TALKS, FILMS & EVENTS

You are required to attend the 4/22 dance performance on campus as well as TWO other events. One must be a film, the other can be a film or lecture. Post a response and evaluation for both the events you choose to attend. Please start a new post if you are the first to respond to an event. Then other people who also attended can post their responses as comments to the initial response. The responses should be similar to reading responses, describing the film a bit for those who did not see it but focusing on your ideas rather than on summarizing, doing some thinking about relationship of the event to themes in the course.
More events may be added to this list as they are announced. You may attend up to three extra events for extra credit (extra events 10pts each, required events 25 each except April 22 event counts double for 50).

I've put stars ** by the events I particularly recommend.

Websites for More info about locations, tickets, etc:
Yerba Buena http://www.ybca.org/
Berkeley Art, Technology, Culture Colloquium http://atc.berkeley.edu/
Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
California College for the Arts http://www.cca.edu/calendar/



**Tuesday February 27 PFA
7:30 Pine Flat
Sharon Lockhart (U.S., 2005, 138 mins)
[guest icon] Sharon Lockhart in Person
The long static shot has been used to beautiful, often demanding, ends by filmmakers as diverse as the Lumière Brothers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Andy Warhol, and James Benning. For Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart, who is also a photographer, collaborated with a group of youths living in a small town in the Sierra foothills. As they worked together over three years, an intimacy developed, and the kids shared the places they valued and the rhythms of their everyday life. Slowly a film emerged: a girl reading alone, a boy asleep outside, some kids playing in the river, others traipsing among the trees are depicted in twelve ten-minute shots. While Pine Flat provides a portrait of rural life and landscape, the pregnant shots also contain the promise of narrative. Tender and endearing, the film gives the young people unusually extended time on the screen, and allows us to contemplate how we experience the passing of time.


Sunday, March 4 at 8:30pm
Film Art Phenomena: Works by Nicky Hamlyn, Nicky Hamlyn In Person.
701 Mission Street (corner of Third) Tickets: 415-978-ARTS
Composing his work “in camera,” the films of Nicky Hamlyn incorporate each shooting’s unique character, producing open-ended outcomes while questioning matter and perception. Quoting from his Film Art Phenomena (published 2003): “I see my films as arising out of an encounter between a situation or location or subject, and a camera/production strategy. I have been inspired partly by Robert Morris’ reading of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as resulting from the interactions of horizontal canvas, paint viscosity, stick, gravity, arm mechanics. Morris’ behavioristic take on Pollock redeems it from an expressionistic reading.” Screening: Minutiae, Hole, Not Resting, Pistrino, Water, Matrix, Penumbra, Object Studies, and Transit of Venus, which records two consecutive passes of Venus across the sun. (Caroline Savage)


**Monday March 12 7:30 Kaja Silverman (lecture)
Art Technology Culture Colloquium, on campus (see website for location)
Berkeley Rhetoric and Film professor Kaja Silverman delivers a lecture on the time-based art of James Coleman, particularly a digital video installation he made based on da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper.


Wednesday, March 14 at 8:30pm
Live Cinema Lab: viDEO savant, viDEO sAVant and Friends In Person
California College of the Arts: 1111 Eighth Street (near Sixteenth)
“What happens when you take cinema out of the movie theater, wrench the reel off the projector and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? LIVE CINEMA!” (Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image) The mysterious multi-media ensemble viDEO sAVant has travelled the world presenting its own brand of live improvisational cinema since 1990. This will be their first Bay Area appearance. This dynamic performance will feature a synthesis of sound and moving images with elements produced and mixed on the spot in a process of live interaction between projectionist and musician, yielding fluid results, shifting and varied, never the same twice. Participants include Charles Woodman on images, Margaret Schedel on cello and electronics, and Yoni Wolf (of Anticon’s Why?) on vocals, samples and assorted sound makers. (Steve Polta)


Thursday March 15 PFA
7:30 L’avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy, 1960, 140 mins)
While exploring a volcanic island on a yachting expedition, a troubled young woman named Anna disappears, leaving her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and close friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) to search in vain, and fall in love. L’avventura unfolds against Anna’s very palpable absence, a love story in a void. As always, landscape is the screen onto which Antonioni projects human emotions. Anna’s pain is articulated in the parched suburb from which she came, and in the rocky island on which her cohorts wander, not realizing it is they who are lost. (Anna may have escaped.) Stunning love scenes prepare us for those in The Passenger fifteen years later: love as a standoff, a sizing-up as in a bullfight, played out-of-doors. L’avventura is rich in Antonioni’s visual architecture, wicked humor, and, finally, youth: a shot of Vitti, hair blowing in the wind while village bells answer one another, may be unmatched in these films for its spirit of hope.


