Kineruku June Special Screening

An Afternoon of Experimental Films

Programmed by Kristi Monfries
(an independent curator from Melbourne, Australia)

June 7th, 2008
3 PM – end
Rumah Buku / Kineruku
Jl. Hegarmanah 52
Bandung, 40141
Tel: 022.2039615

Further info visit: zine.rukukineruku.com

Film Synopsis
Anémic cinéma (Marcel Duchamp, France, 1926)
A spiral design spins dizzily. It’s replaced by a spinning disk. These two continue in perfect alternation until the end: a spiral design, a disk. Each disk is labelled and can be read as it rotates. The messages, in French, feature puns and whimsical rhymes and alliteration. The final message comments on the spiral motif itself. (David, Carless, imdb.com)

Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bunuel, Spain, 1929)
Un Chien Andalou consists of seventeen minutes of bizarre and surreal images that may or may not mean anything. A straight razor seems to be placed by a woman’s eye, a small cloud formation obscures the moon, a cow’s eye is slit open, a woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with his cane, a man drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys and live priests, and a man’s hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge. (michael@everyman.demon.co.uk, imdb.com)

Meshes in the Afternoon (Maya Derren, USA, 1943)
A solitary flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a phone off the hook: discordant images a woman sees as she comes home. She naps and, perhaps, dreams. She sees a hooded figure going down the driveway. The knife is on the stair, then in her bed. The hooded figure puts the flower on her bed then disappears. The woman sees it all happen again. Downstairs, she naps, this time in a chair. She awakes to see a man going upstairs with the flower. He puts it on the bed. The knife is handy. Can these dream-like sequences end happily? A mirror breaks, the man enters the house again. Will he find her? Written by (jhailey@hotmail.com, imdb.com)

Very Eye of the Night (Maya Derren, USA, 1958)
Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion. (David Steele, imdb.com)

Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, USA, 1959)
One of the key works of the American avant-garde in the 1960s. Consisting of a prelude and four parts, this is Brakhage’s allegorical version of creation and his magnum opus. A formidable, layered and richly textured work that you can never get to the end of seeing. (wikipedia.org)

Allures (Jordan Belson, USA, 1961)
Accompanied by electronic music. An experimental film in which computer produced patterns portray a hallucinogenic voyage into outer space. Jordan Belson is an American artist and filmmaker who has created nonobjective, often spiritually oriented, abstract films spanning six decades. (orbit.zkm.de)

Pas De Deux (Norman McLaren, Canada, 1968)
In the film “Pas de deux” he does more than a recording of choreography. Much like with Norman McLaren other work the process of the recording is part of it’s art. He exposes the same frames as many as ten times, creating a multiple image of a ballerina and her partner. Black background and backlit figures coupled with pan pipes produce a quiet and detachment similar to that of his film Lines.

Invocation of My Demon Brother (Kenneth Anger, USA, 1969)
Experimental short, featuring strobe-like homoerotic imagery with several shots of the Rolling Stones in performance and an original synthesizer score by Mick Jagger. (imdb.com)

21-87 (Arthur Lipsett, Canada, 1964)
21-87 is a collage of snippets from discarded footage found by Lipsett in the editing room of the National Film Board (where he was employed as an animator), combined with his own black and white 16mm footage which he shot on the streets of Montreal and New York City, among other locations. 21-87 has had a profound influence on director George Lucas and sound designer/editor Walter Murch. Lucas’s aesthetic and style was strongly influenced by it for the Star Wars films. (wikipedia.org)

Piece Touchée (Martin Arnold, Austria, 1989)
Piece Touchée (1989) is a brief exegesis of a woman reading and a man coming to visit her. This footage comes from an unidentified movie from the 1940s, and opens innocently enough with the woman sitting in a chair enjoying her book. There’s no movement at first, but this is deceptive; an almost imperceptible motion starts to happen with her hand moving slightly up and down, a sign of the slight agitation that eventually explodes as something attempts to open the door. (www.brightlightsfilm.com)

Passage a L’acte (Martin Arnold, Austria, 1993)
Passage a L’acte (1993) makes a simple breakfast scene from To Kill a Mockingbird look like a surrealist nightmare. The 1950s family is the target here. Those who know the film will recognize the characters as a father, his two kids, and a neighbor woman, but the film transforms them into a crazed version of the postwar family. (www.brightlightsfilm.com)