Paired texts as dueling histories; a journey imagined and remembered; 57 mileage markers produce an equal number of prospects. The latest in a series of films about the division of landscapes, objects, people, ideas and the Byrd family of Virginia during the early 18th century.
—David GattenRead More »
“In [Sonbert’s] best work, behind the mask of unalloyed visual pleasure lurks a dramatic intensity and trajectory, not just of personal concerns or protracted journeys but of massive social upheavals, the melding or collision of distinct cultural rituals of crisis, cessation, renewal.” – Paul Arthur
(Descriptions below are online program notes written by Jon Gartenberg)
SHORT FUSE is informed by Sonbert’s awareness of his own mortality, once he was diagnosed with HIV. As film critic Steven Holden astutely noted, in SHORT FUSE, “an undercurrent of rage seeps through the cracks of its ebullient surface.” The opening of the film explodes with a sea of turbulent emotions, underscored by the gripping sound track from Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto. Shifting musical passages collide against images of leisure, war, and protest.Read More »
This evocative tribute to the mother of American avantgarde film calls forth the spirit of one who was larger than life as recounted by those who knew her. Friends and contemporaries float through her homes, recalling in tiny bits and pieces words of Deren’s architectural and personal interior space. Clips from her films are projected back into the spaces where they were originally filmed. Fluid light projections of intimate space provide an elusive agency for a filmmaker most of us will never know.”
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Rose, who works for a penny-pinching junk dealer, dreams of romance with wealthy bachelor Ted Tudor.
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Synopsis
Measuring Change consists of two shots, which run for about 30 minutes each. The camera is completely still and its placement seems to be exactly the same for both. The film revisits Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, his landmark 1970 sculptural work on the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake, which the director had already interacted with in Casting a Glance (2007). The filmmaker seemingly repeats the vantage point of one of the shots he made ten years before, allowing the jetty to spiral towards the center of the frame. Yet, there are two major differences. While Casting a Glance was shot on 16mm, and dealt with the durational limitations of the film reel, Measuring Change is shot on digital, which allows one to watch Smithson’s work through Benning’s camera for a much longer period of time (in the Q&A after the screening, he mentioned that he actually prefers the digital image over film – something one doesn’t hear often coming from filmmakers). The other difference is that this time the lake has receded so far back that the Smithson’s piece is completely surrounded by land, while the shore gets lost in the horizon.Read More »
acqueline Stewart wrote:
Made in collaboration with performer Yolanda Vidato, Water Ritual #1 examines Black women’s ongoing struggle for spiritual and psychological space through improvisational, symbolic acts. Shot in 16mm black-and-white, the film was made in an area in Watts that had been cleared to make way for the I-105 freeway, but ultimately abandoned. At first sight, Milanda (Vidato, wearing a simple dress and scarves on her head and waist) and her environs (burnt-out houses overgrown with weeds) might seem to be located in Africa or the Caribbean, or at some time in the past. This layering of locations and temporalities continues to the film’s striking conclusion, in which a now nude Milanda squats and urinates inside an urban ruin. By making “water,” Milanda evokes the numerous female water-based figures in African-Diaspora cosmology as she attempts to expel the putrefaction she has absorbed from her physical environment, while symbolically cleansing the environment itself. Read More »
Shannon Kelley wrote:
A nun in Uganda weighs the emptiness she finds in her supposed union with Christ. Adapted from a short story by Alice Walker, the film was a deliberate first move by its director toward narrative filmmaking, though its graphic simplicity and pantomimed performance by Barbara O. Jones give it an intensity that anticipates Julie Dash’s work on Daughters of the Dust.Read More »
1. Ask Father
2. Billy Blazes Esq
3. Bumping into Broadway
4. From Hand to Mouth
5. Haunted Spooks
6. An Eastern Westerner
7. High and Dizzy
8. Get Out and Get Under
9. Number Please
10. Now or Never
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“I think 37-73 is an extraordinary work, and the best of [Myers’] long films. I am astonished by his skill in image making, and his power to evoke the crazy pain of being an artist. It is a haunting work, with unforgettable scenes ….” – James Broughton
“Richard Myers’ 37-73 was far and away the most noteworthy film in the Exposition (9th Annual Independent Filmmakers Exposition). In fact, Richard Myers is, in my opinion, one of the few innovative conceptually oriented filmmakers in the country. As powerful and complex as is AKRAN, 37-73 is more taut, richer in associative meaning …. 37-73 is about dreams, about memory and its associations with nightmare and magic.” – Owen Shapiro
“Through Myers’ so eloquently expressed dream world we’re able to perceive the entire panorama of the specifically American imagination. It’s as if he’s tapped our collective subconscious.”—Kevin Thomas, LA Times.Read More »