SPRING 2006 UNDERGROUND SCHEDULE

February 4: Japanese Cyberpunk

Revolving around the transformation of people into grotesque hybrids of flesh and metal, Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989, 67 min.) is above all an overwhelming audiovisual experience, set to a brain-pounding score by Chu Ishikawa and complemented by suitably exaggerated sound effects. David Lynch's Eraserhead has often been mentioned as an influence because of its similar brooding, black and white images.

February 11: Ladies Loving Ladies

Sadie Benning has been a cause célèbre in the queer community for almost a decade. Born in 1973 to a filmmaker father and an artist mother, she began making short films at age 15 and two years later came out as a lesbian. An iconoclast even as a teen, she employed the infamous "Pixelvision" camera in most of her early work and continues to use it. We’re pleased to present several of her short films. Flaming Ears (1991, 84 min.) is a pop sci-fi lesbian fantasy feature from Austria that’s set in the year 2700 in the fictive burned-out city of Asche. It follows the tangled lives of three women—Volley, Nun and Spy—as they seek love and revenge.

February 18: Documentary Night

Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves (2003, 105 min.) describes a journey taken across the social, economic, and psychological tobacco terrain of North Carolina by a native Carolinian whose great-grandfather created the famous brand of tobacco known as "Bull Durham." It is a subjective, autobiographical meditation on the allure of cigarettes and their troubling legacy for the state of North Carolina. It's about loss and preservation, addiction and denial. And it's about filmmaking - home movie, documentary, and fiction filmmaking - as the filmmaker fences with the legacy of an obscure Hollywood melodrama that is purportedly based on his great-grandfather's life.

February 25: Birth Movies

Tonight we present a range of experimental cinematic takes on birth. Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959, 12 min.) and Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961, 5 min.) depict the births of two of his children in fragmented, associative style, to which R. Bruce Elder responds in Breath/Light/Birth (1975, 6 min.). Gunvor Nelson’s Schmeerguntz (1966, 15 min.) and Kirsa Nicholina (1969, 16 min.) take on birth and domesticity in mysterious and evocative ways. Standish Lawder’s 1980 Regeneration (3 min.) takes birth from an entirely different perspective, in reverse. Finally, in Baby Home (1997, 30 min.) David Woods investigates 72 stills shot at the home birth of a friend’s third child.

March 4: Lost, Lost, Lost

Jonas Mekas’ Lost, Lost, Lost (1975, 178 min.) is a pinnacle of the diary-film form―fourteen years of footage are presented here, covering the ‘50s and early ‘60s, a time when Mekas had just arrived in America, displaced from his Lithuanian home by the Soviet and Nazi invasions. It documents the growing counterculture of New York and his contact with figures from the film, art and poetry communities such as Ken Jacobs, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara and Salvador Dali.

March 25: Miranda July

With the success of Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005, 91 min.), artist Miranda July gained a considerable measure of mainstream exposure. Along with that delightful and whimsical feature, we’ll also be screening a selection of her short video work, including The Amateurist (1996, 10m), Atlanta (1998, 14 min.), Nest of Tens (1999, 27 min.) and Getting Stronger Everyday (2001, 6:30).

April 1: April Fool’s Grab Bag

Tonight we present several completely unrelated films—if you don’t like one, wait a few minutes and you’ll see something different. Buoyant (2004, 28 min.) is Julie Wyman’s ebullient experimental documentary that intertwines the story of the Padded Lilies, a troupe of fat synchronized swimmers, Archimedes, the Greek mathematician obsessed with floating bodies, and the inventor of the “Drystroke Swimulator” to investigate, proclaim and celebrate the fact that fat floats! Next up will be several selections from the experimental DVD Chaos, which may or may not include work by Peter Sollett, Eileen O’Meara, and George Lucas. Finally Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970, 23 min.), wherein Gehr creates a stunning head-on motion by systematically shifting focal lengths on a static zoom lens as it stares down the center of an empty, modernistic hallway, turning the fluorescent geometry of his institutional corridor into a sort of piston-powered mandala.

April 8: 1960s American Underground Cinema

These playful, off-the-cuff films draw heavily from the life philosophies of the 1950s beatniks. The Beat Generation of the late '50s came to cinematic life in Pull My Daisy (1959, 30 min.), populated by some that era's most indelible talents. Narrated by Jack Kerouac, and co-directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, this was a radical experiment when first released, and is still a seminal glimpse into the Greenwich Village lifestyle which typified the beatnik counterculture. The Last Clean Shirt (1964, 39 min.) presents three identical takes of an interracial couple riding in a car while the woman speaks in an unknown tongue. Each take is subtitled with a different stream of consciousness narration by poet Frank O'Hara. Avocada (1966, 37 min.) seems to be the only extant film of the handful produced by Bill Vehr. Luminary Jack Smith described it as “incomparable and nutritiously beautiful . . . a film possessed of gilded glamour.”

April 15: Surrealism Night

Probably the 20^th century’s most influential avant-garde, surrealism produced work in a wide variety of artistic media, including some of cinema’s most extraordinary early films. Tonight we present a number of key surrealist films from Europe as well as the United States. Included in this screening will be work by Man Ray (Le Retour á la Raison, Emak Bakia, L’Etoile de Mer), Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou), Joseph Cornell (Rose Hobart), and Hans Richter (Ghosts before Breakfast), all of which explores the mysterious terrain beyond consciousness in ways both playful and terrifying.

April 22: Local Experimental Film Festival

The 3^rd Annual Underground Film Series Film Festival will be held this evening at 7 p.m. Details will be forthcoming.