Wednesday 2/04: "NEXT!" Magic Lantern Cinema Presents The Re:Direction Show

MAGIC LANTERN CINEMA PRESENTS:

The Re:Direction Show
Wednesday February 4th, 2009
Cable Car Cinema
204 South Main Street, Providence RI
9:30 pm
$5 admission

In honor of our new president and the dire need for big changes, we are starting the year out with a set of films about direction, movement, and leadership.  The first Magic Lantern of 2009 takes a look at the practice of film directors: self-selected rulers, benign, despotic, and somewhere in between, who are subjected to circumstances and infelicities beyond their control and who, in turn, subject their minions to their whims and vision.   As a theme, re:direction treats  filmmaking as a form of social engineering that involves the exercise of power in the face of what feels like powerlessness.  These films blur the line between the individual and the social, fact and fiction, narrative and experiment in an effort to expose the process of art and industry, of vision and realization, and most of all the labor and politics that impinge on the seemingly hermetic world of cinema.   More than simply films about filmmaking, though, these pieces all navigate between what we can and can't control in the name of art and politics, exploring the various detours that the world presents us with and how we deal with them.

Bruce Baillie, Have You Thought of Talking to the Director?, 1962, 16mm, b&w, sound, 15 minutes

Harun Farocki, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet at Work on Franz Kafka's "Amerika," 1983, 16mm transferred to video, b&w, sound, 26 minutes
John Smith, Pyramids/Skunk, 2007, video, color, sound, 16 minutes
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Swamp, 1971, 16mm transferred to DVD, color, sound, 6 minutes
Annemarie Jacir, like twenty impossibles, 2003, 35mm transfer to DVD, color, sound, 16 minutes

TRT: 79 minutes


SYNOPSES:

Bruce Baillie, Have you thought of talking to the director?, 1962, 16mm, b&w, sound, 15 minutes
An experiment in narrative form, this film documents a trip to Mendocino, CA.

Harun Farocki, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet at Work on Franz Kafka's "Amerika," 1983, 16mm transferred to video, b&w, sound, 26 minutes
The film documents Farocki, under Straub's direction, rehearsing for his role as Delamarche in the film Klassenverhältnisse (1983).  The directing technique of Jean-Marie Straub and his wife Daniele Huillet is so repetitive and detail-obsessed that the performers are made to rehearse the scenes to the point of exhaustion. Straub manages his actors like a theater director.- Tilman Baumgärtel

John Smith, Pyramids/Skunk, 2007, digital video, color, sound, 16 minutes
This is one of the most recent pieces from the Hotel Diary series, a collection of video recordings made in the world's hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East- video data bank

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Swamp, 1971, 16mm transferred to DVD, color, sound, 6 minutes
This film deals with the limitations of perceptions through the camera eye as Bob (Robert Smithson) and the filmmaker (Nancy Holt) struggle through a muddy New Jersey swamp. Verbal directions cannot easily be followed as the reeds crash against the lens, blocking vision and forming continuously shifting patterns. Confusion ensues. - filmmaker's collaborative

Annemarie Jacir,  like twenty impossibles, 2003, 35mm transferred to DVD, color, sound, 16 minutes
When a Palestinian film crew decides to avert a closed checkpoint by taking a remote side road, the political landscape unravels, and the passengers are slowly taken apart by the mundane brutality of military occupation. Both a visual poem and a narrative, like twenty impossibles wryly questions artistic responsibility and the politics of filmmaking, while speaking to the fragmentation of a people. - AJ


Curated by Paige Sarlin

Graciously Funded by the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Modern Culture and Media at Brown University