Join us at the November screening for Mills Folly Microcinema, the monthly showcase of experimental film and video presented by Arts + Literature Laboratory.
Mills Folly Microcinema will screen Film-Makers' Cooperative: New Work 2018 (digital video, 75 minutes), a collection of experimental and documentary shorts from New York’s historic artist-run distributor of moving image art, on Thursday, November 29 at 7:30 p.m. Admission $5, or free for Arts + Literature Laboratory members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 7:15 p.m.
The Film-Makers' Cooperative (and its parent the New American Cinema Group, Inc.) was the first artist-run organization devoted to the dissemination of moving image art. Founding members included Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, and Jack Smith, who distributed 16mm prints of their films to film societies, museums, and campuses across the country. The Cooperative archive now consists of more than 5,000 films by over 1,000 media makers working in film and digital video, including Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Carolee Schneemann, and Peggy Ahwesh.
Film-Makers’ Cooperative: New Work 2018 will showcase wide-ranging experimental and short documentary work by both new and long-term FMC members, including M.M. Serra, Mark Street, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Simon Liu, and former UW-Madison Art Department instructor Barbara Lattanzi. The program was curated by Mary Billyou, Carolina Mandia & Courtney Muller for the FMC's New Year New Work 2018 screening.
Program Highlights:
Filmmaker M.M. Serra serves as the Executive Director of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and she has been making films since the 1980s. She describes her Mary Magdalene (2017) as “a construct of personal, mythological, and political projections of the fluid identity of the individual. . .This digital representation fragments and layers the profile that is representative of multiple gender identities.” (More information at mmserra.com/about.html.)
Beloit, Wisconsin native Mark Street has been featured at the Wisconsin Film Festival (At Home and Asea, WFF 2002; Fulton Fish Market WFF 2004) and many other festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, and London. He is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Art Department at Fordham University, where he teaches film/video production. His new film Zoom (2018) manipulates images from a Dutch/French thriller through hand-bleaching and painting on the filmstrip to “open up new psychological depths.” (More information at markstreetfilms.com.)
Janis Crystal Lipzin has been making art for over forty years using a wide range of media and formats, including 8mm and 16mm film, photographic prints and transparencies, video, audio, digital photography, multi-media installations and media performance. She taught Film and Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 2009, where she served as Chair of the Film Department. She describes her De Luce 2: Architechtura (2013) as follows: “Light and photo-chemistry collide and conspire to energize 12 different architectural backdrops, suspending and dissolving celluloid matter into a luminosity reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s radiant field paintings.”
Simon Liu was raised in Hong Kong and Stoke-On-Trent, England, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. His films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Toronto International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, among many others. He is a member of Negativland Motion Picture Lab, an artist-run film lab where he prints, processes and completes his films on 16mm and 35mm film. The International Film Festival Rotterdam describes his film Highview (2017) as “four, partially overlapping, 16mm images that fully coalesce into a colourful abstract painting but also create a narrative as an exploded montage.” (More information at www.liufilmsliu.com.)
Complete Screening List (and Links to Artist Pages):
Siren (James Autery, 2016, loop)
Two (Carolina Mandia, 2017, 1 min.)
Illegal Contemplation (Rrose Present, 2017, 3 min.)
One Minute and Forty Seconds for Anna (Barbara Lattanzi, 2017, 2 min.)
Sonic Intangible (Johnny Welch, 2016, 16 min.)
Zoom (Mark Street, 2018, 6 min.)
Seagulls - Gaviotas (Eduardo Darino, 2015, 3 min.)
Mary Magdalene (M.M. Serra, 2017, 5 min.)
De Luce 2: Architectura (Janis Crystal Lipzin, 2013, 9 min.)
In an Alien Land (Maria Niro & Angela Christlieb, 2017, 8 min)
Highview (Simon Liu, 2017, 19 min)
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
Mills Folly Microcinema is programmed by James Kreul from Madison Film Forum. Mills Folly Microcinema will showcase nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We will also network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we will incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at open shows (the video equivalent of an open mic).
Mills Folly Microcinema is funded in part by a grant from the Madison Arts Commission, with additional funds from the Wisconsin Arts Board.
