history

FASCINATING FASCISM: Propaganda Films of the 1930’s

An evening dedicated to the fascinating and propagandistic film, performances, and parades of 1930s United States and Germany. The program features selections from American and German musical films, including favorites from the king of spectacle, Busby Berkeley and Nationalist Socialist chorus line The Hiller Girls, propaganda films by Leni Riefenstahl, footage from World’s Fair synchronized swimming display Billy Rose’s Aquacade, and European Mass Gymnastics. Influential conceptual painter, Olivier Mosset, and performance studies scholar, Yasmine Jahanmir, will cap off the night with a discussion of how geometric abstraction and athletic embodiment converge in art and culture during this politically tumultuous time.

Filed Under: Tagged With: found footage, history, lecture performance

WED 12/7
FASCINATING FASCISM: Propaganda Films of the 1930’s

WED 9/14
LEFTIST REVOLUTIONS: Chris Marker’s
Grin Without a Cat

From young anti-war protesters in America to the death of Che Guevara and the rise of leaders like Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-Tung, this remarkably fluid 3 hour documentary examines the rise and fall of the leftist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Rejecting textbook history, the first segment delves into the beginnings of this liberal faction, focusing on 1967, when anti-Vietnam fervor swept the USA and invigorated the political debate. In part two, the disintegration of the movement, dubbed the “new left,” is laid out. Rather than authoritative or sociological. Marker’s technique is essayistic, digressive, fleet-footed, sublime and conjunctural.

WED 9/ 30 @ 7:30
KENNETH ANGER REDUX!
I Will Be Called Lucifer

I Will Be Called Lucifer (Filmmaker, Anthony Buchanan in person!!)

Through a searing mixture of myth, biography, docu-fable, collage and fantasy, Anthony Buchanan’s essay film is an homage to Kenneth Anger, to creative rebels and to the great poets of Hollywood. It’s a love letter from a younger filmmaker to a mentor converging the many lives of Lucifer with the story of filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s troubled production of LUCIFER RISING. Robert Oppenheimer, JFK, Charles Manson, Dennis Hopper, Marilyn Monroe, Bobby Beausoleil and others surface in an experimental film which explores the consequences of seeking truth in archetypal narratives.

Queer Experimental Cinema 101

Tonight, a screening of selected pivotal short works from the history of queer experimental cinema including films by Barbara Hammer, Kenneth Anger, Su Friedrich, Michael Wallin, Jean Genet, Abigail Child, Curt McDowell and more!

Filed Under: Tagged With: experimental film, history, queer

RADICAL GERMAN CINEMA PT. 1: Harun Farocki

Introduced by German Film Scholar Annette Brauerhoch

Harun Farocki (1944-2014). Mr. Farocki made more than 100 films, many of them short experimental documentaries that explored contemporary life, and what he saw as its myriad depredations — war, imprisonment, surveillance, capitalism — through the visual stimuli that attend them. Ruminative, but with an undercurrent of urgency born of his longstanding social engagement, Mr. Farocki’s films sought to illuminate the ways that the technology of image-making is used to shape public ideology. Tonight we screen two of Farocki’s masterful late essay works: War at a Distance (2003) and Workers Leaving the Factory (1995).

Filed Under: Tagged With: experimental film, film essay, German Cinema, history

Wed 2/18
BLACK POWER MIX TAPE!

(Black History Month Special)

During the rise of The Black Power Movement in the 60’s and 70’s, Swedish Television journalists documented the unfolding cultural revolution for their audience back home, having been granted unprecedented access to prominent leaders such as Angela Davis, the SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael, and Black Panthers founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Now, after more than 30 years in storage, this never-before-seen footage spanning nearly a decade is finally available. Director Goran Hugo Olsson presents this mixtape, focusing on the key figures and events in the movement- providing a radically different slant than the biases of the American media. With Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Abiodun Oyewole, John Forte, Robin Kelley and more!

RADIO URUGUAY: Mark Street’s Hasta Nunca.

Sunday, October 26

RADIO URUGUAY: Mark Street’s Hasta Nunca.

Filmmaker Mark Street (Brooklyn) in person!

EV is thrilled to present the work of longtime compatriot, Mark Street, an always adventurous and insightful filmmaker with a practice that spans from experimental film to re-invented documentary and narrative forms. Street’s experimental narrative, Hasta Nunca follows Mario Ligetti, a middle aged hipster DJ who produces an underground radio show in Montevideo, Uruguay. On his show “Secrets and Stories”, he invites listeners to share their intimate thoughts with him and a live radio audience. The film is the product of a close collaboration between Street and an Uruguayan cast and crew, and lead actor Rufo Martínez, a real life DJ and television personality. Shot in cinéma vérité style, Hasta Nunca takes a deeper look at one of Latin America’s under represented countries, carefully touching upon local themes like the lingering effects of the dictatorship and the illegality of abortion. The film interweaves documentary and fiction, scripted narrative and improvisation, and is as much a portrait of Montevideo as it is the story of one of its chroniclers.

Filed Under: Tagged With: artist-in-person, experimental film, history, Latin America

Wed 9/24
MEDIA SHAMANISM Films & Poetry of Ira Cohen

EV Associate Curator, Carl Hanni guides us through the life and work of poet, photographer, filmmaker, publisher and legendary shaman/bohemian Ira Cohen. Ira Cohen lived and created a singular body of work in New York City, Tangier and Katmandu from the 1960s until his death in 2011. His contemporaries included William S. Burroughs, Angus MacLise (Velvet Underground), Gerard Malanga, Charles Henri Ford and Paul Bowles. EV will screen Cohen’s transcendent The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda and Kings With Straw Mats. In Kings With Straw Mats, Ira Cohen is both participant and observer to an extraordinary parade of people on pilgrimage into the heart of one of India’s greatest sacred celebrations, the Kumbh Mela. With the eye of a filmmaker and the voice of a poet, Cohen introduces an array of holy men as they gather for the event, which occurs only once every 12 years.

VISIONARIES OF POETIC CINEMA

Sunday, September 14

VISIONARIES OF POETIC CINEMA

Poets and Artists COME TOGETHER! Tonight we present an essential program of rarely screened

1950 to 60’s American Avant-Garde cinema that will forever alter your perception of the subtle and expansive potential of the film medium. Come experience the church of light at Exploded View! Works by Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Bruce Conner, Shirley Clarke, Ron Rice, Joseph Cornell, Bruce Baillie and more.

Filed Under: Tagged With: experimental film, history