FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Website & Email: Richard Sanchez The Experimental Film Channel www.ExperimentalFilmChannel.com P.O. Box 7473 ExperimentalFilmChannel@hotmail.com Boulder, CO 80306 DIEFilmFesitival@aol.com Office: (720) 220-8916 The 2009 Denver International Experimental Film Festival Denver, CO (April 3, 2009)-The Experimental Film Channel & the Denver Crossroads Theater present The 2009 Denver International Experimental Film Festival. Celebrating the best in experimental film approximately every 3rd Tuesday of the month. Film appreciation and networking. Next Show-April 21st, 2009 @ 7:30 p.m. $10.00. Denver Crossroads Theater, NEAR LIGHTRAIL, 2590 Washington Street, Denver, CO 80205, (303) 832-0929 For more information please visit:
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Show #1
Tuesday April 21st , 2009
7:30 p.m.
Approximate Running Time: 2 hours 15 min
First show lineup:
The Free Speech Zone KASUMI, Director 18 min
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6m_OXHU808
Screenings: Nemo Festival, Paris, France-organised by Thecif-Region lle de France, in association with le Forum des Images (Paris 1er) and Reperages magazine. 2004
Athens International Film Festival, 2004, 12th International Art Film Festival, Bratislava, Slovak Republic, June 2004, Seoul Net & Film Festival, Seoul, South Korea, July 2004
SHORT SYNOPSIS: A fusion of multi-layered polyphonic sampling, heavy, relentless beats, and scorching satire, “The Free Speech Zone”, a psychedelic Dada/techno opera, is a scathing condemnation of the American government’s quest for world domination through unrelenting mind control. LONG SYNOPSIS: The veneer of American democracy twitches in its final death throes as the Church of Bush Rove Cheney, Inc. relentlessly jam theirflag-waving religious sloganeering and invocation of god-like superiority down the throats of an uneducated, uninsured, uninformed public. “We are the supreme race! We have the supreme weapons!” Street protesters wishing to demonstrate against the zealotry of the Masters of Mendacity and Manipulation are confined-literally- to caged areas, euphemistically named “free speech zones” out of sight and earshot of average Americans who are “guarded” from the truth by the state controlled media. “They won’t win. They cannot win against the symbol of Christ!” With ruthless calculation and Machiavellian logic, The Republican Princes of Power and Privilege have crafted a permanent war economy in order to provide welfare for the wealthy. “It is the one and only way to maintain the supreme race!”
52 Ford by Ernesto Palomino__________________________________28 min
Hold on to the film “52 Ford”: it is the movie celluloid, cinema as art and culture strip in a 28 minute 16mm format, that launches Palomino in 1960 from the “promising one” (receives the Cal Art Institute Scholarship in 1956) into the extra-ordinary artist of today. The movie and assemblage: you are inside a true 1952 Ford, part sculpture, part collage and theatre cast, a family of characters including a pot smoker, a multi-colored grandfather, car babies, wire birds and teen-agers--- who are you? Where are you going? What border-points are you crashing through? This “moving” art piece, assembled in 1960 can be seen as Palomino’s initial attack and challenge to mainstream America. Here, he forges his new art figure, himself as artist, perhaps, all of us, as consensual drivers of our social condition, this culture vortex termed “our nation” – a careening performance-art-culture-terminator where society looses its day-to-day Eisenhower identity and collapses into a Mex-Warhol re-formulation of things and signs gone astray, and fracture to become an eerie spectacle of de-structure, raw eye-ball slang, Low-rider re-formulations on American art and Chicano being. Enter Palomino’s aesthetics and you step into a dangerous Pachukosis narrative on the crises and ruptures of our current collective consciousness.
September 5:10 by Mitch McCabe 9 Minutes
http://www.mitchmccabe.com/Sept.html
Official Selection: New York Film Festival, Academy Award Nominee-Student Award, Best Documentary-Big Muddy Film Festival, Hamptons Film Festival, Florida Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival, New Zealand Film Festival.
“Moving. The best of the PS2000 Film Festival.” –Village Voice
Video images intertwine with messages left on an answering machine one day in September. The usual daily routine of calls from friends ensues until 5:10 pm, when the voice of a relative announces that “something has happened.” Gradually the phone trnansforms itself into a box of voices echoing the aching sadness and detachment of loss.
