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Event
Industry Town: The Avant-Garde and Hollywood
Sunday October 16, 7:30 pm
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Industry Town: The Avant-Garde and Hollywood
Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, Screening 3
At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd (at Las Palmas), Los Angeles CA 90028
Info: www.lafilmforum.org
Tickets: General $10, Students/seniors $6; free for Filmforum members
Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.
Los Angeles Filmforum continues our film screening series Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 on October 16thth with Industry Town: The Avant-Garde and Hollywood. Many experimental works have explicitly played with the dominant film industry (Hollywood and beyond), parodying its forms or structures of manufacture or utilizing images from classic and not-so-classic films as the raw material for new creations. We'll start the show with one of the earliest examples of commentary on the Hollywood quest, and perhaps the first made with a expressionist bent in Los Angeles, Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra. Its importance is such that we have included it despite it coming from before 1945.
We continue through the decades with ever evolving approaches to the industry, practice and lifestyle of Hollywood. Puce Moment (Kenneth Anger, 1949) and Zebra Skin Clutch (Cynthia Maughan, 1977-78) both look at a woman and their relationship to the fabulous styles of starlets, revealing the influence of celebrity and fashion. In Death of the Gorilla, Peter Mays manipulates footage filmed off late night television to create his own colorful collage of form and wonder. George Lucas's 6-18-67 starts from the position of a standard movie "making of" short and subverts it into a meditation on landscape and beauty. By the time we reach the 1970s, the conceptual investigations of art of the time find appropriate parallels. John Baldessari's Title breaks down some of the essential elements of screen plays, language, and acting. Based on Romance utilizes storytelling traditions of melodrama but locates the scenes in the art world of the time.
In person: Peter Mays, Bruce Yonemoto, Norman Yonemoto
Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 will feature over 24 shows between now and May 2012. Alternative Projections is Filmforum's exploration of the community of filmmakers, artists, curators and programmers who contributed to the creation and presentation of experimental film and video in Southern California in the postwar era. Film series curated by Adam Hyman and Mark Toscano, with additional contributions by David James, Christine Panushka, Terry Cannon, Ben Caldwell, Stephanie Sapienza, and more.
Alternative Projections is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945 1980, an unprecedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.
Simultaneous with the start of the screening series we are launching a website at alternativeprojections.com containing oral histories, articles, and a searchable database with individuals, films, organizations, and exhibitions, and archival content. This will be the first database of its kind and will give scholars and the public a much richer understanding of art production in Los Angeles for years to come. The contents of the screening series can also be found there.
Screening:
The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapić.. Cinematography by Gregg Toland (1928, 16mm or 35mm, b/w, silent, 11min.)
Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive
Its makers all went on to become influential figures in different ways, Toland as the cinematographer of Citizen Kane and other films, Florey as director; and Vorkapich as the conceptual master of film form, teaching at USC for many years.
Article on it: http://forgottenclassicsofyesteryear.blogspot.com/2010/07/life-and-death-of-9413-hollywood-extra.html
Puce Moment, by Kenneth Anger (1949, 16mm, 6 min.)
Print from Canyon Cinema
Concept, direction, camera and editing by Kenneth Anger. Music by Jonathan Halper. Filmed in Hollywood. Cast: Yvonne Marquis (Star).
"A lavishly colored evocation of the Hollywood now gone, as shown through an afternoon in the milieu of a 1920s film star.
"PUCE MOMENT is a fragment from an abandoned film project entitled Puce Woman. The soundtrack used here is the second one; the first was the overture to Verdi's I Villi. The film reflects Anger's concerns with the myths and decline of Hollywood, as well as with the ritual of dressing, with the movement from the interior to the exterior, and with color and sound synchronization ...." - Marilyn Singer, The American Federation of Arts
The Loves of Franistan, by Jules Schwerin (1949, 16mm, b/w, sound, 9 min.)
Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive
Death of the Gorilla, by Peter Mays (1966, 16mm, color, 16 min.)