Thursday March 22 PFA
7:30 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Mamoru Hosoda (Japan, 2006)
(Toki wo kakeru shoujo). One of the most acclaimed anime features in recent years, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the first animated adaptation of a famous 1965 young adult novel that has spawned countless films and television programs through the years. Makoto is a vivacious—if klutzy—seventeen-year-old tomboy whose carefree summer days are literally thrown for a loop when she discovers a mysterious ability to leap back through time. Her trivial temporal maneuvers, like undoing little blunders or finding out exam questions in advance, soon lead to complicated wrinkles that have an inevitable impact on those around her, especially when her best friend confesses his love for her. Hosoda is a remarkable new talent who, together with art director Nizou Yamamoto (Princess Mononoke) and character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Neon Genesis Evangelion), has crafted a magical, affecting film full of humor, warmth, and the bittersweet pangs of first love.


Tuesday, March 27
7pm CCA, SF Rebecca Solnit (author of the Muybridge reading)
Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus Info: 415.703.9505
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, art critic, curator, political activist, and educator. She won wide acclaim for her 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West.
Another work, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (2000), combines text by Solnit with photo essays by Susan Schwartzenberg and traces the devastation attending San Francisco's dot-com-fueled gentrification: skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that have driven out artists, activists, and the poor; the homogenization of the city's appearance, industries, and population; and the decay of public life and erasure of sites of civic memory. Solnit is also the author of River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003).


**Friday March 30 PFA
7:00 Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni (U.K., 1966, 110 mins)
For his first English-language film, Antonioni set a metaphysical mystery in the world of fashion, at a time when the director’s metaphysics had itself become a fad; the movie and its meaning were the talk of the swingingest parties of 1966. Photographer David Hemmings snaps images of Vanessa Redgrave and an older man apparently trysting in a London park; later, analyzing the eyelines, scrutinizing the grain, he believes he sees evidence of murder, but finds that the harder you look, the less you know. The same interpretive limits apply to the viewing of Blow-Up: is this portrayal of youth culture, with its pot parties and Yardbirds shows, its rehearsed rebellion and limitless cool, affectionate—perhaps parodic—or a lament over the inscrutable emptiness of hip? Is it really about philosophical depths, or fascinating surfaces? Like its closing game of mime-tennis, the film may be daring us to focus on something that doesn’t exist. Keep your eye on the ball.—Juliet Clark


**Wednesday April 4
7:30 The Medium Is, works by Lynda Benglis, Peter Campus, Hermine Freed, Dan Graham, Richard Serra
With its instantaneous feedback and image manipulation, video technology creates a nowness of perception along with the distraction offered by any good spectacle. In Now, Lynda Benglis’s first color tape, the eponymous word is repeated, questioning the currency and the command. Then, over-driving the color image, Benglis collapses the notion of the medium as neutral. Wearing headphones in Richard Serra’s Boomerang, Nancy Holt repeats phrases that are heard, then heard again in delay. The effect is of feedback effectively devouring its own message. Using a split screen in Two Faces, Hermine Freed faces herself, caressing her mirrored image. Suspended between images, Freed exists as a doubled person, alienated and adrift. Recorded in San Francisco, Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror is a study of mediated relations, a mirror standing in for the TV as the artist describes the audience before him. The circularity of the exchange captures the phenomenology of feedback. In Peter Campus’s seminal tape Three Transitions, inherent properties of the medium become potent metaphors for the depiction of internal states and the breach between reality and illusion.—Steve Seid
Now (Lynda Benglis, 1973, 12 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From VDB). Boomerang (Richard Serra, 1974, 10.5 mins, B&W, DVD, From The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Two Faces (Hermine Freed, 1972, 8 mins, B&W, Mini-DV, From VDB). Performer/Audience/Mirror (Dan Graham, 1975, 23 mins, B&W, DVD, From EAI). Three Transitions (Peter Campus, 1973, 5 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From EAI).
• (Total running time: 59 mins, U.S.)


