Three Thursdays dedicated to short film

Thursday, July 15th, Sundown (8:30pm)
PS 1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave @ 46th Ave, Long Island City, New York
visit PS 1 at www.ps1.org Curated by Ocularis and the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema

Admission is a $5 suggested donation

Pre-screening ambient musical performances by Vaimarama
Lighting by Galapagos Art and Performance Space

Dynamic, kinetic, satiric, and entrancing adventures in this eclectic collection of experimental films that cross from pop cultural allusions to social critique. Kick-ass editing and psychedelic sounds.

PASSAGE À L'ACTE; Martin Arnold; Austria; 1993; B&W; 16mm; 12min
Four people at the breakfast table locked in the beat of the editing table. The short, pulsating sequence shows in its original state, a deceptive harmony. Arnold deconstructs this scenario of normality by destroying its original continuity, catching the tinny sounds and bizarre body movements of the subjects. The message which lies deep under the surface of the family idyll is exposed-that message is war.

HOME STORIES; Matthias Müller; Germany; 1990; 16mm; 6 min
"She screams. She falls silent. The expectation of terror creates her terror. But what she faces is nothing but the observer's view. She is the observed. Cliches of melodrama unite into a drama of stereotypes. The brilliant montage of cases in point reveals the mechanism of voyeurism in HOME STORIES by Matthias Müller." -German Association of Film Critics

"Home Stories" is created out of found material but never the less it is formed of original esprit. Scenes of Hollywood melodramas are montaged so that through repetition, the cinema goddesses assume the stereotype of the classical victim. The beauties are looking at some kind of threat that is placed outside of the image. Müller's heroes have many destinies but only one role. They represent the observed in a scope where looks can kill. -Heike Kühn, Frankfurter Rundschau, 1991

TERMINUS FOR YOU; Nicolas Rey; France; 1996; B&W; 16mm; 10 min
In the beginning, man invented the staircase. Standing at its bottom, or resting at its top, he contemplated the scenery that lay around him. Alas, he became weary of constantly climbing up and down these steps and soon devised the escalator, which would take him effortlessly to the peaks or the bowls of the world. Verticality now conquered, man took his ambition to the dreary lengths of the underground- cinema's unlikely twin- hoping that the acceleration of bodies on conveyor belts would provide a similar rush. But boredom continued to reign supreme in the halls of the subway. So man, inspired by a stroke of genius, decided to cover the walls with gigantic multicolored advertisements... and finally, there was light.

HAPPY END; Peter Tscherkassky; Austria; 1996; 16mm; 10 min
Happy End is a found footage film: the re-working of someone else's home movies from the 60s and 70s. The sequences selected are taken from many hours of the staged private life of "Rudolf" and "Elfriede", pivoting on demonstrative celebrations, alcohol and cake consumption.

Who watched these two before Peter Tscherkassky's (and then our) gaze fell on their gaiety? Who stood behind the camera? I think that the theory that they themselves are responsible (in expectancy of their own spectatorship- look, it was so wonderful there) misses the mark. Neither is it a hidden camera, since Rudolf and Elfriede turn to it laughing, gesticulating and with glass in hand. It must be their child, a child who never enters the picture himself, except in the form of a symbolic doll and recurring mirrors which evidence his doings.

LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS; Bruce Conner; USA-Mexico; 1961-95; Color; 16mm; 15 min A hypnotic trip of lush beauty and saturated color. Mushroom hunting in Mexico, set to the swirling music of Terry Riley.

ZERO; Joe Kelly; Calgary; Canada; 1997; 16mm; 3 min An exhilarating take on ethnographic films, combining innovative animation and editing with a great ear for rhythm.

FREE FALL; Arthur Lipsett; Canada; 1964; 16mm; 9 min This biting satire on North American cultural mores by Stanley Kubrick's favorite avant-gardist is a collage of film scraps (rejected from Canadian Television). Approximate to channel surfing through the signals of television's golden era relayed by space aliens.

Thursday, July 22nd, Sundown (8:30pm)
PS 1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave @ 46th Ave, Long Island City, New York
visit PS 1 at www.ps1.org Curated by Ocularis and the Independent Feature Project (IFP)

Admission is a $5 suggested donation

Secret lives, hidden stories, fantastic visions. Animated, documentary, and narrative shorts. Directors will be present to discuss their work.

Reception to follow at Galapagos Art and Performance Space, 70 North 6th Street, Williamsburg

PASSAGE À L'ACTE; Martin Arnold; Austria; 1993; B&W; 16mm; 12min
YOURS, Jeff Scher; 1998; Color; 16mm; 4 minutes
Eye-popping and playful, a sharp short from acclaimed animator Jeff Scher.

