Director Alison Kobayashi in person

At the International House tomorrow, Feb. 24, 7:00pm, performance and video artist Alison Kobayashi will be presenting her work.

Kobayashi’s pieces address the migration of desires, alongside the transmission of ideas and memory across distances and time. In other words, the works function as mediation through migration. Kobayashi is captivated by found objects that contain traces of private experiences.

Films with artist's notes below.

Dan Carter
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 2006, Canada, video, 15 mins, color
Dan Carter donated his answering machine to a secondhand store. Dan Carter did not remove the cassette tape. So I took it. This film is based on the messages.

From: Alex To: Alex
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 200,6 Canada , video, 6 mins, color
In the fall of 2003 I found a letter on the Winston Churchill Blvd QEW overpass. It was labeled From: Alex To: Alex. This is a film based on the contents of that letter.

DO GOOD
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 2009, Canada, video, 11 mins, color
I catalogued my family’s home video collection. I came across videos of my sister and I in Brownie and Girl Guide ceremonies. It made me want to DO GOOD. It made me want to invite others to DO GOOD too. Five Brownies created new badges. Each Brownie made a video that ex¬plained what was required to earn her badge. You are invited to participate in DO GOOD.

PERIOD 4L
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 2011, Canada , video, work in process, color
John Massier found a letter at a bus stop outside of Dickie’s Dounuts in Buffalo, New York. He gave me the letter.

Pleasure Dome
dir. Alison Kobayashi, 2010, Canada, video, 12 mins, color
Very little is publicly known about what is inside Pleasure Dome. We sought to learn more about Pleasure Dome by closely examining its characters. The goal was to create an objective look at a very singular place. This video is a sample of those findings.

Visiting Filmmaker: Kathryn Ramey

Fall (Kathryn Ramey, 2006)

As part of the Visiting Filmmaker Series sponsored by Temple's Film and Media Arts department, filmmaker Kathryn Ramey will be discussing her work, which uses experimental film techniques to address anthropological and socio-cultural research.

The event starts at 5:15 in Temple's Annenberg Hall (13th and Norris), room 3.

Temple Cinematheque: 60s/70s Animation

The next screening in the Temple Cinematheque series will be a program of Academy Award-winning animation shorts from the 1960s and 1970s. All of the titles will be screened in 16mm:

Pas de Deux (Norman McLaren, 1968, 13m)
Closed Mondays (Bob Gardiner and Will Vinton, 1974, 11m)
Special Delivery (Eunice Macauley and John Weldon, 1977, 7m)
Afterlife (Ishu Patel, 1978, 7min)
The Critic ( Ernest Pintoff, Mel Brooks and Bob Heath, 1963, 4m)
Frank Film (Frank and Caroline Mouris, 1973, 9m)

The program screens next Friday, February 18, at 3 PM in Annenberg Hall (Room 3), 13th and Norris St.

Calendar winter update

The Philly Repertory Film Calendar is now updated. An iCal download, it can be saved then imported into your iCal or Google calendar. It's a handy way to keep up with local screenings and events.

Look out for another update in mid-March.

Stan Douglas in conversation

Stan Douglas in conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen and Nora Alter


Monday, February 14, 2011
6:30 pm
Slought Foundation (4017 Walnut)
Free; reservation not required

Slought Foundation and the Temple University Department of Film and Media Arts are pleased to present artist Stan Douglas in conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen and Nora Alter on Monday, February 14, 2011 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation. This program has been organized by Nora Alter, Chair of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. The conversation will engage Douglas’ Vidéo (2007), an audio-visual meditation on Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965), as well as the artist’s more recent public art project Abbott and Cordova (2009), a photo reenactment of the Gastown riot of 1971. The event will begin with a special screening of Vidéo (35 min; 2007).

"I'm always looking for this nexus point, the middle ground of some kind of transformation. I guess this accounts for the embarrassingly consistent binary constructions in my work. Almost all of the works, especially the ones that look at specific historical events, address moments when history could have gone one way or another. We live in the residue of such moments and for better or worse their potential is not yet spent."
-- Stan Douglas in conversation with Diana Thater (London: Phaidon Press, 1998).

Stan Douglas was born in 1960 and attended the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. His film and video installations, photography, and work in television address the history of literature, cinema and music, the technical and social aspects of mass media, and modernism in terms of its failures as a theoretical utopian concept and its manifestation in present day urbanism. His work frequently engages in subtle societal criticisms and investigations of authorship and subjectivity, and has often been imbued with tropes associated with Blues and Jazz. They are media machines, Automats of a sort, which involve the viewer in their mechanics; they reflect an era of transition from literally mechanical reproduction to electronic saturation. Douglas's widely appreciated work has appeared in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and three Venice Biennales; at Documenta 9, 10 and 11; at the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao; and at the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco and New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the Dia Foundation for the Arts in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others. His work has also been shown in New York at The Studio Museum, Harlem, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Dia Center for the Arts.

