Therefore I
Live: Home Movies, Personal Cinema, and the Avant-Garde
01>See the World Travel Films, Anthropology, and Personal Cinema Monday, October 9, 2006 8:00 pm at
Eyedrum
See the World presents films from the
very earliest days of cinema to 2006, including rare selections from the
Smithsonian's Human Studies Film Archive.
From the beginnings of cinema, starting with the Lumičre brothers, travelers and
explorers set out to document journeys and places which had never been seen by
most people. Itinerant filmmakers from the early twentieth century such as
Burton Holmes toured the U.S. with their films of faraway locales. Marie Menken
and Rudy Burckhardt, masters of the handheld camera, fashioned small, exquisite
film works with a profound sense of movement and place.
Over the course of the century, film became a widely used method of fieldwork
for anthropologists and ethnographers. Margaret Mead's Bathing Babies in Three
Cultures shows an everyday ritual from different vantage points, and provides us
with a glimpse of family life in the 1930s. Timothy Asch's humorous, revealing
film shows a group of young boys in a Yanomami village, imitating their fathers'
shamanic ritual. In an extraordinary ten-minute single take, Jean Rouch uses his
intense, deeply involving camera style to document the drums and dance of a
possession ritual in Niger.
In Trevor Fife's poignant Meridian Days, a sea journey provides the occasion for
reflections on the life of the filmmaker's 82-year-old grandmother. Pablo
Marín's travel reels of New York capture the hyperkinetic energy of the city. We end the screening with Warren Sonbert's 1989 masterpiece
Friendly Witness, which presents a succession of shots from his world travels,
weaving different people and locations into a work that is both intimate and
global.
Trevor Fife, Meridian Days (2003), 16mm,
color, sound, 12 minutes (screened on miniDV)
Marie Menken, Go Go Go (1962-64), 16mm,
color, silent, 12 minutes
Marie Menken, Arabesque for Kenneth Anger
(1961), 16mm, color, silent, 4 minutes
Joseph Cornell and Rudy Burckhardt, Angel
(1967), 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes
selections by Auguste and Louis Lumičre
(1890s) (screened on DVD)
Early 20th-century travel films from the Human Studies Film
Archive (screened on VHS):
Anonymous, Street Scenes at Tokio (1910); Anonymous, The Pyramids and Sphinx and
Marrakesh, Morocco (1929); Burton Holmes, In Siamese Society (excerpts) (1919);
Anonymous, Japan: Promotional and Theatrical Footage, excerpts (1927) Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Bathing
Babies in Three Cultures (1930s/1952), 16mm, black & white, sound, 13 minutes
(screened on VHS)
Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon,
Children’s Magical Death (1974), 16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes
Jean Rouch, Tambours D’avant/Tourou et
Bitti (1971), 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes (screened on DVD) Pablo Marín,
NYC (As Seen for the Second Time in My Life) (2006), Super-8 on video, black &
white, sound, 9 minutes (screened on DVD)
See
the World is dedicated to Amos Vogel, founder of Cinema 16 (1947-1963) and
author of Film as a Subversive Art, in gratitude for his continuing inspiration
to seek out films and make them available to audiences.
THEREFORE I LIVE is a Film Love event, programmed and hosted by Andy Ditzler for
Atlanta Celebrates Photography and Frequent Small Meals.
All screenings take place at 8:00 pm at Eyedrum,
290 Martin Luther King
Jr Dr Suite 8, Atlanta, GA, 30312
404.522.0655 www.eyedrum.org
still from "Children's
Magical Death" by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Gagnon