CUBA 15; Elizabeth Schub; 1998; 16mm; 12 minutes
In Cuba, a girl's fifteenth birthday is almost as important as her wedding. An insightful and humorous look at the two days surrounding this rite of passage.

I REMEMBER, David Chartier and Avi Weider; 1998; Color; 16mm; 17 minutes

John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) stars in this lyrical exploration of a young man's memories. Poignant and outrageous.

THE SECRET STORY; Janie Geiser; 1997; Color; 16mm, 9 minutes
Toy figures moving "through a landscape of domestic images and family illness... suggesting both the dark and the cathartic trajectories of the richest fairy tales."

THE LAST GUY TO LET YOU DOWN; Rolf Gibbs; 1998; B&W; 16mm; 12 minutes
The engaging documentary portrait of a full-time mortician and part-time doomed romantic. "The Last Guy" is wry, disturbing, and surprisingly upbeat.

TWO OR THREE THINGS BUT NOTHING FOR SURE; Jane C. Wagner & Tina DiFeliciantonio; 1996; 16mm; 12 minutes
A powerful cinematic portrait of author Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina), interweaving childhood photos and documentary footage in an exploration of identity.

THAT CREEPY OLD DOLL; Beck Underwood; 1998; Color, 16mm; 4 minutes
An animated tale of a child's obsession with scary things. Definitely not a bedtime story.

HERB; Amie Steir; 1998; Color; 16mm; 8 minutes
Herb is a very sexy guy. A Long Island rock god with dreams of Playgirl glory... His girlfriend tells all.

Ocularis is a non-profit organization run by filmmakers, curators and cinephiles dedicated to bringing repertory cinema, combined with innovative short films, to New York's alternative cinema audiences. Ocularis was originally conceived of as a center for independent filmmakers to meet and interact, to screen their work, and see and to discuss the work of other filmmakers. In its primary venue located in Galapagos, (an old mayonnaise factory converted into an Art & Performance Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn), Ocularis screens 16mm retro features preceded by short films by local filmmakers weekly, and curates events such as silent films accompanied by live, original scores, and short film programs traversing a wide range of genres.

The New York Times called Ocularis "one of the more evocative new screening venues" and New York Magazine named our rooftop series as the Best Open Air Movie Screenings in their 1998 Best of New York issue.

Ocularis comes from the Late Latin and directly translated means 'of eyes', and originally comes from the Latin 'Oculus' which means eye. For more information, visit us at www.billburg.com/ocularis

The Independent Feature Project (IFP) is a not-for-profit service organization dedicated to providing resources, information and avenues of communication for its members: independent filmmakers, industry professionals and independent film enthusiasts. It is committed to the idea that independent film is an important art form and a powerful voice in our society.

The IFP provides services to independent filmmakers of varying levels of experience which assist them in expressing their unique points of view. It facilitates a connection between the creative and business communities. Other goals of the organization are to expand and educate the audience for independent film, and to encourage the diversity and quality of independent production. IFP has regional representation in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis and New York and recognizes that American independent filmmaking has no one address and speaks to people everywhere. For information contact IFP, 104 West 29th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10001 Tel: (212) 465-8200 Fax: (212) 465-8525 E-mail: ifpny@ifp.org website: www.ifp.org

Thursday, July 29th, Sundown (8:30pm)
PS 1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave @ 46th Ave, Long Island City, New York
visit PS 1 at www.ps1.org Curated by Ocularis

Admission is a $5 suggested donation

Pre-screening ambient musical performances by Vaimarama
Lighting by Galapagos Art and Performance Space

Mosaic spaces of sound and vision, journeys, collage, and an ode to industrial Long Island City. Short work by filmmakers native to, residing in, or transfixed by the borough of Queens.

Alan Berliner
CITY EDITION; 1980; 16mm; B/W; sound; 10 minutes
"...the newspaper page...you have very loud and noisy headlines...a mosaic space made up of unconnected items from every part of the world at once.... The total lack of story line...is as sophisticated as Picasso..." --Marshall McLuhan Permanent Collection: Museum of Modern Art

MYTH IN THE ELECTRIC AGE; 1981; 16mm; color; sound; 13 minutes
commentary by Marshall McLuhan "...Berliner's film, which talks about nature, culture and technology, impresses through its outstanding classical editing technique... Berliner finds precise and original transitions." Catalogue essay by Ines Sommer. --Found Footage Permanent Collections: Museum of Modern Art, Queens Museum, NYC Public Library International Conference/Exhibition: "Found Footage" Vienna, Austria (1991)

