Tuesday, June 16 – 8:00pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center
(164 N. State St.)
Opening Night Program

HORIZONTAL BOUNDARIES (2008, 23 mins., 35mm, US) by Pat O’Neill
O’Neill explores the geography of California through a dynamic range of optical effects.

NEW YORK LANTERN (2008, 15 mins., video, US) by Ernie Gehr
"The haunting world of the photographic still. A fraction of a second frozen for eternity. How it pulls and vibrates the imagination with its uncanny magic of a world unavailable to the living (not necessarily that photographic motion pictures are!). A bizarre universe of bits and pieces, ever so shimmering and oscillating with layers of time, allusions, and of course, human projections. Bring them back to mind. A conjuring act sorts. From far away. New York Lantern? - a tour, if you wish, of a shifting landscape, an imagining of a New York as close and as distant from us now as perhaps the Big Bang." (EG)

DE TIJD (2008, 9 mins., 35mm, The Netherlands) by Bart Vegter
Colorful, computer-generated abstract forms move through subtle transformations in this breathtaking film.
Live musical accompaniment by White/Light.

UNE CATASTROPHE (2008, 1 min., 35mm, Switzerland/Italy) by Jean-Luc Godard
Godard shows the power of the miniature with this tiny cinematic gem.

ELEMENTs (2008, 7 mins., 16mm, US) by Julie Murray
A delicate and haunting landscape film.

FALSE AGING (2008, 15 mins., video, US) by Lewis Klahr
Using cutouts and music from Lou Reed, John Cale, and Jefferson Airplane, animator Klahr creates a mini pop—operetta of surprising emotional depth.

COSMIC RAY (1961, 4 mins., 16mm, US) and PERMIAN STRATA (1969 , 4 mins., 16mm, US) by Bruce Conner
A kinetic masterpiece and an unlikely juxtaposition of Bob Dylan and a found 1940s biblical narrative, showing in tribute to the late Bruce Conner.

NIGHT SIDE (2008, 4 mins., 16mm, US) by Rebecca Meyers
Meyers provides a lyrical glimpse of the nocturnal world.

MY TEARS ARE DRY (2009, 4 mins., 16mm, US) by Laida Lertxundi
A Southern-California homage to Bruce Baillie’s classic All My Life.

BLACK RAIN (2009, 3 mins., video, UK, US Premiere) by Semiconductor
The British duo Semiconductor utilizes satellite imagery of cosmic dust and other solar matter to create a beautiful dance of light.

Wednesday, June 17 at The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
7:00pm
Barry Doupé’s Ponytail

PONYTAIL (2008, 92 mins., video, Canada) by Barry Doupé
This astonishing computer-animated feature is a tour-de-force of technique and cryptic storytelling as it follows a set of Sims-like characters struggling against inaction. “This feature-length video follows several inflicted characters and recounts the ways in which they find resolve. A series of entropic scenarios held together by an attraction to failure and its spectacle describe the characters’ malfunction — their inability to fulfill personal desire. Compelled by the consequences and rewards of their attempts they question their own trajectory. Using elements of melodrama, performative monologue and traditional narrative structure Ponytail presents a unique society of characters that destroy the distinction between memory and invention.” (Doupé)

Preceded by:
UP THE RABBIT HOLE (2008, 5 mins., video, Canada) by Asa Mori
In this deliberately crudely animated work a “six-nippled creature finds herself trapped in a capsule with a dead rabbit and a bloody hole.” (Video Out)

Thursday, June 18 at The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
7:00pm
Group Show One: Past Perfect

THE SCENIC ROUTE (2008, 25 mins., video, US) by Ken Jacobs
“A work of genuine hypnosis. Ken Jacobs tears open a scene from the film The Barbarian (1933). Like so many of his found-footage experiments, it is a movie about the shadows people leave behind - here, quite literally.” (International Film Festival Rotterdam)

