“It is narratively delocalized, spreading over the generalized body surface like a lateral backwash from the function-meaning interloops that travel the vertical path between head and heart.” – Brian Massum.

Integral to LeVeque’s practice is an interest in the momentary temporal delay between perception and the impact of perception on consciousness. Within the physicality of this delay is the potential for the provoking of an autonomic response. Spectatorship becomes physical. LeVeque also has an ongoing interest in stochastic process, the use of algorithmic structures and the destabilization of narrational logic.

Curated with Adam Khalil.

We will present the following films:

Program runtime 68 minutes

Three Songs of Lenin, USA, 2008, 11 minutes, digital projection, stereo

Three Songs of Lenin is an 11-minute piece made from three one-second samples taken from the second song We Loved Him of Vertov’s film Three Songs About Lenin. Building on Vertov’s second song’s structural use of moving and still images to articulate a dynamic of Lenin’s passing from life to death, this video employs an algorithmic structure where every other frame is the first frame of the one-second sample. The 29.97 frame rate allows us to almost see moving and still images at the same time as an imagining of Lenin haunting the present.

Traders Leaving the Exchange, A Guard and the Street, USA, 2011, 15 minutes, digital projection, stereo

A 15-minute unstable remix of a video I shot in 2000 and edited in 2011 of the “members” door of the New York Stock Exchange as the traders were leaving at the end of their workday. A security guard is positioned in front of the “members” door. The shot is a close up of the door and the guard taken from across the street busy with traffic and pedestrians. The architecture of the “members” door and the fact that the guard never moves from his position just to the right of the door gives the video a temporal and spatial continuity. The remix consisted of cutting the video into small fragments. The selection of each fragment was based on a particular element in that moment of the shot. The fragments were duplicated and mixed together employing a complex algorithm through customized software. The visual effect is that multiple temporal realities and movements manifest.

as the waves play along with an invisible spine (the workers die), USA, 2011, 10 minutes, digital projection, stereo

As the waves play along with an invisible spine (the workers die) is my first experiment with attempting to stimulate alpha waves as a part of the viewing experience. This piece is just under 11 minutes long and is a stroboscopic work that pulsates black and white at approximately 14 Hz. Buried within that field of pulsation is a 90 second algorithmically condensed version of John Huston’s 1956 black and white film Moby Dick. Huston’s minimal close-ups of the doomed sailors flicker as afterimage ghosts that emerge from the visually unstable field of alternating black and white frames.

Workers Leaving the Factory -Ten Days that Shook The World, USA, 2011, 13 minutes, digital projection, stereo

Downloaded, repeatedly recompressed and reversed

This video is a 13-minute re-edit of the film Workers Leaving The Lumière’s Factory in Lyon. Famously, in 1895 the Lumières assembled approximately 100 workers and crowded them together behind the gates of their factory. When the gates were opened the film began and the “compressed” workers emerged and dispersed into the street. In this digital work, an online version of the Lumière’s movie was downloaded and subjected to a process of repeated recompressions by cycling through six standard QuickTime settings. Like mold on a slice of bread, with each recompression colorful artifacts of mal-interpolation appeared and grew. This edit uses 32 different recomposed and degraded audio samples from Eisenstein’s film October with the Shostakovich score and sound effects.

Communist Like Us, USA, 2010, 4 minutes, digital projection, stereo

Communists Like Us is an ambient music video made from a few seconds of archival footage of Mao Zedong applauding and members of the Red Guard chanting. The title Communists Like Us was taken from the 1985 text of the same name written by Felix Guattari and Toni Negri.

Dramatically Repeating Lawrence of Arabia, USA, 2004, 15 minutes, stereo

Dramatically Repeating Lawrence of Arabia is a re-edit of David Lean’s 217-minute orientalist “classic” Lawrence of Arabia into a 15-minute hallucination of repeating masculinized poses, costumes and dramatic gestures. An algorithmic structure based on the compositional technique of phasing condenses and frame-by-frame remixes the original film into a cycling of divergence, convergence and momentary mirrorings. Stripped of narrational logic and image stability and combined with a phasing re-mix of Maurice Jarre’s Overture from Lawrence of Arabia, Dramatically Repeating Lawrence of Arabia pursues an affect of dramatic melancholy.

