February - May 1999
All programs curated by Astria Suparak and accompanied by program notes, unless otherwise noted. Unmarked screenings took place at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, free of admission charge and open to the public, projected on 16mm, Super-8mm, 3/4" and 1/2" video.

April-May calendar.

Date
Title
Program information
May 12, 1999


M. Scorsese, "The Big Shave"		 Three by Martin Scorsese Three rarely seen films from Kino International:
- "American Boy," 1978, 55 min., 16mm.
An "interview" of Scorsese's friend Steven Prince, who played the gun dealer in Taxi Driver and road managed Neil Diamond. One of Prince's anecdotes in the film was later lifted by Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction.

- "Italian American," 1974, 48 min., 16mm.
Scorsese invites viewers to the home of his parents (who have appeared in Goodfellas, Mean Streets and Raging Bull.

- "The Big Shave," 1968, 6 min., 16mm.
A musical bloodletting.
May 5, 1999


A. Bag, "Untitled Fall '95"
 Alex Bag

- "Untitled Fall '95," 1995, 57 min., video.

A satire on the New York City art school experience. Performance/video artist Bag freebases TV. "Her persona emerges as a mix of Johnny Rotten, Kristen McMenamy, and Patti Smith - as something mediated." Includes an appearance by Bjork.

April calendar.

April 28, 1999


L. Thornton, "Peggy and Fred in Hell"		 Leslie Thornton

+

Mauricio Kagel

A rare screening of films by Argentinian-born, Austrian-based experimental composer Kagel.
1) Mauricio Kagel, "Antithèse," 1965, 19 min., 16mm.
2) Mauricio Kagel, "Unter Strom fur drei Spieler," 1969, 20 min.

"Peggy and Fred in Hell is one of the strangest cinematic artifacts of the last 20 years, revealing the abuses of history and innocence in the face of catastrophe as it chronicles two small children journeying through a post-apocalyptic landscape... Breaking genre restrictions, Thornton uses improvisation, planted quotes, archival footage, and formless timeframes to confront cause and effect as it is framed in viewers' preconceptions"
3) Leslie Thornton, "Dung Smoke Enters the Palace," 1989, 16 min., video.
4) Leslie Thornton, "Peggy and Fred in Kansas," 1989, 11 min., video.
5) Leslie Thornton, "Peggy and Fred and Pete," 1988, 17 min., video.

April 21, 1999


Voice Crack.		 "Broken Music" Sabotaging technology for the use of music. Video work by NY artist/composer Christian Marclay and a rare screening of the Swiss improv duo Voice Crack's film "Kick That Habit," including live footage of Moslang and Guhl playing 'cracked everyday electronics.'

"There can't be any revolution, not just in music, but within the whole information society - Sabotage is the only thing you can do if you want to display a critical position - it's the only thing that's left." - Marcus Popp (Oval)

Program curated by Astria Suparak and Kean Holtkamp, with an accompanying essay by K.H. This program evolved into: Broken Music.
April 14, 1999


Still from "The Effect of Dada & Surrealism..."		 Guest: Dennis Nyback presents:

"The Effect of Dada & Surrealism on Hollywood Movies of the 1930s"		 Film historian/archivist Dennis Nyback presents films from his personal collection.

Featuring W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers (Dada), Busby Berkeley and Frank Tuttle (Surrealism), Bela Lugosi, Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler. All on 16mm film.

- THE BIG BROADCAST (Paramount 1932): Opening title and credits from.
- INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (Paramount 1933): Excerpt from, W. C. Fields arrives in China.
- DAMES (Warner Brothers 1934): Excerpt from, Busby Berkeley sequence.
- LADY IN THE DARK (Paramount 1944): Excerpt from, Surrealistic interlude.
- EVERYTHING'S RHYTHM (Gaumont British 1937): Excerpt from, Harry Roy performs "Make Some Music."
- NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (Paramount 1941): Excerpt from , W. C. Fields fights traffic.
- DAMES (Warner Brothers 1934): Excerpt from, Busby Berkeley sequence.
- DUCK SOUP (MGM 1933): Excerpt from , Battle finale.
- INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (Paramount 1933): Ending scene and credits from.
April 7, 1999



Program notes by Liotta; J. Liotta, "Blue Moon"

Guest: Jeanne Liotta

 

