Smoke & Mirrors

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/4/9/0/event_22366224.jpegJoin us at the Austin School of Film for an evening of flowing layers and reflected rays! We will be rocking out our fog machine to screen Anthony McCall’s seminal Line Describing a Cone, described as “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.” (P. Adams Sitney.) Our smoky program will also feature work by Caroline Koebel (the instructor of our upcoming avant-garde film class) and Scott Stark!

Program:

Satrapy / Scott Stark

1988 / 13min / Color / Sound / 16mm

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Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, injecting a note of "negative sound" every third beat against the 5-beat background. As the film progresses, contrapuntal variations of 3, 4, 5 and 7 beat rhythms blend and collide, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces.

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hole or space / Caroline Koebel

2006 / 4.23 mins / B&W and Color / Silent / Digital

Pricks, gaps, dots, openings, hole or space takes its cue from contortionists of the early screen in spiraling out from conceptions of the body as whole.

The film uses early cinema and avant-garde classics as its compositional notes: Luis Martinetti, Contortionist (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1894); Crissie Sheridan Serpentine Dance (Edison, 1897); Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, 1924); An Optical Poem (Oskar Fischinger, 1938); Tarantella (Mary E. Bute & Ted Nemeth, 1940).

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Sea Lion / Caroline Koebel

2007 / 2:50 / Color / Super 8 to Digital

This hand processed Super 8 film marvels at the beauty of the movement of the sea lion. It reflects the fascination of the filmmaker’s two-year-old son with this animal new to his world.

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“Line describing a cone is what I term a solid light film. It is dealing with the projected light-beam itself, rather than treating the light-beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface (the screen).

The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time.

The form of attention required on the part of the viewer is unprecedented. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other. For this film every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can - indeed needs to move around, relative to the emerging light-form.” - AM

"... Anthony McCall's LINE DESCRIBING A CONE [is] a film which demanded to be looked at, not on the screen, but in the space of the auditorium. What was at issue was the establishment of a cone of light between the projector and the screen, out of what was initially one pencil-like beam of light. I consider it “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.”

$6 / $5 for Students