Under the Stars: Experimental portrait films of stars and their makers.
Home Stories, Matthias Müller, 1990
Quarry, Glen Fogel, 2008
A Hallow Kiss for Mark Lapore, Luther Price, 2008
A Separate Peace, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, 2009
Her Fragrant Emulsion, Lewis Klahr, 1987
Rose Hobart, Joseph Cornell, 1936
The Maids, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, 2011
Andy Warhol, Marie Menken, 1964 - 65
Program approx. 70 minutes
These distinct, experimental works take stars and other filmmakers as their starting point, working with found footage or repotage style camera work, these seven filmmakers explore star text and the particular form of personal obsession that such heavenly bodies engender. The screening will be Dirty Looks' first rooftop screening of the season and will be accompanied by a complimentary publication produced with Birdsong Micropress.
Matthias Müller's Home Stories culls from classic Hollywood Woman's Films like Written on the Wind, Madame X and The Birds, re-editing footage shot off the tv to examine the finite gestures and the repetitive interplays of genre (and gendered) cinema. In Quarry, Glen Fogel submits himself to an act of revisionary portraiture, inserting himself into a particularly unsettling episode of "Law and Order." A Separate Peace reconfigures brief sequences of homoerotic longing hidden in this coming of age teen drama, A Separate Piece, the 1972 film adaptation of the John Knowles young adult novel. "It is fraught with admiration, competition, and (un)conscious attempts to contain the other."
Luther Price's A Hallow Kiss for Mark LaPore is an eliptical portrait film made after the passing of the late, namesake experimental filmmaker. Price's typically masterful use of found-footage is embellished by a cinematic stutter effect that brings the screen to life with a frenetic luminosity. Lewis Klahr's Her Fragrant Emulsion is an obsessive homage to B-starlet Mimsi Farmer. “The images I use are outmoded, and there’s a way that they’re dead. By working with them I’m kind of re-animating them, so I don’t really think of myself as an animator, as much as a re-animator that’s bringing these things back into some kind of life.” Made by Joseph Cornell in 1936, Rose Hobart is one of the landmark films of experimental cinema. Cornell reduced the adventure film East
of Borneo to longing takes of its star, Rose Hobart. Placing a blue glass before the projector, the film is a wondrous rabbit hole of dreamy obsession. The Maids submits the 1975 film adaptation of Jean Genet's play to the same technique used to create A Separate Peace. Marie Menken's Andy Warhol captures the elusive artist in a delirious candor, at work in the studio, at exhibition openings, rarely has Warhol been caught this unguarded as in close friend Marie Menken's lens.