FILM AT REDCAT PRESENTS | Mon May 21 | 8:30 pm 
Jack H. Skirball Screening Series
$10  [students $8, CalArts $5]

New Day at 40 A Community’s Celebration 

REDCAT is proud to mark the 40^th anniversary of New Day Films by hosting a celebratory screening of work by two of its Los Angeles-based members, Anayansi Prado’s Niños en Tierra de Nadie (Children in No Man’s Land) and Adele Horne’s The Tailenders. The collective was created by filmmakers Julia Reichert, Jim Klein, Amalie R. Rothschild and Liane Brandon when Klein and Reichert failed to secure distribution for Growing Up Female (1971), about the social constraints placed on women aged 4 to 35. In the early 1970s the act of hearing women’s voices was perceived as a “radical,” and New Day welcomed the work of filmmakers—both men and women—who were challenging the political status quo in terms of gender, social and racial inequality. Today, New Day Films counts about 120 members, whose films have won Academy Awards, Emmys, and premiered at major film festivals, and cover issues as diverse as immigration, human rights, LGBT, disability, addiction, criminal justice, youth and aging.

In person: New Day Members Adele Horne, Ann Kaneko, Meena Nanji, Anayansi Prado and Jonathan Skurnik

Curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud in collaboration with New Day Films.

-JO

SAUL BASS: A LIFE IN FILM & DESIGN
Tuesday, December 13, 2011 | Lecture | 7:00pm | Hammer Museum 

Saul Bass was the designer of iconic titles and posters for films by Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger, among others; the creator of dynamic logos and advertising campaigns for clients such as Quaker Oats and United Airlines; and an Academy Award winning filmmaker. Pat Kirkham, co-author with Jennifer Bass of Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, explores the world of one of the 20th century’s most influential visual innovators. A book signing will follow the program.
-JO 

Naomi Uman: The Ukrainian Time Machine
Monday, December 12, 2011 | 8:30pm | REDCAT

FRAGMENTS FROM A DIARY | Los Angeles premiere
In 2006, experimental filmmaker Naomi Uman returned to the land her great-grandparents had left a hundred years earlier. Living among the babushky of a tiny Ukrainian village, she discovered a lifestyle that didn’t seem to have changed much in a century, and set out to make a series of “precise miniatures of a rural life that’s fading” (Robert Flaherty Seminar) shot in 16mm, while keeping a video diary. In Kalendar (2008, 16mm, silent, 11 min.), a series of exquisite snapshots examine the meanings of the months in the Ukrainian calendar. Videodiary 2-1-2006 to Present (2011, video, 83 min.) reframes the previous elements into a larger narrative struggling with issues of identity, gender, and her intimate connection with the history of Judaism and global immigration.

In person: Naomi Uman

Curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud.

-JO 

The Experimental Impulse

November 18, 2011 - January 15, 2012
Opening reception: Saturday, November 19 | 6–9pm

Presented as part Pacific Standard Time.

The Experimental Impulse explores the pivotal role of experimentation in Los Angeles in the years immediately following the city’s emergence as a vital artistic center. The exhibition offers new insights into the understanding of developments in critical art practice after 1965 and bridges the gap between these histories and more recent approaches to artmaking. Consisting exclusively of reproductions and facsimiles of materials culled from publications, institutions, and personal collections, as well as a series of recent video and audio interviews conducted for the exhibition, The Experimental Impulse reflects on the networks of exchange and support structures that underlie the history of art in Los Angeles. With contributions by participants in “The Experimental Impulse” seminars at CalArts’ School of Art (2009/10 and 2010/11), the exhibition operates from a position that context informs content and develops an open-ended methodology that has been characteristic of CalArts since its founding. Conceived from the perspective of artists and art students who currently live and work in the city, the exhibition’s curatorial approach reexamines the very notion of historical representation and aims to embody the principles of experimentation. 

