Happening Now (Ad)

NEW YORK CITY
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23, DOORS 7PM, PROGRAM 8PM

HAPPENING NOW AT THE FILM-MAKERS¹ COOP
BENEFIT SCREENING AT MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP
66 East 4th Street (btw. 2nd Ave and the Bowery)
Subway: 6 to Astor Place; N, R, W to 8 St.; F, V to Lower East Side-2nd Ave; Tickets: $10-$25 sliding scale

Rally on behalf of the Film-Makers' Cooperative at a Benefit Screening and Silent Auction. The evening will feature a program curated by Caroline Koebel of historic and contemporary works recently inducted into the world-famous FMC collection with many of the artists in person. Partake in Two Boots Pizza, refreshments, and hand-screened FMC t-shirts. Auction items include books, i.e., Stan Brakhage's Film Biographies, Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream, Carolee Schneemann's Split Decision, and the dazzling Flaming Creature - Jack Smith and his Amazing Work and Times, - also: signed paintings and other unique pieces of art and expression like Ken Jacobs'first-of-it's-kind "Life Enhancer"!

PEGGY AHWESH
BEIRUT OUTTAKES (2007, DVD, sound, 7:00)
A startling digital resurrection of deteriorating 35mm trailers from the 1960s found in a ruined Lebanese movie theater. Outtakes appears to be a ready-made, albeit one tailor-made for Ahwesh's career obsessions, pre-filled with her signature elements: gleeful disruptions of high and low, affection for decayed textures, a peeping eye for lurid sexuality, and a fascination with unlikely images of the Middle East. Just one sequence of a go-go-booted belly dancer wriggling in an Arabic-language cinema advertisement for home air conditioners alone has the power to shatter more stereotypes than 500 pages of Edward Said. ­Ed Halter

PIP CHODOROV
FAUX MOUVEMENTS (WRONG MOVES) (2007, 16mm, sound, 12:00)
Having studied cognitive science and film semiotics, Pip Chodorov (b. 1965)recent films and drawings explore the terrain between the two fields. While aiming to confuse the parts of the brain responsible for the perception of motion (areas VI7 and VI8 of the optical cortex), Chodorov maximizes the potential hypnotic power of repetition and irregularity.

KEN JACOBS
CAPITALISM: SLAVERY (2006, DVD, silent, 3:00)
An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief.

BOSKO BLAGOJEVIC
DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE (2007, DVD, sound, 2:55)
Remembering the 90s, distracted; a single articulation, a way in.

LYNNE SACHS
THE SMALL ONES (2007, shot on16mm, DVD, sound, 3:00)
During WWII, the US Army hired Sachs¹ cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones‹small and large‹of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of highly abstracted war imagery and home movies of children at a birthday party.

CHIAKI WATANABE
1/3 (ONE OVER THREE) (2006, DVD, sound, 7:00)
1/3 is an audiovisual ensemble with lo-fi and minimalist aesthetics. The ensemble experiments with "one-bit" as an art expression. The emphasis is on using a single bit of information such as one-bit color, one-bit code and a one-bit note. In the title, "1" stands for one bit, "3" stands for the number of audio and visual inputs (one video from a laptop and two sound sources from custom-made electronics and electronic violin effects). 1/3 explores the essence of simplicity within the complexity with electro-psycho-physical perspectives. Sound by Tristan Perich(electronics), Sylvia Mincewicz (electronic violin)info: www.vusik.net

MIKE KUCHAR
TONE POEM (1982, 16mm, sound, 6:00)
The comfort of solitude leads to dreams.

FLAVIA SOUZA
CARNALEVARE (2003, DVD, sound, 5:20)
CARNALEVARE is an experimental film about the ecstasy of growth and decay.It is an attempt to reveal that ³the rawest materials in life are so pregnant with mystery and the capacity for change that disguising them is beside the point.² Carnalevare means ³take away the meat² and is related to the observence of Lent and the festival of Carnival. The parallel between this ritual and the cycle of birth and decay is in its powerful release and potential for material transformation. All the objects used in the set had been thrown away, by manipulating a few discarded materials and juxtaposing them meaningfully they could perhaps be transformed into something new. My inspiration for this small film was to investigate my own materiality,free of false trappings under the sure and unchangeable influences of time and nature.

JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ
THE GLOWING WOMAN (2007, 16mm, sound, 4:00)
Spiraling colors and abstracted rotating text, poem by Wanda Phipps on the soundtrack both layered and singular. The colors created through hand-printing black and white film with a flashlight and colored filters onto unexposed color film in the dark.

MARTHA COLBURN
MEET ME IN WICHITA (2007, DVD, sound, 7:00)
This work throws Osama Bin Laden into the fairytale Land of Oz. A combination of watercolors, collage and paint on glass animation, this film is a play between fact, fiction, politics, fantasy, terror and morality.

SARAH PUCILL
BACKCOMB (1995, 16mm, screened on DVD, sound, 6:00)
The Surrealists were fascinated by the idea that beneath the surface of everyday life there exist disruptive and uncontrollable forces. In Backcomb, Pucill inflects these themes with a feminist sensibility. In her film, the feminine, is neither personified nor idealised but remains symbolic - we never see the face of the woman with the black hair, nor do we hear her speak, but we come to see her as an almost elemental force. She suggests there is no escaping restrictive social definitions without some kind of violence, symbolic or otherwise. -- Chris Darke, London Production Fund

JUD YALKUT
KUSAMA'S SELF-OBLITERATION (1967/2007, 16mm, sound, 24:00)
A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration. The soundtrack is by the C.I.A. (Citizens for Interplanetary Activity). "The obsessive act of covering (destruction of boundaries-identities) gradually equivalent to the ritual of uncovering (Stripping away of ego); individual self, destroyed in mask/parody/clustering, is transcended. Mandalic (magic circle meditational form used to concentrate attention to a spiraling in/to a point through which new, expanded awareness is possible. The techniques of superimposition, a mere gimmick in most films, is an apt formal analogue for the dissolution of discreteness, for the meshing-merging of identities in the last orgiastic section of SELF-OBLITERATION -- we are confronted with an atomistic collection of figures interacting but one emergent, undulating Meat-Cloud-Being." -- Paul Sharits.


SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23
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