OFFICIAL PROGRAM:
November 14-16, 2003
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Curated by Christopher May

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Friday: 7:00 – 7:45PM: Pre-Film Avant-Improv
Theatre doors open at 7:PM with Glen Whitehead: Trumpet. Johnathon Lee: Saxaphone. Randy Bowen: Percussion. Bob Tudor: Piano. Mark Neihoff: Bass.

Friday: 7:00 – 7:45PM: VIP Opening Night Reception
Meet and greet the guests with a cash bar and Swiss hors d'Oeuvres by Sencha, held in the Fine Arts Center's Theatre Lounge.
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Friday: 7:45 - 10:30PM: Section 1

Panels for the Walls of Heaven

Stan Brakhage, 2002, 35 minutes, 16mm, Silent, Canada
{Above stills courtesy of Marilyn Brakhage, The Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper - www.fredcamper.com}

Chiquitita and the Soft Escape

Michael Robinson, 2003, 10 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Philadelphia, PA
“Began as an effort to prove nostalgia and sentimentalism to be purely mechanical processes but became an argument for the opposite through its assembly. Twin attempts at structuring images of home and loved-ones break down in the face of the romantic. The title refers to the ABBA song, whose reentry into my life sparked much of this questioning.”

For to There

Pablo de Ocampo, 2002, 6 minutes, 16mm, Silent, Portland, OR
“A landscape film about places, both known and unknown and my experience in those places…. viewed through a veil of clouded memories.”

Meridian Days
Trevor Fife, 2003, 12 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Portland, OR
A hauntingly poetic travelogue that stems from audio and visual material collected on a 3-week luxury ship cruise taken with the filmmaker’s 82-year-old Grandmother.

All My Life

Bruce Baillie, 1966, 3 minutes, 16mm, Sound, CA

*****12 Minute Break*****

Trauma Victim

Robert Todd, 2002, 17 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Boston, MA
“Traveling by car from prison to prison allowed me to see America as many of us have come to experience living in it: as tourists who can lay no legitimate claim to the space we pretend to inhabit. This is a view from the inside of one such dislocated ‘citizen’.”

Loretta

Jeanne Liotta, 2003, 4 minutes, 16mm, Sound, New York, NY
“No escape from the frame for the tragic heroine of this hand-tinted photogram operetta.”

Ingreen
Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 12 minutes, 16mm, Sound, San Francisco, CA
This is the first of three films depicting the emergence from adolescence. Ingreen is a reflecting pool of the underwater involvement of a mother-father-son relationship.

Metaphysical Education

Thad Povey, 2003, 4 minutes, 16mm, Sound, San Francisco, CA
“The molding of young flesh and the beating of desperate wings. Gravity and the desire to fly battle for the soul of the boy in the most difficult of ages.”

Daylight Moon
Lewis Klahr, 2002, 13 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Los Angeles, CA
"Lewis Klahr's collage films have always mimed the processes of memory by pulling together the discards of contemporary life (images from ads, text books, or comic books, objects such as game pieces, menus, playing cards) into scenarios that seem like some Hollywood film dimly remembered. In Daylight Moon, he reaches even further back, to try to recall the moments in which a small child configures the world out of patterns of visual fascination, a mode of seeing that relies on touch and the feel of things rather than deep space. One of his most abstract films, Daylight Moon rarely reveals a human figure. Instead of characters, Klahr gives us the play of enigmatic spaces and empty sites that promise both the invitation of desire and the discovery of crime." -Tom Gunning

The End

Christopher MacLaine, 1963, 35 minutes, 16mm, Sound, San Francisco, CA
MacLaine made few films, but his work is crucial for understanding how American avant-garde film developed through the 1950's. He was an enigmatic and somewhat eccentric figure on the San Francisco North Beach "beat" scene in the 1950's. The End intercuts color and black and white sequences, as well as sound-with-no picture in showing five different people, each seen on the last days of their lives.
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Saturday: 9:00 -10:30AM: Shuga's VIP Lounge
VIPs can enjoy conversation and a continental breakfast in the Fine Arts Center’s Theatre Lounge, courtesy of Shuga’s.
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Saturday: 10:30AM -1:30PM: Section 2

To the Happy Few

Thomas Draschan & Stella Friedrichs, 2003, 5 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Austria/Germany
Structured around the mystical idea of the mandala, in this case pictures of (fake) suns, galaxies and planets. These images are in sync with an Indian Bollywood song to enhance the pseudo-psychedelic effects. The film material covers a very wide variety of found footage from various sources and decades starting in the 1930s until the end of the 1980s.

