|
Event
The Festival of (In)appropriation #9
Sunday February 19, 2017, 7:30 pm Los Angeles Filmforum presents The Festival of (In)appropriation #9 At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028
Curator Greg Cohen with filmmakers Tony Gault and Roger Beebe in person!
Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, détournement, or recycled cinema, the incorporation of already existing media into new artworks is a practice that generates novel juxtapositions and new meanings and ideas, often in ways entirely unrelated to the intentions of the original makers. Such new works are, in other words, inappropriate. This act of (in)appropriation may even produce revelations about the relationship between past and present, here and there, intention and subversion, artist and critic, not to mention the "producer" and "consumer" of visual culture itself. Fortunately for our purposes, the past decade has witnessed the emergence of a wealth of new audiovisual elements available for appropriation into new works. In addition to official state and commercial archives, resources like vernacular collections, home movie repositories, and digital archives now also provide fascinating material to repurpose in ways that lend it new meaning and resonance.
Founded in 2009 and curated by Jaimie Baron, Lauren Berliner, and Greg Cohen, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a yearly showcase of contemporary, short (20 minutes or less), audiovisual works that appropriate existing film, video, or other media and repurpose it in inappropriate and inventive ways. This years program features an astonishing variety and complexity of moving-image appropriation art, including a riotous YouTube reaction video mash-up, an exquisite found-footage ready-made, a queer-Asian-American homage to Hollis Frampton, several sublime works of cut-out animation, and a pseudo-documentary (or is it?) about the lost work of an early-Soviet scientist dedicated to the exploration of human mental projection.
Watch this conversation about Festival of (In)appropriation #8 between Curator Greg Cohen and film scholar Constance Penley at UCSBs Carsey-Wolf Center (10/27/2016): https://vimeo.com/191083847
Read this review of Festival of (In)appropriation #7 (2015) in Artillery magazine: http://artillerymag.com/festival-inappropriation-7/
Check out this interview by Laura Wissot with curators Jaimie Baron and Greg Cohen in Filmmaker magazine: http://filmmakermagazine.com/84086-the-festival-of-inappropriation-6-at-los-angeles-filmforum/ - .Uv6Qlf0dq89
Tickets: $10 general admission; $6 students (with ID)/seniors; free for Filmforum members. Tickets available at Brown Paper Tickets or at the door For more event information: www.lafilmforum.org, or 323-377-7238 Visit the Festival of (In)appropriation at https://festivalofinappropriation.com/ Screening:
Lying Women by Deborah Kelly (Australia, digital video, color, sound 2016, 03:56) The stop motion animation Lying Women attends both to printed arts material qualities and its ideological freight. As a high school student in 70s Melbourne, my primary exposure to art history was through the pages of books. I studied the western canon at a triple remove: as a girl, as an antipodean girl, as an antipodean girl who had never seen the paintings except as printed papers cheap approximations of European glory. Lying Women imagines canonical reclining nudes escape from centuries of servitude to a worldview in which decorative passivity is their whole purpose. The work proposes a great gathering of queer female energy, a revolution, a collective will to autonomy. (Deborah Kelly)
Semiotics of Sab by Tina Takemoto (USA, digital video, b/w, sound, 05:35) An oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono, whose work on stage and screen spans more than five decades. The grammatology of his career attests to conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood. (Tina Takemoto)
Halimuhfack by Christopher Harris (USA, 16mm transferred to digital video, color, sound, 2016, 4:00) A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. By design, nothing in this film is authentic except the source audio. The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear projected, grainy, looped images of Masai tribesmen and women recycled from an educational film become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation. (Christopher Harris)
Take Me to Pemberley by Daniela Zahlner (Austria, digital video, color, sound, 2015, 02:00) Mr. Darcy: The synonym for the romantic hero since 1813, as he first appeared in Jane Austens novel Pride and Prejudice. The book had several movie adaptations (especially prominent [were those from] 1940, 1995 and 2005), which not only inscribe Darcys character in popular culture, but also illustrate our capitalist notions of love and desire, as well as a wish for escapism into a pre-industrialized, pre-virtualized world. I, too, fell for Mr. Darcy. Thanks to my webcam and Photo Booth, I can finally have my go [at] winning him over. (Daniela Zahlner)
Every Feature Film On My Hard Drive, 3 Pixels Tall and Sped Up 7000% by Ryan Murray (USA, digital video, color, sound, 2013, 3:29) Every Feature Film On My Hard Drive, 3 Pixels Tall and Sped Up 7000% is comprised of 240 Hollywood movies running simultaneously, squeezed into a single frame and a 3.5 minute runtime. This work highlights the mass amount of media that we have at our fingertips and creates an abstraction of the color and duration of cinema. (Ryan Murray)
Actual Case History by Tony Gault (US, 16mm transferred to digital video, color, sound, 2015, 09:00) Rotoscope animation reshapes a found film into an examination of the vague, indefinite fears which keep growing in our minds. (Tony Gault)
Official Teaser #2 Reaction!!! by Kevin McCarthy (US, digital video, color, sound, 2016, 6:30) When the second teaser for THE FORCE AWAKENS comes out, a STAR WARS agnostic tries in vain to embrace the zeitgeist, joining superfans to create his own lukewarm trailer reaction video mashup. (Kevin McCarthy)
Sneeze by Yunjin Woo (USA, 16mm/found footage transferred to digital video, color, sound, 2015, 05:11) Sneeze explores the stigmatized symptom of common coldthe involuntary expulsion of air and bodily fluidas an allegory of social ruptures that might mediate infectious resistance. Mixing the Cold War eras educational film footage promoting personal hygiene as a war against germs with images of explosive creation, this film aesthetically subverts the uniquely modern fantasy of separation and isolation of the healthy from the ill. (Yunjin Woo)
