April's EIGA ARTS programme

[Joss Winn]

April's EIGA ARTS programme is screening two significant contemporary
American experimental filmmakers.  I'd like to find one or two more
screenings in Japan for them if possible, so if you know anyone/anywhere,
please let me know!  Thanks. Joss.


EIGA ARTS
is particularly proud to present films by
Scott Stark and Brian Frye

April 24th, 6.30pm, Avanse 4F, Saga City, Japan

April's EIGA ARTS promises to be the best yet.  We're lucky enough to be
able to see two programmes of some of America's finest contemporary
avant-garde filmmakers.



SCOTT STARK'S films have shown locally (San Fransisco), nationally and
internationally, including recent one person shows at New York's Museum of
Modern Art (MOMA) and the Austria Filmmaker's Cooperative in Vienna.  His
films, I'll Walk With God and Acceleration both won recent Director's
Choice first place awards at the Black Maria Film Festival.  He has taught
art classes at the San Fransisco Art Institute (where he received his MFA),
interveaving non-traditional uses of films and videos with a variety of art
disciplines.  Stark served for seven years on the board of the San
Fransisco Cinematheque during which time, among other things, he co-counded
the Cinematheque's journal of film and media art, Cinematograph.

Scott has produced more than 50 films and videos in the last 18 years.
Additionally, he has created a number of gallery and non gallery
installations using film and video, and created elaborate photographic
collages using large grids of images.  Born and educated in the mid-west,
he has always been interested in aggressively pushing his work beyond the
threshold of traditional viewing expectations, challenging the audience to
question its relationship to the cinematic process; yet he also tries to
build into the work elements of whimsy and incongruity that allow the
viewer an entryway into the work while maintaining a critical distance.
Both a passionate purist and a cynical skeptic, he likes to emphasise the
physicality of film while humorously cross-referencing it to the world
outside the theater, attempting to lay bare the paradoxes of modern culture
and the magical nature of the perceptual experience.

More about Scott's work can be found at <http://www.sirius.com/~sstark>



Scott Stark programme 7.00-8.15pm

in.side.out (1999, videotape, colour, sound, 10mins)

"in.side.out is a very personal piece.  On the surface it's about the
changes taking place, over a two year period, in an empty lot and a
decrepit old building next to my house.  Deeper down it's about the walls
and windows between my interior and exterior selves, and how the fragile
constructs of identity are etched, eroded, re-shaped and transformed by
outside forces."(SS)

Acceleration (1993, Super-8mm, colour, sound, 10mins)

"A snapshot taken in a moment of human evolution, where souls of the living
are reflected in the windows of passing trains.  The camera captures the
reflections of passengers in the train windows as the trains enter and
leave the station, and the movement creates a stoboscopic flickering effect
that magically exploits the pure sensuality of the moving image." (SS)
First Prize (Director's Choice), Black Maria Film Fetival, 1994

Under A Blanket of Blue
(1996, Super-8mm, colour, sound, 15mins. Video presentation)

"A super-8 alchemy of song and imposing urban landscapes.  Filmed in
heavily over-developed areas of northern and central Spain, the
dehumanizing and impersonal architectural structures that the inhabitants
call 'home' are edited into a bittersweet array of rigid geometric forms
and bland textures.  Ironically grafted onto the imagery is Glenn Miller's
sweet romantic ballad, 'Under A Blanket of Blue,' both in original
recording and in a breathless vocal a capella by the maker during the
filming." (SS)

Satrapy (1988, 16mm, colour, sound, 13mins)

Part of The Chromesthetic Response Series (4 films) in which 16mm film was
shot in a 35mm still camera producing a flickering, collage-like effect.
Because the images spill over onto the optical soundtrack area of the film,
the variations in image density actually generate their own peculiar
sounds.

Satrapy is composed of rephotographed pornographic playing cards which
rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black
lines, injecting a note of 'negative sound' every third beat against the
5-beat background.  As the film progresses, contrapuntal variations of 3,
4, 5 and 7 beat rhythms blend and collide, creating an almost indiscernible
complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals
become scattered and disordered.  The 'girlie' cards break out onto
saturated colour fields and eventually find their way into the real world,
aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other
surfaces.(SS)

Honourable mention, Oberhausen Film Festival, 1989

I'll Walk With God (1994, 16mm, colour, sound, 8mins)

"Using emergency information cards surreptitiously lifted from the backs of
airline seats, I'll Walk With God pictorially charts an airline flight
attendant's stoic transcendance through and beyond worldly adversity.
Through an elaborate system of posturing and nuance that evokes an almost
ritualistic synergy, the female protagonist(s) are shuttled toward a higher
spiritual plane, carried aloft on the shimmering wings of Mario Lanza's
soaring tremolo."(SS)

First Prize (Director's Choice), Black Maria Film Festival, 1995

Back In The Saddle Again (1997, 16mm, B/W, sound, 10mins)

"A found footage film that innocently plays with many of the elements I
explore in my own work.  A family's playful interaction with a 16mm movie
camera, singing along as a group with Gene Autrey's title song in front of
the camera, combines western fantasy, American kitsch, gender posturing,
deterioration of the film's surface, the wonderment of the cinematic
process, and the use of controlled accidents to shape the form of the film.
My only intrusion on the footage was to print it first in negative, which
adds a bleak, mysterious edge to it, and to print it again in positive,
which seems to answer many of the questions raised in the first part." (SS)


**Under A Blanket of Blue may be swapped with :

Don't Even Think (1992, Super-8, colour, sound, 15mins).  If time allows,
both will be shown.

