Current Schedule All tickets $6 unless
otherwise noted.
Monday, April 3 at 8 PM
Rocky Road to Dublin
Peter Lennon, 1967, 69 minutes
"Magnificent!
One of
the most beautiful documentaries the cinema has given us." - Cahiers du Cinéma
“One of the few independent documentaries made in Ireland in the 1960s,
Lennon’s film takes a revealing snapshot of his country post-revolution
and finds a society straining under the pressure of social and
religious traditions. After one screening in Dublin in 1968, Rocky Road… was suppressed for
three decades and never released in Irish cinemas or shown on Irish
television. Its international fame was sealed when it became the final
film to be shown at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, before Godard,
Truffaut and co. shut the event down. More than just a fascinating
time-capsule piece, this exceptional, rarely-seen documentary still
remains resonant today.” – ICA, London
Presented in association with the Irish Arts Center.
Still courtesy of First Run/Icarus Films.
Monday, April 10 at 8 PM
Takahiko Iimura: Performance Films
"Iimura is a significant and singular filmmaker, but also
one of the most important conceptual artists working in any medium." –
Malcolm Le Grice
Takahiko Iimura, a key figure in the cultivation of avant-garde film in
Japan and one of its greatest proponents stateside, presents his
recordings of several remarkable performances.
Cine Dance: The Butoh of Tatsumi
Hijikata (1963/5, 33 min)
"Through these films, it
became clear that the Black Butoh dance created by Tatsumi Hijikata is
closer to the neo-dada movement taking over the provocative, cynical
and absurd forms rather than the German expressionist dance usually
connected." - Nicolas Villodre, curator of Cinematheque Francaise, Paris
Fluxus Replayed (1991, 30 min)
A document of Fluxus performance in New York, 1991, in which S.E.M.
Ensemble (Director Petr Kotik) and the members of Fluxus reenact key
works by Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Allison
Knowles, Ben Patterson, Jackson Mac Low and Emmett Williams.
John Cage Performs James Joyce
(1985, 15 min)
A private performance by John Cage realizing his Writing for the Fifth Time Through Finnegan's Wake in three
ways: reading, singing and whispering.
DVDs of each of these works will be available for sale at the screening.
Monday, April 17 at 8 PM
Anton Perich Presents: Starring Taylor
Mead
In the early
Seventies, Anton Perich produced/directed approximately twenty video
movies, starring Taylor Mead, for his weekly cable TV show. At
that time, when the tapes were repeatedly censored by the cable
broadcast network, they created a major scandal within the world of
television, and Ocularis is proud to present three of them this evening.
In The Aging Rock Star, Mead
plays the title character planning a million dollar comeback when all
of his former and current wives, along with his long lost daughter and
her boyfriend, appear at his door asking for money. Claiming to be
poor, he eventually seduces said boyfriend and sails off to Catalina.
Later, in Ulysses, Mead is
cast as an unhealthy zillionaire who, after long travels from
institution to institution, returns home to his luxurious, sprawling
SoHo loft, only to find it transformed into a children’s camp, managed
by his wife’s new husband. Dr. Tinkerbelle reintroduces her patient to
his former wife and takes him through the mansion to meet a variety of
characters, including some visitors from Transylvania.
And finally, in Washington Rasputin,
Mead stars as a senile grandmother who owns CBGB and is heiress to a
great American family fortune. Sometimes, she turns into the handsome
Sylvester who pretends to be dead. As her aging grandchildren come out
of the woodwork, they are subjected to Mead’s bizarre saga of the
family history, one illustrated with somber portraits of their decadent
ancestors hanging on the walls. And they have to sing for their
dinner.
With an introduction by Anton Perich and Taylor Mead.
Monday, April 24 at 8 PM
Argument
Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall, 1978, 84 minutes
"The twin principles
of modernism and marketing: seeing fresh promise in familiar things."
Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall's legendary and provocative essay film Argument, first screened at the
Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1978, has been almost unseen
for the last twenty years. LUX has now made a new High Definition
restoration of the film, and its trenchant analysis of media ideology
seems more pertinent than ever.
Three male voices dissect one edition of the New York Times through a series of
locked-off shots, revealing the prejudice and latent content of news
and advertisements, reading images as texts and presenting text as an
image. Fashion photographs are used as a starting point for a political
investigation of news, advertising, and images of masculinity - while
at the same time, the filmmakers reflect on their own position and the
possibility of radical film practice. Influenced by both the America
and European avant-gardes, notably Godard and Hollis Frampton, Argument is stylistically beautiful
and relentless in its enquiry.
With an introduction by Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall.
Monday, May 1 at 8 PM
BAC 40th International Film and Video
Festival
The Brooklyn Arts Council International Film and Video Festival has
served independent film and video artists for forty years, making it
the longest running event of its kind in Brooklyn. The festival
provides opportunities for film and video artists to show their work to
other artists, critics, the media and an enthusiastic New York
audience. The festival also serves Brooklyn and the wider New York
community by providing quality film and video programs from all over
the world, free of charge.
In conjunction with other screenings at venues across the borough, this
year Ocularis continues its tradition of showcasing some of the
festival’s best short films and videos. For more information, please
visit www.brooklynartscouncil.org.
FREE SCREENING
Monday, May 8 at 8 PM
Flipped Chips
Curated by
interdisciplinary artist duo LoVid, Flipped Chips includes single
channel videos as well as presentations by artists from around the
world who custom make their own hardware video instruments.
Dan Sandin, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Matthew Schlanger,
Steve Beck, Jim Wiseman, and Bill Etra represent a generation of
pioneers who explored video and moving image synthesis. These artists
developed hardware instruments as technological advancements in an era
of idealism and utopian views of communication, where video and
television were regarded as the ultimate new creative medium, able to
elicit widespread cultural and social change.
Tonight their work will be shown alongside that of a new generation of
artists returning to hardware-based video instruments, like Billy Roisz
(NTSC), noteNdo, Jon Satrom, Paul Slocum, Karl Klomp, Cory Arcangel and
Paper Rad, and LoVid. Departing from their predecessors, the latter set
approaches technology with personal and global nostalgia as well as a
romantic infatuation with the media-generating object. Inspired by
noise, extreme music, glitch and hacker culture, as well as the
fragility, unpredictability, and limitations of technology, they choose
to work with decades-old electronic components for personal aesthetic
reasons and as a reaction to the dominance of technology and media in
mainstream culture.
Advance
tickets available here.
Monday, May 15 at 8 PM
TVEYE Video Salon
Hot on the heels of their
previous DVD releases (which include work by
the likes of Super 8 luminary Saul Levine) TVEYE Video’s ready and
waiting with their latest title, Video
Salon: Volume I, and Ocularis is the happy host of its screening
and launch party.
“In 2002, the residents, neighbors, and friends of Exile, an
artist’s loft in Long Island City, created Video Salon. Video Salon's
primary purpose was to bring together a network of people with a
variety of talents and skills who could find ways to combine their
efforts to produce a video in a single day. No postproduction,
minimal preproduction, everyone participating on every level. One
prerequisite: enthusiasm. A director’s background was not a
factor. Filmmakers, teachers, musicians, landlords, construction
workers, anyone could propose a project. The rule was for each script
to be shot sequentially, shot by shot, in-camera, on one videotape. The
very first Video Salon project, You
Can’t Have Love Without Love, featured a 1960’s-era rock band
who believe their music can change the world. The band’s music
was written and pre-recorded by members of the crew. The cast and
crew had one day to pull it off, shooting the entire project in a
matter of hours. In camera. One shot after another. No breaks. No
dreams of post-production. At the end of the day,
the whole crew screened the finished video on the television in the
living room. What they watched was the final product. There was
no turning back. The challenge and intensity of the shoot was instantly
rewarded. Instant gratification.