Les LeVeque is an artist who works with digital and analog electronic technology. His projects include single and multi-channel videos and video/computer based installations. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University with a concentration in Video. His work has been exhibited and screened internationally including: The Whitney Biennial, New York; Georges Pompidou Center, Paris; Museum fur Neue Kunst ZKM, Karlsruhe.

His new video “Traders Leaving the Exchange, A Guard and the Street” premiered in the 2011 New York Film Festival. The Video Data Bank distributes his single channel video work. His work is represented by KS Art in New York City.

Keith Sanborn is a media artist, theorist and  translator based in New York. His work has been the subject of a number  of one-person shows and has been included in major survey exhibitions  such as the Whitney Biennial (twice), and festivals such as OVNI  (Barcelona), Video Vortex and The Rotterdam International Film Festival. His theoretical work has appeared in publications ranging from Artforum and Kunst nach Ground Zero to exhibition catalogues published  by MoMA (New York), Exit Art, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. He has translated into English the work of Guy Debord, Georges Bataille, Lev  Kuleshov, Esther Shub, Paolo Gioli and Napoleon, among others. He teaches at Princeton University and the Milton Avery Graduate School in the Arts of Bard College.

Thomas Zummer, is an artist and lecturer at the Tyler School of Art and a visiting professor in critical studies in the Transmedia Programme at  the Hogeschool Sint Lukas, Brussels, as well as visiting professor at  the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. Zummer is an  internationally aclaimed independent scholar and writer, as well as  an artist and curator. As an artist he has exhibited  internationally since 1976, including at Exit Art, Thread Waxing Space,  and The Dia Foundation in New York City. From 1980-81 Zummer was at the New School for  Social Research where he was a graduate faculty and studied philosophy.  In 1982 Thomas Zummer began his studies with Paul de Man and Jacques  Derrida at Yale University in the Comparative Literature department. Thomas Zummer then worked as a research assistant to Michel Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley.

By watching many of these works now, we see films that contradict the stereotype of the genre as filled with artless, dry, conformist products. These short, midcentury films made for American classrooms offer a surprising range of qualities: artful and banal, timely and dated, stimulating and campy, weird and ingenious. Introductions to selections by Elena Rossi-Snook of the invaluable Reserve Film and Video Collection, New York Library for the Performing Arts, Skip Elsheimer of A/V Geeks (by conference), Juana Suárez and Dan Streible from NYU Cinema Studies.

Program runtime: 79 minutes

The16mm films to be projected:

Lunchroom Manners, Coronet, 1960, 10 minutes

The rude, clumsy puppet Mr. Bungle shows kids how to behave in the cafeteria.

Courtesy of A/V Geeks

A Lunchroom Goes Bananas, Coronet, 1978, 12 minutes

The food in a school cafeteria goes on strike [!] to protest kids’ poor manners.

Courtesy of A/V Geeks

The First Americans and Their Gods, Part One, Philip Stapp, 1969, 10 minutes

The International Film Foundation’s profound humanistic treatment of the subject.

Courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Cities in Crisis: What’s Happening? (Ray Witlin, 1967) 21′ Universal Educ. and Visual Arts

Introduced by Juana Suárez

Roaches’ Lullaby, Eliot Noyes and Claudia Weill, 1973, 5 minutes

Interviews with three zealous New York City roach-haters.

Courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Muzak, Tony Ganz and Rhody Streeter, 1972, 5 minutes

Meet the executives of the “efficiency through music” corporation.

Courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Bodies, EDCOA Productions, 1975, 10 minutes

An uninhibited montage confronting inhibitions; from sexologist Robert T. Francoeur.

Ro-Revus Talks About Worms, South Carolina ETV, 1971, 6 minutes

This legendary public health film helped eliminate an epidemic Ascaris infestation.

Courtesy of A/V Geeks

Dan Streible, in addition to co-editing LEARNING WITH THE LIGHTS OFF, is an NYU cinema studies professor and director of the Orphan Film Project, a collective effort of media artists, archivists, curators, and scholars devoted to saving and screening neglected media artifacts. He programmed the 2011 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and is now organizing the 8th Orphan Film Symposium, April 11-14, 2012, at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens.

Devin Orgeron is Associate Professor at North Carolina State University and co-editor of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association for Moving Image Archivists. He is the author of Road Movies.

Marsha Orgeron is Associate Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University and co-editor of The Moving Image, the journal of Association for Moving Image Archivists. She is the author of Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age.

