The International Experimental Cinema Exposition Announces “Cinema in the Sky”


Telluride, Colorado, USA - October 3, 2001 – The four-day experimental film event, that is held at 10,000 feet in Telluride Mountain Village, is pleased to announce the return of experimental filmmaker Robert Schaller. Robert Schaller performed the festival’s traditional “cinema explosion” at the first annual festival last year. His work entitled “If Not One and One” was a three-channel film projection, projected onto three hand-made screens coupled with the performance of music and a live dancer. The performance was spectacular and the festival is thrilled to showcase his work again.

This year Robert Schaller will project his newest experimental films onto a kite flown by avant-garde kite artist David Wagner. The event will take place three nights of festival in the Colorado skies.

One of the films to be projected is “Scenes from Wayang Kulit” whose theme comes from a combination of Indonesian, Malaysian, and Balinese shadow puppet theater. The artists’ intent is to put “the gods back into the sky”. The art of puppetry in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bali is performed by individuals likened to catholic priests. It is believed that these persons have the ability to summons the gods to manifest themselves through puppets. David Wagner has studied kite craft in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia. He and Schaller are familiar with shadow puppet theater and hope to impart this art to the Western world.

The other piece is entitled "In Heaven as it is on Earth: An Exploration in Arial Images". This piece explores through arial images and found footage the paradox of our existence on this planet in an age of hyperbolic high-tech positivism and its detritus, and the earth on which we write it.