Perhaps/We

Solomon Nagler, 2003, 11 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Canada
Within the mystical spaces of a Judaic self-doubt, falls a dreaming painter from the fallen Polish city of Lodz. A million murdered spirits brings to him into a world of faded photographs and stone angels, who petrified teardrops forever, scar the widowed landscape of Poland.

Kaddish
Brian Frye, 2002, 8 minutes, 16mm, Sound, New York, NY
“A fragment of tinted nitrate. An acetate recording of a wedding ceremony. Echoes of the bitter sweetness of the Spirit on the tongue of Man. As Frampton tipped his hat to Gloria, so might I.”

Ojos Que No Ven
Allen D. Glass II, 2003, 14 minutes, 16mm, Silent, Mexico
What the eyes do not see, the heart does not feel. A portrait of life shot in Mexico City, along the U.S.-Mexico border, and in Los Angeles.

Figures in the Landscape

Thomas Comerford, 2002, 11 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Chicago, IL
This pinhole film examines the relationship of the human figure to the “new” suburban, monumental sprawl landscapes of Schaumburg, IL. Found texts provide local stories of both human interaction with the landscape and ideas of land development. This film is part of a series of films made with pinhole cameras and found/homemade noise machines.

Terra Incognita

Ben Russell, 2002, 10 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Chicago IL
Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Texts from ancient and modern explorers about Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.

The Quarry

Ben Russell, 2002, 4 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Chicago, IL
The Quarry is a silent document of five minutes in the presence of the sublime. This small, quiet 16mm film serves as a testament both to cinema’s failure to reproduce the lived moment and to its success in replacing that moment with one that is equally wondrous.

Den Of Tigers

Jonathan Schwartz, 2002, 18 minutes, 16mm, Sound, India
“Den of Tigers was made from the opportunity to travel to West Bengal, India on an invitation to record sound for a film. While there I collected images/sounds for this, my own project - a reflection of my experience, feelings, and most of all, the participation of walking, looking, and listening.”

*****12 Minute Break*****

The following new films by Robert Schaller were made using a pinhole camera and hand-processing techniques:

Anima
Robert Schaller, 2003, 10 minutes, 16mm, Silent, Ward, CO

Above
Robert Schaller, 2003, 6 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Ward, CO

Untitled
Robert Schaller, 2003, Expanded Cinema, 16mm, Live Violinist, Ward, CO

Friendly Fire

Thorsten Fleisch, 2003, 7 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Germany
Burnt filmstrips meet the light and texture of the screen with structures of residue, ash, flames and destruction. New landscapes and worlds appear in the state of disintegration by fire. Awaking the dead, the lifeless filmstrips have been resurrected. The former carrier of conserved imagery is now in full bloom of organic splendor.

Consume

Dominic Angerame, 2003, 12 minutes, 16mm, Sound, San Francisco, CA
Inspired by the novel 'Flicker’ by Theodore Roszak, this film was intended to explore the images captured in the flickering light of multiple projector beams. By utilizing superimpositions within the camera, one can experience the pulsating light and explore hidden imagery through use of the "Sally Rand” personae that Roszak refers to.

Hojas de Maiz

Eric Theise, 2002, Expanded Cinema, 10 minutes, 16mm, Live African Drum Ensemble, San Francisco, CA
A cameraless film, Hojas de Maiz was created from impressions taken of cornhusks used to form and steam tamales. An old media (etchings, celluloid) journey through progressions of color and screen energy.

Out of the Ether

Kerry Laitala, 2003, 11 minutes, 35mm, Sound, San Francisco, CA
“The films of Kerry Laitala evoke a glowing world in which spirits, memories and moldering artifacts swirl into feverish dreams recalling gothic conditions of poetry and decay.” – Steve Polta

