This event is part of a monthly screening series with The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
The program launches two videos which examine the construction of performance, both which are distributed by the Film-makers’ Coop. One comes from the perspective of contemporary art practice, the other as a strategic query into ways in which veracity and information are constructed and disseminated into a cultural mainstream.
Peter Cramer and Jack Waters have been partners for over two decades in their combined experience in performing, visual and media arts. Their films, videos, installations, and performances have shown in New York City, throughout the U.S., and internationally. Please visit http://www.alliedproductions.org for more information.
Giornalisti En Maschera by Peter Cramer and Jack Waters
(2009, USA, 30 minutes, DVD)
Did painting die, or simply meiotically reproduce as video art? Has nationalism outlived its cultural relevance? These familiar questions and others are reconstituted and posed at the press previews of the 2001Venice Biennial. The drector/performers investigate relations of art, business, and politics in the guise of objective journalists three months preceding 9/11. Other interviewees include Special Prize winners Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (Canada), and other artists; woven together with excerpts from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
Söma Söma Söma by Peter Cramer
(2000, USA, 34 minutes, DVD)
Examining three generations of conceptual, performance, and installation by artists Geoffrey Hendricks, William Pope L., and Patty Chang with interviews and footage of their exhibition performances. A documentary video of the exhibition of the same title curated by William Pope L. at NYC’s Sculpture Center at its former location on East 69th St. Originally conceived as a private commission by artist Geoffrey Hendricks to document his performances, Cramer & Waters had access to include the artists regarding their participation to provide a wider context for the exhibition.
http://www.franklinfurnace.org/goings_on/thismonth/soma.html
Presented with:
A Brief History of the New American Cinema Group
History and Mission
A group of twenty-three artists in New York City founded the New American Cinema Group in the autumn of 1960. It included filmmaking luminaries such as Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, Alfred Leslie, Robert Frank, Gregory Markopoulos, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jack Smith. The group collectively believed that they were part of a new generation of filmmakers. The purpose of the New American Cinema Group was to promote experimental, avant-garde, and personal filmmaking in light of the mainstream film industry that ignored such work.
A division of the New American Cinema Group, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (FMC), was founded as an artist owned and artist run non-profit distribution organization for the works of independent and avant-garde filmmakers. The FMC functioned as a non-exclusive distributor of their work accepting all films without curatorial censorship and giving the filmmaker a specified percentage of all rental income – currently 60%.
In 2009
the FMC entered its forty-eighth year of continuous operation and moved into a new location at 475 Park Avenue South. Since 1991, M.M. Serra has served as the Executive Director running the daily operations of the FMC with the assistance of Ryan Marino and Joshua Solondz. Since its conception the FMC actively participates in the artistic community of New York. We are engaged in various exhibition venues throughout the city, including Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, P.S.1 and the Living Theatre as well as other venues. Our staff comes from various educational institutions, offering internships to students of New York University, the New School, School of Visual Arts, Fordham and Cooper Union.
Posted in: Past Events.