This week at SFC: trinidad + tobago film festival
STUDIOFILMCLUB
BUILDING 7
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
PORT OF SPAIN
For more info about the Film Festival, click here
STUDIOFILMCLUB is very proud to have Hilton Als select this years program for our part of the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival 2009.
Hilton is an author and staff writer for the New Yorker and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
He has been actively involved with SFC since agreeing to choose films for the festival - writing syopsis's and his conversations have suggested film after film for screening...
For the festival Hilton has entitled his three night selection THREE WOMEN - and it starts off withwith Robert Altman's classic 3 Women.
Three Women
In 1977, the late Texas-born director, Robert Altman (1925-2006) had a dream. It involved three women living in a desert resort community, somewhere in California. The next morning, with the help of the screenwriter, Pat Resnick, Altman began sketching his film, which remains his most personal, and among the more disturbing produced during Hollywood's late to mid-seventies golden age. Starring three performers from Texas--Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule--"3 Women," is as much about the double-self as Ingmar Bergman's brilliant, "Persona," but with the cock-eyed charm of a M-G-M comedy starring Zasu Pitts. While Janice Rule paints enigmatic murals in a rundown apartment house for singles, Duvall-as-Millie-Lamorroreaux'
s new roommate, Pinky Rose (Spacek) starts to assume aspects of Millie's personality, including her awkwardness, and penchant for sleeping with Rule's husband. For her astonishing work--she improvised a great many of her monologues--Shelley Duvall won the Best Actress award at Cannes, while Spacek collected a Best Supporting Actress honor from the New York Film Critics.
3 WOMEN Wednesday 16th September 8:15 pm
Directed by Robert Altman
Starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule
Running time: approximately 125 minutes
Color film
Robert Altman is generally regarded as one of America's great directors. By the time of his death, he had made over forty feature length films, including the seminal MASH (1970), "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971) and
"Nashville" (1975). His work was distinctive in its use of overlapping, naturalistic dialogue, and for its criticism of America's status quo. He was awarded an honorary Oscar before his death in 2006
Thursday 17th September 8:15pm
Two Women: Sort Of
The filmmaker Leslie Thornton's "Peggy and Fred in Hell," is a process-oriented work that combines archival footage, and images Thornton's shot and arranged herself, on both film and video, from 1984 to 2009. In the early nineteen-eighties, the artist began filming two children she met in Providence, Rhode Island. In short order they became the focus of her project--to show the last two beings, a pre-adolescent brother and sister, on earth. Inundated by media and natural devastation, Peggy and Fred traverse a post-apocalyptic universe where they can only reflect one another, and the ruin of the world. (Part of the story Thornton means to tell here through metaphor is her own history of duality. How to resolve the image of her father, a gentle man, with the fact that he was a scientist who worked on developing the Atom bomb?) Combining bright lights, pictures and sound from television, as well as pre-sound images from documentary nature films, Thornton's extraordinary document is a near hallucinatory blend of "real" shots and manufactured scenes, or fiction. Taken together, they challenge our notion of what's true and what's false, what defines a boy and a girl, and how to cope in a world that won't let us alone even as it disappears right before our very eyes.
Peggy and Fred in Hell
Directed by Leslie Thornton
Running time: 90 minutes
Color and black and white
Leslie Thornton was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1951. She is a professor in the Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown University. Her other films include "Let Me Count The Ways..10...9...8...7," which was selected for inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Kalup Linzy
The performance artist and filmmaker Kalup Linzy generally performs in drag, but he's a post-camp artist. While his videos--a take-off on the soap operas he watched as a child--have arch elements, Linzy is sincere in his appreciation of story-telling, pathos, and suspense. But the world seen in long-running television shows like "The Guiding Light," and "The Young and The Restless," are almost all-white, upwardly mobile, or both. Linzy rejects this notion, and makes poor or lower middle-class Southern-based black women the focus of his short, trenchant videos. Following no particular order, Linzy's soap operas track the inhabitants of a small Southern town who need a ride to the club, or disagree with someone's object choice. It's Faulkner by way of Tyler Perry. Crudely dubbed--one troubled character asks, "Is God throwing shade?"--Linzy speaks all his characters lines, both men and women, black and white, the better to maintain control over his fictionalized world filled with real humor and feelings.