Dinosaur Too

Ana Gil-Costa & Sonia Gil-Costa, 2003, 3 minutes, 35mm, Silent, Spain
Dinosaur Too is a cameraless film, which uses found footage of 1970's mainframe computer imagery scanned into a computer and then printed directly onto clear celluloid strips using a household inkjet printer. The colors of the printing inks, cyan, magenta, yellow and black used by the computer printer are also printed onto clear celluloid strips as solid color. Through direct printing on celluloid, a medium for which it was not meant, the digital acquires a type of existence, which it can only have in the very technology that it seeks to replace. The promise of the digital is in this way inverted, and in an ironic reversal, redirected to the material of celluloid. Rather than announcing an obsolescence it potentates instead the further exploration of celluloid's singular materiality.
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Saturday: 1:30-3:00PM: Shuga's VIP Lounge
VIPs can enjoy conversation, complimentary lunch time snacks and beverages in the Fine Arts Center’s Theatre Lounge, courtesy of Shuga’s.
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Saturday: 3:00 – 6:00PM: Section 3

A Fall Trip Home
Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 11 minutes, 16mm, Sound, San Francisco, CA
The second in his trilogy, it is less a psychodrama and more a sad sweet song of youth and death, of boyhood and manhood and our tender earth.

Little b and MBT

Frank Biesendorfer, 2003, 25 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Colorado Springs, CO
The soundtrack is made from Biesendorfer’s recordings of voices, discussions and sounds surrounding a recent Herman Nitsch action in Austria. The images, consisting primarily of special and intimate moments of his wife and children, intertwine with the audio in strange and ambiguous ways. The film battles itself in order to cancel itself out, but the conflict remains circular and supercedes both the audio and visual, in a place beyond the material and physical.

Encounter in Space

Thomas Draschan, 2003, 7 minutes, 16mm, Sound, Austria / Germany

Calling All Cars

Alfonso Alvarez, 2001, 5 minutes, 16mm, Sound, San Francisco, CA
An exciting day in the life of a rookie lawman. He has never had to fire his weapon, respects his superiors, and is always ready for any emergency - day or night.

Secret History of the Dividing Line

David Gatten, 2002, 20 minutes, 16mm, Silent, Ithaca, NY
Paired texts as dueling histories; a journey imagined and remembered, 57 mileage markers produce an equal number of prospects. Timed marked, marking time, making space. SPLICE

Olhar e Sensação

Carlos Reichenbach, 1994, 10 minutes, 35mm, Sound, Brazil
A free flight towards memory, instinct, perception and emotion. An obsessive search for unexpected angles of Anhangabaú Valley, an aboriginal-rooted landmark of São Paulo. The incognito metropolis seen synopsis through the eyes of caged animals. Author and child dive beyond their windows. All paths lead to tunnels. Cinema aspiring to painting. Drafts of the love-hate relationship between the artist and the city where he lives. Buccaneer souls and visions. {Presented by Carlos Adriano and Bernardo Vorobow}

Nine Through Twelve

Hans Michaud, 2001, 16 minutes, Sound, New York, NY
Michaud has created a dark, black and white film that is not only obscure and eerie, but is also hard to see. Celluloid ghostings appear organically as the film gets darker and as images attempt to creep toward the eye.

Summer Wind
Nathaniel Dorsky, 1965, 14 minutes, 16mm, Sound, San Francisco, CA
“In the last episode of his trilogy the world is seen from a larger view. "A singularly direct and unpretentious evocation of summer life in Nathaniel Dorsky's home town. The number of that life’s aspects so surely revealed, the range and thoroughness of observation, the sensual accuracy of the camera, the remarkably poetic use of slow motion, and the unhurried, meditative unfolding of episode, distinguish Summer Wind as a work of ripeness beyond its maker's year's"- Ken Kelman

*****12 Minute Break*****

Panel of Filmmakers, Curators & Special Guests
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Saturday: 6:00-7:30PM: Shuga's VIP Lounge
VIPs can enjoy conversation, hors d'Oeuvres and beverages in the Fine Arts Center’s Theatre Lounge, courtesy of Shuga’s.
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Saturday: 7:30 - 10:45PM: Section 4

Tribute to Gregory Markopoulos:

Considered by film critics to be a master of visionary film, Markopoulos' achievements have occupied a place in the history of filmmaking parallel to those of filmmakers Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage. Gregory J. Markopoulos was one of the first filmmakers to articulate the ideal of a filmmaker as creator of every aspect of a film and to realize this in his work. His important innovations, such as editing with the smallest unit of film, a single frame, and the simultaneous narrative of past, present, and future, or his most individual use of color, are all directed towards the representation and resolution of complex emotions.