Liotta, maker of films and other cultural ephemera, will show and tell classic and contemporary experiments in cinema by herself and others. She taught filmmaking at Pratt last semester.
"Seen and unseen meet in the place between image and emulsion." - JL

1) "The Flamethrowers," a collective film by O'Toole/Alte Kinder/Schhmelzdahin, 1988-90, 9 min.
2) "Blue Moon," Jeanne Liotta, Super8, sound, 3 min.
3) "garden film," Jurgen Reble, 1993, 16mm blown up from Super8. Reble documents the exhuming of film from my garden plot, then takes it home and chemically alters it.
4) "garden film," Jeanne Liotta, 1999, in-progress, Super8. What happens when you bury film, or "nature is a sledgehammer."
5) "Trapeze Disrobing Act," Thomas Edison, 1901, 1.20 min. From the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection.
6) "Dervish Machine," Jeanne Liotta/Bradley Eros, 1992, sound, 10 min., 16mm blowup from super8. Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin's Dream machine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema.
7) "Retrospectroscope," Kerry Laitala, 1997, 4 min, silent. Wraith infested spools spark to life. In 1895 Georges Demeny invented the revolving glass disc phonoscope. This apparatus was designed for animating chronophotography and 'to indulge the curiosity to commit a series of piquant indiscretions.' Putting a new spin on this paracinematic apparatus, Laitala built a kind of sibling rival to that previous invention, made out of plexiglass transparencies and set in motion-the retrospectroscope.
8) "Ceci n'est pas," Jeanne Liotta, 1997, 7 min, silent, 16mm blowup from super8.
9) "Flight," Greta Snider, 1996, 5 min, silent. "Flight is my father's photographic legacy, compiled and transformed into light. I wanted to materialize what spirit ephemera I have remaining from him. His family photographs, his hobbyist pictures of trains and roses, his airplanes, and his obsession with birds circling, this material is shot through his eyes. THe images are imprinted onto the film, like a fingerprint or trace. It's his movie, really..."
10) "Valse Triste," Bruce Conner, 1978, 7 min, sound.
11) "What Makes Day and Night," Jeanne Liotta, 1998, 10 min, sound.
12) "Works and Days," Hollis Frampton, 1969, 12 min, silent.

March calendar.

Date
Title
Program information
Press
March 31, 1999


P. Greenaway, "A Walk..."; A. Calder, "Calder's Circus" 		"Bestiary"

- "Calder's Circus," 1961, 19 min., film on video.
See Alexander Calder play with his circus sculptures. In his mid-20s Calder made illustrations in a New York journal for Barnum & Bailey's Circus. In Paris, 1927, he created the miniature circus which is now on display at The Whitney Museum.

- "Rhyme 'Em To Death," The Wooster Group, 1993, 10:33, b/w, video.
Reconstructs the trial from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame from a new perspective, that of the minor character of the goat (a postscript in the novel). The Group used 15th century trial transcripts in which animals were persecuted as witches.

- "A Walk Through H," Peter Greenaway, 1978, 41 min, 16mm. Subtitled "The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist." Records an extraordinary symbolic journey through a mysterious bird-filled country.

  

March 17, 1999


M.M. Serra, "L'Amour Fou"


Program notes.

"Hot & Heavy: Radical Cinema from the 1960s to the 1990s,"

Curated by M.M. Serra.


A. Child, "Covert Action"

 A treat from M.M. Serra, Executive Director of the Filmmaker's Cooperative. All presented on 16mm.