 ”Alongside Muellner’s photographs, he tells a story about a recent trip to Russia, retracing his steps from 17 years earlier while trying to find an old friend who has disappeared. Text and image are represented in equal parts, and play off of each other with subtlety and emotion. The older Muellner reflects on the younger version of himself with both nostalgia and a critical eye.” — Jason Fulford, J&L BOOKS

Nicholas Muellner is a photographer, writer, and curator based in central New York. His work across a range of disciplines and practices considers the poetics of representation as a conduit between political understanding and personal experience. His most recent book projects focus on autobiographical narrative and the place of photography with that practice. These include The Photograph Commands Indifference (A-Jump Books, 2009), and The Amnesia Pavilions (A-Jump Books, 2011). In addition to solo and group exhibitions in the US and Russia, he has collaborated on critical writings, multi-media works and curatorial projects, including Now Is The Winter, an exhibition of politically and psychologically linked works by U.S. and Russian artists that opened at Proekt_Fabrika in Moscow in May 2007. He teaches photography and critical studies at the Park School of Communications, Ithaca College.

Dan Torop is a photographer and digital artist whose work often plunges into the fantastically irrational relationship between the land and its inhabitants. He described Twain’s visit to Lake Tahoe for Triple Canopy magazine, and then recreated the story as a 53 foot wall scroll. He is engaged in fieldwork for a further Twain project at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover residency site. Torop spent years digitally creating a small patch of the ocean and during a residency at Eyebeam programmatically rebuilt three blocks of the Bowery. He has exhibited photographs of formal sorrow and dream spaces at the Derek Eller Gallery. In 2010, A-Jump Books published Skydiving, a sequence of his landscapes and portraits. Torop lives in Brooklyn, and teaches at NYU’s studio art program.

Jim Supanick is a videomaker and writer born in Cleveland, Ohio, and living in Brooklyn. Forthcoming videos include a long-term project titled “Seed Sold Back to the Farmer”, a two-part animated essay about the assembly line and its legacy of damage, as well as a re-edited segment of Caspar Stracke’s “Circle’s Short Circuit” (featuring an interview with Avital Ronell). He has received support from NYSCA, the Puffin Foundation, and the Experimental Television Center. His essays on film, video, and visual culture have appeared in such publications as Film Comment, Millennium Film Journal, The Wire, Cineaste, and The Brooklyn Rail, along with exhibition catalogs and with DVD releases; others can be accessed at As a Chimney Draws. He is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a NYFA Grant for Nonfiction Literature. He is also a member of Synthhumpers, a quasi-musical collaboration with Josh Solondz. Jim currently teaches at City College of New York.

On a remote Scottish isle an ancient and secretive tradition continues. Ten men set sail on a unique adventure to hunt seabirds and bring the meat back to the community of Ness.

The hunting of sea birds was outlawed in 1954 in the UK, but the community of Ness on the Isle of Lewis continues to be granted the only exemption under UK and EU law allowing them to hold the annual hunt. Every August ten men from Ness set sail for Sula Sgeir, a desolate island far out in the Atlantic. Following in the footsteps of countless generations, they leave their normal lives behind to journey through storms and high seas to reach the remote hunting ground on this unique adventure.

The men live on the island for two exhausting weeks, sleeping in old stone bothies among ruins built by Celtic monks over a thousand years ago. They work ceaselessly, catching, killing and processing 2000 birds using traditional methods before returning home with this rare meat so cherished by the people of Ness.

For fifty years the hunters kept their activities out of the public eye, refusing countless approaches from film makers. Mike Day managed to win their trust and has produced a unique and fascinating glimpse into this long hidden tradition.

“A gorgeously shot documentary feature that takes viewers into the heart of this ancient tradition, celebrating its longevity and lamenting its decline without once being patronizing, overly worthy or dull. The Guga Hunters Of Ness is poetic, haunting, its beautiful imagery making it hard to look away.” – EYE FOR FILM

The Film has screened at Glasgow International Film Festival, the Celtic Media Festival and broadcast on BBC2 in January 2011.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Michael Day worked originally as a Middle Eastern specialist and lawyer in Dubai and London before retraining as a filmmaker. He founded Intrepid Cinema in 2009 before making The Guga Hunters of Ness. A self shooting director, Mike trained on cameras from the family photography business, established by his great grand father in Scotland in 1918.