Kalup Linzy was born in Clermont, Florida, in 1977. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of South Florida, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
One Woman
In 1997, Kara Walker won the MacArthur "genius" award--one of the youngest artists to be so honored. This was for her body of work, which centers on race, and the powerful psychological projections that are attached to stereotypes. From the start of her career, Walker has used the antiquated silhouette form to address slavery, and it's resulting confusion: "carpet-bagging," "freedom," miscegenation. It was only a matter of time before the artist made the next step--by having her sweeping still narratives move. In 2004, Walker directed her first film, "Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions"--a film that gains in narrative power through its chronological confusion. Things happen, but when? While a Walker film is rooted in the history of slavery--we recognize the plantation, the masters and the slaves--we see it through a modern lens, informed by our knowledge of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," "Mandingo," and other sexed up, vexing conceits. Walker means to incorporate both views in her work--the historical and the ahistorical, the trashy and the exalted--while opening the viewer up to another vista altogether: their race-defined, not to say limited, self.
Friday September 18th 8:15pm doors open 7:30
Directed by Kara Walker
Running time: Approximately One Hour
Color and black and white
Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969, and partly raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2007 Time Magazine named her one of the country's one hundred most influential artists.
FILMS:
Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, 2004
DVD video, B & W, silent
8 minutes 49 seconds
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker, 2005
DVD Video, B & W, stereo
15 minutes 57 seconds
…calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea., 2007
DVD video, Color, silent
9 minutes 10 seconds
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road, 2009
DVD Video, Color, stereo
13 minutes, 22 seconds
National Archives Microfilm Publication M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Lucy of Pulaski, 2009
DVD video, Color, stereo
12 minutes, 8 seconds
BUILDING 7
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
PORT OF SPAIN
For more info about the Film Festival, click here
STUDIOFILMCLUB is very proud to have Hilton Als select this years program for our part of the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival 2009.
Hilton is an author and staff writer for the New Yorker and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
He has been actively involved with SFC since agreeing to choose films for the festival - writing syopsis's and his conversations have suggested film after film for screening...
For the festival Hilton has entitled his three night selection THREE WOMEN - and it starts off withwith Robert Altman's classic 3 Women.
Three Women
In 1977, the late Texas-born director, Robert Altman (1925-2006) had a dream. It involved three women living in a desert resort community, somewhere in California. The next morning, with the help of the screenwriter, Pat Resnick, Altman began sketching his film, which remains his most personal, and among the more disturbing produced during Hollywood's late to mid-seventies golden age. Starring three performers from Texas--Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule--"3 Women," is as much about the double-self as Ingmar Bergman's brilliant, "Persona," but with the cock-eyed charm of a M-G-M comedy starring Zasu Pitts. While Janice Rule paints enigmatic murals in a rundown apartment house for singles, Duvall-as-Millie-Lamorroreaux'
s new roommate, Pinky Rose (Spacek) starts to assume aspects of Millie's personality, including her awkwardness, and penchant for sleeping with Rule's husband. For her astonishing work--she improvised a great many of her monologues--Shelley Duvall won the Best Actress award at Cannes, while Spacek collected a Best Supporting Actress honor from the New York Film Critics.