A Place Ive Never Been by Adrian Flury (Switzerland, digital video, color, sound, 2015, 04:40) By sourcing multiple digital images of the same place from different archives, this experiment in film makes use of frame by frame montage to discover hidden forms, patterns and references, thereby giving new meaning to the prevailing redundancy of these pictures. (Adrian Flury)
[sic] series by Roger Beebe (US, 16mm transferred to digital video, color, sound, 2014, 04:25) Three perfect fragments, presented exactly as found. (Roger Beebe)
Somebody was Trying to Kill Somebody Else by Benjamin Verhoeven (Belgium, digital video, color, sound, 2014, 06:11) Part of an ongoing project called Scanning Cinema [that consists] of scanning moving images by using a flatbed scanner and a monitor and putting them back into an animated film. The inversions [produced by this] method (the physical action of scanning) [generate] a new language like a disturbed echo from the photographic reviving of moving images. [] The fragments used [here] are a re-montage of Michelangelo Antonionis Blow-Up, [while] the original soundtrack of Herbie Hancock has undergone the same process as the images. The movie consists of 10,000 scans put together in a stop-motion film. (Benjamin Verhoeven)
Cut Out by Guli Silberstein (Israel/Palestine, digital video, color, sound, 2014, 04:19) A radiant, energetic girl is shouting and punching the empty space in front of her. She is roughly cut out from her surroundings by a computer algorithm struggling to contain her. Her enemies are rubbed off the frame, sound is removed and music added, emphasising her anguish and anger. Is she real? Is she a dream? Gradually, more fragments of the scene are revealed, and the context is made clearer. The video-processing highlights the documented scene as image, both of a fight for freedom, and a media event. (Guli Silberstein)
Ektoplasmic Vision by Ricardo Salvador (Spain, Super-16mm transferred to digital video, b/w & color, sound, 2016, 09:40) In 1965, the compendium of an earthly life devoted to scientific research was found in Kresty prison of Leningrad, encrypted in twelve vinyl records printed with stroboscopic images and hypnotic sounds, labeled with the name HK320. Ektoplasmic Vision tells the story of Dr. Joseph H. Stanislaw, a mad scientist of dubious provenance, who claimed to be a Nephilim (half human half demon). During his earthly passage (1888-1944), Dr Stanislaw investigated the human mental projection, and designed his own devices to print and reproduce on Ektoplasmic film the images created by the spheres of mind. Ectoplasmik Vision is the documentary promotion along with the official trailer for Hermetica Komhata HK320, a retro Sci-fi film, 90 minutes long, recently produced by Hermética Films. (Ricardo Salvador)
The Neutral Zone by LJ Frezza (USA, digital video, color, sound, 2015, 06:40) A survey of the utopias featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). Some of the structures that constrain and produce our understanding of possible futures. (LJ Frezza)
Doppelgänger by Tasman Richardson (Canada, digital video, b/w & color, sound, 2016, 14:25) Imperfect reflections, simulations, and recordings, sampled from cinema, vhs, and finally total signal failure. Originally performed live as a dual, parallel projection (mirrored). All sounds are from the source clips. harmonies and rhythms are achieved with complex combinations of temporal warping and editing of the video source. (Tasman Richardson)
----------------------
Jaimie Baron (Festival Director) Jaimie Baron is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her work on documentary, experimental film and video, audiovisual appropriation, and digital media has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her first book, The Archive Effect: FoundFootage and the Audiovisual Experience of History, was published in 2014. She is also a co-founder of Docalogue, an online space for scholars and filmmakers to engage in conversations about contemporary documentary.
Greg Cohen is an artist, Associate Programmer at Los Angeles Filmforum, and Lecturer in Latin American Cinema and Visual Culture at UCLA. His work in video, photography, and multi-media installation has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and draws on diverse intellectual and aesthetic interests, from landscape theory and aesthetic philosophy to cultural memory and experimental archives, and from the history and theory of architecture to the intersections of moving-image media and radical politics. As a founding associate of REASArch (group for Research on Experimental Accumulation and Speculative Archives), Cohen has also produced The Valaco Archive, an ongoing visual research project (https://valacoarchive.com), parts of which were recently featured in Limn magazine (http://limn.it/).
Lauren S. Berliner is an Assistant Professor of Media & Communication and Cultural Studies at University of Washington Bothell. Her research focuses on participatory media production practices, gender and sexuality, and pedagogy. Also a filmmaker, she has screened her work internationally and has facilitated video production programming for girls and queer youth. She earned her PhD. in Communication from UC San Diego, an MA in Visual and Media Art from Emerson College, and a BA in English and Anthropology from Wesleyan University.
----------------------
This program is supported 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 Bloomberg Philanthropies. Additional support generously provided by American Cinematheque. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city's longest-running organization screening experimental and avant-garde film and video art, documentaries, and experimental animation. 2017 is our 42nd year.
Also coming to Los Angeles Filmforum: January 22 Resistance Isnt Futile: Films on the Occasion of a Presidential Inauguration February 12; February 25-March 1 Sergei Loznitsa (various venues) February 18 Tony Gault, Roger Beebe, Elizabeth Henry: Special Guests of the Festival of (In)appropriation
Memberships available, $70 single, $115 dual, or $50 single student Contact us at lafilmforum@yahoo.com. Find us online at http://www.lafilmforum.org/. Become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @LosAngFilmforum
|
|
|
LocationSpielberg Theater at the Egyptian (View)
6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
United States
Categories
Dog Friendly: Yes! |
Non-Smoking: Yes! |
Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
|
Contact
|