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Anniversary
Tour Show:
TIE, The International Experimental
Cinema Exposition, marks more than 500 films screened since
its inception in Telluride, Colorado. TIE's traveling showcase
remains true to its dedication: celluloid works in their true
format, from the latest contemporary works to archival films
from the rich history of experimental cinema. The tour is
a collection of highlights from the past six years of TIE’s
expositions and festivals. The varying programs exhibit at
a limited number of venues in North America and abroad. TIE
Director, Christopher May, appears in-person.
World
Premier:
December 10th, 2004 - 7:00PM - 10:30PM
Denver, Colorado - Starz FilmCenter
900 Auraria Pkwy, at the Tivoli.
Come early for complimentary Cookies & Eggnog.
No Late Seating.
After
Party:
Private Reception @ The Forest Room 5
2532 15th Street
Enjoy a complimentary Cocktail and Tapas.
Tickets,
$22 (Includes the Private Reception and Screening):
Available at the Starz FilmCenter Box Office,
900 Auraria Pkwy, at the Tivoli after 4PM, Friday,
Dec. 10th.
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Official
Program / December 10th, 2004:
Routemaster {Ilppo
Pohjola, 17 min., 35mm (Cinemascope), Finland, 2000}
Routemaster is a montage
of rhythmically organized repetitions and involves an abstraction
of motion that increases in frequency and scale. Intercutting
of two counterposed materials provides the basic framework
of the film. On the one hand, it uses black-and-white, endlessly
accelerating and rhythmically varying images of the inexorable
forward motion of the racing cars. On the other hand, it uses
colorful, extreme slow-motion images of details of a checkered
flag fluttering in the wind. The escalating speed, growing
abstraction and mosaic-like repetition of images leads on
to manipulated, yet realistic images of human bodies used
in crash tests. In the end, all that is left is the black-and-white
flash of speed, the gyrating pulse of the mosaic, the details
of the human bodies and the intense soundtrack. Routemaster
has some of the qualities of a live concert. It is a film
conscious of its context. It aims at a new filmic synthesis
of the history of structuralism and minimalism, and at finding
technical approaches that revitalize the tradition of formalist
expression. Soundtrack includes work by Non (Boyd Rice) and
Merzbow.
Delicacies
of Molten Horror Synapse
{Stan Brakhage, 10 min., Silent, 16mm, USA, 1991}
The primary "Molten Horror"
is TV - though there are other horrors metaphored in the film.
Four superimposed rolls of hand-painted and bi-packed television
negative imagery are edited so as to approximate the hypnagogic
process whereby the optic nerves resist grotesque infusions
of luminescent light.
Den
of Tigers {Jonathan
Schwartz,
18 min., 16mm, India / USA, 2002}
This gorgeous film was made
from during travel to West Bengal, India on an invitation
to record sound for a film. While there, Schwartz collected
images/sounds for this, his own project - a reflection of
the maker’s experience, feelings, and most of all, the
participation of walking, looking, and listening.
The
work has universal appeal; it touches outside the traditional
arenas of genre and boundaries. It speaks with many voices
- the associational values of experimental cinema, the patience
of objective documentary, emotional levels of narrative, and
intellectual/research oriented foundations of an essay. The
culmination of visual construction and sound layering moves
beyond hearing and seeing. For content, Jonathan builds the
work, with elements of tradition, into his own- a unique and
new voice. It sings with observational, textural, lyrical,
and metaphorical songs. It is in the construction where innovation
enters -the interplay of movement-color-composition-meaning-mood
swimming within the layering compositions of sound inspires
emotion, association, and intellect. The process is rooted
in coupling the experimental cinema artist approach with that
of an independent journalist. Jonathan's work is not journalism
in any sense - yet the approach of creating his work requires
intuitive response in the field. In the end, the piece manages
to fill one with feeling while remaining honest, challenging,
beautiful, and magical.
Film
(Dzama) {Deco
Dawson, 23 min., 16mm, Canada, 2001}
An attempt to rekindle the
lost form of surrealist cinema made popular in the 1920s by
Dali / Bunuel and Man Ray. Marcel Dzama is a Winnipeg based
Visual Artist who works on small page size drawings. Watercolour
Storyboards. This is a beautiful fictional biography of Marcel
Dzama’s work. His real life father Maurice plays the
role of the artist.
Darling
International {Jennifer
Reeves & M.M. Serra, 22 min, 16mm, USA, 2000}
Atmospheric post-Warhol yet
timeless narrative about lesbian sadomasochist relationships.
A dark and sensual experimental narrative that explores a
skilled technical worker's sexual fantasies during her nights
as a 'femme' on the Lower East Side of New York.
Meridian
Days {Trevor
Fife, 12 min., 16mm, USA, 2000}
Meridian Days is a
navigational term that refers to the phenomenon of temporally
losing or gaining a day when you cross the international dateline.
This hauntingly poetic and beautifully crafted travelogue
stems from audio and visual material collected on a 3-week
luxury ship cruise taken with the filmmaker’s 82-year-old
Grandmother. The result is a visually stunning and engaging
mix of humor and disparity.
