Richmond Moving Image Co-op - Events - Essential Cinema: Disarming the Canon

RMIC Events >> 2004

Essential Cinema:
Disarming the Canon
Wednesday, October 20, 8 pm

Fuses (1964/67) by Carolee Schneeman 16mm, color, silent, 23 min. Filmed and edited by Schneemann; with herself, James Tenney and Kitch. "Pornography is an anti emotional medium, in content and intent, and its lack of emotion renders it wholly ineffective for women. This absence of sensuality is so contrary to female eroticism that pornography becomes, in fact, anti-sexual. Schneemann's film, by contrast, is devastatingly erotic, transcending the surfaces of sex to communicate its true spirit, its meaning as an activity for herself and, quite accurately, women in general. Significantly, Schneemann conceives the film as shot through the eyes of her cat -- the impassive observer whose view of human sexuality is free of voyeurism and ignorant of morality. "In her attempt to reproduce the whole visual and tactile experience of lovemaking as a subjective phenomenon, Schneemann spent some three years marking on the film, baking it in the oven, even hanging it out the window during rainstorms on the off chance it might be struck by lightning. Much as human beings carry the physical traces of their experiences, so this film testifies to what it has been through and communicates the spirit of its maker. The red heat baked into the emulsion suffuses the film, a concrete emblem of erotic power." -- B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Art Institute.
Cats Amore (2002) by Martha Colburn 16mm, Color, Sound, 6 min. "The cats started as a series of paintings… When you transform the paintings into a film, people can see them, because you can mail them the film. So I copied the cats and made them moveable as puppets, and then I made them dance." – Martha Colburn
	Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) By George Kuchar 16mm, color, sound, 15 min. "A very direct and subtle, very sad and funny look at nothing more or less than sexual frustration and aloneness. In its economy and cogency of imaging, HOLD ME surpasses any of Kuchar's previous work. The odd blend of Hollywood glamour and drama with all-too-real life creates and inspires counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality." -- Ken Kelman
Ballhead (1985) by Mara Mattuschka 16mm, b&w, sound, 5 min. Hands vigorously pull scraps of paper from an antiquated printing press, while their owner remains invisible. Then Mimi Minus and a razor blade; the incident is still shocking, even sixty years after Bunuel's cut into the pupil of an eye, or the brutal shaving of Joan of Arc. The shrouded head, wrapped in muslin, reappears and black paint is daubed over the top. Black is found in many of Mattuschka's films as if a child with dirty fingers had taken the exposed roll of film outside to play. Mara Mattuschka makes bacterial cinema as she daubs and scrawls. -- Stephan Settele
La Suture (2000) by Michele Handelman video, color, sound, 8-1/4 min. An attic, a giant sewing needle and an anti-gravity fairy tale of sibling rivalry. Three sisters fight over who gets the biggest phallus in this post-feminist animation-infused playground by media artist Michelle Handelman. If Hans Christian Anderson got a sex change, surfed the porn sites, and hung with the freaky girls, his stories would look like this.
Mayhem Is This What You Were Born For? (Part 6) (1987) by Abigail Child 16mm, b&w, sound, 16-1/2 min. Characters from PERILS reappear, this time in a film noir setting, soap opera thrillers and Mexican comic books generating the action. Perversely and equally inspired by de Sade's Justine and Vertov's sentences about the satiric detective advertisement, MAYHEM is my attempt to create a film in which Sound is the Character and to do so focusing on sexuality and the erotic. Not so much to undo the entrapment (we fear what we desire; we desire what we fear), but to frame fate, show up the rotation, upset the common, and incline our contradictions toward satisfaction, albeit conscious.
Channeled Energies (1993) by Joel Schlemowitz 16mm, color, sound, 3 min. 3 minutes of painful and pleasurable images glimpsed in negative juxtaposed with a single long scratch played on an optical reader on the soundtrack.
Switch Center (2002) by Ericka Beckman 16mm, color, sound, 10 min. SWITCH CENTER is a tribute to the futuristic architecture of the Soviet post war period, and a reaction to seeing it transitioned to shopping malls or global corporate office structures. I was invited by Balazs Bela Studio in Budapest to produce a short experimental film in Hungary. I was the first American artist to be invited by this famous film collective after the fall of Soviet power. The collaboration took place in August 2000, culminating in SWITCH CENTER, a ten minute experimental documentary shot in many defunct Danube Water Works locations on the outskirts of Budapest. The architecture of a 1960's water purification plant, left intact for 25 years, inspired me to recreate the factory in sight and sound, and to juxtapose that with the present. While I was meditating on the animation of 3-story water tank, a Pokemon commercial was being filmed down the corridor.

MM Serra The Film-Makers' Cooperative is the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world. Created by artists in 1962, the Coop has more than 5,000 films and videotapes in its collection.

Photo: MM Serra, Executive Director, The Film-Makers' Cooperative.
Photo by Ken Hopson