Boston's Own: A Night of Local Cinema!
Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 20h, $5 Donation
The Video Underground
385 Centre St, Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts 02130-1241
Come one, come all! Come to the Video Underground and spend an exquisite evening under the stars with a night of Boston based filmmakers and artist, working in 16mm and Super8 avant garde cinema! Featuring films by Rob Todd, Saul Levine, Rebecca Meyers, Brittany Gravely, Gordon Nelson, Tara Nelson, Shawn Morrissey, Mariya Nikiforova, Adam Paradis, Kim Arnias, and much more!
Many of the filmmakers will be in attendance for this night of local cinema goodness!
- Spun (Saul Levine, 1992, Color, Super8 Sound, 24fps, 12 min.)
With Amanda Katz spinning and weaving. - (Canyon Cinema Catalog Notes)
- Lullaby (Robert Todd, 2009, color, 16mm, 8 min.)
Waiting for something to happen, my thoughts moving me to fill the space with a presence. Haunting in the dim, then found myself in a playground, quiet, colorful, and moved within it, with it, me and the playground, alone. I swung away, and slowly drifted off.
- Spectral cycle (Robert Todd, 2009, Color, 16mm, 5 min.)
A ghosting on film, run through the color spectrum, a voice conjoining spirituality and aesthetic practice, both on the viewer's part and the maker's.
- Lions and tigers and bears (Rebecca Meyers, 2005, Color, 16mm, 12 min.)
In lions and tigers and bears, Rebecca Meyers focuses on the urban wildlife, both real and simulated, with which we share our cities. The most unlikely creatures somehow survive in a hostile environment, while animals are also invoked in artworks, corporate logos and other icons. Pets and animal icons testify to a human longing for proximity to wildlife, while the urban landscape offers its fugitive creatures artificial substitutes for the tree limbs and tunnels of the wild (Toronto Film Festival Program Notes).
- Whale/Wail (Paul Turano, 1995, b&w, 16mm, 6 min.)
This film is an optically printed and transformed work derived from an 18 second sequence of images shot from the T.V. depicting pilot whales beaching themselves, and humans pushing them back to sea. The score is a combination of electronically manipulated sounds: voice, frequency, guitar, and ambient sounds of the ocean. The film attempts to create an aural and visual experience akin to the whales’ experience of self destruction.
- Introduction to living in a closed system (Brittany Gravely, 2001, Color, 16mm, 18 min.)
What each of them [Lewis Mumford and R. Buckminster Fuller] has done, really, has been to write philosophical poems celebrating a world that does not truly exist, and perhaps can never exist, even though the poems are true.-Allan Temko
Introduction to Living in a Closed System uses an innovative technology which operates on both the conscious and subconscious levels to address the complexity of the poetry and the problems created by pastoral dreams of synthetic futures.
- Automatic meat probe (Shawn Morrissey, 2001, Color, 16mm, 5 min.)
Sounds from the Bruce Willis film Die Hard and pictures from an anonymous ’70s action movie are cut up, collaged, and screwed with in a story about boys who like long walks on the beach. It’s like a gunfight without the guns, if you know what I mean… - (Magic Lantern Program Notes)
- Bus film (Gordon Nelson, 1986, Color, Super8 sound, 24fps, 2'5 min.)
Composed of a pattern of 3 second shots, this metrical film is a record of a cold bus trip around the fringes of Erie, Pennsylvania.
- Re-synch (Tara Nelson, 2010, Color, 16mm, 2'5 min.)
Two educational films and a movie trailer from the 1970's are fragmented and re-combined to create new relationships between picture and sound. Fast cars, drugs and child safety tips converge in this found footage film.
- Ward's pond (Mariya Nikiforova, 2009, Color, 16mm, 9 min.)
In the spirit of Robert Smithson and James Benning, 'Ward's Pond' is a film-poem dedicated to a location in Jamaica Plain, MA. A glacial kettle hole that belonged to the Ward family farm in the 1600s, the pond and its surroundings were transformed into a park by Frederick Law Olmsted at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, overshadowed by a high-rise apartment building, Ward's Pond continues its quiet existence. The film captures several moments over the course of nearly a year in its life.
- Penumbra (Kimberly Arnias, 2010, b&w, 16mm, 6 min.)
Penumbra, examines “how the boundaries of ‘who we are’ are constantly being negotiated with others…[and] where contradictions are suppressed in order to maintain continuity.” - (GASP Arts Program Notes)
- Bullwinkle film (Adam Paradis, 2010, Color, 16mm, 4 min.)
The reel still turning, the band plays on. Endlessly falling into the unknown, spotlights cut across the sky and the marquee lights up again, and we are offered something exciting and bright.
But in the end it is all the same thing, once again.
Event Sponsored by -Ula Cafe- City Feed and Supply-Ufo Hefeweizen-
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Bajo el título de L'ouragan scopique" (El huracán escópico), la