Ice-T, Rutger Hauer, Gary Busey, F. Murray Abraham, John C. McGinley

All-time favorite Hopper performance (Blue Velvet)

Circles of Confusion: Hollis Frampton (Part 3)

Saturday January 30, 2010 @ 2:00pm
Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Avenue (at San Vicente)

Free Admission

More info on the five-part screening series at LA Film Forum.
In conjunction with Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair and Khastoo Gallery.

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was an American filmmaker, artist and writer who left a legacy of brilliant innovation in avant-garde cinema. His films are challenging and ground breaking explorations in the material properties of the medium, including but not limited to mathematics, the contours of perception and cognition, and the phenomenological nature of the motion picture.

PART THREE of this series will include Poetic Justice and (nostalgia), followed by a panel with Alex Klein, David James, Madison Brookshire and Michael Ned Holte.

I had a feeling that James Cameron was rocking out to Yes’ prog rock masterpiece, Fragile, when he dreamt up the idea for Avatar, and there is more than a little circumstantial evidence that the film’s look owes a substantial debt to master cover artist Roger Dean.

Abdellah Taïa +
An American In Tangier, Mohamed Ulad, 1993, 27 mins
Chronicles/Morocco, Michel Auder, 1971-71, 26 mins
Morocco 1972: The Real Chronicles with Viva, Michel Auder, 2002, 36 mins

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at Light Industry, Brooklyn
7:30pm, $7

More information here

Tuesday July 14, 7PM
LACMA Bing Theater

Brought to you by tank.tv, the LACMA film program, The Young and Evil, guest-curated by the Tate Modern’s Stuart Comer, features works by filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Anna Halprin, Curt McDowell, and Barbara Rubin, and will be followed by an onstage conversation between Stuart Comer and artist William E. Jones.

NOTE: This program contains material of an adult nature, which may be inappropriate for some viewers. Discretion is advised.

On Friday, July 17, Outfest will host the contemporary program at REDCAT, originally commissioned and presented on www.tank.tv.

See www.outfest.org for more information.


Bing Theater | Tickets required:
$7 general admission,
$5 members, seniors 62+ and students with ID.

Another Border:
A Selection of Films and Videos from the Cinémathèque de Tanger Archives
@ LACMA

Tuesdays: June 9, 16, 23 & 30 | 7 pm | Bing Theater
Tickets required: $7 general admission, $5 museum members,

TONIGHT, June 9

PROGRAM 1: (HI)STORY Tellers
 
An American in Tangier
Dir. Mohamed Ulad | 1993 | 27 min
The American writer and composer, Paul Bowles, reflects on his life in Morocco, his adopted home for over fifty years.
 
Vues du Grand Socco at du Petit Socco (View of the Main Square and the Small Square)
Dir. Gabriel Veyre | 1935 | 7 min
Photographer and filmmaker Gabriel Veyre was 25 years old when engaged by the Lumière brothers as a cinematograph operator. In 1901 he became the photographer and cinematographer to the Sultan of Morocco, and in 1935 he traveled around the country to build an archive of daily life in Morocco.

Intermission

Ouarzazate Movie (The Door of the Desert)
Dir. Ali Essafi | 2001 | 57 min
The people of Ourzazate, a small Moroccan town, make a living from international cinema productions. The whole population works as extras in films they will most likely never see. In the cloakrooms and casting sets, Essafi follows the people of the town in both their humiliations and Hollywood dreams.
 
This program will be accompanied by a special introduction by Bidoun Magazine (www.bidoun.com) and a reading by author Gary Dauphin. During the intermission attendees are invited to a reception sponsored by Bidoun Magazine.

The Cinémathèque de Tanger (www.cinemathequedetanger.com) is a nonprofit organization based in Tangiers, Morocco devoted to the preservation and promotion of Moroccan cinema. Curated by Bouchra Khalili and Yto Barrada, Another Border showcases the vitality of contemporary Moroccan film and video alongside the richness of historic archival footage from the region. This selection of Moroccan short movies, documentaries, experimental films, and videos follows the fault lines between representation and reality, in both daily life and extraordinary circumstances. The intersection between tradition, globalization, and shifting notions of ‘modernity’ creates not a clash, but a fertile space for reflection. Addressing both the complex space between the West and Morocco, the program provides a platform for further dialogue on the ideas of hope and hospitality.