Jennifer Merin has written about film for 20 years. She covers documentaries for About.com and is the film critic for Women’s eNews. She reports of film and cultural matters for Westwood One Radio Network’s morning drive news magazine, “America In The Morning,” and has reviewed films and interviewed filmmakers for New York Press, a leading alt weekly newspaper, andcontributed to TheReeler.com. Jennifer’s worked as newswriter/editor for ABC and CNN, and reporter for NBC. Her ongoing weekly column about culture and travel has resided in the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Tribune Media, Creators Syndicate and is currently distributed by ArcaMax publishing. Jennifer is president of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, a nonprofit association of women covering film and the movie industry. AWFJ presents the annual EDA Awards. Jennifer edits and publishes AWFJ Women On Film, the organization’s syndicated journal. Jennifer holds an MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied and worked with many of today’s leading filmmakers.

Program runtime: 1 hour 7 minutes

O’er the Land by Deborah Stratman, USA, 2009, 51 minutes, 16mm

A meditation on the milieu of elevated threat addressing national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence. Of particular interest are the ways Americans have come to understand freedom and the increasingly technological reiterations of manifest destiny.

This film is concerned with the sudden, simple, thorough ways that events can separate us from the system of things, and place us in a kind of limbo. Like when we fall. Or cross a border. Or get shot. Or saved. The film forces together culturally acceptable icons of heroic national tradition with the suggestion of unacceptable historical consequences, so that seemingly benign locations become zones of moral angst.

“…captures, as the artist herself put it, ‘iconic representations of how nationhood is defined.’ That nation would be the USA, home of French and Indian War reenactments in Kokomo, Indiana; high school football games in [Columbus, Ohio]; machine-gun festivals; and border policing—both to the south and the north, with a long take of Niagara Falls having a near-hypnotic effect after so much firepower. Yet whereas borders are vigilantly guarded in Stratman’s work, the Images Festival excels by doing precisely the opposite…” – Melissa Anderson, ARTFORUM

Love It / Leave It by Tom Palazzolo, USA, 1973, 15 minutes, 16mm

“Love It/Leave It is a raucous treatment of patriotic color, football, nudity and parades set to a refrain of ‘Love It’ and coalescing into Tom Palazzolo’s nightmare rendition of America the Awful. It sounds the theme song of this program [at the Whitney] and gives you a pretty good start on deciding to ‘Leave It.’” - Archer Winston, NEW YORK POST

Deborah Stratman works in a territory between experimental and documentary genres. In her films and frequent work in other media including photography, sound, drawing and sculpture, Stratman explores the history, uses, mythologies and control of landscapes of varying types and scales: from Xinjiang China to suburban California. Her recent works have variously addressed the milieu of elevated threat, patriotism, sonic warfare, comets, sinkholes and faith. She is currently collecting a decade’s worth of FEAR (call 1-800-585-1078 to participate) and teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Anthony Elms writes, is Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and is Editor of WhiteWalls Inc.
His writings have appeared in Afterall, Art Asia Pacific, Art Papers, Artforum, Cakewalk, May Revue, Modern Painters, New Art Examiner, and Time Out Chicago.   As an artist, Elms has been included in projects exhibited at Gahlberg Gallery (Glen Ellyn), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Mandrake (Los Angeles), Mess Hall (Chicago), Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago), and VONZWECK (Chicago), among others. He has independently curated many exhibitions, including: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-61 (with John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis); Interstellar Low Ways (with Huey Copeland); Can Bigfoot Get You a Beer?, and A Unicorn Basking in the Light of Three Glowing Suns (both with Philip von Zweck).

Tom Palazzolo is well-known for his short documentary films. He was showcased at the Art Institute of Chicago in November and December of 2010. In a unique combination of cinema-verite and surrealism, Tommy Chicago( his nom de plume) has produced numerous short documentary snapshots of eccentric Chicago characters such as the Chicken Man, the Tattooed Lady,  the Pigeon Lady, as well as the unveiling of the Picasso Sculpture in the Civic Center.  In recent years he has moved on to surrealist narrative films such as Caligari’s Cure, whose subtext may be read as a documentary on the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, Palazzolo’s alma mater, and where he taught film.

Program runtime: 1 hour 27 minutes

We will be presenting the following films and media:

- OWS Photos by Adrian Kinloch

- Right Here All Over by Alexander Mallis & Lily Henderson, 2011, 3 minutes

A new angle on Occupy Wall Street reveals the strong micro community that has formed there.

