Wholphin

Serious fans of experimental cinema have a few benchmarks among them – not just a fervent love of unusual work in filmmaking and performance – but good transportation and a librarian’s sense of investigation. You need to be a fucking art detective at times in order to find great events.

There are many established outlets for the experimental world but consistency is difficult. Museums and film festivals are often event based and deal with high profile press and premieres to get folks in the door. Underground microcinemas are great but bills are tough to keep up with and getting the word out to fans across a big city is not cheap or efficient.

Which is why the new venue Light Industry is so exciting. Based in Brooklyn, the multimedia space is being invented by stalwart experimental cinema champions Thomas Beard and Ed Halter. Focusing on a weekly schedule, each event will be organized by a different artist, critic or curator. You may see an artists’ own collection of shorts, or a writer’s favorite lost film, or a collection of silent boxing movies discussed by a curator working in an entirely different field.

“There’s such a rich and varied body of film and electronic art being shown in the city right now, but the audiences for, say, contemporary art or experimental cinema or new media don’t overlap nearly as often as they could and should,” says Beard. “I feel like there’s something really exciting about the prospect of having all this different work under one roof, with the freedom to do things that might not make as much sense in more institutional contexts.”

Even in New York where experimental worlds have flourished. Series like the Robert Beck and Ocularis are defunct, MOMA and the Whitney create a single explosion and push it for months, and the New York Underground Film Festival is having its last fest this April.

“Right now, there’s nothing happening like this on a consistent, weekly basis,â€? Halter adds. “Particularly in Brooklyn, where is where the majority of these artists and curators now live.”

Beard and Halter have been pillars for experimental work for years. Beard is formerly a Program Director of Ocularis and a programmer at Cinematexas. Halter programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival from 1995-2005, wrote for the Village Voice, currently teaches at Bard College and wrote the book Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. Both are currently editing books on aspects of experimental film exhibition – Beard on Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader and Halter on Small Cinemas: American Avant-Garde Film Exhibition from Ciné Clubs to Microcinemas with Andrea Grover.

All events will take a place on Tuesdays at 8PM in Industry City, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn that’s home to a cross-section of manufacturing, warehousing and light industry. As part of a regeneration program intended to diversify the use of its 6 million square feet of space to better reflect 21st century production, Industry City now includes workspace for artists.

Opening night March 25 features the program “The Blazing World,� compiled by Beard and Halter. Pitting the love-all world of the avant hippie with AA-meeting views of today, the compilation is stunning, from 70s work by Kurt Kren, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson to a 2007 short by wunderkid Michael Robinson.

Get more info on all upcoming shows at Light Industry: www.lightindustry.org

PT Anderson, Schnabel, Haynes… Did Eastwood make another B Movie this year?

The real film of the year is FROWNLAND, and has a show in Los Angeles tomorrow night…

Frownland
Sat, 7:30pm
Silent Movie Theatre
more info here

Director in town too!

The film that started a ruckus at CineVegas:

“Well, yikes, a fight nearly broke out after this one screening. Some guy in the back of the theatre was booing throughout the closing credits. When they ended, this other guy stood up, turned to face the booer, and screamed, ‘You! You’re a fucking asshole!’ I mean he really screamed. He was absolutely enraged. Red as a beet. Shaking. That’s when a third guy stood up and started defending the booer. The second guy turned on the third. Everyone was arguing. It was sort of a melee. Turns out that last guy was the attending critic for Variety and he wound up writing us a killer review. Which leads me to think that that kind of raw caustic energy is real good for the project. It forces people to quickly choose a position and defend it. I should probably start hiring shills to run up and punch me in the face after each screening.”

— Ronald Bronstein, director

Great lost films are not from 1919, but from the last 20 years.

In the film CHAMELEON STREET, the enigmatic Doug Street puts on a series of cons, sometimes to make money, sometimes to prove he can do more than what the world expects of him. In short time he goes from a simple extortion plot to complex impersonations, including as a reporter from Time, a Yale student, a lawyer and even a surgeon. Yes, a surgeon.

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The point of the film is not just to tell a story of a conman, but asks what a black man is expected to do to make a living in this modern world. Based mostly on the true story of super-con-man William Douglas Street Jr, the film is written and directed by Wendell B. Harris Jr, who also turns in an uncanny performance as the lead character. The film existed in the burgeoning indie cinema of the early 90s. Unlike most of the films around him though, Harris provided a complicated character and not a simple genre drama or comedy. The extremely intelligent Street has great ideas to fight the system, but is constantly stumped by tiny details he cannot control. It’s a drama and you root for Street to win but feel sorry for the people getting conned as well. And it’s bittersweet funny, as the sardonic humor in the film rings all too true. Above all, you feel the frustration that leads to fighting back against the grain.

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Harris acted in his own super-8 film shorts growing up in Flint, Michigan. After reading an article on Street in 1983, he started researching and interviewing him in order to write the script, resulting in 36 versions of the script over 4 years.

