Events of the Week: Maysles and Wiseman

Tonight, the International House is having a special event with Albert Maysles, the noted direct cinema documentary filmmaker. He will be participating in a discussion at 7:00. [event information]

And this upcoming Tuesday, Nov. 11, the Philadelphia Film Society at the Roxy will be screening Frederick Wiseman's latest documentary, National Gallery. Wiseman himself will be in attendance for the screening. 7:00pm [event information]

Marker (and Varda)

There's an embarrassment of riches this week, as Penn, Temple, and Slought are organizing a commemorative symposium on Chris Marker's work, with visiting filmmakers to include Agnes Varda. Here's a rundown of events:

Wed. March 13

6pm
Agnès Varda, in conversation with Molly Nesbit

University of Pennsylvania, Meyerson Hall

Thurs. March 14
7PM
Screening: Beaches of Agnes (Varda 2008)

Varda in person

International House

Friday, March 15

5:30PM

opening panel and reception for Chris Marker event

Slought Foundation

reservation recommended

Saturday, March 16

10AM-6PM

Chris Marker event

Slought Foundation

reservation recommended

Saturday, March 16

7PM

Screening: early Chris Marker collaborations

International House

Ross McElwee tonight

Ross McElwee will be presenting and screening his latest film Photographic Memory tonight at University of Pennsylvania:

Thursday, November 8, 2012
5:30pm
401 Fisher Bennett Hall
University of Pennsylvania

Strong! at Haverford

STRANGE TRUTH Documentary Film Series presents

STRONG!
A screening and conversation with Filmmaker Julie Wyman and Olympic Weightlifter Cheryl Haworth

Wednesday March 21, 2012
7:30pm

Sharpless Auditorium, Haverford College

Cheryl Haworth is a young woman with a big dream: to be the strongest woman in the world.
As the 300-pound Olympic weightlifter prepares for Beijing 2008, she struggles with injury, confidence, and her place in a world where larger women are not readily accepted.


Sponsored by the John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Leaves of Grass Fund, and Independent College Programs
Organized by Visiting Filmmaker Vicky Funari in conjunction with the Exhibitions Program

Screening and Q&A with director John Greyson

"FIG TREES"

Screening and Q&A with director John Greyson
Wed., March 14

7:00 PM

KINSC Sharpless Auditorium
Haverford College

Fig Trees is documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell in Toronto and Zackie Achmat in Capetown, as narrated by an albino squirrel, an amputee busker and St. Teresa of Avila. Organized at Haverford College by Farid Azfar (History Department) and Vicky Funari (Filmmaker, Independent College Programs).

The recipient of the 2000 Toronto Arts Award for film/video and the 2007 Bell Award in Video Art, John Greyson is a filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist and educator whose productions have won accolades at festivals throughout the world. In addition to Fig Trees, his feature films include Urinal, Lilies, Uncut, and The Law of Enclosures). As a televisor director, his credits include episodes for Queer as Folk, Made In Canada, Drop the Beat and Welcome to Paradox. Greyson is active in various anti-censorship, AIDS, peace and queer activist media projects. He has taught film and video theory and production in Canada, the United States, Cuba and South Africa. He joined the full-time faculty in the Film Department of York University (Ontario, Canada) in 2005.

Temple Cinematheque: David Holzman's Diary

This friday writer/actor/producer L.M. "Kit" Carson will come to discuss his role in the production of David Holzman's Diary, this week's Temple Cinemathèque film presentation. The documentary will be shown in 16mm

Friday, Febuary 17

3PM

Annenberg Hall, AH 3 (basement screening room)

13th and Norris

Temple University main campus

SCT Film Lab Coordinator Len Guercio will introduce the film as well as moderate a post-film Q&A.

In a career characterized by a diverse body of work and a singular independent filmmaking aesthetic, Carson will also discuss his latest documentary, Africa Diary, which will premiere this March on the Sundance Channel.

As before, the screening is free and open to all. However, seating is limited so please arrive early.

This Cinemathèque screening is made possible by support from Temple's FMA Department & faculty as well as the SCT Operations department.

John Akomfrah at Scribe

Tonight, at Scribe Video Center:

Father of Black British Cinema, John Akomfrah, Comes to Scribe, 7PM for an in-person conversation with Louis Messiah.

In Conversation with John Akomfrah (in-person)

April 18

7PM

at Scribe Video Center

$5

Please join us Monday April 18, 7PM at Scribe for an in-person conversation between acclaimed British filmmaker John Akomfrah and Scribe's executive director Louis Massiah. Considered one of the founding fathers of Black British Cinema, Akomfrah will screen excerpts from his new works and the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions.

Presented in partnership with Temple University's Department of Film and Media Studies and the University of Pennsylvania's Program in Cinema Studies, Center for Africana Studies, and the English Department - Latitudes Reading Group. $5, free for Scribe members, Temple University and University of Pennsylvania students and faculty. Seating is first-come first-serve. Attendees may also pre-register for this event by calling 215-222-4201.

Peter Rose film screening

Language, Time, and Fiction - Six works by Peter Rose

Peter Rose will show six works that propose sly philosophical questions about consciousness and language, time and space, and appearance and reality. The screening will conclude with the Philadelphia premiere of a new work that presents a luminous nocturnal portrait of a vanished culture.

University of Pennsylvania
Van Pelt Film Studies Center
Room 425 Van Pelt Library

Thursday, April 14, 2011
5:00pm

Works on video format.

El General at Haverford

A screening at Haverford this week, with the director in person:

EL GENERAL
directed by Natalia Almada 2009

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
7:00 pm
Sharpless Auditorium
Haverford College

Filmmaker Natalia Almada will be present to introduce and discuss the film.

In 1910 a revolution erupted in Mexico. Among its rallying cries was "the right to vote." Nearly a century later this same cry is heard as thousands take to the streets during a hotly contested presidential campaign. Through the legacy that filmmaker Natalia Almada inherited as the great-granddaughter of Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles (1924-1928), one of Mexico's most controversial revolutionary figures, accused of having been a dictator, an "Iron Man" and a "Nun-Burner," yet also acclaimed as the "father of modern Mexico," El General is a portrait of a family and a country under the shadow of the past.

Natlaia Almada was the recipient of the 2009 Sundance Documentary Directing Award for El General; her previous credits include All Water Has a Perfect Memory, an experimental short film that received international recognition, and Al Otro Lado, her award-winning debut feature documentary about immigration, drug trafficking and corrido music. Almada’s films have screened at The Sundance Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum and The Whitney Biennial and have been broadcast on the PBS series P.O.V., The Sundance Channel, ARTE, VPRO and others.

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.

Leighton Pierce

Still from Number One (2007)

Next Tuesday, the Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College will be hosting an evening with film and video artist Leighton Pierce.

Tuesday, October 26, 7pm

Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema, Swarthmore College (Directions)

One of the most acclaimed and prolific experimental moving image artists working in the U.S. today, Leighton Pierce uses film, video, photography, and sound to create experiences in transformative time, executing all aspects of his works himself –conceptualization, cinematography, editing, sound design and composition. Pierce will present an hour-long program of his work including the area premieres of Retrograde Premonition and Sharp Edge Blunt, followed by Q&A. Pierce’s early interest in music, especially jazz and electronic music, and the construction of emotional experiences in time continue to guide his work. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Whitney Biennial. He teaches in the prestigious film program of the University of Iowa, where he has influenced many important experimental artists.