AFS & Experimental Response Cinema: 'Studies in Natural Magic'

PROGRAM 1: Legendary experimental film distributor Canyon Cinema celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with a national tour of programs that represent a rich panoply of independent artist-made films. Introduced by curator David Dinnell.

Filmmaker SCOTT STARK in person!

(Program 2 will be at the Alamo Ritz, Tuesday May 15.)

PROGRAM:

Light Lick: Amen (Saul Levine, 2017, 4 minutes, color, silent)
A stark portrait of my father at daily morning prayers to which I respond, AMEN. Light Licks are a series of films I began in 1999.
The films are made frame by frame, often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into the frame left
unexposed. Light Licks are ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice, and extend my interest in the ways
film can be a medium of visual improvisation. (Saul Levine)

Catfilm for Katy and Cynnie (Standish Lawder, 1973, 3 minutes, color, silent)*
Preserved by the Academy Film Archive. In the early 70’s, a New York cat-lover and filmmaker named Pola Chapelle produced a “Cat
Film Festival,” which was shown in a large downtown NYC auditorium to an audience of more than a thousand cat-lovers. At
the time, I lived with my wife Ursula and our daughters Katy and Cynnie, together with many, too many cats. I loved my family
but not the cats. (Standish Lawder)

28.IV.81 (Bedouin Spark) (Christopher Harris, 2009, 3 minutes, color, silent)
Approximates a small child’s fantasy world in the dark. In a series of close-ups, the nightlight is transformed into a meditative
star-spangled sky. An improvisation, edited inside the camera and shot on a single reel. The stars swirl in silence. (International
Film Festival Rotterdam)

Redshift (Emily Richardson, 2001, 4 minutes, color, sound)
In astronomical terminology redshift is a term used in calculating the distance of stars from the earth, hence determining their
age. Redshift attempts to show the huge geometry of the night sky and give an altered perspective of the landscape, using long
exposures, fixed camera positions, long shots and timelapse animation techniques to reveal aspects of the night that are invisible
to the naked eye. (Emily Richardson)

A Study in Natural Magic (Charlotte Pryce, 2013, 3 minutes, color, silent)
Witness an alchemist’s spell: the transmutation of light into substance: a glimpse of gold. (Charlotte Pryce)

Starlight (Robert Fulton, 1970, 5 minutes, color/B&W, sound)
A Tibetan Lama. His disciple. The disciple’s wife, young boy and terrier. An old tugboat crossing the Mississippi River. A man
in his seventh month of solitude. His hermitage built by his own hands. The man’s bloodhound; his cat. Clouds crossing the
Continental Divide. A mountain stream. A girl. The sun. (Robert Fulton)

Swish (Jean Sousa, 1982, 3 minutes, color, silent)
The subject of the film is motion, and it is an attempt to get inside of it. It was made with a moving subject and a moving camera
with an open shutter, the result being that each frame is unique, without the smooth continuity that is expected in film. The
subject, a female body at close range, provides an intimacy and eroticism. At the same time it can be seen as a modern version
of Futurist simultaneity. (Jean Sousa)

Portland (Greta Snider, 1996, 12 minutes, B&W, sound)
Three friends, including the filmmaker, rendezvous in Portland by hitchhiking or train-hopping from different cities. After
a week of arguments, soup kitchens, brushes with the law, and bad weather, each leaves with a different memory of the trip,
refracted through the tensions and expectations of their triangulated friendship. (Greta Snider)

Degrees of Limitation (Scott Stark, 1982, 3 minutes, color, silent)*
A single 100’ roll shot with a hand-wound 16mm Bolex. For each shot the camera was wound one additional time, allowing me
to make it a little bit farther up the hill. Will I reach the top before the film runs out? A study in self-imposed limitations. (Scott
Stark)

Shrimp Boat Log (David Gatten, 2006/2010, 6 minutes, color, silent)
A mathematical concept by Leonardo da Vinci, translated into a beautiful conceptual film consisting of 300 shots, each 29
frames long. Footage of a logbook of shrimp boat names and the image of those same boats at the mouth of the Edisto River.
(Erwin Van’t Hart, International Film Festival Rotterdam)

Boston Fire (Peter Hutton, 1979, 8 minutes, B&W, silent)
Boston Fire finds grandeur in smoke rising eloquently from a city blaze. Billowing puffs of darkness blend with fountains of water
streaming in from offscreen to orchestrate a play of primal elements. The beautiful texture of the smoke coupled with the
isolation from the source of the fire erases the destructive impact of the event. The camera, lost in the immense dark clouds,
produces images for meditation removed from the causes or consequences of the scene. (Millennium Film Journal)

Orchard (Julie Murray, 2004, 10 minutes, color, sound)
Much of the footage that comprises Orchard is of a 19c ruins that included a walled orchard in and area known as Rostellen in
southwest Ireland. It is set deep in the woods and the crumbling brick and mortar of the broken walls has become the anchor
for the roots of slender trees, so uninhibited for all this time that they reach twenty feet in height and have thick roots that follow
like slow lazy trickles of water and in other places branch and wind over the brickwork in an apparently intelligent arterial
arrangement reminiscent of the human body. (Julie Murray)

Hand Held Day (Gary Beydler, 1975, 6 minutes, color, silent)*
Preserved by the Academy Film Archive. Over the course of two Kodachrome camera rolls, we simultaneously witness eastward and
westward views of the surrounding landscape as the skies, shadows, colors, and light change dramatically. Beydler’s hand,
holding the mirror carefully in front of the camera, quivers and vibrates, suggesting the relatively miniscule scale of humanity in
the face of a monumental landscape and its dramatic transformations. (Mark Toscano)