1.) "Christmas on Earth," Barbara Rubin, 1962, 30 min., 16mmx2, sound on tape. The only existing print!
A double-screen projection of this 1962 "Happening" film originally called "Cocks and Cunts," it was once projected on the walls of Andy Warhol's Factory and usually accompanied by the Velvet Underground performing live. "...just what was filmed, uncut, unedited." - BR;
2.) "Dyketactics," Barbara Hammer, 1974, 4 min.
A groundbreaking film: an evocative, sensual montage of erotic lesbian love.
The first lesbian lovemaking film to be made by a lesbian filmmaker. Hammer: "I wanted to make a lesbian commercial."
3.) "I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo,"Jack Smith, 1968-70s, sound on tape: Newly Released!
Taking its title from one of his live performances, "I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo for the Lucky Landlord Underground," staged in the early 1980s, but shot mostly in the late '60s and edited a decade later. One of his many film that features the filmmaker as a mock-celebrity, clad in a leopard skin bell-bottomed jumpsuit attended by a nurse as he sits among the debris of his duplex loft at Grand and Green streets.
4.) "Trickfilm," Peggy Ahwesh, 1996, 6 min.
"The Madame spends an evening home with her favorite pet." - PA. M.M. Serra stars.
5.) "Covert Action," Abigail Child, 1984, 8 min.
Found-footage film. "This is very elicit stuff, very sexy material on which to speculate. The first speculation is in film terms, re-reading history, how memories are remembered. There is also a fondness for the captured image, the artifact." -L. Hirshberg, NYU Forum.
6.) "L'Amour Fou," M.M. Serra, 1992, 20 min.
"A curious meditation on the pleasure and terrors of S&M in which interviews with enthusiasts collide with choice porn clips, Fleischer cartoons, Hans Bellmer poupees and a couple of sphincter-tightening routines. The results are compelling, this film lingers, never once slipping into hype or deadly cool." - M. Dargis, Village Voice, 1992.
7.) "Just For You Girls," M.M. Serra, 1997, 2 min.
A Johnson's Baby Powder ad.

Program text from the FC catalogue, Canyon Cinema catalogue, or as relayed over the phone by Serra or Ahwesh.		 Village Voice:

"Radical Cinema from the 1960s to the '90s: Christmas on Earth: Barbara Rubin outdoes both Jack Smith and Andy Warhol in this mother of all underground movies. It's as powerful and transgressive as the day it was made, nearly 40 years ago." - A. Taubin
March 10, 1999
Dutch Harbor still.
 "Dutch Harbor"

 - "Dutch Harbor" by Braden King and Laura Moya. 1998, 80 min., 16mm.

Beautiful indie documentary on the Alaskan harbor, with a soundtrack by members of Tortoise, Gastr Del Sol, Palace, Dirty Three, 11th Dream Day. 		 
March 3, 1999


A. Liipsett still.
 Guest: Julie Murray

Murray will present her films as well as work by other filmmakers.

"The films of Julie Murray are astonishing works of subtle insights and great beauty. Deftly combining her own photographed material and a variety of found footage, Murray creates speculative other worlds which resonate with hidden meaning and tentative connections." - P. Friel, Chicago Filmmakers, 1998

1) "Powers of 10," Charles and Ray Eames, 1968, 8 min.
2) "Freefall," Arthur Lipsett, 1964, 9 min. Compressed time and wooden elephants in clouds.
3) "Otherwise Unexplained Fires," Hollis Frampton, 1977, 14 min.
4) "Conscious," Julie Murray, 1993, 10 min.
5) "Anathema," Julie Murray, 1995, 7 min.
6) "If you stand with Your Back to the Slowing Speed of Light in Water," Julie Murray, 1997, 19 min. "This film attempts allusions to the influence of water touching water (and other fractal equivalents) upon the ordinary confounding anxiety of complex relations, mannerisms and exchange between the animate and the inert. Combined with loose ascriptions of flaws in the medium itself to subject and content throughout, it aims to illuminate a vital sense innate to perception where inversion is counterbalance, and focal myopia the articulation of space." - JM
7) "Micromoth" (work-in-progress), Julie Murray, 1999, 4 min.
8) a surprise!

  

February calendar.

February 24, 1999


S. Benning, "Flat Is Beautiful"		 "Girl Trouble" "Since the early '70s, filmmaker Chantal Akerman has experimented with a blurring of cinematic hierarchies and an undulant, hypnotic approach to plot." - Artforum, Nov 1998

- Chantal Akerman, "J'ai faim, J'ai froid" (I'm Hungry, I'm Cold), 1984, 12 min., film on video, b/w, France.
Starring a young Maria de Medeiros (Henry and June, Pulp Fiction). Two young girls run away from home in Brussels. They spend a day in Paris looking for food and love, with comic and poignant results.
- Chantal Akerman, "Saute ma ville" (Blow Up My Town), 1968, 14 min., film on video, b/w, Belgium.
Featuring the filmmaker in her first film, aged 18. A young woman comes home to her apartment in Brussels, where she cooks pasta and seals herself in with duct tape. Story ends with a bang.
- Sadie Benning, "Flat Is Beautiful," 1998, 50 min., video, USA.
The pixelvision prodigy's new major work. "Flat is Beautiful is an experimental live-action cartoon using masks, animation, subtitles, drawings, and dramatic scenes to investigate the psychic life of an androgynous eleven-year-old girl. Growing up in a working class neighborhood with her single mother and gay roommate, Taylor confronts the loneliness of living between masculine and feminine in a culture obsessed with defining gender difference. Shifting between black and white film and grainy pixelvision video, Flat is Beautiful explores the internal and external worlds of sad people." -VDB catalogue
February 17, 1999


E. Gehr, "Shift"		 "Films In The Round" (full-figured films)
Elliptical narratives, repetition, and other round things. mostly.