3 WOMEN Wednesday 16th September 8:15 pm
Directed by Robert Altman
Starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule
Running time: approximately 125 minutes
Color film
Robert Altman is generally regarded as one of America's great directors. By the time of his death, he had made over forty feature length films, including the seminal MASH (1970), "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971) and
"Nashville" (1975). His work was distinctive in its use of overlapping, naturalistic dialogue, and for its criticism of America's status quo. He was awarded an honorary Oscar before his death in 2006
Thursday 17th September 8:15pm
Two Women: Sort Of
The filmmaker Leslie Thornton's "Peggy and Fred in Hell," is a process-oriented work that combines archival footage, and images Thornton's shot and arranged herself, on both film and video, from 1984 to 2009. In the early nineteen-eighties, the artist began filming two children she met in Providence, Rhode Island. In short order they became the focus of her project--to show the last two beings, a pre-adolescent brother and sister, on earth. Inundated by media and natural devastation, Peggy and Fred traverse a post-apocalyptic universe where they can only reflect one another, and the ruin of the world. (Part of the story Thornton means to tell here through metaphor is her own history of duality. How to resolve the image of her father, a gentle man, with the fact that he was a scientist who worked on developing the Atom bomb?) Combining bright lights, pictures and sound from television, as well as pre-sound images from documentary nature films, Thornton's extraordinary document is a near hallucinatory blend of "real" shots and manufactured scenes, or fiction. Taken together, they challenge our notion of what's true and what's false, what defines a boy and a girl, and how to cope in a world that won't let us alone even as it disappears right before our very eyes.
Peggy and Fred in Hell
Directed by Leslie Thornton
Running time: 90 minutes
Color and black and white
Leslie Thornton was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1951. She is a professor in the Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown University. Her other films include "Let Me Count The Ways..10...9...8...7," which was selected for inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Kalup Linzy
The performance artist and filmmaker Kalup Linzy generally performs in drag, but he's a post-camp artist. While his videos--a take-off on the soap operas he watched as a child--have arch elements, Linzy is sincere in his appreciation of story-telling, pathos, and suspense. But the world seen in long-running television shows like "The Guiding Light," and "The Young and The Restless," are almost all-white, upwardly mobile, or both. Linzy rejects this notion, and makes poor or lower middle-class Southern-based black women the focus of his short, trenchant videos. Following no particular order, Linzy's soap operas track the inhabitants of a small Southern town who need a ride to the club, or disagree with someone's object choice. It's Faulkner by way of Tyler Perry. Crudely dubbed--one troubled character asks, "Is God throwing shade?"--Linzy speaks all his characters lines, both men and women, black and white, the better to maintain control over his fictionalized world filled with real humor and feelings.
Kalup Linzy was born in Clermont, Florida, in 1977. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of South Florida, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
One Woman
In 1997, Kara Walker won the MacArthur "genius" award--one of the youngest artists to be so honored. This was for her body of work, which centers on race, and the powerful psychological projections that are attached to stereotypes. From the start of her career, Walker has used the antiquated silhouette form to address slavery, and it's resulting confusion: "carpet-bagging," "freedom," miscegenation. It was only a matter of time before the artist made the next step--by having her sweeping still narratives move. In 2004, Walker directed her first film, "Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions"--a film that gains in narrative power through its chronological confusion. Things happen, but when? While a Walker film is rooted in the history of slavery--we recognize the plantation, the masters and the slaves--we see it through a modern lens, informed by our knowledge of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," "Mandingo," and other sexed up, vexing conceits. Walker means to incorporate both views in her work--the historical and the ahistorical, the trashy and the exalted--while opening the viewer up to another vista altogether: their race-defined, not to say limited, self.
Friday September 18th 8:15pm doors open 7:30
Directed by Kara Walker
Running time: Approximately One Hour
Color and black and white
Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969, and partly raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2007 Time Magazine named her one of the country's one hundred most influential artists.
FILMS:
Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, 2004
DVD video, B & W, silent
8 minutes 49 seconds
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker, 2005
DVD Video, B & W, stereo
15 minutes 57 seconds
…calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea., 2007
DVD video, Color, silent
9 minutes 10 seconds
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road, 2009
DVD Video, Color, stereo
13 minutes, 22 seconds
National Archives Microfilm Publication M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Lucy of Pulaski, 2009
DVD video, Color, stereo
12 minutes, 8 seconds
posted by Attillah at 9:29 AM
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