Below is a list of 13 experimental film programs that may be of
interest. This is just a
sampling of the many films being shown this year. Programs below
are listed with screening time and followed by synopsis and link to
an online video of the trailer as available.
The 25th
anniversary of the
Dallas Video Festival is being held at the Dallas Museum of Art
located at 1717 North Harwood, Dallas TX 75201 downtown. All films
listed are screened at the DMA with the exception of Expanded Cinema
which is best seen outside from the South/West perspective of downtown.
EXPERIMENTAL / ABSTRACT / ART -
-
Expanded Cinema - literally expanding video onto the Dallas
skyline
Wed.,
Sept. 26 audio simulcast on KXT 91.7 FM at 8:30pm. Shown
on the curved walls outside the Omni Dallas Hotel downtown from sundown to
sunup for the weekend duration of the festival.
-
Live Cinema Courtyard performances by
Assor, Blanton, Georgiou, Mckendrick & Morris
Thursday.,
Sept. 27 from 8 – 9:30 pm in the Fleischner Court Yard, upstairs
outside
-
Man with a Movie Camera by
Vertov with an original musical score composed by Jack Waldenmaier
performed live by Voices of Change.
Friday.,
Sept. 28 at 7 pm in the Horchow Auditorium at the Dallas Museum of
Art
-
Short Burst of Horror - shorts block curated by Charles Dee Mitchell
Fri.,
Sept. 28 at 9:30 pm in the Horchow Auditorium at the Dallas Museum of
Art
-
Pull My Daisy featuring Jack Kerouac is part of The Work
of Robert Frank retrospective program
Sat.,
Sept. 29 at 12 pm in Horchow Auditorium
-
Trash Dance by Andrew
Garrison
Sat.,
Sept. 29 at 5:15 pm in Horchow Auditorium
-
Animation - block of 10 shorts
Sat.,
Sept. 29 at 1:30 pm in the C3 Tech Lab Screening Room at the Dallas
Museum of Art
-
La Jetée by Chris Marker
Sat.,
Sept. 29 at 8:30 pm in the C3 Tech Lab Screening Room at the Dallas
Museum of Art
-
Incidental Odysseys - block of 6
shorts
Sat.,
Sept. 29 at 5:15 pm in the Art Studio Screening Room at the Dallas
Museum of Art
-
Secession from the Broadcast: The Internet and the Crisis of Social
Control, lecture by Gene Youngblood –The Program.
Sun.,
Sept. 30 at 3 pm in the C3 Theatre at the Dallas Museum of Art
-
Mess With Texas by
Kelly Sears, Mark and Angela Walley, Scott Stark, Alec Jhangiani, and
Alex Luster
Sun.,
Sept. 30 at 5 pm in the C3 Theatre at the Dallas Museum of Art
-
The Well of Representation – block of 7 short films
Sun.,
Sept. 30 at 5:15 p.m. in the Art Studio Screening Room
-
Images From the Past – block of 2 shorts
Sun.,
Sept. 30 at 6:30 pm in the C3 Tech Lab Screening Room at the Dallas
Museum of Art
EXPANDED
CINEMA - The exterior walls of the Omni Hotel downtown will serve as a screen for an exhibition of video art
works created especially for the building's gigantic display. Audio
for the program will be simulcast on KXT public radio (97.1 FM) at 8:30pm on Wednesday.
The biggest video canvas in Dallas will be created on the four curved walls outside
the new Omni Dallas Hotel near the convention center featuring new video
art works from media artists Kari Altmann, Frank Campagna, Tim
Capper, Rebecca Carter, Brian Fridge, Jeff Gibbons,
Andrea Goldman, Mona Kasra, Kyle Kondas, Phil Lamb, Shane
Mecklenburger, Mike Morris, Ted Setina, Carolyn Sortor, Ron
Tanferno, and Jenny Vogel. Curated by Carolyn Sortor,
Bart Weiss, and Mike Morris.
Only
a handful of buildings in the world offer display systems similar to
the one on the Omni Hotel, and since this particular system was
specifically created to fit the hotel's architecture, it is unique.
