The following is September calendar of screenings at Echo Park Film Center (workshops still to be announced!). Shows begin promptly @ 8 PM and are $5 suggested donation (unless otherwise noted). EPFC’s microcinema is supported in part by grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Thursday, September 4 – OPEN SCREEN – 8 PM
It’s our cinematic free-for-all, daring you to share your film with the feisty EPFC audience. Any genre! Any style! New, old, work-in-progress! First come, first screened; one film per filmmaker; 10-minute maximum. DVD, VHS, mini-DV, DV-CAM, Super 8, standard 8mm, 16mm.
Friday, September 5 – KPFK Outreach Committee Film Night – 8 PM
KPFK neighborhood advocates present a night of films that we hope encourage a lively debate and discussion. $5 suggested donation. Nobody turned away for lack of funds!
Wednesday, September 10 – IT’S ALIVE! Alternative Animation and Sound Techniques Class Screening – 8 PM
A screening of new experimental works created by EPFC’s Alternative Animation and Sound class, including Mara Lafontaine, Nick Lowe, Ariel Teal, Grace Wielebinski, Adam Badlotto, Lexi Lutter, Carlo Cesario, and Mookyung Sohn. Come see the innovative ways our students used 16mm film to explore unconventional animation techniques: human-scale stop motion, rotoscoping, scratch-on-film, rayographs, and much more! All films are accompanied by live sound performances and hand-drawn optical soundtracks. Screening followed by a reception for the filmmakers.
Thursday, September 11 – Angel City Jazz presents INTERSTELLAR – 8 PM
The Echo Park Film Center and Angel City Jazz are proud to present the first show in the series INTERSTELLAR, celebrating the space where the fringes of film and jazz overlap. Tonight we are pleased to present Shirley Clarke’s masterpiece on Ornette Coleman, Ornette: Made In America, followed by a set by L.A.’s improvised music stalwart Joe Baiza and his band the Mecolodiacs. Shirley Clarke began making films in the 1950’s, a time when few women worked in the field. Her adaptation of Jack Gelber’s play The Connection (1961) won praise for its graphic, unglamorous depiction of drug use. This was followed by The Cool World, and Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Despite the success of Clarke’s fourth feature, Portrait of Jason (1967), created from a 12-hour-long interview with gay African American hustler and aspiring nightclub performer Jason Holliday, Clarke found it increasingly difficult to get financing for her films. From 1975 to 1985 she taught film and video production at UCLA. Clarke’s fifth and final feature, Ornette: Made in America is a well-received portrait of the eccentric musical genius and was a cinematic comeback for Clarke. In it Clarke weaves documentary footage, video art, music videos and architecture into a vibrant collage that mirrors Coleman’s groundbreaking jazz. Shirley Clarke is acknowledged as a major influence by many current filmmakers. Milestone Film and Video’s “Project Shirley” is intended to present some of Clarke’s best films in beautifully restored versions. Jazz and punk rock guitarist Joe Baiza’s Mecolodiacs features Baiza on guitar and vocals, Rafa Gorodetsky on electric bass, and Wayne Griffin on drums. Baiza is a founding member of the bands Saccharine Trust and Universal Congress Of. He has played with guitarists Nels Cline and Greg Ginn, among others, and toured with Mike Watt. In addition to albums with his own bands, he has played on albums by The Minutemen and the SST all-star jam band October Faction. Currently he is in the reunited Saccharine Trust, the improvisational unit Unknown Instructors, and The Mecolodiacs.
Friday, September 12 – Los Angeles Filmforum presents LIFE IS AN OPINION—films by MARY HELENA CLARK and KAREN YASINSKY – 8 PM
I want to make cinema that is both trance-like and transparent: that operates on dream logic until disrupted by a moment of
self-reflexivity, like tripping on an extension cord. (Mary Helena Clark) An uneasy wind blows through these films. With aesthetic interests in magic, illusionism and deception, Mary Helena Clark creates films permeated with mysterious associations, ineffably assembled according to dream logics into fragmentary formations of distant or lost lives. After Writing is a silent song of abandon, a post-linguistic elegy to an apparently lost world. Orpheus (outtakes)—citing Cocteau, referencing Keaton—conjures an “interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within” (Andrea Picard). The Plant, “a spy film,” wanders the streets of Chicago, seeking meaning but finding something more. Clark’s newest film, The Dragon is the Frame is a powerful, fragmented and questing meditation on loss, in tribute to late artist Mark Aguhar. Recent films by Karen Yasinsky evidence a similar interest in the fragment, using puppetry, animation, cinematic quotation and hints of narrative to trigger emotive positions of discomfort and empathy. Audition evokes a lonely haze of distance through the persistence of repetition. The assembled images comprising After Hours contrast violence with precarious grace and dance delicately between delirious heights and abject depths of experience. Marie—a rotoscoped animation based on Bresson’s …Balthazar—is a brief assaultive animation commemorating its character’s fall from grace while Life Is an Opinion, Fire a Fact, oscillates from despair to serenity while contemplating suicide as depicted by Bresson and Tarkovsky. Finally, The Lonely Life of Debby Adams (“the movie I tried to dislike and rip apart but I just couldn’t”) is a meditation on panoptic voyeurism, performativity, privacy and objectification. (Steve Polta) Mary Helena Clark and Karen Yasinsky In Person!
Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.