Restored print from the Academy Film Archive
"Peter Mays achieved these hypnotically dense and hallucinatory in-camera superimpositions by shooting off late-night TV with color filters in multiple passes, then edited the mass of footage into a psychedelic phantasmagoria suggesting an elusive, dream-like narrative."Mark Toscano
"A sight/sound combine of exotic imagery shot semi-randomly in superimposition off a TV and then cut to make a fast moving but extremely ambiguous 'story.' Gorilla moves through modern man's myth mind like a runaway train bursting at the seams."Peter Mays
6-18-67, by George Lucas (1967, 5 min)
Print courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing
A behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the film MacKenna's Gold (1969)
Title, by John Baldessari (1971, 16mm, b/w & color, sound, 20 min.)
Video from Electronic Arts Intermix
Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor. Through the gradual integration of cinematic techniquesmotion, color, sound, acting, editing and arcthe artist inverts the traditional Hollywood model, stressing structure over narrative coherence. Electronic Arts Intermix
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, by Jack Goldstein (1975, 16mm, color, sound, 2 min.)
Print courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Koln, and MOCA
"Goldstein's iconic two-minute tour de force, brings media's subliminal power to the fore," - Jordan Kantor, Artforum review
"The film represents a short performance sequence that signifies the power of MGM as the penultimate studioin fact, as the very model for the Golden Era of Hollywood studios, which even already in 1975 belonged to a distant "then" of the past. "Going to the movies" represents a staged sequence of ordered entrances into the apparatus of cinema. " - Fareed Armaly , from longer article on the film: http://www.constanzeruhm.net/portfolio/jack-goldstein-metro-goldwyn-mayer.phtml
Cue Rolls, by Morgan Fisher (1974, 16mm, colour, sound, 5:30)
Print courtesy of Morgan Fisher
"Over the years Morgan Fisher has analysed nearly every aspect of the production and projection process. Cue Rolls appears to be a continuous five-and-a-half-minute shot, the visual subject of which is a synchronizer through which four strands of black and white leader are running continuously.
"As the soundtrack makes clear, Fisher has applied what once was a standard industry practice (for making colour corrections and other modifications before final prints were struck) to a situation in which it would seem to be entirely irrelevant. Specifically, a single continuous forty-foot shot of four strips of leader moving through the synchronizer was "analysed" into ten-foot segments that were subsequently A and B rolled so that the ten-foot segments could be re-synthesized into a convincing illusion of the original, uncut shot. The leader moving through the synchronizer was a plan for the negative cutter who would edit (or who, by the time we see the film, has edited) Cue Rolls." Scott MacDonald
Zebra Skin Clutch, by Cynthia Maughan (1977-78, 2:03, b&w)
Video from Electronic Arts Intermix
Based on Romance, by Bruce & Norman Yonemoto (1979, 24:15)
Video from Electronic Arts Intermix
This stylized narrative is the first in the Yonemotos' Soap Opera Series,in which they employ the traditional syntax and codes of melodrama to explore how mass media formulas manipulate desire and sexuality, fantasy and reality. Played out with the self-conscious acting and dialogue of a soap opera, this story of the dissolution of a contemporary romance is set in the context of the postmodern Southern California art scene. By emphasizing modes of representation TV, movies, art the Yonemotos reconstruct a narrative of melodrama itself, illustrating their assertion that personal dramas and romantic ideals are the result of media propaganda, a social fantasy that becomes reality.
Directors: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. Camera/Lighting: Nikolai Ursin. Written/Produced by Bruce Yonemoto. Performers: Anastasia Hagerstrom, Michael Hickman, Wenden Baldwin, Harvey Segalove. A KYO-DAI production.
Total - 101 min.
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Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980. This unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.
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.
Coming Soon to Los Angeles Filmforum:
Oct 23 Alternative Projections: Film/Music/Forms Early Abstractions of the 1940s and 1950s (at the Egyptian Theatre)
Oct 30 Alternative Projections: Distributing the Avant-Garde: Selections from the Creative Film Society Collection (at the Egyptian)
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city's longest-running organization screening experimental and avant-garde film and video art, documentaries, and experimental animation. 2010 is our 34th year.
Memberships available, $60 single or $95 dual
Contact us at lafilmforum@yahoo.com. www.lafilmforum.org
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LocationSpielberg Theater at the Egyptian
6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
United States
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| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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