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The Experimental Cinema Group at CU Boulder was ushered in by Carla Selby and Gladney Oakley and was later carried forward by Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage. It is now called First Person Cinema and the curator is Don Yannacito. This program was started in 1955 with the intention of bringing an awareness of the personal cinema to Boulder, and has become a highly respected international showcase for the makers of personal film. It is the longest running program in the world screening avant garde film and video work.

The Stan Brakhage Film Series will continue to show films by Brakhage on the first Sunday of every month at 7:30pm in ATLAS 100. All shows are free and open to the public.

MOST SCREENINGS ARE MONDAYS AT 7:00 PM IN THE VISUAL ARTS COMPLEX AUDITORIUM 1B20 / ADMISSION IS $4.00

Student Award Showcase

Student Award Showcase

Monday, January 25, 2016
7:00 PM

Winners of The Grillo Awards

Made possible with funds from the Arts and Cultural Enrichment Fee. Free admission. The Grillo awards are designed to encourage excellence in filmmaking and help defray some of the expenses required to pursue a degree in film production. A total of up to $17,000 of Grillo funds is distributed each year to four tiers of production students. Final recipients and individual award amounts will be determined each semester by in-class student votes and a panel of judges made up of CU Film Studies faculty and outside professionals. A selection of award winning films will be shown one night only. The Grillo Awards are drawn from a University of Colorado Foundation fund set up in the early ‘90s by the founder and former Director of the CU Film Studies Program, Virgil Grillo (1938-1994), whose dedication and vision helped shepherd Film Studies from its modest beginnings in the 1970s to an undergraduate program with some 600 students.

Erin Espelie

Erin Espelie

Monday, February 8, 2016
7:00 PM

Erin Espelie is a filmmaker, writer, and editor, investigating current scientific research related to the Anthropocene, issues in environmental history, questions of epistemology, and our expectations of the moving image. Espelie’s films have shown at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute, the Natural History Museum of London, Whitechapel Gallery, Crossroads (San Francisco), the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, and more. Her film THE LANTHANIDE SERIES recently won the grand prize at the 15th Seoul International New Media Festival. Most of her professional career in print journalism has been on the staff of Natural History magazine, where Espelie serves as Editor-In-Chief and as a columnist. Since 2002. her monthly column, “The Natural Explanation,” has highlighted high-caliber wildlife photographers and human influences on the environment. Espelie now has a joint appointment at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the Film Studies Program and Department of Critical Media Practices.

Gene Youngblood

Gene Youngblood

Monday, February 15, 2016
7:00 PM

Free admission!

Gene Youngblood is a theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar on the history and theory of alternative cinema. His best-known book, Expanded Cinema, has been cited as the first academic text to consider video an art form, and was influential in establishing the field of media arts. Youngblood is kicking off CU’s Spring of Kuchar, with multiple events celebrating the life and work of the legendary underground filmmaker George Kuchar. He will present a preview of Tarnished Angel, a multimedia work in progress on the 232 video diaries George Kuchar made in 26 years from 1985-2011. This event will be presented in tandem with the internationally renowned filmmaker Jennifer Reeder, who will present the following evening at 6:30pm in VAC 1B20. Both events are sponsored by a grant from the Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and in cooperation with the Department of Art and Art History and the Film Studies Program.

Stephanie Barber

Stephanie Barber

Monday, February 29, 2016
7:00 PM, Naropa University

Stephanie Barber is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Barber’s films and videos have been screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The National Gallery of Art, DC; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles among other galleries, museums and festivals. Many of her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema and Fandor.com. Her collection of short stories All the People was published by Ink Press Productions in June 2015. Her earlier books These Here Separated…and Night Moves were published by Publishing Genius Press in 2009 and 2013 respectively. She lives in Baltimore, MD and teaches in the Mt. Royal Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Art at MICA. Ms. Barber will share a few of the short videos she created during her installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art entitled JHANA and THE RATS OF JAMES OLDS, followed by a reading of a few selections from her book All the People, and then screen her recent feature, the experimental narrative, DAREDEVILS, 85min.