Rudo y Cursi. This special evening is part of Cinema Tuesdays, a new weekly series curated by Flux celebrating innovative film at The Montalbán special events theatre in Hollywood.

Tuesday May 5th, 2009
7pm — Acamonchi art show; Clorofila (Nortec Collective)
8pm — Screening plus Q&A with director Carlos Cuarón

The Box in Chinatown is hosting the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles of work by pioneering artist and filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek (1927-1984). The show includes a number of original collage works, as well as a recreation of his Movie Mural (1965) and Panels for the Walls of the World, Telephone/Fax Mural (1970). Not to be missed. On view March 14 - April 18, 2009.

More info here.

THE GOAT and the Occasional Others

Thanks Michael

Chris Marker:

maybe French,
likely Russian,
87 years old,
filmmaker,
photographer,
writer,
poet,
seldom interviewed,
lover of cats, owls, bears, and wolves,
&c.

and now?
… well, now this would be his YouTube channel.

Enjoy.

On Paris Hilton, on Madonna, on Art Basel Miami Beach and on food, music and poetry.

This Blog is out of control.

Isabella Rossellini

All time favorite movie Hoop Dreams is available to watch free here.

Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003. The film is Thom Andersen’s 2-hour, 49-minute “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” a cinematic essay/meditation and labor of love on how this city has been depicted on the screen. Smart, insightful, unapologetically idiosyncratic and bristling with provocative ideas, it’s as sprawling and multi-faceted, fascinating and frustrating as L.A. (an abbreviation Andersen despises) itself.

It took Andersen, who teaches at Cal Arts, four years to put “Los Angeles Plays Itself” together. As with his too-little-seen last film, a keen examination of the output of blacklisted screenwriters called “Red Hollywood,” the new work reveals Andersen to be a director with a constitutional aversion to conventional thinking.

As with “Red Hollywood,” the heart of “Los Angeles Plays Itself” (and the reason why a commercial release is problematic) is brilliant and extensive use of clips from a hoard of feature films.

Starting with a startling opening shot of distraught stripper Sugar Torch running on a downtown street, from Sam Fuller’s “Crimson Kimono,” through a closing segment on the black independent films “Bush Mama,” “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts,” Andersen serves up segments of more than 200 films, from 1913’s “A Muddy Romance” through 2001’s “Hanging Up.” Truly, as the voice-over read by fellow independent filmmaker Encke King suggests, this has to be the most photographed city in the world.

These are not just any clips from any films. Andersen seems to have seen all movies made with a local connection. He’s familiar with everything from Laurel and Hardy’s 1932 classic “The Music Box” and the 1972 gay porn film “L.A. Plays Itself,” which gives Andersen’s work its name, to “Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf” and “Death Wish 4: The Crackdown.” Working closely with editor Yoo Seung-Hyun, he also has impeccable taste in what to select.

With its tart, acerbic tone and politically progressive stance, “Los Angeles Plays Itself” was clearly made by a sophisticated insider, someone who loves the city, is capable of comparing “Dragnet” to the work of Bresson and Ozu, and has no tolerance for the reason its name got shortened in popular usage (”Only a city with an inferiority complex would allow it”).

The bulk of “Los Angeles Plays Itself” is divided into three sections that detail the different uses the city has been put to on-screen, sections that try to answer the question: Have movies ever depicted Los Angeles accurately?

The first of these, “The City as Background,” recounts how Los Angeles has been considered so visually malleable that it could play as anywhere. Though the James Cagney-starring “Public Enemy” takes place in Chicago, there’s a scene in it in front of Bullock’s Wilshire. And downtown’s Bradbury Building has been used as sites including a Mandalay hotel, in what was then Burma (”China Girl”), and a European military hospital (”White Cliffs of Dover”).

Because Andersen is architecturally sophisticated, familiar with the critical works of Esther McCoy, and David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s indispensable book “An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles,” he shrewdly points out the many ways that modernist architecture, especially the work of John Lautner, has been denigrated by Hollywood by being repeatedly used as the major villain’s home of choice.

The next section, “The City as Character,” deals with films that gave Los Angeles a personality. Here Andersen, among many other things, tracks down the house that was Barbara Stanwyck’s residence in “Double Indemnity,” a film he says convinced everyone that Los Angeles is the world capital of murder and adultery. He also has some kind words for the late, lamented neighborhood of Bunker Hill, urban renewed out of existence but living still in “The Glenn Miller Story,” “Criss Cross” and “Kiss Me Deadly.” He also admires “The Exiles,” Kent MacKenzie’s landmark 1961 independent film about Native Americans who lived up on the hill.

