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Event
Simon & The Sacred Cenote: 16mm Selections from the Archive of The American Egypt
Jesse Lerner returns to the Velaslavasay Panorama to present a collection of 16mm films on the topic of geography, anthropology, tourism and cultural representation in Mexico.
Simon & The Sacred Cenote: 16mm Selections from the Archive of The American Egypt features Simon of the Desert (1965) by Luis Buñuel starring Silvia Pinal, Claudio Brook and Enrique Álvarez Félixa. The last film Buñuel made while exiled in Mexico, it is a richly compact allegory with a whirlwind ending that is both incredulously shocking and completely appropriate.
Other 16mm films include a 1950s homemade travelogue through Mexico made by Mr. Smith, the operator of a sugar plant in Texas, a 1960s military educational film on the Expedition of a sacred well in the Yucatan and a behind-the-scenes trailer for Kings of the Sun, the 1963 film about a Mayan kingdom starring Yul Brenner. Excavating these films re-tells, in a contemporary context, what has been told before as fact and fiction by tourists, foreign artists and explorers in Mexico.
Jesse Lerner is a documentary filmmaker, curator, writer and Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. He is the curator & archivist of The American Egypt, a studio facility and collection in Echo Park. His short films Natives (1991), Magnavoz (2006), and the feature-length experimental documentaries Frontierland (1995), Ruins (1999), The American Egypt (2001), Atomic Sublime (2010), and The Absent Stone (2013) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America and Japan and have screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao.
Photograph ©LBFI
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LocationVelaslavasay Panorama (View)
1122 W. 24th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007
United States
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