JENNIFER REEDER

Monday, February 21
7:30

Jennifer Reeder is a movie maker and visual artist from Ohio. She constructs very personal narratives about landscapes, coincidence and trauma. She recently completed a short narrative about re-telling and Scandinavia called The Closer Stockholm. A web project of the same title (thecloserstockholm.com) is in progress. She recently completed her first feature length project called Tiny Plastic Rainbow. Currently, she is working on revisions for an original feature length narrative screenplay called Accidents at Home and How They Happen.

Recent exhibitions/screenings include: Viennale, in Vienna Austria; the Havana Biennale in Cuba; Video Culture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; The 2000 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art; In the Middle of Nowhere at the Center for the Arts in San Francisco; Generation Z at P.S.1, New York; The 48th International Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy.

Jennifer received an MFA in 1996 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was nominated for the 2000, 2001 and 2002 Rockefeller Grants for Film/Video/New Media. Jennifer currently lives in Chicago where she maintains a studio and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois.

BLACK MARIA

Monday, March 7
7:30

As a youth John Columbus visited what most consider to be the American home of the motion picture near his boyhood home; Thomas Edison’s 1893 Black Maria Film Studio in West Orange, NJ . Shortly thereafter Columbus acquired an 8mm movie camera and embarked on a lifelong involvement in moving images. After earning his BFA cum laude at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford in 1969 he joined U.P. Independent Filmmakers’ Cooperative in Manhattan where he projected for the ledgendary Jack mith.

In 1972 Columbus entered Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts, Film Division where he studied under Erik Barnouw (the documentary historian) and Andrew Sarris (film critic and exponent of the “Auteur Theory”) and collaborated with the noted Steve Anker on his thesis film. After gaining his MFA in Filmmaking in 1975 and completing several Ph.D. credits in film studies, Columbus taught film at Stockton State College (NJ).

In 1980, as a filmmaker himself, Columbus set out to develop the now nationally recognized alternative film festival named after The Black Maria studio. Shortly thereafter he joined the part time faculty at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where he is now a Adjunct Associate Professor of Film. Columbus remains the Director of The Black Maria Film and Video Festival, which now is in its 24th year committed to explorational and poetic independent vision. Columbus remains a filmmaker, his 2002 16mm film, “Corona” has exhibited in many festivals and at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

The Black Maria Program at the University of Colorado

John Columbus will introduce eight to twelve recent film and video works by independent artists whose pieces have received awards in the juried 24th Annual Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Columbus will, in collaboration with Don Yannacito, curate the two and a half hour Black Maria program focusing primarily on new experimental work by recognized and emerging makers from the U.S. and abroad. The Black Maria is known for its special commitment to experimental film but also maintains a strong interest in poetic documentary and uncommon animated film. Columbus and the Festival annually travels throughout the nation exhibiting cutting edge work at colleges, museums, and libraries. In addition to the University of Colorado the festival will, in 2000, visit the Millennium in New York City, , Out North in Anchorage, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Berks Filmmakers at Albright College in Pennsylvania, Cornell Cinema, The Virginia Festival of American Film, and 50 or more additional venues coast to coast.

LEWIS KLAHR

Monday, March 14
7:30

Here in middle age, finally self permission to directly take on some of the richest source material imbibed in my childhood-- indelible memories, impressions, physiognomies, second hand experiences and imaginings about-- World War 2, baseball, the Mississipi River, mythopoeic crime. The quartet a symmetrical structure suggesting wholeness-- 4 the number of the directions, the winds, The Beatles, completeness. The reappearance of the Deep Sea Diver figure, the protagonist of my first cutout animations in “PICTURE BOOKS FOR ADULTS ” and my first 16mm film “THE PHARAOHS’ BELT”. I can’t help but wonder what his reemergence heralds for me: the beginning of a new phase or merely the final grace note for the one that ’s ending? ---lewis klahr, Los Angeles, summer 2004

THE TWO MINUTES TO ZERO TRILOGY

A feature length narrative compressed 3 different times into 3 separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized. A crime story told 3 different ways concerning the events of a two month period leading up to, and immediately following a bank robbery. The imagery has all been appropriated (the fancy, art world sanctioned term for stealing) from 4 issues of an early 1960’s comic book version of the then popular, American TV show “77 Sunset Strip”.

16mm 33min, 2003-04, optical sound, color
TWO DAYS TO ZERO, (23min, 2004)
TWO HOURS TO ZERO, (9min, 2004)
TWO MINUTES TO ZERO, (1min, 2003)
Music by Glenn Branca an excerpt from “The Ascension” (1980). Film commissioned by the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival “Just A Minute” program.

DAYLIGHT MOON (A Quartet)

16mm, 40min, 2002-04, optical sound, color
VALISE (14.5min, 2004)
HARD GREEN (5min, 2004)
SOFT TICKET (7min, 2004)

GRADUATE STUDENT SHOW

Monday, April 4
7:30

In recognition of recent efforts to establish closer ties between the University of Colorado film studies and art and art history departments, First Person Cinema has programmed a selection of new and recent films and videos by four former CU film studies bachelor’s degree students now working toward studio art MFA degrees. Jason Goode and Victor Jendras graduated in spring 2004; Rick Silva in 2001; and J. Gluckstern has taught super 8 and 16mm production classes at CU since 1999. Tonight’s show will feature innovative experimental work by emerging artists in a variety of formats, from 16mm film to digital media.

J. Gluckstern

“Too Much Information,” 20 minutes, video. A critique of both documentary form and content as manifested in a self-portrait of the artist as too clever for his own good.

“Land Without Continuity, ” 5 minutes, video. An exercise in treating conceptual territory as surreal ethnography.

Victor L. Jendras

“Shadows in the Storm,” 10 min
"The Zakalogue part 7: Hail and Fire,” 7 min
To be announced, 7 -15 min.

Rick Silva

“Supercollider,” 3:33 minutes, video

GEHR

Monday, April 18
7:30

Gehr, who began to make films in the late 1960’s, presently lives and works in San Francisco. He has shown his work extensively, and has also taught at various schools, including at U.C. Boulder in the summer of 1979.

SIDE/WALK/SHUTTLE

“Cinema’s virtuoso minimalist uses a glass-enclosed outdoor elevator as a ready-made crane for a series of aerial views of San Francisco. The movie is pure sensation: Side/Walk/Shuttle has the effect of a slow-motion roller coaster. The camera stately swoops and stomach-dropping descends obliterate all sense of gravity. San Francisco is so viscerally, and obsessively, transformed that Gehr might honorably have titled his movie Vertigo. ” -- J. Hoberman, Village Voice.

(1991) 16mm. 40 minutes. Color. Sound.

GLIDER

“Cool, delirious and mysterious, Futuristic, yet ancient. A voyage into a pictorial space that seems to be governed by extra-terrestrial optical and gravitational laws, and yet…” -- Ernie Gehr.

"Glider gleans the phantasmagorical from the hyper real – poised on contradictions – lucid and obscure – factual and soft edged, stoic and ecstatic. Are our feet on the ground in a diurnal dream, is this a document in mid-air with apparent motion evoking actual travels?” -- Mark McElhatten.

(2001) Digital Video. 37 minutes. Color. Silent.