In conjunction with the exhibition at REDCAT, East of Borneo, a collaborative art journal and multimedia archive, hosts a selection of commissioned essays, documentation, interviews and research materials related to the process of organizing The Experimental Impulse. Edited by Stacey Allan, this archival component to the exhibition offers an alternative immaterial approach to the role of catalogues and print publications.

Co-organized by Thomas Lawson and Aram Moshayedi

Exhibition design by Martin Kersels and Thomas Lawson

- JO

Doin’ It on Tape: Video from the Woman’s Building

November 13, 2011, 7:30pm
Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028

Alexandra Juhasz and artist Jerri Allyn co-host this screening that features video artworks, public service announcements and documentary footage from the Woman’s Building and the L.A. Women’s Video Center. The LAWVC was cofounded at the WB by Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, and Annette Hunt in 1976 and joined by Jerri Allyn in 1977. Featured artists include: Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, Annette Hunt, Cheri Gaulke, Starr Goode, Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Susan Mogul, Sheila Ruth, Jane Thurmond, and more …

This screening is organized in partnership with the LA Filmforum and in conjunction with the exhibition “Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building” on view at Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design October 1, 2011-January 28, 2012. The video in this program is provided with the permission of the artists; the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute; and the Woman’s Building Archive, Otis College of Art and Design.

“Doin’ It In Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building” is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration, initiated by the Getty, that brings together more than sixty cultural institutions from across Southern California for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America. Additional funding for Doin’ it in Public has been provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Henry Luce Foundation, and Barbara Lee Family Foundation.

The program will include excerpts from the following:

Childcare Public Service Announcement, 1977, LA Women’s Video Center - Nancy Angelo, Annette Hunt, Candace Compton, Jerri Allyn

Mother and Lesbian Daughter Public Service Announcement, 1977, LA Women’s Video Center - Nancy Angelo, Annette Hunt, Candace Compton, Jerri Allyn

Homosexuality Public Service Announcement, 1977, LA Women’s Video Center - Nancy Angelo, Annette Hunt, Candace Compton, Jerri Allyn

Lesbian Occupations - Public Service Announcement, 1977, LA Women’s Video Center - Nancy Angelo, Annette Hunt, Candace Compton, Jerri Allyn

My friends imitating their favorite animals, Candace Compton, 1979

1893 Historical Handicrafts Exhibition / The Woman’s Building at the Chicago Worlds Fair, LA Women’s Video Center, 1976

Feminist Studio Workshop Video-Letter, Susan Mogul, 1974-75

Opening night at the Woman’s Building (Spring Street), December 13, 1975 (including Sheila de Bretteville, Gloria Steinem, June Wayne), Sheila Ruth

Judy Chicago, Sheila Ruth, 1976

Constructive Feminism: Reconstruction of the Woman’s Building, Sheila Ruth, Diana Johnson, and Annette Hunt, 1975

Scenes Never to Be Seen - FSW First Day 1975, Sheila Ruth

Kate Millett, Claudia Queen, Cyd Slayton, 1977

Nun and Deviant, Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, 1976

I love LA, Jane Krauss, 1977

Eclipse in the Western Palace, Cheri Gaulke, 1976

Our Lady of LA, Kathleen Forest, Cheri Gaulke, Sue Maberry, 1982

The Goddess in Art: Starr Goode interviews Marija Gimbutas, circa 1980s

Learn Where the Meat Comes From, Suzanne Lacy, 1976

Record Companies Drag their Feet, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, LA Women’s Video Center - Nancy Angelo, Annette Hunt, Candace Compton, Jerri Allyn, 1977

In Mourning and Rage, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowtiz, LA Women’s Video Center - Nancy Angelo, Annette Hunt, Candace Compton, Jerri Allyn, 1977

So you Want to be a Waitress? The Waitresses - Leslie Belt, Chutney Gunderson Berry, Denise Yarfitz, Jerri Allyn, 1978

La La La workshop, (unknown) 1976

- JO

Dream States: The avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s

October 9, 2011, 7:30pm
Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028

Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors with ID, free for Filmforum memmbers.  Tickets available at:http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/200736

A dorm near USC.  A flat above the Sunset Strip.  A garage in the San Fernando Valley.  A stage in Pasadena.  These are the places where the filmmaking artists of Los Angeles found ways to express their creativity in the years after World War II. 