The display consists of LED light bars that wrap the entire building,
creating a continuous "screen" approximately 193 feet high
and 999 feet wide. So while it's the biggest screen in town, it's
extremely low-res: only 20 display "pixels" tall.
Because
of the unusual features of this screen, the Omni has to date had a
relatively limited repertoire of video it could display properly.
Ordinary video can be played on it but because of the low-res nature
of the screen, it doesn't always translate well; and the system
automatically stretches the picture to fill the entire width of the
display, unless individually adjusted to fill just part of it.
Artists for this project worked closely with the display system's
operator to analyze its exact requirements, including the formats
compatible with the system software and the dimensions of the display
and its "pixels." They then created a template designed to
make it as easy as possible for other artists to make works that
would utilize the display system's full potential.
The
weekend long video art exhibition on the exterior of this downtown hotel is
titled "Expanded Cinema" in honor of pioneering media arts
theorist Gene Youngblood, whose 1970 book by the same title is seen
as the first to recognize the potential importance of video and other
new media as fine art media.
Live
Cinema Courtyard feat.
Assor, Blanton, Georgiou, Mckendrick & Morris. An
evening of live cinematic works performed in the Fleischner
Courtyard. Each of these works transforms the event of cinematic
projection into a live situation that expands off the screen and into
the space while exchanging the prerecorded index for actions
performed in real-time. Artists include Nadav Assor, Andrew Blanton,
Danielle Georgiou, Julie Mckendrick, and Michael A. Morris.
Man
with a Movie Camera by
Vertov. We
celebrate our 25th
anniversary with a classic film that should be a VideoFest favorite.
Made in 1929, it speaks both aesthetically and conceptually to the
work we show now. With a new original musical score composed by Jack
Waldenmaier and live performance by Voices of Change, Man
with a Movie Camera
Человек
с киноаппаратом,
is an experimental silent documentary film by Russian director Dziga
Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. Vertov's feature film,
produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in
Odessa and other Soviet cities. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are
shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of
modern life. To the extent that the film can be said to have
"characters," they are the cameramen of the title. Critics
voted this film 8th best of all time in the 2012 British Film
Institute poll. A forerunner of contemporary film story editing, it
suggests the possibility of the music video and contemporary
documentary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ZciIC4JPw
Short
Burst of Horror (block of 5
shorts curated by Charles Dee Mitchell)
Ethereal
Chrysalis by Syl Disjonk
Enter
the multidimensional maze of the Ethereal Chrysalis, where the doors
of perception become the annihilation of all rational thoughts.
We,
The Masses by Robyn O’Neil
Houston
artist Robyn O'Neil is known for her large-scale, graphite drawings
of men lost in vast, snowy landscapes, landscapes that evoke austere
beauty, danger, and horror. This short film, produced in conjunction
with Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School, animates O'Neil's world. A
solitary figure, literally dropped from the sky, confronts
unreasoning antagonists and natural disaster, and possibly attains
transcendence. http://vimeo.com/26486761
Pull
My Daisy featuring
Jack Kerouac is part of The
Work of Robert Frank
retrospective program. Considered
the beginning of the New American Cinema, Pull
My Daisy
(1959) is an important avant-garde film with the words dreamed up and
narrated by Kerouac. Presented
by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston at the DMA with Curator Marian
Luntz in Attendance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9nmJQOX-Q&
Trash
Dance by Andrew
Garrison. Sometimes
inspiration can be found in unexpected places. Choreographer Allison
Orr finds beauty and grace in garbage trucks and in the men and women
who pick up our trash. Filmmaker Andrew Garrison follows Orr as she
joins city sanitation workers on their daily routes to listen, learn,
and ultimately to convince them to collaborate in a unique dance
performance. Filmmakers in Attendance. https://vimeo.com/45222871
Animation
block of 10 shorts (59 min.)
One
Minute Puberty written and animated by
Alexander Gellner (not
appropriate for children)
Alexander
Gellner animated this psychedelic video about a man experiencing the
many stages of life in a single minute.