Video Salon has continued since then, each video expanding the
collaboration and the boundaries of the previous. A horror bloodbath,
an elderly adoption scandal, a dental disaster, steamboats, pathetic
lawyers, telepathic miscommunications, a bling bling music video, 19th
century Spanish Flamenco dancers...you never know what you’re getting
with Video Salon.” – Adrianne Jorge
Sunday, May 21 at 1 PM
Children’s Matinee
Charles Silver,
Associate Curator in the Film and Media Department at
MoMA, returns to Ocularis with another terrific lineup of children’s
films from the Museum’s collection. His last visits took us from the
moon to the circus to Sinbad’s Island. And his new selection promises
to be just as exciting, an afternoon well spent for kids, parents, and
Silly Symphony enthusiasts everywhere.
This event will also serve as a fundraiser to support The Williamsburg
Neighborhood Nursery School, an exemplary local nursery school offering
an early childhood program supporting the development of pre-school age
children.
Cracker Jacks and other snacks included with price of admission.
Work to be screened:
Dare-Deviltry
MGM Sports Parade, narrated by Pete Smith, 1936, 11 min
This film takes a look at the diving horse and other death-defying
novelties at Atlantic City's Steel Pier.
The Red Balloon
Albert Lamorisse, 1956, 33 min
This Oscar-winning short is one of the most beloved children's film
ever made. It recounts the adventures of a Parisian boy as he follows a
red balloon all over his city.
Twice Two
James Parrott, 1933, 20 min
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy marry each other's twin sister (the boys
play all four roles) and try to live together with predictably
complicated results ending in the usual mayhem.
Ticket Price: Adults - $7, Children $5
Sunday, June 4 at 7 PM (Special Screening)
Guy Sherwin - Live Cinema
Since the early 70s, UK artist Guy Sherwin has been using
film and projection to explore and experiment with light and time. He
will present an evening of expanded cinema works, from simple
performances such as Man with Mirror
in which the filmmaker interacts with his former self; to live
multi-layered projections such as Vowels
and Consonants, made and performed with Lynn Loo.
Several films in the program use hand-made optical soundtracks.
The program is in three parts:
Optical Sound Films
Cycles #3 , 1972/2003, 9 min,
live projection for two 16mm projectors, two loudspeakers; Vowels and Consonants, 2005, 12
min, (with Lynn Loo) for five 16mm projectors; Newsprint #2 , 1972/2006, 10 min,
live projection for two performers, two 16mm projectors, two
loudspeakers; Railings, 1977,
9 min, 16mm for vertical format projection.
Urban Spaces
Station. Camden Road, 2004, 8
min, three screen 16mm projection, silent; Under the Freeway, 1995, 16 min,
16mm, optical sound; Bay Bridge from
Embarcadero, 2006, 6 min, three screen 16mm projection, silent.
Mirrors
Man with Mirror, 1976/2006,
9 min, live performance for super 8 film and hand-held screen
Also showing is Tree Reflection,
a film loop reflected in the pool at Galapagos.
Monday, June 5 at 8 PM
Free To Be…You and Me Invitational
Inspired by a Brooklyn film
artist’s recent discovery that his 16mm
collection contained multiple copies of the celebrated 1974 film (for
television) Marlo Thomas’s Free To
Be...You and Me, Ocularis has devised a scheme to put his reels
to good use. More than twenty film and video artists will be invited to
rework, restage, respond to, satirize, criticize, or in their own way
create short works inspired by the original’s all-too-memorable
segments, including “It’s All Right to Cry,” “William Wants a Doll,”
“Ladies First,” and “Parents Are People.”
Recognized as an important cultural document of the shift in values our
country experienced during the 1970s, Free
To Be...You and Me (originally a book and concept album) stirred
conversation among people of all ages on hitherto unspoken issues like
divorce, media awareness, and, maybe most cohesively, the identity
politics of gender and race. In light of how such conversations
have evolved into the 21st century, including more sophisticated global
perspectives, issues of sexuality, and how the rhetoric of “freedom”
has taken on new resonance within our current state of affairs,
Ocularis is excited to see the results of its challenge.