Diedrich Diederichsen was editor of two music magazines in the 1980s (Sounds, Hamburg; Spex, Cologne) and taught at several academies in the 1990s in Germany, Austria, and the U.S. in the fields of art history, musicology, theater studies, and cultural studies. He was Professor for Cultural Theory at Merz Academy, Stuttgart from 1998 to 2006, and is currently Professor of Theory, Practice, and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna. Recent Publications include Psicodela y ready-made, Buenos Aires 2010; Utopia of Sound, Vienna 2010 (co-edited with Constanze Ruhm); Rock, Paper, Scissor—Pop-Music/Fine Arts, Graz 2009 (co-edited with Peter Pakesch); On Surplus Value (of Art), Rotterdam/New York 2008; Eigenblutdoping, Cologne 2008; Kritik des Auges, Hamburg 2008; Argument Son, Dijon 2007; Personas en loop, Buenos Aires 2006; Musikzimmer, Cologne 2005.

Video Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Will Schmenner, a Penn grad student who is bringing his film programming experience to our benefit, is curating a series of artists' films and videos at The Museum of Art. The first screening in the series is this Sunday, February 13:

Kiss (Robert Bowers, 1971, 6 minutes)

True/False (Colin Campbell, 1972, 9 minutes)
This Is My Mouth (John Watt, 1973, 10 minutes)

Birthday Suit with Scars and Defects (Lisa Steele, 1974, 13 minutes)

Semiotics of the Kitchen (Martha Rosler, 1975, 6 minutes)

My Rectum Is Not a Grave (To a Film Industry in Crisis) (Steve Reinke, 2007, 7 minutes)

Screening starts at 2:00pm.
Film at Perelman

Location: Perelman Media Room

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Perelman building

Single ticket: $8 (members and students with ID $6), includes Perelman building admission
Series ticket: $38 (members and students with ID $30), includes Perelman building admission

Series details here.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival selections

This week, the International House is presenting selections from the 9th Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Wed, Feb. 9
Iran: Voices of the Unheard
The untold story of Iranian secularists through three fascinating characters – each from a distinct social, economic and educational background – but all sharing a love for their motherland and in need of a country free from political repression and theocracy. (dir. Davoud Geramifard, Canada, 2009, BetaSP, 68 mins, color, Farsi w/ English subtitles)

Thurs, Feb. 10
In the Land of the Free…
Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King – aka The Angola 3 – have spent a combined century in solitary confinement in Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Targeted by prison officials for being members of the Black Panther Party and for fighting against terrible prison conditions, they were convicted of the murder of a prison guard. New evidence continues to emerge as they continue to challenge the verdict. Narrated by Samuel L Jackson, In the Land of the Free… presents the ongoing story as dramatic events continue to unfold. (dir. Vadim Jean, UK/US, 2009, BetaSP, 84 mins, color)

Fri, Feb. 11
Pushing the Elephant
An intimate family drama set against the backdrop of the 1998 conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pushing the Elephant tells the story of Rose Mapendo, who was separated from her five-year-old daughter Nangabire. Rose survived the atrocities of those years and eventually resettled in Phoenix, Arizona with her other children. Now, after 12 years apart, Rose and her daughter Nangabire are reunited in the US. Through the story of their reunion, we come to understand the excruciating decisions Rose made in order to survive and the complex difficulties Nangabire faces as a refugee in the US, torn between her painful past and a hopeful future. (dir. Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel, US, 2010, BetaSP, 84 mins, color, English, Kinyamulenge and Swahili w/ English subtitles.)

Sat, Feb. 12

Youth Producing Change

Young people are on the frontlines of many of the world’s human rights crises, but we rarely get to hear their points of view. The third edition of Youth Producing Change shares powerful stories from young filmmakers across the globe as they turn the camera on their own lives and share their visions of change. Youth Producing Change Short Film Program was founded by Adobe Youth Voices. Full list of titles available at the International House website.

All films begin at 7:00 pm and are presented in video projection.

Companion Blog

For those interested in the more academic side of film studies, I have a separate blog run for the Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar. The seminar itself is a monthly meeting organized around the presentation of academic papers. The weblog will list events in the series and any other talks in the field taking place in the Philadelphia area.

1960s Omnibus Art Film

One of the semi-forgotten genres of the 1960s wave of international/European art cinema is the omnibus film. Producers would package feature length compilations of short films by New Wave and art cinema directors, often around an organizing theme. The practice would help market the work of lesser known directors and could take advantage of coproduction-oriented film policy.

This Thursday (Feb. 3), Secret Cinema is screening The Oldest Profession, an omnibus film about prostitution, featuring leading female stars of the decade (Raquel Welch, Jeanne Moreau, and Elsa Martinelli) and auteur directors, including Jean-Luc Godard and Philippe de Broca. The print is a dye-transfer 35mm print, including the Technicolor sequences of the American print. That means, too, it is dubbed in English, but it's worth noting that all versions of films like this were post-dubbed, since they had international casts.

Screening takes place at 7:00pm at the International House's cinema. Admission: $8.00 ($5.00-$6.00 for members, students & seniors)