Talks, Films, & Events (Repost)

A reminder of upcoming 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).

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 APRIL 3 PFA
7:30 Anthology Film Archives: Recent Preservations
Andrew Lampert in Person
Lampert, archivist and programmer at Anthology Film Archives, long a key institution on the East Coast arts scene, presents classics of 1960s and '70s avant-garde in fabulous prints that you'd normally have to travel to New York to see. Program includes:
Film Number 16 Oz: The Tin Woodman's Dream (Harry Smith, c. 1967). Zenscapes (Marie Menken, c. 1957). Note to Colleen (Saul Levine, 1974). Nine Variations on a Dance Theme (Hilary Harris, 1966). Five 8mm Films (George Landow, 1961-62). Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1964-67)

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.

TUES APRIL 10 PFA
7:30 BB Optics: Optical Printing and Preservation Work
Bill Brand in Person
Brand presents a wide range of works preserved or printed by his firm, BB Optics, including avant-garde pieces and films confiscated from the Nixon White House by the FBI. Program includes:
New Left Note (Saul Levine, 1968/82). Nixon White House Super-8 Films (Reel S-10) (1969-73). The Fallen World (Marjorie Keller, 1983). Fire in My Belly (David Wojnarowicz, 1986-87). Home Avenue (Jennifer Montgomery, 1989). Black and White Film (Robert Huot, 1968-69). Daffodils (Katy Martin, 1979/81)

Tuesday, April 10 at Stanford University
4:30pm
the Sawyer Seminar Visualizing Knowledge: From Alberti's Window to Digital Arrays
presents a panel discussion between Pavle Levi and Marta Braun on "The Visibility of Motion."
Lectures and discussion will be held at the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa
Ave., Stanford, CA 94305, (650) 723-3052.
http://visualization.stanford.edu information
http://visualization-wiki.stanford.edu streaming audio

THURSDAY APRIL 12 PFA
7:30 Time After Time
In experimental works and emotionally evocative narratives, students examine memory and its decay.
Program includes: Wandern (Daniel Czernilofsky, 5 mins). you are i hate you (Marik Armstrong, Josh McVeigh-Schultz, 14 mins). My Companions (Wenhua Shi, 1 min, B&W). A Sikh in America (Peter Alsop, 5 mins). Multiple Hugs & Kisses (Yosuke Hosaka, 6 mins). Saturday Ice Fever (Scott Bishop, Siyu Song, Frances You, 2 mins). Hard Knock Life (Alison Beaumont, 2005, 2 mins). Blips and Beeps (Nikolaos Hanselmann, 4.5 mins, B&W). Urban Jungle (Sophie Cooper, 8.5 mins). Fractal (Morgan Swing, 15 mins). Home Movies (Jason Karpman, 3.5 mins, B&W)
Total running time: 67 mins (plus Q & A)

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.

Monday April 16 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.
http://archidose.blogspot.com/2007/01/30-in-30-27.html


TUESDAY APRIL 17 PFA
7:30 Anger Rising: The Restoration of Works by Kenneth Anger at UCLA Film and Television Archive
Ross Lipman in Person
New 35mm prints of four of Kenneth Anger's most famous films, plus an illustrated lecture by UCLA's Lipman detailing the challenges involved in restoring them. Program includes:
Fireworks (1947). Rabbit's Moon (1971). Scorpio Rising (1963). Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965)

Jim Campbell at Hosfelt Gallery March 17-April 28
Jim Campbell is a digital artist (and pioneer of HDTV) who installs arrays of LED lights to produce unusual projections of film of video. He has a show of new work open right now in San Francisco. If you want to go you can write about the exhibit as an event review.
http://www.hosfeltgallery.com/HTML/exhibitions.htm

Jim Campbell TALK at PFA Sat April 21 12pm in MEASURE OF TIME gallery


(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.

TUESDAY APRIL 24 PFA
7:30 Academy Film Archive: Recent Preservations
Mark Toscano in Person
Preservationist Toscano presents abstractions, conceptual pieces, and dryly humorous films, all preserved in the past year at the Academy. Program includes:
Film Exercise #5 (John & James Whitney, 1944). The Assignation (Curtis Harrington, 1952). Documentary Footage (Morgan Fisher, 1968). Runs Good (Pat O'Neill, 1970). Four Corners (Diana Wilson, 1978). Future Perfect (Roberta Friedman, Grahame Weinbren, c. 1976). Brummer's (David Bienstock, 1967). Murder Psalm (Stan Brakhage, 1980).


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.