accompany parts of Smith's rant. In this sequences, as in many others for instance, the witty nod to Andrew Warhol set in Warsaw and scored with A NIGHT IN TUNISIA, Hein's unexpected combination of sound and image, of references and citations, calls to mind what might be one of the film's central concerns: what can underground film tell us about the changes in Eastern Europe over the past 15 years? With his sexy, playful and contemplative film, Hein asks of the underground what Jack Smith asked of Maria Montez: give socialist answers to a rented world." - Marc Siegel
OTTO MUEHL was a notorious personality within the Direct Art movement that emerged in Vienna in the 1960s. Muehl staged, filmed, and often performed in highly charged works that challenged conventions and decency laws, which often provoked police responses in Austria and Germany.
NOV 22 (Sat.) ANNETTE FRICK / KURT KREN
JOYCE IN PREUSSEN (4 min.-2002-04), COSMIC ELEMENTS (6 min.-2002-2004), CHAUSSEESTRASSE 7 ODER HEUT GEFALL ICH MIR (16 min.-2003), SECHSMALSIEBEN (2 min.-2002-04), ALLENT GUTE KOMMT VON OBEN (6 min.-2004) and other works by ANNETTE FRICK. Films by KURT KREN- 2/60 48 HEADS FROM THE SZONDI TEST (4 min.-1960), 3/60 BAUME IM HERBST (5 min.- 1960), 13/67 SINUS BETA (5 min.-1967), 15/67 TV (4 min.-1967) GRUN ROT (2 min.-1968), VENECIA KAPUTT (30 Sec-1968), 20/68 SCHATZI (2 min.-1968), 22/69 HAPPY END (4 min.-1969), 49/95 TAUSEND JAHRE KINO (3 min.-1995).
Berlin Photographer and filmmaker, ANNETTE FRICK, will be present to discuss her work. Ms. Frick, well known for her photographs of drag queens and the gay community in Berlin, will be screening several atypical short films.
"COSMIC ELEMENTS is a camera-less film which I exposed and then developed using the type of photogram technique which even Man Ray experimented in. This film original is neither digital nor producible on video, and was created without a great technical apparatus and without financial means. In an almost abstract but very definite manner the film attempts to do justice to the primitive forms of plants in all their complexity and similarity."- A.F.
KURT KREN (1929-1998) was one of the great masters of personal cinema in Europe. His singular films were often very short and meticulously constructed. In the mid-1960s he filmed some of the performances of the Direct Art movement in conjunction with Otto Muehl and Gunter Brus. A retrospective of his films was held at Millennium in 1978.NOV 29 (Sat.) REMEMBERING DIANE BONDER
On this Thanksgiving weekend the Millennium remembers Diane Bonder, a frequent presence in the Personal Cinema Series, the Workshop Program and very much missed. She passed away in 2006.This program features several short films, mostly early works - TONGUE IN CHIC (21 minutes-1996), THE PHYSICS OF LOVE (24 min.-1998), and IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME BY NOW (15 MIN.-2001).
On TONGUE IN CHIC (directed by Diane Bonder and Liss Platt) - "Somewhere between a history of underground sex genres and a response to rampant commercialism, Tongue In Chic is a campy romp through the making of sexual representations, particularly those produced by the lesbian community. The work parodies a variety of filmic styles and strategies including Warhol, experimental styles and self reflexive genres of the 1980s. Part history lesson, part product endorsement, and an attempt to get serious about not taking ourselves so seriously, this piece offers it all up in a multi-layered parody hellbent on demystifying the sex-tape genre." - D.B.
On THE PHYSICS OF LOVE - "The Physics of Love is an experimental work which tells the story of an unresolved relationship. Using the laws of science as metaphor, the work explores domestic labor, disease, violence and desire, and the way in which the social becomes inscribed on the body. While the laws of physics anchor reality the work of ghosts unhinge it." - D.B.
DEC 6 (Sat.) BENEFIT SCREENING FOR THE FILMMAKERS COOP
The Millennium is pleased to present its annual, pre-Christmas benefit screening and party to support this venerable and worthy cinema institution.
This program will feature recent films and videos deposited in the Film-Makers Cooperative of New York. Since its founding in 1962, the Coop has played a vital role in the development of a truly independent, avant-garde cinema in the United States and abroad. It has been a model for other distribution organizations around the world. The coop is open to all films/video makers regardless of style, subject matter, geography. Artists set the rental prices, write the descriptions for the catalog, receive equal treatment in regards to publicity, and care and handling of work. Come early, bring your friends, meet the makers, and see a wide range of cutting edge films and videos. Refreshments will be served.
ADMISSION BY $10 CONTRIBUTION.
DEC 13 (Sat.) PETER ROSE
OMEN (11 min.-2001), THE GEOSOPHIST'S TEARS (8 min.-2002), PNEUMENON (41/2 min.-2003), ODYSSEUS IN ITHACA (51/2 min.-2006), STUDIES IN TRANSFALUMINATION (51/2 min.-2008) and two very new works- CONFLATION (2008) and I THINK I SHALL WALK FOREVER IN THE AFTERNOON (2008).
Since 1968 Peter Rose has made over thirty films, tapes, performances and installations. Many of the early works raise intriguing questions about the nature of time, space, light, and perception and draw upon Rose's background in mathematics and on the influence of structuralist filmmakers. He subsequently became interested in language as a subject and in video as a medium and generated a substantial body of work that played with the feel and form of sense, concrete texts, political satire, oddball performance, and a kind of intellectual comedy. Recent work has involved a return to an examination of landscape, time, and vision and takes the form of installation.
DEC 20 (Sat.) NHIEU DO
PLACE AND SPACE (31/2 min.-2005), TOSHI MAKIHARA (9 min.-2005), THE OVERPASS (171/2 min.-2006), CRY RIVER (191/2 min.-2007), THE UNDERPASS (211/2 min.-2008) and THE WINDWAY QUARTET (13 min.-2008), TESTIMONY (7 min.-2008). Nhieu Do will be present to screen a program of videos and films in his first one-person program at Millennium. He studied film/video at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His work evokes his interest in perception and the transformation of the ordinary.
CRY RIVER - "tells the story of a young man on a vision quest that takes him through Tarkovskian landscapes." - N.D. PLACE AND SPACE - "is a kaleidoscopic recreation of moving images where space within rotating space creates an infinite mise-en-scene." - N.D. TESTIMONY - "A personal testimony to video arts in three parts - Comfort Zone, The Flame, and Reflection." - N.D.
Clayton Patterson
Robert Attanasio
Wilhelm Hein
Annette Frick
Diane Bonder