Conceived by Erik Z and Nick Hallett.
Curated by Ocularis.
Free To Be You and Me — Darrin Martin,
Boy Meets Girl — Joshua Thorson,
When We Grow Up — Laura Parnes,
Parents Are People — Jason Cortlund
and Julia Halperin, Housework*
— Seth Kirby, Helping — Spencer Parsons, Don't Dress Your
Cat in an Apron* — Jennifer Matotek,
Ladies First — Ximena
Cuevas, Dudley Pippin — Kent
Lambert, It's All Right to Cry — Mighty Robot, My Dog Is a Plumber* —
Stephanie Gray and Kelly Spivey, William's Doll — Peggy
Ahwesh, Atalanta — Lynne Sachs,
I'd Rather Be the Sun — Michael Gitlin
and Jacqueline Goss, Marlo
Thomas Talking with Kids About Their Siblings — Nao
Bustamante, Sisters and Brothers — Ben Coonley, Three Wishes— Big Noise Films, Girl Land* — Bradley Eros, Circle of Friends — Tyler Coburn, Free To Be You and Me
(Reprise) — Ray Sweeten
*Denotes album-only track.
Sunday, June 11 at 7 PM (Special Screening)
I Am Not a War Photographer
An Illustrated Talk
by Lynne Sachs
"'I Am Not a War
Photographer' is a cinematic presentation and talk exploring my
decade-long artistic rather than physical immersion in war. From
Vietnam to Bosnia to WWII Occupied Rome to the Middle East today, my
experimental documentary films push the borders between genres,
discourses, radicalized identities, psychic states and nations through
the intertwining of abstract and reality based imagery. In my talk, I
will introduce precise visual strategies I have discovered in working
with these fraught and divisive themes. Often opting for a painterly
rather than a photographic articulation of conflict, I struggle with
each new project to find a precise language of images and sounds with
which to discuss these volatile moments in history, exposing what I see
as the limits of a conventional, documentary representation of both the
past and the present. Infusions of colored “brush strokes” catapult a
viewer into contemporary Vietnam. Floating drinking glasses moving
across a Muslim cemetery in Sarajevo evoke a war time without water.
Pulsing, geometric mattes suspended in cinematic space block news
footage of a bombing in Tel Aviv. These and many other
examples form my visual approach to looking at trauma, painful memory,
and conflict. By using abstraction we are not avoiding graphic realism
but rather unpeeling the outer, more familiar layer, hoping to reveal
something new about perception and engagement in cinema." - Lynne Sachs
Including clips from Which Way is
East: Notebooks from Vietnam; Investigation
of a Flame; www.House-of-Drafts.org; States of Unbelonging; and a new
work-in-progress.
Monday, June 12 at 8 PM
Mood Alterations
The MadCat Women’s
International Film Festival makes a pit stop in Brooklyn with these
alternately loving and disturbing 16mm portraits from Austria, France,
Germany, Mexico and the US. Filmmakers use editing, optical printing
and camera movement (or lack there of) to create an ethnographic study
of Romania, a musical peek at a girl on the verge of puberty and a
pulsating found footage bonanza, among other stories.
Work to be screened: don’t leave
without news, Christine Khalafian, 18 min, 2005; Contemplating the City (Contemplando la
ciudad),
Angela Reginato, 4 min, 2005; Picture Again, Linda Christanell, 9
min, 2003; Influence of Ocular Light
Perception on Metabolism, Stella Friedrichs and Thomas Draschan,
5 min, 2005; Bubonic Prairie,
Mary Beth Reed, 3 min, 2005; Ice/Sea,
Vivian Ostrovsky, 32 min, 2004.
Curated by Ariella Ben-Dov.