- Between the Banks by Hank Linhart, USA, 2011, 6 minutes

On May 1st, 1980, myself and three others installed about 300 army helmets at 7:30 AM at Chase Manhattan Plaza. The plaza is situated between several banks. We documented the illegal installation in super8. In 2004 I put the footage together into a 9 minute B&W film. Its more of a document than a documentary. In the end a security guard escorts me through the helmets to be arrested. It is a distant forerunner to the later occupation movement. -Hank Linhart

- Monday Morning in Zuccotti Park by Steve Bognar, USA, 2011, 2 minutes

A simple short about an early morning in the park.

- Occupy Wall Street by Martha Colburn, USA, 2011, 4 minutes

Music by ZOMBY. Made with the help of Tricia Gray. Shot on SUPER 8 and 16mm.

- Bankers for Economic Justice by Adele Pham, USA, 2011, 1 minutes

This is a very common scene down at Broadway and Liberty. Truly makes me hopeful, and I’m the cynical hippie! - Adele Pham

- Occupy Atlanta – Day and Night by Adele Pham, USA, 2011, 7 minutes

Adele Pham, Ira Mckinley, and Messiah Rhodes are on the road visiting occupations in Ithaca, Albany, Wall Street, DC, Durham, and Atlanta. This is one of several videos that we will post about the movement. #OCCUPYATLANTA has had it’s share of triumphs and controversies, we arrived after the occupation was cleared from Troy Davis Park (formerly Woodruff Park) and over 52 protesters were arrested. The world is watching to see what ATLANTA will do next. -Adele Pham

- Tent Monsters by Occupy Melbourne, 2011, 3 minutes

All our parks belong to us.

- Fist Bump with Cops by Rumur, Inc., USA, 2011, 1 minute

-OCCUPY YOUR HOMES – Homeowners Speak Out by Messiah Rhodes, USA, 2011, 5 minutes

Two homeowners, Jean Cassine of Queens Village and Mimi Pierre Johnson of Elmont, describe how the foreclosure crisis has caused angst and frustation for themselves, as well as their communities. They have been fighting for years to keep their homes and see the Occupy movement as an opportunity for others to do the same.

- Occupy the DOE   by Meerkat Media, USA, 2011, 5 minutes

The Panel for Education Policy (or PEP), enacts policy for the New York City Dept. of Education – every member is appointed, not elected. A plurality of these voting members are selected by the Mayor directly. The PEP replaced the Board of Education when Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002. It is intended to be a democratic forum where people voice concerns, prior to the panel’s vote on educational policy. Today the panel is convening to discuss new standards being implemented in schools. 200 parents, teachers staff and students are in attendance.

- We The People Have Found Our Voice by Iva Radivojevic, USA, 2011, 8 minutes

If it’s our sharing that makes us powerful, why return to normal?

This life is more worth living than the one we left behind. -Leaflet, Solidarity March with Occupy Wall Street, October 5, 2011

- Occupy Wall Street – The Eviction of Zucotti Park by Laura Newman, USA, 2011, 4 minutes

- The Morning After Eviction by Messiah Rhodes, USA, 2011, 4 minutes

Awoken by glaring floodlights, and boots of over 1,000 riot police, #Occupywallstreet was evicted from Zuccotti Park during the early hours of Tuesday, November 15, 2011. More than 200 protesters were arrested and as the sun rose, the real test for the #occupy movement began.

-#Occupy Bat Signal for the 99% by Mark Read, USA, 2011, 5 minutes

Video from the #occupy bat signal crew. An inside/outside look at this series of inspiring projections that lit up the Verizon building in Lower Manhattan on November 17th.

- Occupy Wall Street by New Left Media, USA, 2011, 15 minutes

 PRESENTED WITH:

Rooftop Films is known internationally as one of the most dynamic film festivals in the world. In 2011, we will screen more than 25 feature films, almost all of which are New York, U.S. or World Premieres. We’ll also show over 150 short films in themed programs which have received accolades for being smart, entertaining, and filled with astonishing movies. This combination of brilliant, original programming and stunning outdoor venues makes Rooftop Films one of the best-attended film festivals in New York. We have also begun to expand to other cites. In 2010, Rooftop screened films outdoors in Toronto, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Harrisburg, Calicoon, and Camden, Maine. At Rooftop Films, we bring the underground outdoors.