1) Sharon Couzin, "Deutschland Spiegel," 1980, 12 min.
Translating to "German Mirror" and named after the newspaper, this film combines old German newsreels with Couzin's personal footage of her son.
2) Hollis Frampton, "Noctiluca: Magellan's Toys: #1," 1974, silent, 3.5 min.
The title (nox/luceo) means something that shines at night, like the moon. It suggests the nocturnal navigation Magellan had to rely on during his first trip around the world.
3) Hollis Frampton, "Critical Mass," 1971, b/w, 26 min.
4) Ernie Gehr, "Rear Window," 1986/91, 10 min.
The view from a Brooklyn apartment "sublimates Hitchcock's voyeurism into a frenzied engagement with the visible... linking the film to his father's death and calling it a 'hopeless attempt' to render the ephemeral tangible." -J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
5) Ernie Gehr, "Shift," 1972-74, 9 min.
Gehr's first film to use extensive montage.
6) Martin Arnold, "Passage a L'Acte," 1993, 12 min., b/w.
"Four people at the breakfast table, an American family, locked in the beat of the cutting table. The short, pulsating sequence at the family table shows, in its original state, a classic, deceptive harmony. Arnold deconstructs this scenario of normality by destroying its original continuity. It catches on the tinny sounds and bizarre body movements of the subjects, which, in reaction, become snagged on the continuity. The message, which lies deep under the surface of the family idyll, suppressed or lost, is exposed -- that message is war." -FMC catalogue. Footage from "To Kill a Mockingbird."

All on 16mm. 72 min. total.
February 10, 1999


M. Muller, "Home Stories"		 Films by Matthias Muller, 1984-91. - "Continental Breakfast," 1984-85, 19 min., S8mm.
- "Final Cut," 1986, 12 min., S8mm. Muller uses rephotography, multiscreen reprojection, dying, hand processing.
- "Epilogue," 1986-87, 16 min, S8mm.
- "The Memo Book" (Aus Der Ferne), 1989, 28 min., S8mm.
- "Home Stories," 1991, 6 min., 16mm, West Germany.

All on 16mm. 75 min. total.
February 3, 1999


C. Marker, "Sans Soleil"
 "Sans Soleil" - By Chris Marker, 1982, 100 min., 16mm, France.

"Travels between Japan, Africa, and Iceland synthesizing sounds and images fluidly."

 

About:
The Pratt Film Series was a weekly program dedicated to showing media work not easily accessible to the public, and to forging ties across art disciplines including performance, music, painting, sculpture, technology, animation, theater, and architecture.

Over the last three years work from eighteen countries, spanning nearly the history of cinema (1901 to works in progress and premieres), have been exhibited here. We also featured guest filmmakers and performers, traveling film and music festivals, and collaborations with other New York City venues.

Astria Suparak, Pratt Film Series Director 1998-2000

Wednesdays, 8:30pm
Dekalb Ave, betw. Hall + Classon St.s
A/C train to Clinton-Washington


Pratt Film Series Expands:
"Pratt Films, a division of the Program Board in Student Activities, has gained increasing attention and recognition outside of Pratt. Outside publications have acknowledged the integrity of the series, including write-ups in the Village Voice by writer Amy Taubin, and the inclusion of Pratt as a venue for alternative films in the Manhattan User's Guide. This year Pratt Films has featured a growing number of guest filmmakers, an international range of films, extremely rare work (some of which have no American distributors or only one print of which exists), and work blending the genres of film, video, performance, and experimental music.

Film programmer/curator Astria P. Suparak has been invited to curate at other locations such as Anthology Film Archives (by the request of the Executive Director of the New York Film-Maker's Cooperative), and the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema a the Collective Unconscious Gallery.

Films are screened Wednesday nights at 8:30pm in Engineering Building room 371. Admission is free." - Gateway, Vol. 9, No. 17, May 3, 1999