He also conceived how his films should be presented. In 1980, Gregory J. Markopoulos and Robert Beavers held the first of a series of open-air screenings on the terraced fields near the village of Lyssaraia in the Peloponnese. The intention was to present the films in an environment conducive to their full appreciation. Although Markopoulos' films are now recognized as highly innovative works of art by the most esteemed film institutions around the world, the ideal setting for his films remains the Peloponnese.

To find out more about summer screenings in Greece or how you can contribute to the Markopoulos restoration project, please contact:

Temenos, Inc.
Peck Slip Station
P.O. Box 539
New York, NY 10272-0539
Email: mail@the-temenos.org
Phone: 917-860-1839

The Films:

Psyche

Gregory Markopoulos, 1947, 25 minutes, 16mm, Sound, U.S.A.
"Psyche has no parallel among early American avant-garde films. For Markopoulos was at once the filmmaker most attracted to narrative of his generation...and one of the most radical narrative film-makers in the world.... Three interrelated characteristics define Markopoulos's style: color, rhythm, and a temporal construction." - P.Adams Sitney

Swain

Gregory Markopoulos, 1950, 24 minutes, 16mm, Sound, U.S.
“Markopoulos completed the film Swain, inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe. A collection of stories and sketches, Fanshawe was printed at Hawthorne’s own expense in Boston in 1828, after the author graduated from Bowdoin College. Later, after gaining recognition in the literary community, Hawthorne attempted to destroy all copies of this book. Perhaps Markopoulos related both to the story and the conditions under which it was written, which reflected his own financially limited self-productions. His collaborator on this project was his friend Robert C. Freeman, Jr., who operated the camera so that Markopoulos could perform in the film. In the final stages of production, Markopoulos edited the footage on the living room floor of Freeman’s house.” -Matthew Yokobosky

Ming Green
Gregory Markopoulos, 1966, 7 minutes, 16mm, Sound, U.S.A.
Dedicated to Stan Brakhage. Music: 'Traumen' from Wesendonck Lieder by Richard Wagner. A portrait of the filmmaker's apartment made a few months before his departure from New York.

Twice a Man

Gregory Markopoulos, 1963, 49 minutes, 16mm, Sound, U.S.A.
Dedicated to Clara Hoover. Music excerpt from Manfred Symphony by Peter Tchaikovsky. Cast: Paul Kilb, Olympia Dukakis, Violet Roditi, Albert Torgesen. “Limitless change in rhythm, or sudden interjection of alliteration, metaphor, symbol, or any discontinuity introduced in the structure of the motion picture, makes possible the arrest of the spectator's attention, as the film-maker gradually convinces the spectator not only to see and to hear, but to participate in what is being created on the screen, on both the narrative and introspective levels."

*****12 minute break*****

Honor & Obey
Warren Sonbert, 1988, 21 minutes, 16mm, Silent, San Francisco, CA
"In Warren Sonbert's Honor and Obey soldiers march in formation, a tiger stalks through the snow, religious processions wind through the streets, and palm trees wave in a tropical breeze. As brightly colored images of authority figures blend into scenes of cocktail parties, this 21-minute silent film flows along with the grace of a musical score built on complex tensions hidden among the notes. 'Whose authority will you obey?' the film seems to ask, as it deftly avoids simple-minded juxtapositions." - Caryn James, The New York Times

Un Chant d' Amour

Jean Genet, 1950, 27 minutes, 16mm, Silent, France
Frenchman, Jean Genet is one of the greatest radical geniuses of the avant-garde that has ever lived. His plays, poetry and art are celebrated worldwide. Un Chant d' Amour, Genet's only film, is considered an avant-garde classic. The film caused quite a stir during its release in the 1950’s due to its sensual and surrealist context of prisoner relations and desire. “Genet exhibits the obvious influence of his friend Jean Cocteau's filmmaking style as well as the influence of Kenneth Anger's film Fireworks, of which Cocteau was a great fan. Despite this influence, the tone and content is pure Genet.” - Matt Bailey