The idea of the death of film is not new– over the past two decades, major manufacturers have severely halted their rate of production and processing of film and paper stocks. The Index of Maladjustment is celebrating this recently antiquated medium by showcasing film scratches, chemical traces, color shifts, and the inherent mysteries that are not possible with glossy digital processes. This championing of human slights, an antithetical concept within the present hyper-digital society, strives to find the beauty within what has been deemed an error, and subsequently altered. These maladjustments—evidence of mistakes, defects, and failures—are, in fact, something to be contemplated and revered. – Lindsey Castillo, Curator

This event coincides with the Camera Club of New York’s February 25 s8mm hand-processing workshop with Kenneth Zoran Curwood. For more information visit their website.

We will be presenting the following films:

Dusted Rays by Kenneth Zoran Curwood, USA, 2011, 5 minutes, 16mm

An experiment using my own footage as an image library for a cut-up piece. I aim to include 15 seconds from every reel of film I ever shot and processed. Developing processes shown in the film will include COLOR: reversal, negative. x-pro (reversal as neg), x-pro (neg as reversal), Black and White: reversal, negative, hi-con. Processing effects shown include solarization, mordencage, tinting, toning. -KZC

Kenneth Zoran Curwood was born in NYC in ’71. He likes to take apart old movie cameras and projectors, and re-purpose them to re-photograph film one frame at a time. He then processes the film in home-made chemical mixtures, with often dismal results. He is currently working on a script for a partly animated feature, based on his days of being a student at SVA from ’89-’95. Some of his work has been transferred to video and edited to songs for his pals in bands, and can be seen here.

Dervish Machine by Bradley Eros & Jeanne Liotta/Mediamystics, 1992, 10 minutes, Super-8 to 16mm blow-up, B&W/color

“M’elevasti! Lift me up.”

Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin’s Dreamachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.

Bradley Eros is an artist working in myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, contracted and expanded cinema & installation. Also a maverick curator, designer, researcher & investigator. Concepts include: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, cinema povera, poetic accidents and musique plastique.

8fps, 45rpm, 3spi by Rachael Guma, 5 minutes, Super 8 and Ektachrome

Super 8 found-footage film of the needle of a sewing machine blown up to 16 mm, hand-sewn, re-photographed back to Super 8, and hand-processed. The image of a pulsating needle as the thread punctures through the surface of the film strip, while the sound of a stylus needle scratches the surface of a rotating record player.

Rachael Guma is a filmmaker and sound artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Through her experiments with Super 8 film and analog sound, Rachael strives to create an engaging live viewing experience that embraces the idiosyncratic qualities of technology, while maintaining a hand-crafted approach to her output. Ever since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, her films have screened at the San Francisco Cinematheque, RX Gallery, Mono No Aware, Northern Flickers, Microscope Gallery, and AXWFF 2011. As a member of Optipus Film Collective, she has performed live foley sound at Participant Gallery, Dense Mesh IV, and the 2011 Index Festival.

Intimate Machine by Shona Masarin, 2010, 3 minutes, Super 8 transfered to video

Two looping frames, side-by-side, cycle through two film-strips that are cut to different lengths. The beginning and end of each loop are lost in all the various narrative and compositional possibilities imposed by the slip-stream of images and sounds that push, touch, and collide – like endless variations of a motif. The machine is able to manufacture an infinite amount of imaginary anxieties, dreams, and stories through the repetition and juxtaposition of images that act as hieroglyphs. Sound by Andrew Hurst.

Shona Masarin is a New York City based Australian film artist whose work involves the physical, alchemic, and sculptural manipulation of found images and materials to create abstract animations. Finished works have taken the form of of Super 8mm or 16mm films, film performances with live music, and installations; presented at film festivals in Australia, including the Melbourne International Film Festival, and at various alternative art spaces and galleries in Brooklyn. She has received funding for her work from the Australia Council for the Arts and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust.

Nightlight by Dagie Brundert, Super 8, Germany 2009, 2.21 min.

Berlin lights in time-speed-machine; the gelatin layer of the film stained red.

Dagie Brundert was born in a small town in the middle of West Germany and moved to Berlin to study visual arts / experimental film. She fell in love with her super 8 camera (Nizo) in 1988. Since then she tries to be “a particle-finder, a wave-catcher and a good story-teller; to absorb weird beautiful things from this world. Chew them and spit them out again.”

