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First Person Cinema (formerly The Avant-Garde Cinema Program), was started in 1953 by Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage, seminal figures in the independent/personal/experimental film movement. Their intention was to bring an awareness of the personal cinema to Boulder. This program, curated by Don Yannacito since the 1960s, has become a highly respected, international showcase, for the makers of personal film. It is the longest existing program in the world that has been continually screening avant-garde film and video work.

The Stan Brakhage Film Series will continue to show films by Brakhage on the first Sunday of every month at 8:00pm in Fine Arts N141. All shows are free and open to the public.

Student Award Showcase

Student Award Showcase

Monday, September 17
8:00 PM

Winners of the Grillo and Goldfarb Awards.

Made possible with funds from the Arts and Cultural Enrichment Fee

Free admission!

The Grillo/Goldfarb Kage Credit grants are designed to encourage excellence in filmmaking and help defray some of the expenses required to pursue a degree in film production. A total of up to $11,000 will be distributed each year to four tiers of production students. Final recipients and individual grant amounts will be determined each semester by a combination of in-class student votes and a panel of judges made up of CU Film Studies faculty. A selection of films from the advanced classes will be screened in this evenings show. The Grillo grants are given as Kage credit in honor of the founder and former director of the CU Film Studies Program, Virgil Grillo (1938-1994), whose dedication and vision helped shepherd Film Studies from its modest beginnings in the 1970s to an undergraduate degree program boasting some 600 majors.

Goldfarb grants are given by the Goldfarb Foundation and Peter Goldfarb, President. (Screening made possible by ACE fees.)

Various shorts presented in digital format, full awards show is estimated to last no longer than 80 minutes.

Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder

Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder

Monday, October 1
8:00 PM

“Both individually and in collaboration, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder are creating some of the most innovative and engaging light works of the present time. I hesitate to say ‘films’, since their work, though it is grounded in an understanding and application of celluloid, goes beyond a general understanding of what film is, taking into consideration the architecture and circumstances of the performance / viewing situation and the physical and emotional presence of light itself. From the inventive ways that they create images on the film strip to the use of multiple projection that often incorporates live performance, Gibson and Recoder are two of the most vital young artists working in the field of ‘expanded cinema’.” Mark Webber, The Times BFI London Film Festival.

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have screened their work at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Anthology Film Archives (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa), Cinema Project (Portland), Cal Arts (Valencia), Images Festival (Toronto), Institute for Contemporary Art (London), International Film Festival Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Museu do Chiado (Lisbon), RIXC (Latvia), Image Forum (Tokyo).

Nathaniel Dorsky

Nathaniel Dorsky

Monday, October 15
8:00 PM

“Nathaniel Dorsky is a superbly intuitive Montage-artist and a great photographer… The mood is one of subdued ecstasy… suggesting a universal photosynthesis in which humans are surrounded by and permeated with radiance.” — The Village Voice

“In these intimate and deeply affecting works, veteran avant-garde artist Nathaniel Dorsky utilizes light and color to create films that are silent, non-narrative and forged by seamless editing of astonishing precision.” — Redcat, CalArts

The Visitation

Part One of a set of Two Devotional Songs. The Visitation is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the necessity to describe an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one�s own psyche. The place of articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts.
(2002, 16mm, color/silent, 18fps, 18m.)

Threnody

Threnody is a somber but luminous progression through a delicate articulation of earthly phenomena... an offering to a friend who died. It is the second of two devotional songs, the first being The Visitation.
(2004 16mm color/silent, 25 minutes.)

Song and Solitude

Song and Solitude�s balance is more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, than an exploration of the external visual world as such.
(2005-6 , 16mm, color/silent, 18 fps, 21 min.)

Anthony Cokes

Anthony Cokes

Monday, October 29
8:00 PM

Tony Cokes is a post-conceptualist whose practice foregrounds social critique. His video and installation works have appeared in numerous exhibitions internationally. Cokes is a Professor at Brown University. His screenings will include:

Ad Vice

(1999, 6:36 min )
inhabits the realm of the music-video to use that form�s language against itself to critique capitalist culture

Headphones

(2004, 7:09 min)
examines music as a means of channeling social violence

Evil

(2003, 10:56 min)
addresses urban life, representations of capitalism, and the recent return of “evil”.

Evil.10

(2005, 7:27 min)
presents excerpts from Slavoj Zizek�s text Welcome to the Desert of the Real which reads the destruction on 9/11 as an unacceptable act and an opportunity for critical reflection

Evil.6

(2006, 9:55 min)
animates an edited transcript from George W. Bush�s 2003 State of the Union Address. The video images and sounds isolate the pauses within the same speech.

Evil.5

(2006/7, 8:12 min)
presents quotations from U.S. leaders about 9/11/2001 and the government�s responses to it, particularly the invasion of Iraq

Evil.15.Pt.1

(2007, 5:23 min )
redeploys an article from The New York Times Magazine to frame the hubris and rhetoric of the Bush administration before the 2004 election

Jeanne Liotta

Jeanne Liotta

Monday, November 12
8:00 PM

Jeanne Liotta lives and works in New York City where she makes films and other ephemera, including video, photography, works on paper and live projection performances. Her latest project OBSERVANDO EL CIELO take s place in a constellation of mediums investigating the cosmic landscape. She was represented in the 2006 Whitney Biennial with her 16mm film ECLIPSE and her work has been exhibited at The New York Film Festival; KunstFilm Biennale, Cologne; The Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley; The Museum of Modern Art; and The Whitney Museum of American Art among others. She has been the recipient of awards from The Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and shared the Museum of Contemporary Cinema artist award with Taka Imura in 2006. She also maintains an ongoing research into The Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives and teaches widely and variously, including The New School, Pratt Institute, The San Francisco Art Institute, The Museum School, Boston, and is presently on the faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College.

A SELECTION of MADE and FOUND slim volumes in16MM and video on the material subjects of landscape, science, and natural philosophy etc. Hymns to the VOID, the STARS in their courses, the EARTH under your feet wobbles and DRIFTS. Titles May Include:

Observando El Cielo

(2007, 16mm, sound, 17 min)

Work for the Night Is Coming

(2006,16mm, sound film and hymn board)

Science�S Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (#2 and #10)

(2 min ea. Video, 2006)

What We As Humans Trying Fallibly Forever

(2006 video loop, silent, duration eternal)

Eclipse

(2005,16mm, sound,3 min)

Loretta

(2003 16mm,sound,4 min)

Muktikara

(1999, super 8,11 min,silent)

What Makes Day and Night

(1998,16mm, sound, 9 min)

Land of Enchantment

(1994, super 8, silent)

Peter Hutton

Peter Hutton

Monday, December 3
8:00 PM

Peter Hutton is an experimental filmmaker, known primarily for his silent cinematic portraits of cities and landscapes around the world. He has also worked as a professional cinematographer, most notably for his former student Ken Burns. Hutton studied painting, sculpture and film at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has taught filmmaking at Hampshire College, Harvard University, SUNY Purchase, and Bard College, where he has served as the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program since 1985. (Wikipedia)

“Hutton is a person whose perception of the world is inescapably aesthetic. For him, there is neither ordinary nor extraordinary, and this puts him in the tradition of the earliest cinema� Hutton’s cinema is a refining enterprise, aimed at determining what is essential to movies�. a photo animated by the gentlest breeze, as we are transported to the world of the 19th century American landscape painters, alone on hills recording frontiers in uncivilized repose.” — Mitch Tuchman, LA Times, 1977.

Films in tonight�s program, to be announced.