Therefore I Live: Home Movies, Personal Cinema, and the Avant-Garde
02>In the Garden of Film
Home, the Body, and Handmade Films
Monday, October 16, 2006
8:00 pm at Eyedrum

Stan Brakhage, filmstrips from The Garden of Earthly Delights Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage

Carolee Schneemann and James Tenney in Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1967)

The garden as sanctuary. Home as the place of private life, the family, and sexuality. Home as the Garden of Eden, and the body as home. The body of film: film as a physical object, the filmstrip as home of the image. Home movies as art, and art films made from (and in) the artist's home.

We begin with Marie Menken's ecstatic, handheld Glimpse of the Garden. Rose Lowder's films of sunflowers and a tree in Provençal are painstakingly photographed frame by frame. Lowder changes the focus in between each frame, creating an atmosphere of shimmering movement without moving the camera. Stan Brakhage's garden film reprises his famous Mothlight, through the application of leaves, seeds and other organic material directly onto the filmstrip.

Two groundbreaking body films - Willard Maas and Marie Menken's poetic study of the human form and Stan Brakhage's kinetic film of two friends making love - are followed by Carolee Schneemann's landmark film Fuses. For Fuses, Schneemann and her partner filmed their lovemaking over many months, then Schneemann subjected the filmstrip to a variety of processes: handpainting and etching, bleaching, baking, hanging the filmstrips in lightning and rain. The result is an intense exploration of physicality, and one of the most visually sumptuous films of the 1960s.

Pip Chodorov and Bill Brand use optical printing techniques or process their own film by hand to add layers of visual complexity to their footage of family experiences. We end the screening with Colorado filmmaker Frank Biesendorfer's gorgeously filmed record of domestic life, sexuality, and family travels - multiple superimposed layers revealing the beauty in the everyday.

Marie Menken, Glimpse of the Garden (1957), 16mm, color, silent, 5 minutes
Rose Lowder, Les Tournesols (1982), 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes
Rose Lowder, Champs Provençal (1979), 16mm, color, silent, 9 minutes
Stan Brakhage, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981), 16mm, color, silent, 2 minutes
Willard Maas/Marie Menken, Geography of the Body (1943), 16mm, black & white, sound, 7 minutes
Stan Brakhage, Loving (1956), 16mm, color, silent, 4 minutes new print
Carolee Schneemann, Fuses (1967), 16mm, color, silent, 23 minutes
Pip Chodorov, End Memory (Impromptu) (1995), 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes
Bill Brand, Chuck’s Will’s Widow (1982), 16mm, color, silent, 12 minutes
Frank Biesendorfer, Little B and MBT (2004), 16mm, color, sound, 28 minutes

Program subject to change

In the Garden of Film is dedicated to Scott MacDonald, historian, scholar and chronicler of experimental film, in gratitude for his writings and inspiration.

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

Marie Menken, Glimpse of the Garden courtesy Anthology Film Archives

Rose Lowder, Les Tournesols courtesy Rose Lowder and Light Cone	Rose Lowder, Champs Provençal courtesy Rose Lowder and Light Cone

Frank Biesendorfer, Little B and MBT courtesy Frank Biesendorfer

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