Saturday, September 13 – CINEMA BABYLON – 8 PM
Cinema Babylon is an East Coast-based traveling screening series showcasing emerging independent filmmakers who explore both the excesses of narrative, and the unraveling form of experimental film. This program features innovative, visually lush live-action and animated works that deftly mine and subvert popular culture and collective cultural memory. With films by Rachel Maclean, Stephen Quinlan, Michael Bucuzzo, Lindsay Denniberg, Cate Giordano, Gina Marie Napolitan, and Christina Kolozsvary. Filmmakers in person! More information at http://www.surrealux.com/cinema-babylon/
Saturday, September 13 – EPFC Filmmobile presents BURNING BUNGALOWS – 8 PM
Location: Villa Aurora 520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272. More info: http://www.villa-aurora.org/en/
Burning Bungalows brought new and unseen experimental film from Los Angeles on the road earlier this year. With a handmade mix of animation and live action on video, Super 8, 16mm and 35mm slides we’re covering all the bases for an eclectic hour and 20 minutes. The films tend toward an ethereal conjuring of spirits with a dystopian punk attitude. Program: Vulgarians 1, 2, 3 and Arietta by Cosmo Segurson, Waxing and Milking and Them Oracles by Alee Peoples; He Hates to be Second by Kelly Sears; Berm and Jup by Abby Banks; Artio and Belenus by Nancy Jean Tucker; The Temptation of St. Anthony by John Cannizzaro; Untitled: Varanasi by Lisa Marr & Paolo Davanzo.
Thursday, September 18 – GEMS FROM THE ARCHIVE – 8 PM
Once again film collector Russell Harnden returns with another unique screening of GEMS FROM THE ARCHIVES! He will share with us more of those wonderful educational, industrial and ephemeral films from the 1940’s through the 1980’s for an evening that’s sure to stimulate your mind and make you laugh at the same time. Join us and watch in wonder as chickens take over an Air Force base in AN OUTBREAK OF SALMONELLA INFECTION, an elementary schoolboy gets “rude and crude” in ARE MANNERS IMPORTANT?, and see what happens when a video arcade game goes berserk in EXTENDED PLAY. Drawn from his personal collection of over 2800 films, Russell will present a sampling of many more great titles as well. Remember when the teacher closed the window shades, turned out the lights and turned on the projector? We all dosed-off in the classroom when we should have been paying attention and taken these films VERY seriously. So be sure to come by and see them again for the first time!
Saturday, September 20 – VINEGAR SYNDROME! Selections from the EPFC Film Library – 8 PM
A monthly grab bag of short educational and ephemeral films, plumbing the depths of EPFC’s impressive 16mm library. For enthusiasts of found footage and collage films, it’s a great way to learn what kinds of films are available at the Film Center–the weird, the cool, the good, the bad, the ugly. All films selected purely by title around a specific theme. We won’t be previewing any films, so we’ll be just as surprised as you guys… This month: BAD FEELINGS! Come prepared to watch high-drama driving school films, alarmist public advisory films distributed by local police, over-the-top films about diseases and animal attacks, among cinematic other curiosities. Casual viewing environment—feel free to laugh, talk, and comment on the movies as we screen them. And we’ll watch as many films as we can cram into a 90 minute screening session.
Thursday, September 25 – LA AIR: AMY LEE KETCHUM – 8 PM
LA AIR is an artist-in-residence program that invites Los Angeles filmmakers to utilize EPFC resources in creating a new work over a four-week period. Amy Lee Ketchum will present her project Dreaming Los Angeles which will use Italo Calvino’s story Invisible Cities as a point of inspiration to visualize the dream-like qualities of Los Angeles. The film mixes field recordings, hand-drawn animation, and Super 8 footage taken in locations around the city. Amy will also be screening a selection of her previous films as well as works by filmmakers who have informed her artistic practice including Sergei Eisenstein and Yuri Norstein. Free event!
Saturday, September 27 – NEW WORKS SALON – 8 PM
The New Works Salons series is a casual forum for the presentation and discussion of new works in film and video, with local and visiting artists in-person to introduce their work. Thom Andersen will show his new work The Tony Longo Trilogy. Dana Berman Duff will show her film Catalogue, a silent 16mm black-and-white film that considers the time it takes to look at desirable objects, in this case, those presented in a successful furniture company’s catalogue of knock-off designer pieces photographed in staged rooms to imitate the style of film noir. Plus other artists TBA! And in our store-front window, artist Reza Monahan will install his three-channel video work Swollen Birth Switch, of which Joseph Mattson, author of Eat The Sun writes, “The iris pops as the rear-end bleeds, the retina smokes the anadromous dream, but you just can’t go back you can’t go back you can’t back: the vagina and the whipping are one-way tunnels when you’re Switched at Birth, Swelling/Swollen Birth Switch become the itch forever unscratched and telling, sharp, bug light at birth if the light cuts right…”
CLASSES (members receive 20% discount on class fees!)
CITY OF ANGELS – An EPFC Youth Workshop – 12 weeks: September – December 2014 (Limited Enrollment)
14 Sessions, Wednesdays 4:30 – 6:30 pm, beginning September 17
Our ongoing city stories project is back! Every three years, the EPFC City of Angels youth workshop invites young filmmakers to share compelling tales of LA’s neighborhoods, families and histories through experimental and documentary formats and analog film techniques. The 2014 edition is sure to be the best one yet! Instructors: Eve LaFountain, Miko Revereza, Mike Stoltz, Penelope Uribe-Abee. Open to local youth ages 12 – 19; no filmmaking experience necessary. All program equipment, materials and instruction provided free of charge by EPFC. Enrollment is limited. A one-hour mandatory orientation session for participating students and their parents/guardians will be held on September 16 @ 7:30 pm.