DISTANT THINGS (2006, 10 mins., video, UK) by Katy Woods
“Woods animates micro film by standing a video camera in front of the monitor and speedily flicking through thousands of images. She then pauses for a few seconds resting on an image she likes the look of. Woods has an eye for a satisfying image. She loves a bird. Images of birds are paused at frequently. In a world saturated with visual images how does one make a choice? Ones own intuition seems as successful as any.” (Olsen)

BERNADETTE (2008, 37 mins., video, UK) by Duncan Campbell
“When the Northern Irish Republican political activist Bernadette Devlin was prohibited from speaking in parliament after Bloody Sunday, she punched the home secretary and proclaimed she only regretted she ‘didn’t get him by the throat.’ The firebrand Devlin is obviously hard to historically pin down: a fact that the video artist Duncan Campbell here fully recognises in his celebration of her political spirit. Working with mediated images of her, he mixes fact and fiction, documentary footage with animation and scripted voiceover to create an intriguing portrait of a committed individual.” (LUX)

9:00pm
Group Show Two: Vision Quest

SPIRIT (2005, 8 mins., video, France) by Dominique Furgé
Luminous colored dots or blobs move, connect, combine, and separate against a white background as excerpts from Orson Welles’ radio play The War of the Worlds imparts a narrative impulse to their activity. Music by Legeti and snippets from David Bowie and others complete the spare, but carefully crafted, soundtrack.

THE SEASONS (2008, 30 mins., video, Japan) by Makino Takashi
Made in collaboration with musician Jim O’Rourke, this is a stunning impressionistic work that becomes more than just a nature-piece of trees and water. Takashi’s images, rhythm, and editing work in synergy with the score, each complementing the other, to create a video of surprising emotion and power.

CHROMATIC COCKTAIL (2009, 10 mins., 3D video, US) by Kerry Laitala
A merry-go-round of circles, and squiggles, and more dance before the eyes, quite literally it seems, in this abstract 3D animation.

DIRTY GOGGLES OF PERCEPTION (LEFT AND RIGHT) (2009, 25 mins., double 16mm live projector performance, US, World Premiere) by Joe Grimm
“A synaesthetic performance for modified 16mm projectors and audio circuitry, this piece negotiates the space between the physically real and the perceptually real; between noumena and phenomena. Photosensitive circuitry translates light waves into sound waves, sonifying flickers that are sometimes slow enough to be visible to the eye—and sometimes fast enough to be perceived only by the ear. A monolithic light/noise blast that goes literally to the limits of the senses and beyond them, provoking a confrontation with that ultimate unattainable reality: The World of Things In Themselves. In memoriam Immanuel Kant. Warning: Unsuitable for those with photosensitive epilepsy.”

Friday, June 19 at Chicago Filmmakers (5243 N. Clark St.)
7:00pm
Group Show Three: Shards of Space and Place

TAPE FILM (2007, 5 mins., 16mm, Canada/US) by Chris Kennedy
The viewer’s challenge is to locate the artist in space as he slowly boxes himself in with strips of tape. Inside and outside are confounded in this beautiful hand-processed film, shot on a variety of black and white and color film stocks.

TO BE REGAINED (2008, 10 mins., 16mm, US) by Zach Iannazzi
“The film approaches the subject of humanity’s attempts to correct its imprint on nature, more specifically, interventions with anadromous fish reproductive and migratory cycles on dammed-up and polluted rivers. Mixing found footage, reprinted and hand processed film over a soundtrack of interviews and observations by folks up and down the Connecticut River, the short is a beautiful and unsettling look at the ways we interact with the natural environment.” (ZI)

CROSSINGS (2007, 10 mins., 16mm, US) by Robert Fenz
“A vision of the U.S.-Mexican border as a kinetic and disorienting fault line, an abstract force field suspended between the two nations.” (Media City)

NEW JERSEY GRADUAL (2008, 18 mins., video, US) by Gregg Biermann
A fixture of suburban sprawl and consumerist culture, the parking lot, is transformed into a kaleidoscopic swirl of texture and movement.