Flawed
by Andrea Dorfman
Flawed
is an impressive animated work from Canadian artist Andrea Dorfman; a
work that is at once twee but serious, heart-warming yet
heart-breaking, in which she examines the conflicting feelings that
arise when she strikes up a romance with a plastic surgeon. Through
an intensely confessional narrative, she discovers that the secret to
getting the boy to accept her is to learn to first accept herself.
Princesse
by Frédérick Tremblay
A
dark vision of how a woman must decide between a growing friendship
with her husband's mistress or her love for an unfaithful man.
and/or
by Emily Hubley
An
artist struggles to navigate the territory between despair and
epiphany, and calls upon inner and outer muses. In the course of his
debate, subtle metamorphoses and color mirror the poetic discussion
that oscillates whimsically between characters. With music by Yo La
Tengo and the voices of Kevin Corrigan, Emily Hubley and Tiprin
Mandalay.
White
Out by Jeff Scher
Snow is particularly
joyful in how it transforms everything it covers. Jeff is a painter
and experimental filmmaker. His work is on permanent display in many
museums including MOMA. He has also created work for HBO, PBS, the
Sundance Channel, and most recently, a music video for Bob Dylan. A
selection of his films was just published as an iPhone and iPad app.
La
Jetée by
Chris Marker.
The
VideoFest mourns the passing of the great Chris Marker, whose works
we have shown over the years. His most influential film, La
Jetée,
inspired the movie 12
Monkeys.
Time travel, still images, a past, present and future and the
aftermath of World War III. The tale of a man, a slave, sent back and
forth, in and out of time, to find a solution to the world's fate. He
must replenish decreasing stocks of food, medicine and energy, but
doing so results in a perpetual memory of a lone female, life, death
and past events that are recreated on an airport’s jetée.
Incidental
Odysseys block of 6 shorts
Tear
it up, Son! by Ross Nugent. A man called Jake lives in the
middle of the forest. He goes for walks in any weather, and takes
naps in the misty fields and woods. He builds a raft to spend time
sitting in a loch. He sleeps in a caravan that floats up a tree. He
is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with
strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a
dream he spent two years working at sea to realize.
Pruitt-ego
by J.J.P. by Maruzczack. This video explores the ego of the lost
bystander, a world of move in/move out memory, a sharpened aesthetic
of dismal return to lonely eras nowhere better rehearsed than on You
Tube videos, asking the most important question architecture invites:
How does the Bystander enter Pruitt-Igloo?
Across
and Down by Lori Felker . Every moment is complex and
contradictory, full of randomness and serendipity. We sample, capture
and play it all back to try to finish the puzzles, discovering lists
of disconnected thoughts as they reveal their similarities letter by
letter, frame by frame, revealing a simple, overlying map.
Why
God Hates Me by Bob Kaputo is a poem - a collection of unrelated
images and words - which by themselves may not make any sense or be
interesting, but connected together in this fashion make a sort of
metaphysical comment on your life.
Inquire
Within by Jay Rosenblatt. A hypnotic, apocalyptic examination of
false choices, double binds, vulnerability and faith.
Beginnings
by Roger Beebe. A lazy man’s Biblical concordance. A
mechanical rescrambling of an audio text to produce concrete poetry
and an ideological unveiling. Restarting from the start. More
fun than it sounds.
Terra
Incognita by Kerry Laitala. Mystical
and unknown territories are explored from macrocosmic to worlds as
seen through a microscope. In 3D and, yes, we will have glasses!
Secession
from the Broadcast: The Internet and the Crisis of Social Control,
lecture by Gene Youngblood –The Program.
There
exists in America today an alternative media environment that
surpasses the wildest utopian dreams of twentieth-century media
activism. It presents the possibility of the communication revolution
that is essential if we are to create on the same scale as we can
destroy. It enables the ultimate act of civil disobedience: leaving
the culture without leaving the country. It holds the possibility of
radical resocialization on an international scale and is a mortal
threat to social control as we know it. This lecture is about what is
at stake in the epic struggle for control of the internet, and what
we must do to release its revolutionary potential. Preceeded by a
trailer of Bryan
Konefsky film on Mr. Youngblood’s past work.