Lori Felker

Lori Felker

Monday, April 4, 2016
7:00 PM

Lori Felker is a filmmaker/artist, teacher, programmer, and performer based in Chicago. Her moving image work focuses on the ways in which we process, share, and disseminate information, via screens, dreams, gestures, games, and dialogue. By employing and pushing these structures, she attempts to study the ineloquent, oppositional, delusional, frustrating, and chaotic qualities of human interaction.  She lets the form follow the idea, and so she has worked in a variety of styles, genres, and formats from handmade 16mm animation to humorous performative TV segments, to a feature-length portrait/documentary on a rock’n’roll alien hybrid.

ZWISCHEN

16mm, 2 min, B&W, scratched soundtrack, 2006

32MM

16mm, 3 min, B&W, silent, 2007

ACROSS & DOWN

16mm & Super-8 to video, xx18min, Color/B&W, sound, 2012

BROKEN NEW: DISASTER

video, 4 min, color, sound, 2012

IT DOESN’T MATTER: Saturday Morning Physics

video, 12 min, color, 2012

BROKEN NEW: DRAMA

video, 7 min, color, 2012 

A TRIP TO ALWAYS FALLS

video (for an installation), 3 min, color, 2015

DISCONTINUITY

video, 15 min, color, sound, 2016

FUTURE LANGUAGE: THE DIMENSIONS OF VON LMO

video, 5 minute excerpt, color, sound, 2016

Documentary on Paul Shartis

Documentary on Paul Shartis

Monday, April 11, 2016
7:00 PM

PAUL SHARITS, a film by François Miron. Long after his premature death, the impact of Paul Sharits lingers on. The prominent iconoclast and innovator provoked with fast-flickering, pulsating, colorful mosaics. The many interviews and testimonies are also a portrait of a generation of leading voices in experimental filmmaking. In the mid sixties, Paul Sharits (1943-1993) started to explore the potential of the flicker. In the decades that followed, Sharits was strikingly persistent in pursuing the total deconstruction of the parameters of 16mm film into such novel forms as multiple projection installations, frozen film frames caught in between plexiglass sheets, and ink colored partitions for abstract films. The ultimate impact of the work was not theoretical, but on the contrary very physical, even visceral. Miron’s documentary not only offers a great recapitulation of one of the most idiosyncratic and pertinent oeuvres within avant-garde film history, he also sketches the portrait of a tormented, deeply romantic artist, always courting disaster but also cursed by an inherited mental condition. The reconstruction of a tragic career is animated with ample illustrations combined with home movies and other rarely seen archive materials.

Graduate Student Showcase

Graduate Student Showcase

Monday, April 18, 2016
7:00 PM

Kate Ewald is a time-based media artist and curator from Baltimore, MD. Her curatorial, critical, and academic work is inspired by constant experimentation and a ritualistic study of theoretical philosophies.  Her current work is driven by a conceptual framework titled “Internal Cinema.”

Dario Ortega was born and raised in Fort Collins, Colorado. He is a narrative director and has made three short films, each shown at various film festivals around the country.  He received his BFA from SCAD Savannah in Georgia and loves drinking coffee from small mugs.

Adam Sekuler is a filmmaker and curator based in Boulder, CO. His films strike a delicate balance between stylization and naturalism, anchored within an observational world while creating a poetic and lyrical form of visual storytelling.

Eric Stewart is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist and educator. Working predominantly with 16mm film, his artistic practice invokes photochemical and darkroom processes to investigate landscape, place and cultural identity in the American West.

Christin Turner is a filmmaker whose work draws upon her background in the visual arts. Her narrative work depicts landscape as both metaphor and means for psychological terrains. Turner’s use of color and light has been described as painterly, impressionistic, and psychedelic.