DAVID
SHERMAN IN PERSON
Monday, February 3
David Sherman is a San Francisco based filmmaker and curator. His experimental
films and videos have showed extensively worldwide. His projects include
the co-founding of the world's first Micro Cinema- Total Mobile Home
and, co-founding the Bisbee Underground Film Festival. He is currently
an Adjunct Professor of Film/Video at California College of Arts and
Crafts in Oakland, California.
films to be shown:
THE
SILVER (2001, 22 minutes, color/sound, 16mm)
A chemical Western in 16mm. whose primitive processes reveal a profound
instability of language within desert landscapes. Made through the hand
processing and primitive contact printing of outdated laboratory print
stock, The Silver Returns examines the phenomena of "letter mountains"
that proliferate the old mining towns of the American Southwest.
Tuning the Sleeping Machine (1996, 13 minutes, color/sound, 16mm)
TUNING
THE SLEEPING MACHINE resurrects the cinema projected on the unconscious,
a series of images defined by the gaze of an eye, the presence in an
empty room, the creeping darkness that shrouds a strange face. In this
conflation of image and subject, the timeless dream of cinema finds its
dreamer, and so do we.
To Re-edit the World (2002, 32 min. color/sound, DV)
Assembled from the contents of 4 boxes of 50's and 60's film shot by
San Francisco filmmaker Dion Vigné, spinning through a lost history,
a disappearance of names and faces and works and words of the characters
who comprised one of the great chapters in American Underground filmmaking.
THE GRILLO AWARDS
Monday, February 10
The Grillo family and the University of Colorado Film Studies Department
are proud to announce the creation of the Grillo Awards, which will offer
substantial merit- and project-based grants to CU film students enrolled
in core production classes. The Grillo Awards will be drawn from a University
of Colorado Foundation fund set up in the early '90s by the founder and
former chair of the CU Film Studies Department, Virgil Grillo (1938-1994),
whose dedication and vision helped shepherd Film Studies from its modest
beginnings in the 1970s to an undergraduate degree program boasting some
500 majors.
The Grillo Awards are designed to encourage excellence in filmmaking and
help defray some of the expenses required to pursue a degree in filmmaking.
A total of up to $12,000 will be distributed each year to four tiers of
production students. Final recipients and individual award amounts will
be determined each semester (including summer session) by a panel of judges
made up of CU Film Studies faculty and a Grillo family member. The award
winning films will be shown in tonights program with Grillo family members
and Film Studies faculty present.
NATHANIEL DORSKY IN PERSON
Monday, March 17
Silence in cinema is undoubtedly an acquired taste, but the freedom it
unveils has many rich rewards. The major part of my work is both silent
and paced to be projected at 18 fps. ("Hours for Jerome" should
ideally be shown at 20 fps. when rare luxury of that situation exists,
rather than 24 fps.) To project my silent speed films ("Pneuma"
through "Variations") at 24 fps. or sound speed is to strip them
of their ability to open the heart and speak properly to their audience.
Not only is the specific use of time violated, but the flickering threshold
of cinema's illusion, a major player in these works, is obscured.
It is the direct connection of light and audience that interests me. The
screen continually shits its dimensionality from being an image-window,
to a floating energy field, to simply light on the wall. (In a film like
Pneuma the aura surrounding the screen is as significant as the square
itself.) Silence allows these articulations, which are both poetic and
sculptural at the same time, to be revealed and appreciated.
films to be shown:
LOVE'S
REFRAIN (2000-01, 22 1/2 min, silent, 16mm, color)
Perhaps the most delicately tactile in the series, LOVE'S REFRAIN rests
moment to moment on its own surface. It is a coda in twilight, a soft-spoken
conclusion to a set of four cinematic songs.
ARBOR
VITAE (1999/2000, 8min,16mm, color)
Arbor Vitae is a gesture towards a cinema of pure being. Its atmosphere
is haunted by the period in which it was shot, the year of 1999. Although
the cuts are open and numerous in their intent, the underlying motivation
is the delicate reveal of the transparency of presence, our tender mystery
midst the elaborate unfolding of the tree of life.
THE
VISITATION (2002, 18 min, 16mm, color)
The Visitation is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the
necessity to describe an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place,
but one of revelation in one's own psyche. The place of articulation is
not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response
of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts.
JENNIFER REEVES IN
PERSON
Monday, April 7
Jennifer
Reeves is a Brooklyn-based film artist, currently editing the feature-length
experimental narrative THE TIME WE KILLED, which she just presented as
a work-in-progress at the Independent Feature Film Market at the Angelika
Film Center in NYC. Reeves is veritable one-woman production unit, writing,
shooting, directing, sound-designing and editing her work. Her highly-tactile
films utilize complex techniques of optical-printing, animation, and
sound manipulation, and their unusual image and sound juxtapositions
infer subconscious perception and invention. Reeves’ short films
have screened extensively at diverse venues, and she is often invited
to present and discuss the films in person. Reeves also works part-time
as a film professor at Bard College and New School University. Her essay,
“Argument for the Immediate Sensuous: Notes on Stately Mansions
did Decree and Coupling” (films by Brakhage) was published last
year in the Chicago Review. Her films are distributed by Women Make Movies,
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, and Light Cone in Paris.
films to be shown:
FEAR
OF BLUSHING (2001, 16mm, 5.5 min.)
DARLING
INTERNATIONAL (1999, 16mm, co-director M.M. Serra, 22 min.)
WE
ARE GOING HOME (1998, 16mm, 10 min.)
THE
GIRL'S NERVY (1995, 16mm, 5 min.)
CONFIGURATION
20 (1994, 16mm, 12 min.)
GIRLS
DAYDREAM ABOUT HOLLYWOOD (1992, 16mm, 5 min.)
ELATIONS
IN NEGATIVE (1990, 16mm, 5 min.)
JOHN
COLUMBUS In person
and THE BLACK MARIA
Monday, April 14
John Columbus will introduce recent films and video workds by independent
artiss whose pieces have received awards in teh juried 19th Annual Black
Maria Film and Video Festival. Award winning film to be announced.
EVE
HELLER IN PERSON
Monday, April 21
Eve Heller, born in Amherst, Massachusetts, began making films when she
was 17. She studied film production at the S.U.N.Y. Department of Media
Studies at Buffalo and at New York University. She received her BA in
German Literature from Hunter College in 1987 and an MFA in filmmaking
from Bard College in 1993. Her films have been widely shown, both in
the U.S. and internationally. Eve currently lives and works in Buffalo,
New York.
FILMS TO BE SHOWN:
HER
GLACIAL SPEED (4 min, b/w, silent, 16mm)
The world as seen in a teardrop of milk. I set out to make a film about
how unwitting constellations of meaning rise to a surface of understanding
at a pace outside of worldly time. This premise became a self fulfilling
prophecy. An unexpected interior began to unfold, made palpable by a
trauma that remains abstract.
GLINT
(3 min, color, sound, 16mm)
The kinetic reshuffling of an educational film about 'Reaching Your Reader'
suspends linear strictures of language and gives rise to a playful engagement
of the viewer's impulse to make sense despite the odds.
NOBODY'S
HOME (12 min, b/w, silent, 16mm)
Our childhood house stands empty, flooded with the shape-shifting light
of a dimming day. There's no 'outside' anymore, or place that can be
left behind.
TENDER
SCIENCE (27 min, b/w, sound, 16mm)
A film in memory of my mother, Christiane Menzel Heller.
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