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The Experimental Cinema Group at CU Boulder was ushered in by Carla Selby and Gladney Oakley and was later carried forward by Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage. It is now called First Person Cinema and the curator is Don Yannacito. This program was started in 1955 with the intention of bringing an awareness of the personal cinema to Boulder, and has become a highly respected international showcase for the makers of personal film. It is the longest running program in the world screening avant-garde film and video work.

Most screenings are Mondays at 7:00pm in the Visual Arts Complex Auditorium 1B20 / Admission is free.

Student Award Showcase

Student Award Showcase

Monday, September 17, 2018
7:00 PM

Winners of The Grillo Awards

Made possible with funds from the Arts and Cultural Enrichment Fee. Free admission. The Grillo awards 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 $17,000 of Grillo funds is distributed each year to four tiers of production students. Final recipients and individual award amounts will be determined each semester by in-class student votes and a panel of judges made up of CU Film Studies faculty and outside professionals. A selection of award-winning films will be shown one night only. The Grillo Awards are drawn from a University of Colorado Foundation fund set up in the early 1990s by Virgil Grillo (1938-1994), the founder and former Director of the CU Film Studies Program, whose dedication and vision helped shepherd Film Studies from its modest beginnings in the 1970s to an undergraduate program with some 600 students.

Madi Piller

Madi Piller

Monday, October 8, 2018
7:00 PM

Madeleine (Madi) Piller is a South-American-born filmmaker, animator, programmer, and independent curator currently living and working in Toronto, Canada. Her abstract, nonrepresentational, and poetic images are drawn from film explorations in Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm, as well as photography and video. The resulting imagery is strongly influenced by diverse animation techniques and styles. Her films have been screened at film festivals, alternative spaces, and contemporary art venues nationally and internationally, including TIFF Wavelengths, the Festival du Cinema Jeune, Paris, France, Bienal de La Imagen Movimiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Melbourne Animation Festival, New York Anthology Film Archive, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. Her work has been produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

Ross Lipman

Ross Lipman

Monday, October 22, 2018
7:00 PM

Ross Lipman is an independent filmmaker, archivist, preservationist, and essayist. His recent work, NOTFILM, was named one of the 10 best films of the year by ARTFORUM, SLATE, and many others. THE EXPLODING DIGITAL INEVITABLE is a live documentary essay that integrates an array of movie and audio clips, still photographs, and rare archival documents to tell the story of Bruce Conner’s CROSSROADS’ unique production, as well as the massive cultural spectacle of the original Bikini Atoll tests themselves.

Barbara Hammer

Barbara Hammer

Monday, November 5, 2018
7:00 PM

Barbara Hammer (b.1939, Hollywood, California) is a visual artist primarily working in film and video. Her work reveals and celebrates marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages an audience viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. She has been honored with six retrospectives in the last three years: The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Toronto International Film Festival and Kunsthalle Oslo in Norway, and currently Hammer has a retrospective of all her visual work at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City (Oct. 28, 2017-Jan. 28, 2018). A monograph Evidentiary Bodies: Barbara Hammer accompanies the exhibition. Her recent exhibition at Company Gallery (NY) published Truant: 1970-1979 Photographs by Barbara Hammer. The Austrian Film Museum in Vienna presented in April 2018 a retrospective of her films, many recently restored by The Academy Film Archive and Electronic Arts Intermix, through an Avant-garde Master Filmmaker grant. Currently, Sarah Keller, Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is authoring a book on Hammer’s films to be released by Wayne State University Press.