“Ephemeral, oblique images and words that fail are transformed into an indelible memento mori.”- New York Film Society
Lake Ivan Exists. Episode #30: The Artificial 29 Minutes
Vibrant spoken-word meets colorful cable-access technology in LAKE IVAN EXISTS, an interesting spin-off from the popular New York-area improvisational theater group led by David Finkelstein. In “The Bathroom,” Finkelstein and James Martin engage in simultaneous monologues about cleanliness, life, and death while roaming about a lavatory dressed up to resemble a Roman bathhouse. Along with videographer Eileen White and musician Bob Goldberg, the group coagulates into a living, breathing collage of sound and image as their performance is augmented by video-generated graphics and scrolling text. Although definitely not for everyone’s tastes, “The Bathroom,”
is a good example of how to make a successful experimental video without succumbing to pedestrian production, inappropriate bells and whistles, or a bloated running time. The Lake Ivan players did not have the most sophisticated resources at their fingertips, as the shimmering on-again auto-focus reveals that a consumer camcorder was used to tape this episode, but the overall result keeps us engaged when it could have easily been distancing. Finkelstein also took much care in choosing the graphics-some textual, some-literal-and mating them together specifically for this home video edition, as the raw, weekly episodes consist solely of the recorded improve. For those looking to dive into something far removed from typical narrative devices, “The Bathroom” harbors a mesmerizing “lake effect” that might just do the trick. Micro-Film Summer 2002
This episode from Lake Ivan Performance Group’s popular cable access show, “Lake Ivan Exists,” displays the Group’s signature style of verbally and visually dense video collages. All of the words, actions, music, and videography you see in this video were completely improvised by the performers. Lake Ivan is committed to the serious exploration of improvisation as a tool to uncover the hidden energies and forces which surround human consciousness, and to presenting these discoveries in works which are evocative, ironic, and resonant. Created and performed by: David Finkelstein, Agnes de Garron, James Martin Directed by David Finkelstein.
Glass Crow by Steven Subotnick ___ 6:15min
http://www.stevensubotnick.com/animations.html
Production, Direction, Animation, Sound Design by Steven Subotnick
Music from “Rothko” & “Shaman Song” by Joan La Barbara
“Tarantella” composed and performed by Alexander Stolmack Ness
A meditation on the Defenestration of Prague, the spark which began the Thirty Years War. Richly layered images explore the world of nature, humanity, and heaven during this moment in history. In 1618, some Protestant nobles angrily broke into a meeting in Prague Castle and threw two Catholic ministers out a window. But the men were saved when they landed in a pile of waste in the castle moat. This was known as the Defenestration of Prague. This event ignited the Thirty Years War. Catholics and Protestants fought each other, and armies roamed the land like locusts, sacking towns, burning farms, and murdering peasants. Nearly a third of the population died from war, starvation, and disease. The struggle for souls was a feast for crows.
Rubicon Third Movement: Arc of an Empire by Simon Tarr 20min
In his much anticipated first feature-length motion picture, award winning filmmaker Simon Tarr paints a stunning, sweeping technohistory of the human race from birth to obsolescence. Sacred geometry and ominous CGI intertwine with a retelling of the story of Noah to illuminate the illusion of authority and the nature of autonomy in the contemporary digital sphere. Simon Tarr made his first movie at the age of eight. The strip of film was fashioned from sandwich bags taped together, with spaceships drawn on it. The projector was a shoebox with a lamp in it, the lens was a magnifying glass on the end of a toilet paper tube. The film premiered on the wall of this bedroom, where the film melted after a few seconds. Since then, Simon Tarr’s films have been screened on every continent (yes, even Antarctica) in hundreds of film festivals. Tarr teaches cinema production at Ithaca College. He is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers and a Trustee of the University Film and Video Foundation, and is a dog person.
Cellular Activity: SPLIT SCREEN by Neil Ira Needleman 16min
http://www.smogdance.com/2003/needleman.html
The best way for me to describe Cellular Activity: Split Screen is to think in terms of music. The words that come to mind are: rhythm, counter-rhythm, syncopation, polyphony, sequence, theme and variation. An explanation is in order. “Cellular Activity” has nothing to do with biology, except in the broadest sense. In this ongoing video series, a “cell” is a group of very quick video shots (typically 4 or 5 shots that last, in total, about a second and a half). Each cell is repeated, like a musical theme, so that the viewer’s eyes have the opportunity to “memorize” the content. This repetition allows a rhythmic pattern to develop. Then the fun begins. New cells are added, new video material is introduced, the patterns are varied, the visual content evolves, and perceptual thresholds are discovered. The visual material in Split Screen comes from an uninteresting video installation that I came across in an art museum. The walls of the gallery were dominated by three large video projections that, to my eyes, amounted to less than the sum of it’s parts. Much less. In fact, the only visually interesting part of the installation happened at the seams-the very narrow border areas where the three large projections came together. But you had to deliberately concentrate on those areas, which was clearly not the intention of the artist. Neil Ira Needleman.
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