JOURNEY TO Q’XTLAN (2009, 8 mins., video, US) by Peter Rose
“Incandescent unnamable transfaluminal specters are summoned by an itinerant magus; experiments in performative illumination; a journey, an opera, a koan with and without answer.” (PR)

I’M A NEW YORK BASED ARTIST (2007, 2 mins., video, France) by Pierre Yves Clouin
Actually a Paris based artist, Clouin strikes an ironic note with grungy low-res images of NYC as the soundtrack swells with a well-known 1950s pop standard.

PRO AGRI (2009, 3 mins., 16mm, UK, World Premiere) by Nicky Hamlyn
Lighting the way to a better tomorrow?

CANARIES IN THE COALMINE (2009, 12 mins., video, US, World Premiere) by Rob Ray
A surprisingly subtle and contemplative work from a member of the circuit-bending noise group I Love Presets. Ray documents five abandoned or unpopulated industrial, domestic, and technological sites in the Western U.S. in an “investigation into the mystery and symbolism of the American landscape.”

AFTER WRITING (2007, 5 mins., 16mm, US) by Mary Helena Clark
Markings and traces of past times, found in an abandoned schoolroom.

9:00pm
Group Show Four: The Spirit That Guides Us

OPTRA FIELD III-VI (2007-08, 14 mins., video, US) by T. Marie
“Elegant, dichromatic time-based drawings from a series that explore the propinquity between space, time, movement, perception and opposites, somewhat reminiscent of the painted works Sol Lewitt and Agnes Martin, but purely conceived via electronic media.” (International Film Festival Rotterdam)

tiempo pudente (2008, 2 mins., video, Turkey, World Premiere) by Yoel Meranda
An abstract impression of Barcelona Beach.

océanéant (2009, 3 mins., video, Turkey, World Premiere) by Yoel Meranda
“A pink ocean of nothingness…” (YM)

BEIRUT 2/14/05 (2008, 8 mins., 16mm, US, North American Premiere) by Alexandra Cuesta
Documentary as happenstance, in the middle of bigger things.

atlantis (2008, 11 mins., video, Belgium, US Premiere) by Pieter Geenen
“’atlantis’ shows the banks of the Three Gorges Reservoir being scanned by the searchlights of a Yangtze cruise boat. The lightbeam on this nocturnal landscape seems to explore a sunken universe, a land of which people seem to have left, with demolished buildings, desolate forests and ghost ships.” (PG)

WOLF’S FROTH/AMONGST OTHER THINGS (2009, 15 mins., video, UK, North American Premiere) by Paul Abbott
Confounding and intriguing in its hyper-minimalism and fragmentation, Abbott’s video seems to come from musical traditions (Cage, atonal music) or linguistic theory rather than from cinema or the visual arts. It is a sly work of rupture—questioning the very basis of understanding.

AND THE SUN FLOWERS (2008, 5 mins., video, US) by Mary Helena Clark
Truth is there if you stare hard enough.

FROM RUINS TO REXISTANCE [DAS RUINAS A REXISTENCIA (2007, 13 mins., 35mm on video, Brazil) by Carlos Adriano
“I find ‘Das ruínas a rexistência’ very fascinating. There is something very opaque about this film, but it invites rather than shuts one out. I feel it as a profound contemplation on the relation between poetry and film. This is central to this project, not just because [Adriano] deals with a poet, but because the question of modern poetry and modern film challenge (rather than simply aid) each other. The issue with a film like this seems to me to be less any attempt at expression than interrogating what is an image when it is moving and how does an image get defined by being juxtaposed (or superimposed) with another.” (Tom Gunning)

KEMPINSKI (2007, 14 mins., video, Algeria/France) by Neil Beloufa
“A unique blend of science fiction and documentary, shot in Mopti, Mali.” (Media City)

FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK CASE NO. 142: ABBREVIATION FOR DEAD WINTER [DIMINISHED BY 1,794] (2008, 13 mins., 16mm, US) by David Gatten
“A single piece of paper, a second stab at suture, a story three times over, a frame for every mile. With words by Charles Darwin. A long-distance dedication for a far-away friend half-way up the mountain.” (DG)

PARALLAX (2008, 6 mins., 16mm, Canada) by Christopher Becks
1. The apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.
2. The apparent angular displacement of a celestial body due to its being observed from the surface instead of from the center of the earth or due to its being observed from the earth instead of from the sun.
3. The difference between the view of an object as seen through the picture-taking lens of a camera and the view as seen through a separate viewfinder.

Saturday, June 20 at Chicago Filmmakers (5243 N. Clark St.)
5:00pm
Group Show Five: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Filmmaker

TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) (2009, 12 mins., 16mm, US) by Ben Russell
“From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, this single take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It’s Halloween at the equator, Lightning Bolt for the jungle set.” (BR)

nothing is over nothing (2008, 17 mins., 16mm, US) by Jonathan Schwartz
“There were other places where the lord fell, and others where he rested; but one of the most curious landmarks…we found…was a certain stone built into a house…so seemed and scarred that it bore a sort of grotesque resemblance to the human face. One of the pilgrims said, ‘But there is no evidence that the stones did cry out.’ The guide was perfectly serene. He said calmly, ‘This is one of the stones that would have cried out.’” (Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad)

Unnamed Film (2008, 55 mins., 16mm, Ukraine) by Naomi Uman
Uman is currently living in the Ukraine, in the small rural village from which her ancestors come. Unnamed Film is a quiet, delicate, and absorbing portrait of this community, which unfolds with little dialogue—the images speaking for themselves. It is part of a larger cycle of films, The Ukrainian Time Machine Project.

“In village society it is the babushky (grandmothers, old women) who hold the key to surviving in the absence of economic wellbeing. It is their practical thinking and preservation of what might be considered trash that enables them to survive on pensions of less than eighty dollars a month. In immersing myself in this culture, I have needed to create a life in a foreign place without the luxury of regular access to stores, a car, or the ability to communicate easily with my neighbors. I have learned from watching the babushky how to live simply and practically, wasting absolutely nothing. This economy will be manifest in my films. Each frame, each shot, each fragment of sound is considered. This age-old creativity of making something out of nothing, or strictly out of what one has at-hand, can be applied to the creation of media. Scarcity requires a different kind of resourcefulness. The films in this cycle are small and intimate, repeating age-old stories in as few words as possible.” (NU)

7:30pm
Group Show Six: The Familiar Re-Made

SEQUENCES + INTERRUPTIONS (2009, 16 mins., 16mm, UK, World Premiere) by Nicky Hamlyn
A study in texture and rhythm.

THE SKY TAPED TOGETHER (2009, 7 mins., video, US, World Premiere) by Michael Sirianni
A work of suturing: the sky from a VHS copy of the Cinerama film How the West Was Won is digitally copied and reassembled.

LAKE (2009, 4 mins., video, US, World Premiere) by Jake Barningham
Waves of digital pixels and abstraction.

THE PARABLE OF THE TULIP PAINTER AND THE FLY
(2008, 4 mins., 16mm, US) by Charlotte Pryce
“An intoxicating flower; a metaphorical insect; a longing reach across the centuries. The film is a philosophical search drenched in luminous colors and sparkling light.” (CP)

YSBRYD (2008, 8 mins., video, US) by Julie Murray
The erotic tangle of unexpected protagonists.

BUOY (2008, 6 mins., video, US) by Seoungho Cho
The strata and sea level marks in the Death Valley desert become a disorienting “motion painting” as they are recorded from a moving car.

POSTCARD #3: NIAGARA RISES (2009, 3 mins., video, US, World Premiere) by Carolyn Faber
What comes down must go up.