Mess
With Texas. In
the spirit of cinematic intervention, Contemporary Arts Museum
Houston and Aurora Picture Show asked Texas artists Kelly Sears, Mark
and Angela Walley, Scott Stark, Alec Jhangiani, and Alex Luster to
delve into the vast collection of Texas-related movies, newsreels,
and homemade films collected by the Texas Archive of the Moving Image
(TAMI) and create entirely new works from the footage. These
reworkings are creative intersections of past and present, exploring
varying senses of place and home and bringing new life to cinematic
memories
The
Well of Representation – Block of 7 Short Films
20hz
Semiconductor. A 20hz semiconductor observes a geo-magnetic
storm occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Working with data
collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we
hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at
the frequency of 20hz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and
sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualizations. As
different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex
patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the
limits of our perception
…These
Blazing Stars by Debora Stratman. Comets, once regarded as signs
or signals from beyond, are now seen as time capsules containing
elemental information about our solar system. … These Blazing
Stars! looks at the modern preoccupation with empirical analysis
as well as ancient methods wherein people looked to the stars not
just to measure, but also to interpret both metaphorically and
poetically.
Walt
Disney's Taxi Driver by Bryan Boyce. Walt Disney's
re-imagineering of Martin Scorsese's classic film "Taxi Driver"
follows Mickey Mouse-obsessed Travis Bickle as he looks for love in a
rapidly transforming New York City.
Remote
by Jesse McLean. In the collage video Remote, dream logic
invokes a presence that drifts through physical and temporal
barriers. There is a presence lingering in the dark woods, just under
the surface of a placid lake and at the end of dreary basement
corridor. It’s not easy to locate because it’s outside but also
inside. It doesn’t just crawl in on your wires because it’s not a
thing. It’s a shocking eruption of electrical energy.
The
Story of Milk and Honey by Basma Al-sharif is a short
experimental video belonging to a larger project, which includes
photographs, drawings and text, detailing an un-named individual’s
failure to write a love story. Through voiceover narration that
weaves together images, letters, and songs, a story of defeat
transpires into a journey that explores how we collect and perceive
information, understand facts, history, images, and sound and where
the individual is to be found in the midst of the material.
Dwarfs
the Sea by Stephanie Barber. Small biographies and musing
generalizations--men’s relations to each other and their lives.
There is hope and loneliness, companionship and isolation and the
simplest of filmic elements to contrast the complexity of human
emotions. The delicacy of the formalist writing moves the listener
from intimacy to universalism and back again, swaying gently to and
fro like the rocking of a ship. The minimalism of the photographic
presentation allows the viewer to recognize the humanity in each
individual document of a body.
Ceibas:
Epilogue, the Well of Representation by Evan Meany
In
part a remake of Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! (1979), in part a
repurposing of hacked, 16-bit video game technology. The Well
of Representation asks us to reconsider our fear of the liminal.
Following the convergent narratives of several voices, ranging from
the linearly historical to the cybernetically personal, we come to
understand the journey ahead. Searching
from interface to interface, knowing that whatever home we find will
be a collaborative compromise. One where we might live beyond our
representations and finally come to say what we mean.
Images
From the Past – block of 2 shorts
Intermezzo
by Roger Deutsch compresses five cinematic melodramas by compiling
parallel fragments that speak to each other to create a new meta
melodrama.
Synchronize
by Elise The is a
tribute to the powerful effect movies can have on our imagination.
This short film takes the viewer through the dream of a video store
clerk whose vision is formed by the movies he sees and hears.
http://dallasvideofest.festivalgenius.com/2012/schedule/week
, Julien Donkey Boy, Mister Lonely, and Trash Humpers
. Korine wrote the scripts for both Kids
& Ken Park (which were directed by Larry Clark). His work is distinct & unconventional, focusing more on abstract moments than linear storytelling. His films create a mood, sometimes disturbing but always compelling.
