A New Romantic T.V. Sound
Program Notes

A New Romantic T.V. Sound
Curated by Astria Suparak, for the New York Underground Film Festival 2001

Choose one: A.) Gary Numan, B.) Barnett Newman, or C.) Bruce Nauman. Can you turn me on, with your mundanity, blurry eyes, Midwestern thighs? You are lo fi and all flesh, a flurry of dispassion and slow jams. Where are your emotions, your tai chi, my climax? Modern Love is Automatic, baby.

Out to Reach
Gedi Sibony. 16mm film, approx. 10 min.
Trying to catch leaves falling as the sun rises over Central Park.

Self-reflecting
Kirsten Stoltmann. Video, 55 sec.
A brooding one-liner accompanied by the kitchen sink and a bikini. "Possibly, this is a self-portrait of the artist, but she's not sure." --K.S.

Communication
Zakery Weiss. Video, 6:15 minutes
"Cold Shoulder", "Broken Record", "Silent Treatment"...Familial love in the age of D.A.R.E. "The following is an actual recording of a most harrowing conversation that took place between my Grandmother and I during one day in 2000. If you watch and listen closely enough, you too will experience the sheer terror and gut-wrenching degradation that I experienced during those six minutes." - Z.K.

True Confessions of an Artist
Kirsten Stoltmann. Video, 5 min., 1994.
Tender chunks of pixelvision and candid, dogged love. You are pathetic and I love you for it. Or: "It is obvious that Kirsten Stoltmann is a very good artist -- but she's been having some problems lately." --K.S.

Drop That Baby Again
Karen Yasinsky.16mm transferred to Beta SP, 5 min.
From the animator of last year's leggy "No Place Like Home", another baffling gem with absent-minded women, curiously forgiving husbands, and plastic babies.

The Clandestine Nautical Carnality of Short I
Tony Conrad. Audio composition. 3 min., CD Recording. 2000.
Sexy syntax and phlirtatious phonetics by legendary minimalist composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad.

Bouncing in the Corner #36DDD
Dara Greenwald. Video, 2:30min. 1999
A late-90's feminist looks back on the seminal work of performance artist, sculptor, and filmmaker Bruce Nauman. A take off on "Bouncing in the Corner" where everything is taken off.

Short Film Series (excerpt)
Guy Sherwin. 16mm, 2 min, silent, 1998.
"Juvenile coots diving and surfacing superimposed on upside-down juvenile coots diving and surfacing backwards." -G.S. A film with a palindrome structure; one of an ongoing series Sherwin began in 1975.

American Graffity
Seth Price. 16mm film transferred to video; 16 minutes; NY Premiere
"A bittersweet coming-of-age story set in the small-town America of the late nineteen-sixties, of the George Lucas. An old man and his young, mustachioed, doppelganger are to be dashing in the woods, nursing the secret fear of the urbans: graffiti comes to stand in for the hidden presence of minorities; not simply an eyesore, but represent a host of race- and class-loaded anxieties: the traces of an unseen, imagined and lurking threat, despite the fact that graffiti is perpetrated by many youth who are white and middle-class, such as the filmmaker." -S.P.

letters, notes
Stephanie Barber. 16mm, silent, 4:15 min.
A new concoction by the maker of "pornfilm": Letters found by the filmmaker set against colorful photos of easy living in the Seventies. Example: "Monday June 2 1991 / 12:57pm afternoon / Denise lifted up her shirt and showed me her plumpteous breasts / I paid 89 cents". Barber writes: "stillness and action in the smallest moments which suggest a life. how to insert a memory. very small suggestions of the enormity of our days."

Private Movie
Naomi Uman. 16mm; 6 minutes; NY Premiere.
"The meat from the pork is sweet." A love story in three parts: Las Vegas motels, orgiastic fireworks, and a meat-butcher love song. "It recounts the journey from a miserable marriage, through joyful solitude, to a loving glowing home. This tiny film explores amorous relations with place, pets, men and melancholia." -N.U.

In Love with Love
Brian Frye. 16mm; 3 minutes; 2000
"One can hardly imagine a more charmingly Freudian love triangle."-- B.F

Press.

Please contact:
Astria Suparak
PO Box 1813 / New York, NY 10009
a@astriasuparak.com / http://www.astriasuparak.com