Lindsey Castillo is an artist and curator based in New York City. Her art works have been exhibited throughout New York and Europe. She is currently working on ceramic sculptural pieces, zines, and Super-8 films. Lindsey has been curating events for The Camera Club of New York for the past three years, and continues to develop projects that seek to inspire and create new conversations that pertain to photography and film. To see more of her work and ideas visit her website.

Jeanne Liotta (NYC/CO) makes films and other ephemera including photographs, works on paper, and live projection performances. Her work has been represented in the 2006 Whitney Biennial; The New York Film Festival; The Wexner Center for the Arts; The Museum of Modern Art; Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room in Bklyn, and the Cornell Astronomical Society at Fuertes Observatory. She has taught widely and variously, and is presently assistant professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College.

Love Stories by Sarah Halpern, 16mm, USA 2011, 5 min.

This film was made in celebration of the marriage of Farihah Zaman and Jeff Reichert. It was seen for the first time on the day of their ceremony with family and friends.

Sarah Halpern is in a love/hate relationship with Film. Lately he’s been threatening to walk out on her. If only she weren’t so dependent. One day she’ll show Film that she doesn’t really need him. One day she’ll find another format and move on… that sonofabitch.

Karen by Joshua Lewis, 16mm, multi-projection w/ field recordings, USA 2011, 3 min.

“The hypnotizing dance of light and shadows gracefully accentuated the roundness of her breasts and the pertness of her dark pink nipples. She obliged him by bending lower to kiss his forehead, offering her twin charms to his hungry lips to taste and tease until she cried for more pleasures from his roving hands. She guided his palms from her breasts down to the moist heat between her thighs, aching for a more intimate touch.” -Johanna Lindsey, Tame the Fury, 1990.

Joshua Lewis is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker whose images are teased out from the same incoherent tangle of memory, personal neurosis and sopped-up material culture that also makes up his personality. His work has screened at The Commons Gallery (NYU), Millennium Film Workshop, Spectacle (MASS), Magic Lantern, Anthology Film Archives, and Mono No Aware IV. Josh processes most of his films by hand and is continually in pursuit of a more proximate relationship with the medium through ongoing explorations of photographic reactions. He teaches hand-processing workshops for Mono No Aware and was recently invited to teach as a visiting artist to NYU’s Tisch School of The Arts.

Yes, I Said Yes, i Will, Yes by Phil Solomon, USA 1999, 3 min.

Phil Solomon is an internationally renown film and digital video maker and has been teaching both film history/aesthetics and film production at the University of Colorado since 1991. Mr. Solomon’s work has been screened throughout the U.S. and Europe, including 3 Cineprobes at the Museum of Modern Art and two Whitney Biennials. Phil Solomon’s films have won 10 first prize awards at major international film festivals for experimental film. He has collaborated on three films with his late colleague and friend, Stan Brakhage, who named Solomon’s Remains to be Seen on his Top Ten Films of All Time for Sight and Sound. In recognition of his film art, Philip Solomon has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), a Creative Capital Grant (2000, 2001), The Thatcher Hoffman Smith Award (2007), The Stan Brakhage Vision Award from the Denver International Film Festival (2007) and the Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Work (2008). The N.Y Times, critic Manohla Dargis wrote: “Although part of a long avant-garde tradition, Mr. Solomon makes films that look like no others I’ve seen. The conceit of the filmmaker as auteur has rarely been more appropriate or defensible — The liberating effect of Mr. Solomon’s work suggests a rather different realm: Film Meets Vision, Rejoice!”

Further information on Phil Solomon, including writings, clips, stills, and reviews can be found on his website: www.philsolomon.com

A Visual Guide to Physical Examination by Kelly Spivey,16mm, USA 2011, 6 min.

Kelly Spivey has been making experimental films since 1998. Her films explore themes of class, gender, women’s roles and more recently, anxiety, especially in relationship to our increasingly frenetic urban lifestyles, and information overload capabilities. Her work has screened nationally and internationally and has won awards. Several of her film projects have received support from the Queens Council on the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, and she was a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellow in 2005. She works in New York City in post productions, editing and video preservation at Mercer Media.

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The Camera Club of New York (CCNY) is one of New York’s oldest arts organizations, the Camera Club (CCNY) has been a home for photographers to develop their craft, providing both a working facility and collegial environment for discussion and the exchange of ideas. The Club is dedicated to continuing its long tradition of welcoming both photographers and devotees of photography and encouraging their participation through memberships, classes, lectures, exhibitions and residency program. Since its founding in 1884, the club has nurtured many talented photographers whose careers cover a wide range of disciplines, including portraiture, photojournalism, fashion, street photography, advertising, documentary and fine art.

