C A M E R A O B S C U R A : film + video screenings

| | | | |||| C A M E R A O B S C U R A |||| | | | |
film + video screenings

First monday of every month at Lanfranchi's Memorial Discoteque. Level 2. 144 Cleveland st. Darlington. 7:30 pm. Free. Popcorn.

Monthly screenings with a simple goal of showing interesting and
experimental film and video works in an appropriate setting,
comfortable seating - 5.1audio - large scale projection - free

Month of July (07.07.03)

We will open the night with a few pieces of video jazz the from 242.pilots "Live in Bruxelles" DVD (winner of the transmediale.03 Image award). Our first feature will be the Ingmar Bergman masterpiece "Persona" with introduction by Hamish Ford, followed by a locally produced short "Edges".
Screening last will be the uber-strange "Dementia". After that I think you'll all want to go home.

... Service announcement ...
A few people have asked why http://obscura.lanfranchis.com/ is alwaysdown. It should be fixed by late next week, but you can also reach the same details via the less sexy URL http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~keirs/camera/

These pages host our archive, the add a movie page, upcoming screenings and now a mailing list thingy. We intend to migrate to just using the mailing list, to avoid sending people spam, so if you are interested in the
screenings please add yourself to the list.

We're also interested in suggestions for screenings and local works that you or someone you know has made.
... now back to the regular programme ...

Excerpts from 242.pilots DVD "Live in Bruxelles"
242.pilots are "three video artists who perform collaboratively. using their own custom software, 242.pilots expressively improvise rich, layered
experimental video works in real-time (both as a trio and as soloists).

improvising as a group, the three artists respond and interact with each other's images in a subtle and intuitive way. images are layered, contrasted, merged, and transformed. the degree of interplay and unspoken communication between the artists is akin the best free jazz
ensembles."(www.carparkrecords.com)

Local Short Edges
(1998 Duration 2 Minutes)
"Edges" is a digital animation created collaboratively by Cindi Drennan, Danielle Hickie (animators) and Justin Maynard (audio) in 1998. The trio began with the concept of "Edges", and explored the ideas of boundaries,
borders and frontiers through a kind of chinese whispers. The process involved trading end and beginning frames via the internet... so that the end "edge" of one person's animation would be the beginning edge of another. At the end, all the separate sequences were stitched together to
create a single sequence.

Persona
Written & directed by Ingmar Bergman, Cinematography by Sven Nykvist
Starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, Sweden, 1966.

"Persona is one of those films many people have heard of, but most likely never seen. At least in Australia, the film is somewhat like Ingmar Bergman himself - emblematic of quintessentially serious, angst-ridden "arthouse" business that is never actually shown. Well, here's a very rare chance to actually see this extraordinary film which is considered by many to be both the peak Bergman's achievements, and a towering work of film modernism in its own right. Even if you managed to catch the film on
SBS a few months back, on Monday the 7th of July at 7.30 you can see Persona on a big screen, via a beautiful dvd...

Bergman was the biggest cult director the late-'50s with a string of arthouse hits. However, many viewers increasingly found his '60s work too difficult and confronting. Though not necessarily any more thematically and affectively "anguished" than his other work, compared to Bergman's most popular films - The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries (both 1957), Cries and Whispers (1972) and Fanny and Alexander (1983) - Persona exemplifies
a much more direct engagement with the avant-garde. Here art-cinema's most persistant and weighty explorer of "big themes" - and who (unlike many an intellectual European director) also deals in very raw and confronting
emotional terrain - articulates his content through some of the boldest form (in the process, totally breaking down any such distinctions) ever offered in a commercially-
released film.

The combination of a feature filmmaker's long-form narrative and thematic development with the aesthetic radicalism more usually associated with the avant garde is part of what makes Persona so special and endlessly
rewarding. And alongside the much more coventional The Seventh Seal, the film sits at the epicentre of what is for me the richest ouevre (Bergman's nearly 50 films) in world cinema.

Like The Seventh Seal, Persona features some famous faces of post-war arthouse cinema - Bergman's stars. In her first performance for Bergman, Liv Ullmann here plays an actress in psychiatric care for refusing to speak, while Bibi Andersson plays her nurse - making for a two-hander where only one party provides the lines. As the two women move to a summer house by the sea they enter into violent pychological relations, as the film incrementally
prods what lies beneath "persona" - the masks and performances that are our daily identities. This thematic inquiry is not limited to the drama of human
beings in crisis; through a very precise and idiosyncratic reflexivity, Bergman as author and cinema itself are also interrograted as to their "essence" and reason for being...

Don't miss this unique chance to see one of the most thematically rich and aesthetically sublime films ever made." Hamish Ford.

Dementia
John Parker - 1953, B&W, 57min
"An entirely unique and utterly bizarre rediscovery, John J. Parker's Dementia is a 1950s-style foray into the mind of psycho-sexual madness. Set entirely in a nocturnal twilight zone that blends dream imagery with the
cinematic stylings of film noir, Dementia follows the tormented existence of a young woman haunted by the horrors of her youth, which transformed her into a stiletto-wielding, man-hating beatnik. Accompanied by George
Antheil's sci-fi score, the camera follows a "Gamin" (Adrienne Barrett) on a surreal sleepwalk through B-movie hell, populated by prostitutes, pimps and would-be molesters, all photographed by William Thompson (Plan 9 From
Outer Space, Maniac, Glen or Glenda?)." (www.kino.com)
"One of the strangest movies ever made." - Jim Morton.

As always, check the site for details:
http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~keirs/camera/
and mail us if something tickles your fancy camera_obscura@cse.unsw.EDU.AU

team camera obscura

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||L|A|N|F|R|A|N|C|H|I|S||||||||