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Event
All Smiles: Video works by Anne McGuire
Sunday June 12, 2011, 7:30pm
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
All Smiles: Video works by Anne McGuire (and a couple of bonus films by others!)
Anne McGuire in person!
At the Echo Park Film Center
1200 N Alvarado St. (@ Sunset Blvd.) Los Angeles, CA. 90026 | (213) 484 8846
Note the change in location!
Filmforum first screened a film of Bay Area artist Anne McGuire with When I Was a Monster in 1997, when its multifaceted investigation of the feminine image, performance, and personal trauma resonated with its lack of shame, succinctness and humor. Her video pieces continue to grow in depth, marvels of brief artistic statements working with wit, media savvy, unabashed performances, and brilliant comments on modern society. We're delighted to host her tonight, finally, for a full retrospective of her short works.
She's adding a couple of classic films by others that have had influence on her to round out the evening.
Tickets: General $10, Students/seniors $6; free for Filmforum members
Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.
Museum (1989, 3:00)
Joe DiMaggio 1, 2, 3 (1991, 10:50)
The artist stalks and serenades Joe Dimaggio in her car as he strolls the docks, unaware that McGuire is secretly videotaping his every step. "McGuire's use of her camera as a conduit for shared experience [is] at the heart of the piece that first brought her to a wider audience, Joe DiMaggio 1,2,3, a video in three parts about a chance encounter. Sitting in her parked car in San Francisco's Marina, McGuire's camera was running when elderly baseball legend Joe DiMaggio unexpectedly walked into the shot. In the tape, she follows him, continuing to shoot, and begins making up songs about her feelings for him as she drives." Nicole Armour, "Alternate States," Film Comment (July/August 2000)
The Telling (1996, 3:00)
An odd chat about a lie.
The Waltons (1996, 7:00)
A deft and cunning re-examination of John Boy's near-death experience at the sawmill. A homespun midnight deconstruction of an entire era of television mannerisms.
"One of the strengths of The Waltons, a video that records a session of TV viewing using a handheld camera, is its ability to convey how our surroundings inform our experience. The video doesn't stray far from the images on the TV screen, but our attention is divided between the show's action and the off-camera activity in the apartment."
Nicole Armour, "Alternate States," Film Comment (July/August 2000)
When I Was a Monster (1996, 6:00)
A performance about the artist's experience in the aftermath of an accident.
"While When I Was a Monster conveys McGuire's feelings about her own body after falling off a cliff, it also articulates the universal lack of satisfaction women feel when contemplating their physical selves, and encapsulates another part of McGuire's project: the demonstration of the performative, grotesque aspects of femininity. Though she appears to be in pain, our sympathy hasn't been solicited, and the fact that we can observe such a private examination feels like an intrusion McGuire confronts the audience with her weakened, disfigured body and reminds us of our own fragility."
Nicole Armour, "Alternate States," Film Comment (July/August 2000)
I Am Crazy and You're Not Wrong (1997, 11:00)
A wonderfully witty work about nostalgia and desperation. Anne McGuire portrays a Kennedy-era singer performing in the space where theatre meets television. McGuire's Garland-esque gestures provide both a sense of tragedy and humor. I Am Crazy And You're Not Wrong weaves narrative, performance, memory and history into an ironic and haunting work of singular proportions.
All Smiles and Sadness (1999, 7:00)
McGuire constructs a murky black and white soap-opera world of endless, timeless, and placeless limbo, where the characters talk to each other entirely in clichés, bad poetry, and other contrite forms of speecha short TV show in which nothing is resolved. The tape culminates in an absolutely stunning monologue performance by legendary underground film and videomaker George Kuchar.
I Like Men (2000, 0:40)
A tiny gem that utilizes paper animation and a snippet of sound to humorous, kitschy effect.
After Wegman (2003, 3:30)
An homage to early videoworks by William Wegman, starring Man and Fay Ray's stand-ins.
"Anne McGuire shows that men are dogs."
-Ed Halter, New York Underground Film Festival (2003)
"The droll conceptualism of William Wegman gets the choke chain in Anne McGuire's ode to pedigree, After Wegman. The trim weimaraners of Two Dogs Watching are replaced with equally trim boys, better trained than their canine counterparts. Where Man Ray and pal lavished obedience on man's best artist, McGuire's attentive post-puberty pets track the scent of their own desire. Slyly, we realize that the instincts differ - the ingrained servitude of dogs being perhaps more noble than the libido's leash on guys. As epilogue, McGuire enacts another Wegman piece, the slurping of a glass of milk, grown monumental in the foreground. With the impediment of a less tactile tongue, our young lapping lad struggles toward satiation, the cloudy liquid splashing and slopping often just out of reach. There is sustenance here: at the trough of desire, yes, but also in a lineage of artists that hasn't gone to the dogs." Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive (2003)
Turntable (2005, 3:00)
Lunchtime at a Lazysusan for tourists in Taiwan.
The show closes with two 16mm masterpieces on love and loss selected by McGuire
Anne McGuire was born in the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant, and has lived in San Francisco since 1990.
Anne started making videos in the late 1980's while a student. Her videos, single channel works, are much in the tradition of personal/poetical performance to camera, playing off of the conventions of television. Strain Andromeda The, (1993) the end-to-beginning re-edit of Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain, was her first foray into disaster deconstruction. In 2006 she created Adventure Poseidon The to mark the 20 year anniversary of having been shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean. Several other disaster film re-edits are forthcoming. Her videos have screened at MOMA in New York, The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and numerous festivals, museums, and art galleries around the world. She makes works on paper, writes poems and songs, and performs as Freddy McGuire with electronic musician Wobbly, live and on the radio.
She has taught video art at KyungSung University in Busan, South Korea, the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California Santa Cruz, and Stanford University.
"I love this woman's work for its lowbudget yet whole-hearted dedication to a trope. It seems like bad theatre and maybe it is. There's a use of amateur actors that makes no apologies for its clunky style, yet dives into the language of representation with supreme confidence. It's irony and straight-ahead narrative fused together in a compact, somewhat painful, package.
"McGuire's "I'm Crazy, You're Not Wrong" both broke me up and broke my heart. This flowsy-frumpy, wig-bearing bombshell perches, with much lady-like, drunken lurching, on a high stool and carefully, tenderly, imparts to us her madness and complete abdication of agency in a sad-sack, crazy-ass torch song that seems as if she is making it up as she goes along. I was sold in an instant." Sally McKay, http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/comment/26257/
A link to Barb Latanzi's AMG Strain software she designed in honor of McGuire's film Strain Andromeda The:
http://www.wildernesspuppets.net/yarns/amgstrain/main.html
This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special support provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Additional support generously provided by American Cinematheque.
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city's longest-running organization screening experimental and avant-garde film and video art, documentaries, and experimental animation. 2011 is our 36th year.
Memberships available, $60 single or $95 dual
Contact us at lafilmforum@yahoo.com. www.lafilmforum.org
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LocationEcho Park Film Center
1200 N Alvarado St. (@ Sunset Blvd.)
Los Angeles, CA 90026
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: Yes! |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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