*****5 minute break*****

Underwater Birth

Jason Wade, 2003, Expanded Cinema, 15 minutes, Multi-16mm, Live Sound, Minneapolis, MN
With triple projections and a quadraphonic sound system, the gods of the throne must be watching from hell. Live soundtrack. Alternative processing techniques, modified cameras/ cartridges. Homemade film to film transfers, photocopy, reticulation, and decomposition.... The murk descended from the sky and drowned the winged gods above the hippodrome.
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Saturday: 10:45 PM - Midnight: VIP Soiree in Shuga’s VIP Lounge
David Bryant’s ambient down-tempo beats with complimentary gourmet beer, tapas and a full cash bar in the Fine Arts Center’s Theatre Lounge.
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Sunday: 9:15AM – 10AM: VIP Continental
VIP's can start their morning with complimentary danishes, coffee, tea, and juice that will be available in the Fine Arts Center’s Theatre Lounge.
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Sunday: 10:00AM - 12:30PM: Section 5

Militancy

Carlos Adriano, 2002, 10 minutes, 35mm, Sound, Brazil
“The film ‘Militancy’ is over the top in its statement of erotic cinema love, this mad displacement of libido into images that straddle life – gone gone gone, but present as a trace – and thingness, chemical dispersion of light-galvanized silver halides, machinery, especially machinery that's evident as such and not black-boxed. Carlos Adriano’s film is an even more strident perversity than my own ‘Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son’. It is madly expressive with its musical thundering; in the unguarded way, he ejaculates cinematically. ‘Militancy’ touches me in its romantic fervor. I think of Carlos Adriano as a brave outpost of cine-art." - Ken Jacobs

Standish Lawder
presents a short program of his experimental films. These films were all made in the late 60s or early 70s, the heyday of the experimental film movement in this country. It was a time when many artist filmmakers, Lawder included, rejected Hollywood story-telling conventions and instead used the film medium in ways related to the aims of painting and sculpture of this period, i.e., formal strategies, minimalism, unexpected dislocations of time and space, emphasis on materials and processes of film-making, and incorporation of found or appropriated elements.

The Films:

Raindance
Standish Lawder, 16 mins, color, sound, 16mm
A snippet of a 1950s cartoon is looped endlessly upon itself in multiple varied configurations. Much of the perceived forms and colors do not actually exist on the movie screen; rather, they are the result of exhausted retinal stimulation. Individual frames of the film are imprinted on the retina in a rhythm, sequence and intensity that corresponds to alpha wave frequencies of the brain---thus contributing to the occasion for inner meditative speculation. Original music by Robert Withers.

Necrology
Standish Lawder, 12 mins, black&white, sound, 16mm
An anthropological study film about life and death in New York city.A roll call of the recently deceased.

Headfilm
Standish Lawder, 6 mins, black&white, sound, 16mm
An exercise in filmic perception. A short piece of film is stretched apart so that the illusion of fluid forward movement totally disappears. The pulsed and frozen fragments assume a new life. Likewise the sound track (a practice dictation record for dummies) is slowed down below the threshold of aural comprehension.

Intolerance (Abridged)
Standish Lawder, 12 mins. black&white, silent, 16mm
A "Reader's Digest" condensation of D. W. Griffith's famous but intolerably long classic of 1914. Again, playing with filmic perception underlies the concept. With a home-made optical printer it was determined that the maximum acceptable compression was to double-print every 26th frame of the original. In this way, my high-speed version would include at least one frame of every scene while still maintaining a semblance of narrative continuity.

*****5 minute break*****

Dreams that Money Can Buy

Hans Richter, 1947, 84 minutes, 16mm, Sound
Richter’s classic experimental feature was produced in collaboration with Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Darius Milhaud, John Cage, Paul Bowles and David Diamond.
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Sunday: 12:30PM – 2PM: VIP Closing Brunch
A complimentary buffet will be served courtesy of Phantom Canyon Brewing Co. A Bloody Mary & Mimosa cash bar will be available during the brunch in the Fine Arts Center’s Theatre Lounge.
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Forums and Presentations:
Filmmakers, curators, and special guests will discuss, present and host question and answer forums throughout each Section. Saturday afternoon, there will be an open panel discussion with curators and filmmakers. Robert von Dassanowsky, PhD, will present a short memoriam to the controversial, yet innovative, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl during Section 1.

Section Ticket ($17):
Admission per individual program block.

Festival Pass ($50):
Admission to all screenings and forums.

VIP Pass ($125):
Priority seating and admission to all screenings & forums, Opening Night Reception, Shuga's VIP lounge, VIP Soiree, VIP Continental, Closing Brunch, Festival Gift-bag and 2 drink tickets.