Zoopraxographers
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UPCOMING EVENT: September 28, 2024, 8 PM
Zoopraxographers #1 Cricket Requiem
Four films by Stan Brakhage with music by Ulrich Krieger, Eyvind Kang, and Michael Pisaro-Liu
Shown on 16mm: Cricket Requiem; Song 27: Part 1, My Mountain; Cat of the Worm's Green Realm; and The Persian Series, 1-5.
Performers:
Ulrich Krieger is a German composer and saxophonist living in Southern California. Krieger’s recent focus lies on the experimental fringes of contemporary rock culture, in the limbo where noise, metal, silence, electronic music, improvisation and experimental chamber music meet – not accepting stylistic boundaries. Beside his solo work he performed extensively with his groups Metal Machine Trio and Text of Light. He collaborated and performed with Lou Reed, Merzbow, Carl Stone, John Zorn, Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay, Faust, Phill Niblock, Berlin Philharmonics, Ensemble Modern, Musikfabrik, PARTCH Ensemble, and many more. His compositions are widely performed internationally. Krieger studied classical/contemporary saxophone, composition, electronic music, and musicology in Berlin and New York. He is professor for composition and rock music at CalArts.
Michael Pisaro-Liu is a guitarist and composer and a long-time member of the Wandelweiser collective. While, like other members of Wandelweiser, Pisaro-Liu is known for pieces of long duration with periods of silence, over the past two decades his work has branched out in many directions, including work with field recording, electronics, improvisation and large ensembles of very different kinds of instrumental constitution. Pisaro-Liu is the Director of Composition and Experimental Music the California Institute of the Arts.
Eyvind Kang’s recent albums are Azure (with Jessika Kenney, 2023), Sonic Gnostic (2021) and Ajaeng Ajaeng (2020). They have performed with musicians including Bennie Maupin, Bill Frisell, Laurie Anderson.
Film Descriptions:
Cricket Requiem 1999 | 3 minutes | COLOR | SILENT | 16mm
is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed film which juxtaposes bent, sometimes saw-tooth, scratch shapes multiply colored in pastels on a white field juxtaposed with emerging, and sometimes retreating, bi-pack imagery of the faintest imaginable lines (solarized lines) etched in brown-black. This interplay continues until the latter imagery begins to dominate with increasing recurrence. Then suddenly there's a vibrant mix of thick black lines (which is "echoed" once again near end of film) that alters the increasingly colored bent lines and their thin-stringy accompaniment, with rhythms which suggest a stately and emphatic end.
Song 27: Part 1, My Mountain 1968 | 17.5 minutes | COLOR | SILENT | 16mm
Image-by-image study of the Arapaho summit, in all seasons for two years; the clouds and the climate that carve this place in the landscape.
Cat of the Worm's Green Realm 1997 | 14 minutes | COLOR | SILENT | 16mm
Flares of color break into streams of light, leaves, wood grain and prism-etched vegetation.
A moon lifts out of this dark weave to be replaced by autumn leaves against a grainy sky, a fiery sky.
The moon, again, caught in clouds. The movements, moonlit, of a cat. Vegetation and toned flares (a kind of "ghost light" midst microscopic photography of leaves and twigs).
A gray cat licks itself, its name-tag reflected in lens refractions midst microscopic visions of ice and snow, autumn leaves, green leaves, a distant snow-laden green scene.
A black cat sits quickly down on a green lawn. A night of shards of forms in darkness passes into a day again ... again an octagonal light shape "echoing" the cat's name-tag midst, now, colored leaves in extreme close-up and at some distance mixed with sun. Again a "night" of showering dark, a "dawn" of pinks and yellows of plant growth in close-up.
A kind of gentle yellow "high noon" prevails into which the orange worm appears and reappears, twisting, arching, turning. A phosphorescent orange of leaves explodes midst greens and black holes appropriate to the image of the worm.
Flares of suns, imprismed midst yellows and greens and vibrant sky blues ... always the forms of many varieties of leafage mix with a veritable rain or clash of overall tones, a fire of forms, a glowing color photo-negative of worm, and the final canopies of autumn tone and sky tone permeated by sun, sun streaks and octagonal prism shapes ad infinitum.
Persian Series, 1-5 1999 | 15.5 minutes | COLOR | SILENT | 16mm
Like my previous cultural series films (Egyptian series, Arabic numerals series & etc.) these hand-painted films approximate my imagination of moving visual thinking which produced Persian minitures ...
Stan Brakhage is one of the most influential filmmakers in American avant-garde cinema, noted for his unflinching social commentaries and technical innovations. Over his nearly 40-year career, he has made over 200 films of varying length. He made his first film, Interim (1952) at age 18 after dropping out of college. Brakhage films seek to change the way we see. They encourage viewers to eschew traditional narrative structure in favor of pure visual perception that is not reliant on naming what is seen; rather his goal is to create a more visceral visual experience, for he believes that a "stream-of visual-consciousness could be nothing less than the pathway of the soul." To this end, his films are shot in highly sensual colors and utilize minimal soundtracks.
His work can be divided into distinct periods. His first short films explored the properties and possibilities of light. In many of his experimental ventures, Brakhage has forgone traditional cinematography in favor of working directly with the film stock itself. He has occasionally painted, inked, scratched and dyed images onto it; he has also tried pasting organic objects on the film. His most famous example is the 1963 short Mothlight in which he glued moth wings onto the stock. Some of his early films were based on his most intimate experiences that included making love to his new bride--depicted on negative film--in Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959), and an attempt to bring his dead dog back to life with a camera in Sirius Remembered (1959). During the 1960s, Brakhage's iconoclastic views were celebrated for their poetry, but during the '70s, his focus changed to social issues and he alienated many supporters with such disturbing film series as the "Pittsburgh documents" in which he presented many gruesome views of inner city life with films such as Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971) which was shot in a morgue. He also continued with autobiographical material with the "Sincerity/Duplicity series. During the 1980s, Brakhage's focus again changed--this time he became intrigued with creating truly "abstract" films such as Arabics (1982) which consists of brilliant bursts of colored light which he claims, represent "envisioned music." In addition to filmmaking, Brakhage also wrote books about films and filmmaking and also served as a teacher.
Curator:
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work is grounded in experimental literature, the conceptual avant-garde, and philosophy. Liu's works are concerned with materiality in different contexts and eras, as well as its transformation, symbolism, decay, and emotional resonance. For Liu materiality includes both living and inanimate matter. Through film, poetry, painting, sculpture, and other media, she reflects the light and darkness of the world she lives in. Her films have been shown at international film festivals and museums, including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Image Forum Festival, Japan, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, The Museum of Kyoto, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Seating is limited. Ticket reservations are recommended.
More to Come!
November, 2024