"Tongues flapping, lips smacking, teeth clacking, vocal chords vibrating;
it sounds like speech, but it's in a language where intellect and
vocabulary impede comprehension.  To really hear what's being said, don't
talk; don't even think."

***


BRIAN FRYE is the 24 year old founder of The Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in
NYC, currently one of the best venues for avant-garde film on the East
Coast. His own work has been described as "a notch above formal
experimentation, Frye's films present cognitive conundrums that draw from
the toy-box of historical avant-garde filmmaking." (NY Press)

He has had one person shows at Anthology Film Archives in NYC (the theatre
of the reknown NY Filmmaker's Cooperative) and at The Chicago Filmmakers
Cinematheque.

"His found footage films are beautifully crafted works that delve into our
social and political past with a subtle, satirical wit.  At the same time
they are thoughtful meditations on the nature of the film medium itself.
Frye's films often contain a performative aspect.  He combines tableaux of
minimal action with visual styles sometimes reminiscient of German
Expressionist film, sometimes of the sparse look of early Andy Warhol
films.  His films have a neo-Dada quality, full of visual jokes and
surprises." (Chicago Filmmakers)

"Some of the most original work I've seen recently from a new filmmaker.
Redefining the relationship between the spectator and the film, his
somewhat hermetic works--mostly silent, all in black and white, and varying
from two minutes to about half an hour--don't offer any of the usual
moviegoing pleasures: not only are there no plots, but Frye's images are
neither entertaining nor seductive, nor is his editing particularly
rhythmic or immediately satisfying.  Instead his unassuming, almost
offhanded work points toward an intellectual cinema that questions the way
we see and know the world....Frye is one of a few filmmakers...to make
films that meditate on their limitations rather than celebrate and exploit
cinema's power." (Fred Camper, Chicago Reader).  For the entire review, go
to http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1998/0998/09118b.html

Tonight's EIGA ARTS is the world premier of Francois Boue....



Brian Frye programme 8.30-9.30pm

Francois Boue Services The Fragrance Machine At Bloomingdales (1999, 16mm,
colour, 3mins)

6.95: Striptease (1995, 16mm, B/W, 3mins)

"The spectacle is a false revelation, the mechanism of substitution; it
replaces knowledge with the promise of knowledge, language with the promise
of communication, authenticity with the promise of truth.  It is an
excercise in recursive teleology, its object the reproduction of needs it
cannot satisfy, the desire for alienation.  It exists only as the material
of consumption, the wasted husk of consciousness in presence.  Its
enlightenment is that of the pedagogue, a vicious obscurantism, translating
the beauty of discontinuity into a simple science of empty maxims and
valorized tautology.  For its disciples speak its name in tongues that
cannot be their own, and with the terror of the repentant suicide, they
dance a fearful tarantella and scream with rabid glee the terrible praises
of its own forsaken corpse." (Jackson P. Broadway)

11.95: the most important moment in my life (infinite set) (1995, 16mm,
B/W, silent, 3.5mins)

"The representation of the void is always a representation which is full
and which resolves itself on analysis into two positive elements; the idea,
distinct or confused, of a substitution, and the feeling, experienced or
imagined, of a desire or a regret." (Henry Bergson, 'Creative Evolution')

"Of all things that are concealed and manifested, the Fire which is above
the heavens is the treasure house, as it were a great Tree from which all
flesh is nourished.  The manifested side of the Fire is the trunk,
branches, leaves, and the outside bark.  All these parts of the great Tree
are set on fire from the all-devouring flame of the Fire and destroyed.
But the fruit of the Tree, if its imaging has been perfected and it takes
shape of itself, is placed in the storehouse (or treasure), and not cast
into the Fire.  For the fruit is produced to be placed in the store-house,
but the husk is to be committed to the Fire; that is to say, the trunk
which is generated not for it's own sake but for that of the fruit."
(Hippolytus-summary of MS, 'The Great Announcement')

untitled (1996, 16mm, B/W, 3mins)

"Records of a symbolic city in which the mark of hitoricity manifests
itself despite the static continuity of alienated architecture, and the
spectre of specificity blooms in the shadow of the careless machine.  The
true name of spaces is broken and their secret lives can be realised only
in moments." (Jackson P. Broadway)

Interventions (1996-8, color/B&W, silent/sound, 15 min.)

Meeting With Khruschev  (1997, 16mm, B/W, Silent, 35mins)

"How vitally will it affect the life of a modern Westerner when he learns,
for example, that though the Indian peninsula was invaded and occupied by
Alexander the Great and through his conquest had a capital influence on its
history, India has not even remembered the great conqueror's name" (Mircea
Eliade, 'Myth and reality')

and probably more.....!!!


EIGA ARTS is at AVANSE, Don Don Don no Mori, central Saga.  Next to the
City Library.  Donations upto 1000YEN are encouraged on the door.



Joss Winn

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EIGA ARTS		Tel. (81)-(0)-(952)68-4722
			(0952-68-4722 for domestic calls)
1217 Shinden		Fax. (81)-(0)-(952)68-2989
Kubota-cho		<edq39077 at saga-ed.go.jp>
Saga-gun
Saga-ken
849-0203
JAPAN		http://www.sirius.com/~sstark/org/eiga/eiga.html
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