Alan Berliner was born and raised in Far Rockaway, Queens. A recipient of both Rockefeller Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships, Berliner has achieved recognition as one of the leading independent filmmakers working today. Selected retrospectives of his films have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the International Center of Photography (NYC) and at festivals from Norway and Finland to England and Australia. The New York Times has described Berliner's work as "powerful, compelling and bittersweet... full of juicy conflict and technique, unpredictable in their power of fine art to transform life." In addition to his work in film, Berliner has also produced a substantial body of photographic, sculptural and sound installation works. AUDIOFILE (1993) and AVIARY (1993), both interactive audio installations, were exhibited at the Walter Reade Theatre Gallery at Lincoln Center in January 1994 and at Anthology Film Archives in November 1994. His first one-person exhibition, FOUND SOUND: Audio & Video Installation Works featuring the premieres of CRITICAL MASS (1996) and THE RED THREAD (1996), was held at Sculpture Center Gallery in New York City in March 1996.

Jim Jennings
SILVER CUP; 1998; 16mm; b/w; silent; 11 minutes
A tender ode to the industrial neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens, strung together with Manhattan across the East River by the Queensborough Bridge and the elevated subway line. "The trains and webs of steel enslave and at the same time bring us together. The past haunts me, and at the same time its memories are precious. Much of the film was edited in the camera. About half of what I shot was discarded, and in the editing room I very slowly removed and arranged what remained after several screenings." -Jim Jennings Jim Jennings has screened his work at some dozen one-man shows in the United States and Europe, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to San Francisco Cinematheque to the Oberhausen Film Festival in Germany. His work has been represented in group shows at the Whitney Museum and in the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, both in New York City.

"A unique kind of lyricism comes through and hovers over the images on the screen like the light that projects and contains them" Ernie Gehr

Peter Rose
THE MAN WHO COULD NOT SEE FAR ENOUGH; 1981; 16mm; sound; 33 minutes
"The film uses literary, structural, autobiographical, and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images, a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it "stunning" and "hallucinatory." The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mystical" -Peter Rose

"a powerfully formal, analytic inquiry into the nature of vision and cinema...painfully beautiful images of mysterious events and things that split, multiply, migrate and quiver with a hallucinatory vibrance...a rich fabric interlacing the metaphysical with the ironical." --Sally Banes, Village Voice

Peter Rose was born and raised in Whitestone, Queens. Peter Rose has been making film, tape, installation, and performance works for over thirty years. The works range in form from complex meditations on time, space, light and perception to ribald deconstructions of political and theoretical language. His films and tapes are known for their technical inventiveness, spirited sense of play, and philosophical engagement and have been awarded major distinction at numerous festivals both here and abroad.

The recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including four from the National Endowment for the Arts, six from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and both Guggenheim and Pew Foundation Fellowships, Rose has shown his work extensively at media centers throughout the U.S. and abroad, including solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and group shows at the Whitney Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

"the man who could not see far enough" is in the film collections of the Yokohama Museum of Art, Image Forum in Tokyo, and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Joseph Cornell
THREE BY CORNELL: JACK'S DREAM, CARROUSEL, and THIMBLE THEATRE; edited by Larry Jordan; 1940s; 16mm; Sound; 24 minutes
"Cornell's editing has not been tampered with. It is sometimes minimal (the editing), sometimes extensive, always sensitive. I have added sound tracks to two of the films, using existing notes which Cornell left. Cornell collects images and preserves them in some kind of cinematic suspension that is hard -impossible- to describe. But it's a delight to anyone whose soul has not been squashed by the heavy dictates of Art. JACK'S DREAM is a puppet animation into which Cornell has inserted a few shots from other material - just enough to throw it into the sphere of artful fantasy. CARROUSEL is a fully edited animal piece. There is no way now of determining the order in which the films were made, or even the exact years, but it was some time in the '40s."-Larry Jordan

Never a bohemian, postwar artist Joseph Cornell lived most of his life with his mother and invalid brother on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens. Although his reputation as a recluse is almost legendary, Cornell had extensive contact with the major cultural figures of the century--Warhol, de Kooning, Yoko Ono, and others.

"The box maker and collagist Joseph Cornell was intensely interested in cinema. He had a fine private collection of 16mm prints of comedies, newsreels, and trick films, which he eventually donated to Anthology Film Archive. he also made films but rarely exhibited them. "My filmmaking never really got off the ground," he said more than once. Despite this modest self-appraisal, Joseph Cornell was a superb and innovative filmmaker." -Jonas Mekas