Brakhage and Solomon are two American giants in the so-called poetic, lyrical and personal film. Stan Brakhage is one of the most influential filmmakers in American avant-garde cinema, noted for his unflinching social commentaries and technical innovations. Over his nearly 40-year career, he has made over 200 films of varying length. He made his first film, Interim (1952) at age 18 after dropping out of college. Brakhage films seek to change the way we see. They encourage viewers to eschew traditional narrative structure in favor of pure visual perception that is not reliant on naming what is seen; rather his goal is to create a more visceral visual experience, for he believes that a "stream-of visual-consciousness could be nothing less than the pathway of the soul." To this end, his films are shot in highly sensual colors and utilize minimal soundtracks. Phil Solomon is an internationally recognized filmmaker and has been teaching both film history/aesthetics and film production at CU since 1991. Professor Solomon's work has been screened in every major venue for experimental film throughout the U.S. and Europe, including 3 Cineprobes (one-man shows) at the Museum of Modern Art and two Whitney Biennials. 

Everyday millions of hand-held self-portraits, or ‘selfies’, are uploaded on to the internet. With today’s personal technologies, private self-representations-made-public seem symptomatic of Guy Debord's ‘Society of the Spectacle’ or Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulation’. Yet for decades, experimental filmmakers and video artists have interrogated questions of self-identity and -referentiality. With the performing body as the site of action produced in relation to the film apparatus and video system, they offer a powerful critique of the male gaze and, in turn, the seeming narcissism at the center of today’s ‘selfie’ culture. A diverse range of artists and traditions have thereby subversively taken up subjective, first-person cinema and issues of self-performance in order to explore questions of identity, power, memory, and the construction of the self. ‘Mirror Me’ presents a selection of musings on the mirroring of the ‘self’ in self-reflexive film and video auto-portraits and personal diary films in order to weave together something of a ‘pre-history’ of the ‘selfie’.

Curated by Pascal Richard and Christopher Zimmerman

To celebrate our fifth year anniversary we’ve given ourselves the challenge of programming (and projecting) an evening of double projections!

Vanessa O’Neill’s sublime Suspension uses rephotography, tinting and superimposition to turn a westward view of the Pacific Ocean into a sublime interplay of waves, light and grain. Malcolm Le Grice’s classic Berlin Horse is a film that explores the possibilities of the loop, taking a short fragment of a silent film and subjecting it to a series of colour processes amplified by the phased music of Brian Eno. Daichi Saito’s Never a Foot Too Far, Even is a contemporary expansion, superimposing a section of a Kung-Fu action film into a perceptual play, accompanied by a violin composition by Malcolm Goldstein. Tonight’s screening of Visions in Mediation #2: Mesa Verde, Stan Brakhage’s vision quest to the ruins of the Ancient Peublo cliff dwellings in Southwestern Colorado is amplified by a second print given to Kate MacKay from the filmmaker as a gift. And finally, a third projector will be sparked to present For My Crushed Right Eye, Toshio Matsumoto’s ode to the social unrest and expansion of the late sixties, all of which threatened to burst out of the frame.