Contemporary Animation

Screening Monday April 18th:

William Kentridge / Drawing the Passing

documentary by Maria Anna Tappeiner and Reinhard Wulf

Exploring a space between the personal and the political,  the work of South African artist William Kentridge has since the 1970's investigated the diseased, amnesiac consciousness of the late and post-apartheid South Africa. Kentridge has received international acclaim for his animated films, drawings and theatre work.

In November 1998, filmmaker Reinhard Wulf and art historian Maria Anna Tappeiner visited Kentridge's Johannesburg studio to film the artist at work. The resulting documentary records Kentridge in final stages of animating Steroscope. It includes excerpts from the finished film, plus Kentridge's reflections on his work and the process of making it.  The documentary is a unique record of the artist at work, offering exceptional insight into his creative process.

 Click to view William Kentridge's bio on ART21

 

Wednesday April 20th:

Visiting Artist James Barany 

As a part of the Lawrence University Art & Art History Visiting Artist Series 2011, James Barany, a multidisciplinary new media artist, animator, and opera chorister will be presenting his work to our class.  His visit is sponsored by the Lawrence University Film Club.  He will also be giving a public lecture at 4:45pm in the Wriston Auditorium Followed by a Q&A session and reception.

Program Title: Arias, Animation and Anastomosis

James Barany’s newest time-based media work continues to probe through the emotional layers of his intrapersonal-self.  With a mixture of satirical and turbulent repertoire, he challenges the viewer to question their own definition of ‘self’ through dynamic combinations of animation, vocal oratory and composited video. Barany will present his creative anastomosis- how this work, creative process, and his journey with creative integration becomes manifest.

James Barany is currently a Chorister (Baritone) at The Florentine Opera in Milwaukee and the Coordinator of Fine Art / Associate Professor at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.

More information can be found on his website: http://www.jamesbarany.com/

Experimental Film and Video History

Screenings for the week of April 11th:

Man with a Movie Camera

From Wikipedia:

The film has an unabashedly avant-garde style, and emphasizes that film can go anywhere. For instance, the film uses such scenes as superimposing a shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, superimposing a cameraman inside a beer glass, filming a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed, even filming a woman giving birth, and the baby being taken away to be bathed.

Vertov was one of the first to be able to find a mid-ground between a narrative media and a database form of media. He shot all the scenes separately, having no intention of making this film into a regular movie with a storyline. Instead, he took all the random clips and put it in a database, which Svilova later edited. The narrative part of this process was her job. She had to go into that random pool of clips that Vertov filmed, edit it, and put it in some kind of order. Vertov's purpose of all this was to break the mold of a linear film that the world was used to seeing in those days.

 

Video The New Wave

A 1973 WGBH Boston Public Television documentary exploring the newly emerging work of video art. The program highlights several video artists exploring the video medium and pushing its boundaries, with a focus on artists working with image processing and video synthesizers, performance, documentary forms, and conceptual ideas in their work. 

  Information can be found at Electronic Arts Intermix

Women Make Media

Screenings for the week of April 4th:

Schmeerguntz - By Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley 

1966, 15 Minutes, B&W, Sound 

"Schmeerguntz is one long raucous belch in the face of the American Home. A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public surface deserves to have such films as Schmeerguntz shown everywhere - in every PTA, every Rotary Club, every club in the land.  For it is brash enough, brazen enough and funny enough to purge the soul of every harried American married woman."

 - Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly
 

 Information at Canyon Cinema 

 

The Mom Tapes (Excerpts) - Ilene Segalove 

1974-1978, 4 Minutes, Color, Sound

Segalove takes her mom as subject in these short pieces, recording her stories, her advice, and her daily routine. What results is a portrait of a contemporary mother-daughter relationship, touchingly devoid of drama and full of whimsical humor. For example, in one piece the camera focuses on a pair of unoccupied, overstuffed chairs. The voice of a teenage girl whines, "Mom, I'm bored—" then proceeds to reject each of her mother's suggestions by throwing objects across the room: books, food, sports equipment, the telephone, and so forth. 

Information at Video Data Bank

Info at Video Data Ban

Measures of Distance - Mona Hatoum

1988, 15 Minutes, Color, Sound

In this resonant work, Palestinian-born video and performance artist Mona Hatoum explores the renewal of friendship between mother and daughter during a brief family reunion in war-torn Lebanon in 1981. Through letters read in voice-over and Arabic script overlaying the images, the viewer experiences the silence and isolation imposed by war. The politics of the family and the exile of the Palestinian people are inseparable in this forceful, moving video.

Information at Women Make Movies

Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re) Educational Videotape - 

Valerie Soe

 

1992, 12 Minutes, Color, Sound

 

Picturing Oriental Girls is filled with geisha girls, china dolls and dragon ladies populating a visual compendium of representations of Asian women in American film and television. Juxtaposed with text from mail-order bride catalogs, men's magazines and popular literature, these clips from over 25 films and television programs explicate the orientalism and exoticism prevalent in mass media images of "oriental girls." 

Information can be found on the Valerie Soe page at Flicker 

Girl Power- Sadie Benning

1992, 15 Minutes, B&W, Sound

Girlpower opens with a statement of the themes of violence and disempowerment. The only hope of escape from a world both “brutal and needy” is found in the realm of the imagination where teenage girls can, at last, make their own rules: “I built my own world inside my head. I had imaginary friends, make believe love. I traveled to far away places and did as I pleased. I fought the law and, of course, made my own rules.”

Information at Senses of Cinema

Removed - Naomi Uman 

1999, 8 Minutes, Color, Sound

In Removed, Naomi Uman physically erases the female body from old 16mm porn using nail polish remover and household bleach. This gorgeous attack of beauty and domestic product on celluloid results in a series of animated white 'holes' writhing orgasmically in the place of porn stars. The leering men are captured in various inadequate poses and the original dialogue tracks remain, complete with badly dubbed exchanges. The hole in the film becomes an erotic zone, a blank on which a fantasy body is projected. This brilliant work is unusually precise: it is politically subversive, pornography in its own right, sassy and extremely funny. 

Information at Peripheral Produce


Shirin Neshat - The Woman Moves

2004, 42 Minutes, Color, Sound


An acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, and video artist, Iranian-born Shirin Neshat addresses the complex forces shaping the identity of Muslim women throughout the world and explores the social, political, and psychological dimensions of women's experiences.