Thursday April 5, Friday April 6 PFA (counts as one event)
Thurs April 5 7:30 Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/France, 2004, 118 mins)
Fri April 6 7:00 Tropical Malady: Shot-by-Shot, Discussion with Apichatpong Weerasethakul
(Sud pralad). The agreeably irrational Tropical Malady melds folk fable with euphoric modern moviemaking, effortlessly traversing the mundane and the miraculous. In this pastoral with a dark pulse, two beguiling stories unfold: the first a playful romance between a handsome soldier, Keng, and Tong, a country boy; the second, a nocturnal journey into a realm of shape-shifting creatures. While Keng and Tong’s blissful courtship is told through moody, tender tableaux, the seeds of a lurking apprehension are being quietly sown—a dead body is found at the edge of the jungle, cows are found slaughtered in the fields. The villagers tell of a spirit that inhabits the body of a wandering tiger. As the second story emerges, Tropical Malady leaves behind the matter-of-fact for the mystical, a lush jungle peopled by talking monkeys and tricksters in human form. And who is that stalking the dread tiger? Is it soldier Keng? In this numinous tropic, we relish the malady of not necessarily knowing. Winner, Prix du Jury, Cannes 2004.


Friday April 13 PFA
8:50 The Passenger
Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy/France/Spain, 1975, 123 mins)
A penetrating political thriller, The Passenger, set in the Sahara, is also a desert film, and it resembles the much earlier L’avventura—a desert island film—with its horizontal vistas and its theme of absence. Jack Nicholson portrays a London journalist named Locke who, sent to cover a rebellion in North Africa, assumes the identity of a man, Robertson, who has died in the next hotel room. Locke is running away from being a journalist—from the codes that replace knowing, the images that replace seeing. He’s much like Monica Vitti’s Vittoria in L’eclisse in his desire for escape, for a mask. But, embracing Robertson’s globetrotting, increasingly mysterious persona, he finds himself pursuing not the man’s life, but his death. Even the camera seems to have a will toward another world: it distractedly tracks a passing camel in the desert, an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage in Munich. The film’s famous final seven-minute zoom literally draws out the pain of seeing in focus.



(REQUIRED) Sunday April 22, 2pm Zellerbach theater, Berkeley Dance Project
Directed by Lisa Wymore
Featuring The Reception, a cross-disciplinary performance piece utilizing dance choreography and tele-immersion technology to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence. Also featuring new choreographic works by Tammy Cheney, Robert Moses, Carol Murota, and Ellis Wood. The Reception: Co-directed by Lisa Wymore (TDPS) and Ruzena Bajcsy (CITRIS). *The April 22 performance will be followed by a post-performance discussion: Being Here: Presence/Remote Presence within Live and Media Based Performance by N. Katherine Hayles.
The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a "performance as research" model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.
You do not need to buy a ticket for this performance, meet in front of the theater before the show.



**Monday April 23 Doug Aitken 7:30
Art Technology Culture Colloquia, on campus (see website for location)
Internationally known Video and Digital artist Doug Aitken talks about his work


Wednesday May 2
3:00 Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan, 2003, 82 mins)
Lecture by Marilyn Fabe
(Bu jian bu san). In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang, director of Vive l'Amour (1994) and What Time Is It There? (2001), created the sharpest combination yet of his major themes—rain, missed connections, and the poetry of loneliness—juxtaposed this time against something completely unexpected: a martial arts film. It's a rainy night in Taipei, and the crumbling neighborhood kino-barn is showing King Hu's swordplay classic Dragon Inn. Most of the audience appears to be elsewhere, offscreen dreamers haltingly putting their thoughts of love into very slow motion while the onscreen kinetic frenzies keep blazing on like helpful cues. Visualizing the fantasies of anyone who's ever worked in a movie theater, or just adored being in one, Goodbye, Dragon Inn underscores the essence of why people watch films: to be reminded of what it is to live, and what it means to dream.