LES CHAISES (2008, 9 mins., video, US) by Vincent Grenier
“Two weather worn red vinyl chairs on an outdoor promontory oriented toward a ‘view,’ stand as witnesses.” (VG)

QUIVER (2008, 10 mins., 16mm, US) by Robert Todd
“Quiver. Barely touching. Movement further in and along, through the surface of a light.” (RT)

THREE/3: IN THE OCEAN, ON LAND (2009, 6 mins., video, US) by Peter Bo Rappmund
A diptych of sequences: one all chaos, the other all serenity.

9:15pm
Group Show Seven: Culture Clash

ALTERNITY (2008, 7 mins., video, US) by Van McElwee
“The vanishing point of linear perspective is expanded to a plane. This allows all of the potential events within that vanishing point to mingle freely on the surface of the screen.” (VM)

PARIS TIMES THREE (2009, 8 mins., video, US) by Carina Johnson
A “remake” of Bruce Conner’s 1973 film Marilyn Times Five which keeps the structure and soundtrack of the original but replaces the actress. Instead of the pretend “Marilyn” of Conner’s film (no, it’s not really Monroe) we see the contemporary blonde Paris Hilton, in footage taken from her notorious amateur sex tape One Night in Paris. The result is a smart and telling riff on celebrity, sexuality, and the representation of women in high and low art.

WHEN WORLDS COLLUDE (2008, 13 mins., video, US) by Fred Worden
A kinetic oscillation between different images, Worden creates a War of the Worlds in which everything is in collision (or is it collusion?).

COLLIDE-A-SCOPE (2009, 3 mins., 16mm, Australia, US Premiere) by Gregory Godhard
A fanciful animated supposition of what the results of supercollider experiments would look like.

SUTRO (2009, 2 mins., video, US) by Jeanne Liotta
“Animated portrait of the eponymous television tower on the hill, guardian of fog and electronic signals in that earthshaking city by the Bay...” (JL)

THE ETERNAL QUARTER INCH (2008, 9 mins., video, US) by Jesse McLean
“Rising fundamentalism and a government that cites faith to defend war action have helped to grow a desperate society. Dipping between ecstasy and despair, transcendence and absurdity, this movie journeys to a hidden space where you can lose your way, lose yourself in the moment, lose your faith in a belief system.” (JM)

POOR MAN’S PUCE MOMENT (2008, 4 mins., video, US) by Jessie Stead
“A low-res tribute to Puce Moment (1949) by Kenneth Anger using the soundtrack by Jonathan Halper, evidently added to the film during the 1960s.” (JS)

SAND SAGA (2008, 11 mins., video, US) by Shana Moulton
“Moulton's alter ego Cynthia again gains access to a parallel universe via the transformative powers of New Age body treatments and domestic objects. After applying a facial beauty mask, she moves through an environment energized with Southwestern motifs and rituals, from sculpted heads and Georgia O'Keefe-like forms to sand painting and hot stone massage. Ultimately Cynthia is transported to a fantastical world and emerges transformed.” (Electronic Arts Intermix)

THE PRESENTATION THEME (2008, 14 mins., 16mm, US) by Jim Trainor
Animator Jim Trainor continues his exploration of the dark and the strange in this elliptical tale of a Peruvian prisoner, a blood-hungry priestess, and totemic creatures.

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TICKET PRICES:

Tuesday (June 16) Opening Night Program at the Gene Siskel Film Center: $9.00 general; $7.00 students; $5.00 Film Center and Chicago Filmmakers' members.

Wednesday and Thursday (June 17 and 18) screenings at The Nightingale, per screening: $8.00 general; $7.00 students; $4.00 Chicago Filmmakers' members.

Friday and Saturday (June 19 and 20) screenings at Chicago Filmmakers, per screening: $8.00 general; $7.00 students; $4.00 Chicago Filmmakers' members.

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