“The best in the world at accompanying silent film”—Roger Ebert.
The Alloy trio—Terry Donahue (accordion, musical saw, junk, vocals), Roger Miller (keyboards), and Ken Winokur (clarinet and junk percussion)—return to Hamilton, with their brand new score and their Wall of Junk, to accompany a mind-bending selection of early silent films by Edwin S. Porter, Hans Richter, Ferdinand Zecca, Winsor McCay, Ladislas Starevitch, Robert Florey, and others.
A hidden enclave in the shadow of Citi-field (the New York Mets’ new stadium), the neighborhood of Willets Point, slated for destruction by urban development, houses an unusual and endangered community, where auto wrecks, refuse, and recycling form a thriving commerce. Véréna Paravel (and co-maker J. P. Sniadecki) provide an intimate view into this world. Since premiering at the New York Film Festival last fall, Foreign Parts has been honored as Best First Feature by the Locarno Film Festival; as Best Film by the Docs Barcelona Film Festival and the Punto de Vista Film Festival (Pamplona); and as Best Ethno-Anthropological Film by the Dei Popoli Film Festival (Florence, Italy).
After earning her Ph.D. in Science, Technology, and Society (basically a mix of anthropology, history, sociology, and philosophy) in France, Paravel “divorced” conventional academic life to become a gifted filmmaker. 7 Queens is her remarkable first film.
Warhol may be the best-known American painter and graphic artist of the last century and certainly one of the most successful. For a time he was also a prolific filmmaker, with an entirely provocative approach and an utterly distinctive style. Included in Warhol’s filmography are 472 Screen Tests, portraits of the Warhol Superstars and the movers and shakers in the New York cultural scene of the 1960s. F.I.L.M. director Scott MacDonald will present a selection of the Screen Tests. The main course features Barbara Rose, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, John Ashbery, Lou Reed, Jonas Mekas, Paul Morrissey, Paul America, Susan Sontag, and Jack Smith. Desert: Mario Banana (1964). Warhol’s films are legendarily “boring,” but in fact, many of his films are much more than that. See for yourself!
“good news. Last night, at the Tribeca Screening Room, Matthew Porterfield unveiled his second feature, Putty Hill (which premièred earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival), and it’s extraordinary”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker.
“I was raised in a Baltimore suburb wild with unkempt hedges, disheveled lawns and porches, yards full of car parts and swimming pools, and a church or a bar on every corner. This neighborhood, located just inside the city line, is the inspiration for much of my work and sets the scene for Putty Hill”—Matthew Porterfield.
One of modern cinema’s consummate magicians, Ernie Gehr has spent most of his adult life making fascinating films that cinematically confront the formal and visual conventions of popular movies and popular image-making in general. He’ll present three films that question our presumption that the bottom of the motion picture frame is Down and the top of the frame, Up: Shift (1974), Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991), and This Side of Paradise (1991).
When Gehr, who won the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award in 1990, moved to digital video, we wondered if his videomaking could ever match his filmmaking. There’s no doubt any longer.
“I don’t always succeed, but I’m interested in a work that’s like a…playground where there is no supervision, a place where you can get lost, discover your own movie if you wish, your own pleasures”—Ernie Gehr
Maya Deren is generally considered the mother of American avant-garde cinema, because of the films she made and the passion with which she fought for them. Cellist Kristin Miller will accompany Deren’s best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, co-made with Alexander Hammid), along with At Land (1944) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946). Deren’s belief that Hollywood has been “a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form” led her to explore alternative forms of expression; the results remain distinctive and fascinating.
Miller will accompany the Deren films with her own compositions. Named 2004 Female Artist of the Year by Jam Magazine, Kristin Miller “is a master of her instrument, knows how to get what she wants from it, musically and emotionally”—William A. Huffman, Jam Magazine.
“I’m sometimes asked why I choose the subjects I do. I use art, and film, as a tool to discover ways in which I can go from fear to freedom-from-fear. Each one of my pieces is like a small journey from a state of fear through an experience of accessing and encountering some terrifying reality which speaks ultimately of death, and becoming intimate with it, until I see that there is something beyond death. Having a kind of intimacy with death allows you to be free of it”—Pawel Wojtasik.
Wojtasik will present Dark Sun Squeeze (2003), Naked (2005), Nascentes Morimur (2009), Pigs (2010), The Aquarium (2006), and At the Still Point (2010).
If at any time during the past 25 years you’ve watched the annual Academy Awards show, you’re familiar with Chuck Workman’s films, though you may not recognize his name. Workman is the master editor who composes the montages that evoke various dimensions of movie history. He also produces and directs independent documentaries, and in 2010 he completed Visionaries, a feature film focusing on Jonas Mekas and the (mostly American) film avant-garde, with appearances by Kenneth Anger, Su Friedrich, David Lynch, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Robert Downey, Sr.
With Workman’s Academy-Award-winning short, Precious Images.
During his forty-plus years of filmmaking, James Benning has become the foremost film artist of the American landscape and one of the most influential of all American filmmakers here and abroad—and a regular visitor to Hamilton College. His recent shift to high definition digital video has allowed him to be more productive than ever. He continues to explore his native land with intelligence and ingenuity in his newest feature, Small Roads.
Smoking, especially smoking cigarettes, was, for a couple of generations, ubiquitous in commercial movies. Indeed, as brainless as smoking might seem to us (even to most current smokers), smoking was often the very emblem of thought: when characters in Hollywood movies were thinking, they smoked. James Benning, always a bit of a rebel, has made the ultimate homage to cinematic smoking. See what you’re missing (or miss what you’re seeing)!
Events are presented in the Kirner-Johnson Auditorium at 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoons (except when otherwise indicated). Running times for films are listed; lectures and in-person filmmaker presentations can run from 1½ to 2½ hours.
This series is made possible by the office of the Dean of the Faculty,
by the generous support of the Kirkland Endowment,
and by the Experimental Television Center re-grant program.
Events are curated by Scott MacDonald, with help from Heather Johnsen and Bret Olsen.