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1990. But that didn’t lead to distribution. Rather, the prize led to many meetings in Hollywood, the insult of a possible remake rather than a distribution deal, some deals for writing scripts, and a brutal joke.

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CHAMELEON STREET did get a forgettable theatrical release and Wendell was able to write some scripts. Only now at the end of 2007 does the film finally get a DVD release. A new video transfer, loads of extras about the making of the film in luscious 1980s video, and the trailer for the film. Also two great short videos, You Know Leadbelly?, which is an entertaining short resulting from pre-production character studies, and the great Colette Vignette, a heavily edited short that shows the basis for some of the artistic ends Harris puts into the film.

The behind-the-scenes footage is appropriately called The Process. The mainstream process of the film industry did not work as well. One of his projects that didn’t take off was Negropolis, a sword-and-sandal satire that he hoped would star Howard Stern as Alexander the Great (remember its 1990), Oprah as Cleopatra with a consortion of Cleos around the world, and Harris himself as “Canigula.” But STREET remains Harris’ only film as director.

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The long overdue DVD is great. The big extra is a layered, interesting group of scenes presented as a 30-minute trailer for his film-in-progress titled Arbiter Roswell. Entirely shot, Harris is currently editing what may be the definitive film document on UFOs.

In the end, Harris feels like there is only one way to look at filmmaking.

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I recently interviewed Harris for my zine Cinemad, which is available right here.

DVD available now from Home Vision and Image Entertainment for $26.99.

Live in Austin?? Lucky.

The bad news first: Cinematexas, the long-running, great underground film festival lost its funding from certain institutions and is over. Annually providing the best, brightest and cutting-edgest short (and occasional feature) films, CNTX was an exciting long weekend of political hotbeds, avant-garde works, underground sludge and music films that traversed all of those worlds. It also programmed for the community – programs and a competition for Univ of Texas student films, and various childrens’ shows.

The good news: The fest is having a going away show this weekend, the Cinematexas Viking Funeral.

On Saturday, December 1st there are three free shows:

RAGNA-ROCK. One of two compilations of new work by esteemed Cinematexas alumni like James Fotopoulos, Ben Coonley, Daniel Cockburn, Stephanie Gray, etc.)

UT HOLLYWOOD SHOWCASE. A local screening of this year’s best UT-produced student films, which screened at the DGA Theater in LA in September.

ASSASSINS: A FILM CONCERNING RIMBAUD. An early experiment by Todd Haynes and an clear precursor to his new Dylan non-biopic I’M NOT THERE. This film is rare!

Then on Sunday, December 2nd:

RAGNA-ROLL: More madness from Cinematexas chums. One of these two programs will have videos from the incomparable, one-man-band Laz Rojas.

INTERKOSMOS. A delightfully tongue-in-cheek homage to a fictional East German space project, Jim Finn’s INTERKOSMOS uses recreated newsreels combined with musical interludes to resurrect the ’70s in all its Brezhnev-era glory.

And two incomparable greats: FROWNLAND, the uber indie film from Ronnie Bronstein, led by the new short by Don Hertzfeldt, EVERYTHING WILL BE OK. This single show is so great its already sold out. But try to catch everything else you can. Criminy, its free and hard-to-find films…. Viva Cinematexas.

http://www.austinfilm.org/film/cinematexas-viking-funeral-frownland

From the stunning eight-minute opening shot of to the remarkable documentation of China’s Three Gorges dam, you are overwhelmed by MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (2007). Partly by the size and space of the landscapes, but mostly by the incredible beauty of the images, their composition and color, only to be crushed by the content: a luscious world of destruction.

You can enjoy this vibrant doc even if you are not riding the current wave of environmental danger films. See the environment – see all of us run. If Al Gore makes you feel like you need more visual aids, or if you feel you need words with KOYAANISQATSI, then this is the perfect companion film for the trilogy.

Ultimately LANDSCAPES is the portrait of one man’s voyage, following celebrated still photographer Edward Burtynsky on a tour of Asia taking photos. Burtynsky takes large format stills of industrial landscapes – factory workers lined up to infinity, giant ships eviscerated, massive recycling dumps, expansive strip mines. The goal is to portray human’s relationship to nature in our pursuit of progress. His images are striking and picturesque, leaving the viewer on their own to comprehend the negative global ramifications within.

Director Jennifer Baichwal makes impressive choices. The film perfectly balances the images of Burtynsky and talented cinematographer/creative consultant Peter Mettler, an acoomplished filmmaker and imagemaker on his own. Burtynsky presents the expanse and philosophy, and the filmmakers examine the tiny parts. And when Burtynsky speaks, he doesn’t celebrate nor condemn, but explores who we are in relation to our planet. We need things from the environment to survive, and that is damaging the world.

DVD has tons of extras, additional scenes, commentary and interviews with Baichwal, Burtynsky and Mettler, and a great photo gallery with commentary. Released by Zeitgeist Video, available now for $29.99.