Los Angeles Filmforum launches our film screening series Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 on October 9^th with Dream States: The Avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s.  The serieswill feature over 24 shows between now and May 2012. Alternative Projections isFilmforum’s exploration of the community of filmmakers, artists, curators and programmers who contributed to the creation and presentation of experimental film and video in Southern Californiain the postwar era.  Film series curated by Adam Hyman and Mark Toscano, with additional contributions by David James, Christine Panushka, Terry Cannon, Ben Caldwell, Stephanie Sapienza, and more.

Alternative Projections is part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945 – 1980, an unprecedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.

Dream States: The avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s 
The American Avant-Garde film started coming into its own in Los Angeles during and after World War II.  At first influenced by several key films from Europe, particularly Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, along with influences from psychoanalysis and surrealism, the filmmakers often invoked dream states and elements of Surrealism.   We start our series with the classic Maya Deren film, Meshes of the Afternoon, generally considered the seminal American Avant-Garde film, made on North Kings Road above the Sunset Strip. A pair of other canonical films also were crafted here, Kenneth Anger’sFireworks and Man Ray’s Juliet.  And Alfred Hitchcock asked Salvador Dali to craft a surreal sequence for the film Spellbound.  But beyond these lay a further range of works, not as well known, but equally daring.

Films to be Screened

• 
  Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, 16mm, b/w, 14min.)
  Directed by Maya Deren

• Spellbound (Salvador Dali directed sequence) (1945, b/w, sound, 3 min.)
  Directed by Salvador Dali and Alfred Hitchcock

• Fireworks (1947, 35mm (orig. 16mm), b/w, sound, 15min.)
  Directed by Kenneth Anger

  (restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive)

• Juliet (ca.1940, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3.5min.)
  Directed by Man Ray 
  (print courtesy of the Centre Georges Pompidou)

• 
  On the Edge (1949, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6min.)
  Directed by Curtis Harrington
  (restored print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive)
• 
  Psyche (Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort, part 1)  (image courtesy of The Temenos Archive) (1947, 16mm, color, sound, 25min.)
  Directed by Gregory Markopoulos

• House of Cards (1947, 16mm, b/w, sound, 16min.)
  Directed by Joseph Vogel

  Joseph Vogel’s little-seen House of Cards employs an unexpected combination of live action and animation within an expressionistic framework to investigate the psyche of a man trapped by compulsions of violence.  The striking visuals in this film were made by Vogel with the assistance of John and James Whitney, who had just a year or so before concluded their Five Film Exercises cycle.
• 
  What is a Man (1958, 16mm, color, sound, 9min.) (courtesy UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive © UC Regents. All rights reserved)
  Directed by Sara Kathryn Arledge

  -JO

Los Angeles Filmforum

Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980

Alternative Projections is a focused historical survey of experimental filmmaking in Los Angeles, particularly in the postwar era. The project will culminate in a series of approximately 16 screenings, which will explore the tradition of L.A. avant-garde filmmaking and how it related to other traditions such as painting, sculpture, performance art and dance. Canonical avant-garde works (films by Pat O’Neill, Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren) will be mixed with films that have had limited public screenings in Los Angeles since that period (Gary Beydler, Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren, Robert Nakamura, Sam Erenberg). In conjunction with the screening series, a media-rich website will be launched, including more than 40 newly created oral histories, as well as articles, archival materials, and filmographies of various artists.
(Image: Foregrounds by Pat O’Neill 1978)

List of Screening Here

- JO 

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
Soap Operas 1979-1990
Nov 5 - Dec 3, 2011

LA><ART will present a selection of videos produced by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto in the 1970’s. These videos will trace these artists’ explorations of mass media’s construction of reality. Employing the syntax and narrative of soap operas and other popular forms, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto unveil the mechanics that construct the media’s relationship to reality and fantasy.

- JO