The final section, “The City as Subject,” shows what happened when Los Angeles became conscious of itself as a place a film could be about. Some of his most provocative comments come in relation to “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” films he says jointly promote the notion there is a secret history of the city that it is futile for ordinary citizens to even attempt to know.

As the director says in the press notes, films like this can serve “to dissuade naive viewers from political engagement by telling them that they are condemned to ignorance and powerlessness no matter what they do.” This politicized point of view gets more intense when “Los Angeles Plays Itself” closes with an examination of the work of black directors Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry.

Brilliantly discursive, filled with intriguing detours that follow connections only the director’s mind could make, “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” will please natives of this city more than any other. Finally, the film agrees with the narrator in Jacque Demy’s “Model Shop,” who says, “It’s a fabulous city. To think some people claim it’s an ugly city when it’s really pure poetry, it just kills me.”

The Exiles chronicles one night in the lives of young Native American men and women living in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Based entirely on interviews with the participants and their friends, the film follows a group of exiles — transplants from Southwest reservations — as they flirt, drink, party, fight, and dance.

Filmmaker Kent Mackenzie first conceived of The Exiles during the making of his short film Bunker Hill—1956 while a student at the University of Southern California. In July 1957, Mackenzie began to hang around with some of the young Indians in downtown Los Angeles. After a couple of months, he broached the subject of making a film that would present a realistic portrayal of Indian life in the community.

Mackenzie spent long hours making friends and earning the confidence of these Indians who finally agreed to re—enact a scenes from their lives for this picture. All of the actors, some of whom were recruited on the spur of the moment during the shooting, play themselves in the film.

The Exiles was directed and photographed by a group of young filmmakers — Mackenzie’s college mates, fellow employees, and friends holding down a variety of day—to—day jobs in the motion picture industry. Much of the picture was shot on “short ends,” the leftovers of 1,000—foot rolls (varying from 100 to 300 feet of stock) discarded by major film producers.

In collaboration with cinematographers John Morrill, Erik Daarstad, and Robert Kaufman, the shooting of The Exiles began in January 1958 and the first trial composite print was privately screened in April 1961. Premiering in the Venice Film Festival that year, the film received acclaim from many critics but tragically never found commercial distribution.

It was Thom Andersen’s compilation documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself which kicked off the rediscovery of this lost masterwork. Andersen contacted the daughters of Mackenzie to receive permission to use footage to illustrate the lost neighborhood of Bunker Hill. Although the original negative and fine—grain (interpositive) existed for the film, it was decided that a theatrical distribution of the film could put the materials at risk. So Milestone, in cooperation with USC’s film archivist Valarie Schwan, brought the film to preservationist Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Milestone who distributed last year’s critical and box office hit, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, is releasing the restored version of The Exiles, will be playing at UCLA through Saturday (8/23).

Thank you Stephen

Best Bank Robbery shootout on film. Heat, 1995.

Best Bank Robbery shootout on video. North Hollywood, 1997.

White Columns, Sunday 27 April, 2008 at 8pm

Presenting B’L'ing film and video screening, short videos by:

Becca Albee, David Askevold, Michel Auder, Anne Eastman, Chris Moukarbel, Marina, Ops, Dean Sameshima, Amy Yao, Sandy Yang

John Whitney’s demo reel of work created with his analog computer/film camera magic machine he built from a WWII anti-aircraft gun sight. Also Whitney and the techniques he developed with this machine were what inspired Douglas Trumbull (special fx wizard) to use the slit scan technique on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Jack Goldstein (1945–2003)

“The Jump, 1978, is a silent twenty-six-second loop projected on a fuchsia-colored wall illuminated by black lights. Using editing effects, Goldstein transformed a high diver, jumping into an amorphous deep purple space, into an incorporeal constellation of Technicolor stars. The strenuously exerted body of Goldstein’s early performative films has been completely recast by technology as an image: a burst of graceful, highly regulated, firework like light. The Jump was the last of Goldstein’s early films, and it is a fitting swan song to an era when the body was still considered a viable site of resistance.”

Thanks Kathy

It just doesn’t get any creepier.