“Bruce McClure doesn’t make films, he performs them… Twirling knobs, flipping switches, and adjusting lenses, he coaxes a bank of whirring projectors into producing images impossible to record.” THE BROOKLYN RAIL.

Projector placements in theatrical space symbolically repudiate the camera’s claims on the picture plane by upsetting its hegemony of flattened evidence taken from the outside world. My performances, furthermore, continue to negotiate for real space and real objects on the projector’s side of the movie house in the presence of witnesses. Along the Via Dolorosa, I have erected eight stations commemorating film’s passion and the spirit of projective revisionism. Each of the passion narratives collected in PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINE (2008 – 2011),* illuminates a unique camera shot, an emulsive grisaille, excised from a documentary treatment of pelican life. I now petition you to recognize another station in construction along this secular pilgrimage. Re-awaken metathesis by walking in its sandals! Although incomplete and untitled, this stopping place is a meditation on “entrusting each to the other” and is celebrated by a song.

Film, redefined as an object of the projector’s discretion, is transfixed by projector headlights, the primary lamp and exciter bulb, and left by the wayside as road kill. Picturesquely martyred in this way gives rise to film as a liberating force rather than an intransigent and anachronous icon to be horded. At the station sprocket time converts matter into energy – a metaphor for consciousness – breaking a reign of filmic re-enactments and broadcasting energy into the vitality of perceptual activity. – BM

* St. Thomas Aquinas, “Lord Jesu, blessed Pelican.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo By: Giulio Bursi, 2009

Bruce McClure graduated with a degree in Architecture in 1985 and worked for 23 years in small offices on residential projects. In 1994 he approached cinema by building simple devices using intervals of light to affect the perception of motion. Eventually the film projector was adopted as a primary tool to organize light and sound into “projector performances” that have been included in many festivals in the United States and abroad. By definition these performances are detached from the necessity of recording. His exploitation of the film projector as both a picture and sound device has enabled him to move from “cinema” to the music hall. In 2009 he was the opening act for Throbbing Gristle in Brooklyn and Chicago. Challenging hypocrisy, “Vouchsafe Me More Soundpicture (Fain Make Glories),” is a vinyl recording available on Olde English Spelling Bee (#36) and was excerpted from a performance in 2009 at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Much of the network’s success is a result of the provocative documentaries produced by Santiago Stelley. He has covered Somali refugees in Kenya, transvestite mosques in Thailand, bestiality in Colombia, and hallucinogenic frogs in the Amazon, to name a few.

Stelley will be presenting highlights of his work in company with collaborators for a discussion on chasing the white whale and the ever evolving world of Vice Media.

Curated with Matt Yoka.

Program runtime: 80 minutes

We will be screening the following videos:

Balls Deep – Sewers of Bogota

Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia – The Icelandic Skin-Disease Mushroom Fashion Fiasco

Vice Meets – Issei Sagawa

Santiago Stelley was born in Madrid and studied Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo and the University of Havana. After contributing for years as a correspondent for COLORS Magazine he moved to Venice where he spent 4 years as a full time Editor and Associate Creative Director. In 2004, Mr Stelley left COLORS to head up the Editorial Department of La Fabrica in Madrid and to curate exhibitions for PhotoEspana. During this time he also worked as a Creative Director for LVMH fashion campaigns and catalogues. In 2006 Santiago moved back to NY to work with the Vice Magazine team in developing it’s on-line television network. He is currently the Creative Director for VICE.com.

Thomas Morton is a scrawny nerdlinger from Atlanta who moved to New York to convince the fagbashers he grew up around that he’d “made it.” He’s worked for Vice Magazine since 2004, first as a gofer and drug-mule, then editorial assistant, then assistant editor, then back down to associate editor, then someone had the idea of making him host documentary videos and he’s been living out this cruel prank ever since. As an “on-air personality” he has helped make films in a number of countries around the world, about such subjects as Kyrgyz bride kidnapping, the depredation of the Amazon rainforest, the gay New York leather scene, pollution in the Pacific, witch doctors who give West African email scammers magic powers, and music. Thomas spent the first two years of high school as a goth and is getting a little fat in the stomach area.

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