ALTERNATIVE CINEMA FALL 2014: EVERYDAY PEOPLE Tuesdays, 7 PM (unless otherwise noted), Golden Auditorium, 105 Little Hall, Colgate University Open to the Public | Free Admission SEPTEMBER 2 OCTOBER 28 GRAVITY WAS EVERYWHERE BACK THEN FEVER DREAMS: SHORT FILMS (DUSTIN GUY DEFA) BRENT GREEN, ARTIST IN PERSON! Recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, Visiting artist Brent Green and his band will perform the acclaimed cinematic experience Dustin Guy Defa is a writer, director and actor whose off-kilter 2011 SXSW feature GRAVITY WAS EVERYWHERE BACK THEN in this can’t-miss event. Raw, visceral film debut, BAD FEVER, earned him piles of respect. In this program, he will share and dreamlike, the hand-drawn animated film tells the true story of Leonard Wood, who 4 short films in which he demonstrates his ability to work artistic miracles in a wide built a towering patchwork house in the 1970s as a healing machine for his wife Mary, range of modes, including found footage, personal essay, and fictional narrative. who is dying from cancer. Green and his band perform the soundtrack to this film live. Wrote Richard Brody in The New Yorker, Defa “packs the emotional amplitude of a Heartbreaking, funny, and philosophically challenging, GRAVITY is a magical work of feature film” into the short film format. art that touches on everything from the vastness of space and the existence of God to the futility of our actions and the power of human will. NOVEMBER 4 COLGATE/FLAHERTY DISTINGUISHED FILMMAKER SERGEI SEPTEMBER 9 LOZNITSA HOTEL DIARIES (JOHN SMITH) SERGEI LOZNITSA, ARTIST IN PERSON! HOTEL DIARIES is an ongoing series of video recordings made by artist John Smith Acclaimed Russian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa joins us for a screening of his work. in hotel rooms, staying up late to ponder the horrors of the ongoing “War on Terror.” The inaugural Colgate/Flaherty Distinguished Filmmaker, Loznitsa has been These deceptively simple works consist of single takes from the point of view of celebrated for his documentary films depicting changes in Russia since the fall of Smith’s camcorder as he explores the nocturnal spaces of hotels he is staying in the Soviet Union, as well as for his fiction films “My Joy” and “In the Fog”, which both and shares his thoughts and observations. Politically engaged and very funny, these competed in the Cannes Film Festival. This evening’s program will offer compelling, brilliantly structured ramblings connect the observations of his surroundings with the poetic, and haunting portraits of contemporary Russia and the wider region, and will horrors of world events, in places such as Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, in consistently be followed by a Q&A with Sergei Loznitsa. surprising ways. This screening was made possible due to the generous support of the Office of the Provost/ Dean of the Faculty and the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor CORE fund, as well as the SEPTEMBER 23 cooperation of The Flaherty. 33 MINUTES X 2 (GARY HILL & BILL VIOLA) “Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?” (Gary Hill, 33:00,1984); “Four Songs” (Bill Viola, NOVEMBER 11 33:00,1976). Let’s see what happens when we watch these two classic 33-minute LEVELFIVE (BRODY CONDON) video art tapes together! Both Viola and Hill explore the phenomenological LEVELFIVE was a series of participatory performances focused on critically exploring dimensions of light, time and sound. Hill’s piece is constructed through the elaborate self actualization seminars from the 1970’s such as Large Group Awareness Training technique of reversing the characters’ lines, which were originally performed sessions like Erhard Seminars Training. LevelFive was not a actual self-actualization backwards — a double reversal that suspends meaning in an oddly disembodied seminar, nor is it affiliated with any actual Large Group Awareness Training company objectiveness. Viola’s suite of metaphysical short videos evidence patterns and or group. Players arrived as their characters, and were expected to emote and themes inherent in his work as a whole: synaestheia, the apparent limits of human experience as their characters, with minimal interruption, for the 2 day duration of the perception, the passage of time, death and resurrection. game. This video is an edited version of the documentation from this event, and is a kind of documentary... I guess. SEPTEMBER 30 THE FEMINISM FACTOR: EARLY VIDEO ART NOVEMBER 18 (MARTHA ROSLER, JOAN JONAS AND ELEANOR ANTIN) EVERYDAY PEOPLE (KALUP LINZY & SHANA MOULTON) “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (Martha Rosler, 6:00, 1975); “Vertical Roll” (Joan Jonas, “As The Art World Might Turn Eps. 1-6)” (Kalup Linzy, 29:00, 2013) & “Whispering 20:00, 1972); “Caught in the Act” (Eleanor Antin, 36:00, 1973). Three seminal Pines Eps. 1-6” (Shana Moulton, 32:00, 2002-6). Two recent adventures in performance-based videotapes give a glimpse into the birth of “video art” and the performance-based series, both playing with low-fi aesthetics, YouTube culture, the rise of a feminist art practice in the early 1970s. Rosler mocks and deconstructs consumer culture and kitsch. Kalup Linzy skewers the art world in his web-based a cooking show with deadpan wit and a wee bit of danger to create one of the soap opera, in which he stars as a fame-obsessed gallery artist. Shana Moulton’s most perfect performance-tapes of all time. Jonas breaks a television to present a series stars herself as Cynthia, a silent, somewhat confused character whose mesmerizing new view of how the female body might be seen on a television set. And interactions with the everyday world and the consumer products all around her are Antin does wonders, with her witty portrayal of “the ballerina,” to explode the notion of both mundane and surreal. both a fixed self and documentary reality. DECEMBER 2 OCTOBER 7 JUST LIKE US FUZE, SWIVEL, SHRIVEL, SQUIGGLE (OLIVER HUSAIN) JESSE MCLEAN, ARTIST IN PERSON! Shot in locations the world over (including Germany, India, Indonesia, and China), Jesse McLean is an acclaimed young media artist motivated by a deep curiosity these four recent works by German artist Oliver Husain are playful travelogues about human behavior and relationships, and concerned with both the power and the from someplace that has never existed, except as the impossible sum of various failure of the mediated experience to bring people together. Her mesmerizing videos parts. They combine a keen, respectful sense of place (a 10,000-degree pan sews seamlessly combine found footage and original material. Strange, humane and often various views of Shanghai into a single seamless panorama) with absurd irreverence hilarious, McLean’s videos are places where people just like us try to figure out how (breaking Jakarta up into a composite fantasia of Cartesian planes and hair-pulling to live within and without mass media... for better or for worse. melodramas) to create a unique view of globalization. OCTOBER 21 This series is made possible by the Department of Art and JAPANESE EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA, FILM SHORTS Art History, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Colgate PROGRAMMER TOMONARI NISHIKAWA, IN PERSON! Arts Council and a generous grant from the New York Council on the Arts Electronic Media and Film Program. The program features short films by Japanese artists, focusing on works that display unique effects in visual – some would express a boundary between reality and illusion, while others would express artists’ interests in image manipulation itself. The program includes Shishosetsu by Nobuhiro Kawanaka (1987), Wiper by by Itaru Kato Programmed by Penny Lane. (1985) and Land by Moe Suzuki (2011)..