Sunday, June 18 at 6:30 PM
Open Zone XXI
Closing every calendar is Open Zone, Ocularis’ quarterly open screen
for new works by NYC-based artists. Including documentary, experimental
and narrative film, video and new media, Open Zone provides a unique
opportunity to view and discuss emerging work of all kinds. Inclusion in the program is held on
a first-come, first-serve basis.
6:30 PM
Misplaced Anxiety, Greg
Singer, 8 min
The Plain Silvery Side of This Disc...,
Sean Capone, 1 min
Evocation, Jaeyoon Park, 4 min
Storm Brains, Heli Frantzen, 3
min
Turgataur, Marjan Moghaddam, 3
min
Nocturne Revisited, Aneikit
Bonnel, 4 min
Le Mis Popote, Anders Bramsen,
11 min
The Subway Show, Nurit
Bar-shai and Kleoni Manoussakis, 10 min
The Night Before Christmas,
Sam Bassett, 8 min
Mary-Kate & Ashley Conquer the
Bed Bugs, Tim Reardon, 3 min
8 PM
Happy 10th Birthday Ocularis, Happy 10th Birthday CAVE
Located in Williamsburg, CAVE gallery has been presenting exhibitions
and performances and hosting residencies for ten years. To commemorate
our mutual birthdays CAVE founder and director Shige Moriya will
present a 20 minute live video performance in collaboration with SUIT.
8:30 PM
A Long Struggle, Lea Rekow, 15
min
9 PM
Untitled, Moira Tierney, 5 min
Untitled, Bosko Blagojevic, 3
min
Children of the Night,
Dónal Ó'Céilleachair, 4 min
Void Ratio, Ray Sweeten, 7 min
Video Optica, Katja Loher,
6:38 min
Bird, James Weinheimer, 7 min,
video
The Kite, Julieta Aranda, 5
min
Document, Memory, Tom
Jarmusch, 12 min
10 PM
The Man From Brancheville,
Joanne Pagano Weber, 12 min
Scarecrow, Carleton Bright, 3
min
Ghost Tank Apocalypse, John E.
Goras, 3 min
"Locus Solus" – Broadway,
Antonio Ferrera, 4 min
This One's for the Men, Neneng
Elis, 12 min
“Bosco” Chocolate Syrup, Willy
Hartland, 1 min
Untitled, Tom Ruth, 8 min
Demolition (Brooklyn Style),
Elle Burchill, 8 min
Monday, June 26 at 8 PM
Ocularis at Ten
Our show of shows!
Founded in June, 1996 as a rooftop film series catering to local
audiences in North Brooklyn, Ocularis has since evolved into a weekly
cinema, a producer of collaborative film/video work and a summer
open-air screening series. Now, in honor of that highly eventful
decade, we’ve gathered ten individuals—founders, board members,
directors, et al—who have helped make Ocularis what it is today. Each
will present a film or video that they’ve found representative of their
time with the organization, along with an anecdote or two. And the
results, at once hit parade and history lesson, are to sure to make for
one of our most memorable evenings yet.
Work to be screened: Nouvelle Vach,
Bruce McClure, 6 min, 1998, selected by Dónal
Ó'Céilleachair; Sex
Without Glasses, Ross McLaren, 13 min, 1983, selected by Marie
Losier; The Moschops, Jim
Trainor, 13 min, 2000, selected by Jonathan Howell; Isle of Flowers, Jorge Furtado, 12
min, 1989, selected by Isabelle Dupuis; Little Flags, Jem Cohen, 7 min,
2000, selected by Karyn Riegel; Endless
Obsession,
Glen Fogel, 6 min, 2001, selected by Henriette Huldisch; Les malles, Felix Samba N'Diaye, 13
min, 1989, selected by Moira Tierney; Nettezza
Urbana, Michelangelo Antonioni, 9 min, 1948, selected by Sophie
Fenwick; Welcome to My Homey Page,
Paper Rad, 3 min, 2003, selected by Lauren Cornell; Pixillation, Lillian Schwartz, 4
min, 1970, selected by Thomas Beard