****Intermission****
Alone.
Life Wastes Andy Hardy {Martin
Arnold, 15 min., 16mm, Austria, 1998}
In Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy Mickey
Rooney together with Judy Garland are cloned in an experimental
"Back-yard-musical". The starting point is a number
of scenes from the days when both the adolescents romped through
the family series and Busby Berkeley musicals. These are put
in a new order and before our eyes run forwards and backwards
in a "gentle adagio". Andy Hardy, the all-American
sunny boy of the 30s and 40s returns as an oedipally destroyed
teenie clone to be released from his suffering by Betsy's
singing and kisses.
Color
Film {Standish
Lawder, 2 min., 16mm, USA, 1972}
"Further
examining the medium of film itself, Color Film is
a work Lawder made while trying to make a minimalist, "pure
color" film. Using spliced-together strips of colored
film leader in white, yellow, blue, red, green, etc., Lawder
ran the film through a projector and found the results to
be quite boring. While he was running the film, though, he
noticed how beautiful the colored strips of film looked as
they ran through then projector. So, he turned a camera on
the projector and filmed the colored film gorgeously winding
its way through the projector's machinery."
– Noel Black, Colorado Springs Independent
Blutrausch
(Bloodlust)
{Thorsten
Fleisch, 4 min., 16mm, Germany, 2000}
This film is an attempt to
constitute a human / machine dialogue. It shows the filmmaker's
blood as seen / heard by the eyes / ears of the machine which
is a film projector with optical sound. He affixed his blood
onto clear film leader by cutting into the flesh and then
pressing the film leader onto the wound. Additionally he had
blood taken with a syringe and afterwards dripped it on the
film leader. Fresh and clotted blood was used for a maximum
of variety.
Ingreen
{Nathaniel
Dorsky, 12 min., 16mm, USA, 1964}
Dorsky's first film quickly
gained wide notoriety and respect. Yet, it was expelled from
awards consideration at the Ann Arbor Film Festival due to
it's auto-erotic content and presiding judge Gregory Markopoulos
in solidarity with the film walked out in protest.
"...
Made of beautiful greens ... glimpses of figures of images
that are recognizable ... the esthetic experience is created
by the flow and play of superimpositions." - Jonas Mekas
"...
the film haunts, has tugged at my mind now and again all these
years..." - Stan Brakhage
Fey
Eyes Pin Holes Drums Hum {Thomas
Comerford, 14 min., 16mm, USA, 2000}
This new cinema is created
with a pinhole camera and found/homemade noise machines. The
film examines landscapes and obsolescence.
"[The
film's] diverse, soft-focus landscapes have a haunting and
weirdly-distanced virtuality."
--Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
Un
Chant d' Amour {Jean
Genet, 27 min., 16mm, Silent, France, 1950}
Avant-garde grandfather, Jonas
Mekas, smuggled the banned film into the U.S., from France
during the early sixties. The version screened this evening
is this original and the only existing print in North America.
Un Chant d'Amour is French writer Jean Genet's only
film, which he directed in 1950. Because of its explicit homosexual
content, the 26-minute movie was long banned and was also
disowned by Genet later in his life. The
plot is set in a French prison, where a prison guard takes
voyeuristic pleasure in observing the prisoners perform masturbatory
sexual acts. In two adjacent cells, there are a beautiful
Algerian-looking man and a handsome young convict in his twenties.
The older man is in love with the younger one, rubbing himself
against the wall and sharing his cigarette smoke with his
beloved through a straw. Genet
does not use sound in his film, forcing the viewer to completely
focus on closeups of faces, armpits, and erect penises. The
film, with its highly sexualized atmosphere, has later been
recognized as a formative factor for works such as the films
by Andy Warhol.
Frauenmuskel
{Frank Biesendorfer, 6 min., 16mm, Germany / Austria, 1999}
Frank
Biesendorfer films are unique in that they capture life in
beautiful yet challenging forms. His masterful craftwork reflects
mysterious aspects of patriotism, family, sexuality and their
relationship to subversity and celebration in relation to
contemporary cinematic culture.
Frauenmuskel is a jarring and sexually explicit film.
Yet, the film holds an important dual sense of mystery that
haunts long after the film is over. Filmed during the Hermann
Nitsch action of 1998, the film covers a stroll through the
countryside as well as nightly impressions of the stars and
clouds above Hermann Nitsch’s residence. A score accompanies
the film’s visual structure with “Night String
Quartet”, an original composition from Hermann Nitsch,
himself.
Outer
Space
{Peter Tscherkassky, 10 min., 35mm
(Cinemascope),
Austria, 2001}
From
the off, Outer Space, foreign bodies penetrate the
images and cause the montage to become panic stricken. The
outer edges of the film image, the empty perforations and
the skeletons of the optical track rehearse an invasion; they
puncture the anyway indeterminate action of the film . . .
a shocker of cinematographic dysfunctions; a hell-raiser of
avant-garde cinema.
Program
curated by TIE Director, Christopher May.
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