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First Person Cinema

Fine Arts building, room N141. Mondays at 7:30 pm Admission is $2.00.
Call 303-492-7574 for further information.

 


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 Made through the hand processing and primitive contact printing of outdated laboratory print stock, The Silver Returns examines the phenomena of "letter mountains" that proliferate the old mining towns of the American Southwest.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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