Join us for the Underground Films, Underground series, presented by Mills Folly Microcinema at maiahaus (402 East Mifflin Street).
In June, Mills Folly Microcinema will present three screenings of Underground Films, Underground, a survey of historical expermental films projected on 16mm prints at a special location. The series is programmed by Erik Gunneson and James Kreul.
Underground Films, Underground 1973 will screen at maiahaus (402 East Mifflin Street) on Thursday, June 20 at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $10, and due to limited seating tickets must be purchased in advance at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4261438.
By the early 1970s, many filmmakers responded to the wild extremes of the interdisciplinary 1960s with with more austere formal techniques that explored film-specific properties. Duration became an important element of cinematic experience for those who expanded the terrain opened up Warho's minimalism. The filmmakers screened this evening aggressively explored film as a distinct medium and established new ways to experience moving images. Film running time: 83 minutes. Program time: 2 hours.
Highway Landscape | J.J. Murphy | 1972 | 7 minutes
This past December, J.J. Murphy retired from the University of Wisconsin--Madison after a long career of teaching film production and film history. His recent work has focused on three crucial books on independent filmmaking, Me an You and Memento and Fargo (2007), The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (2012) and the just published Rewriting Indie Cinema: Improvisation, Psychodrama, and the Screenplay.
Murphy began his filmmaking career at the University of Iowa, where he completed several experimental shorts including Highway Landscape. While his later Print Generation (1974) is famous for its complex design, Highway Landscape has a deceptively simple, minimalist premise: “a single take, fixed camera meditation on a dead rabbit on Highway No. 1, outside Iowa City.”
Critic Ron Epple responds, “I think Murphy's description of Highway Landscape as a 'meditation' is quite accurate, since minimal cinema allows the viewer to examine in such radically increased attention the elements of the film he is watching. Although the reality on the screen may be static, the reality in the viewer's mind is not: under the right circumstances (seldom possible in film-viewing situations), the viewer can 'contemplate' what he sees, examines, let his eyes (and mind) wander, taste the possibilities of response."
Miss Jesus Fries on the Grill | Dorothy Wiley | 1973 | 12 minutes
A frequent collaborator with Gunvor Nelson (whose Take Off is included in this screening), Dorothy Wiley made several short films in the early 1970s including Weeny Worm, or the Fat Inkeeper and Zane Forbidden (both 1972). In 2017, the San Francisco Cinematheque organized a series showcasing the work of Nelson and Wiley, which included a personal appearance by Wiley. Programmer Tanya Zimbardo wrote, “As friends living in Marin County, Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley began making films together in the 1960s that foregrounded their personal experiences while examining issues of family, parenthood, partnership and domestic life in the In the context of artist filmmaking in Northern California.”
Mike Reynolds of the Berkeley Barb vividly describes Miss Jesus Fries on the Grill: “A mysterious striking evocation of pain and the short-circuiting sensations of living in this predicament of death . . . Beginning with a newspaper clipping, written in a remarkably detailed manner of a bizarre accident in which a Miss Jesus was killed when a car smashed into the cafe where she was eating. The impact threw her on the grill, heated to 500 degrees . . ."
“. . .It is impossible to convey the combination of counterpointing feelings this film arouses. Like all great art, it is mysterious in its working. Dorothy Wiley has such a clear but tender eye for life. Tender, not sentimental. Miss Jesus is a simply constructed, highly poetical film.”
(nostalgia) | Hollis Frampton | 1973 | 36 minutes
Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and photography. His theoretical essays about film and photography, originally published in October and Artforum, were collected into the book Circles of Confusion: Film Photography Video Texts 1968-1980. Acknowledging his status and influence, the Criterion Collection has released a Blu-ray set that features many of his most famous works, including Surface Tension, Lemon (both 1969), and Zorns Lemma (1970).
Frampton made a cycle of films called “Hapax Legomena” (a noun denoting “a term of which only one instance of use is recorded”) and the most famous film in the cycle is (nostalgia) (1973). Like many of his films, part of the pleasure watching (nostalgia) is discovering its structure as it provokes a unique blend of philosophical and emotional responses.
The filmmaker Standish Lawder wrote that (nostalgia) “is a film to look at and think about, not a film that seizes your mind and forces its sensations on you. It liberates the imagination rather than entrapping it. It raises questions about the nature of film, the tension between fact and illusion, between now and then. It advances our understanding of film magic, and for this I am grateful.”
Take Off | Gunvor Nelson | 1972 | 10 minutes
Gunvor Nelson taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1970 to 1992, when she returned to her native Sweden. Over the course of her career she received a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment from the Arts.
Nelson describes Take Off as “[a] dance, a documentary, a metaphysical strip tease.” The film won prizes at the Berkeley Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Humboldt State Film Festival.
Critic B. Ruby Rich concludes about Take Off that “while the film makes a forceful political statement on the image of woman and the true meaning of stripping, the intergalactic transcendence of its ending locates it firmly within the mainstream of joyous humanism and stubborn optimism.”
Plumb Line | Carolee Schneeman | 1972 | 18 minutes
When Carolee Schneeman (1939-2019) passed away this past March, the New York Times called her “a prime mover of performance art, a feminist visionary, and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century.” Her famous body-centric performance pieces included Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975), but she has been equally influential as an experimental filmmaker.
Plumb Line conveys subjective experience and expands the possibilities for film autobiography. The film’s description at the Film-Maker’s Cooperative states, “Breaking down, splitting apart, burning up: a relationship and the film itself. Edited from scrap diary footage shot in 8mm, hand printed as 16mm. Plumb Line is a moving and powerful subjective chronicle of the breaking up of a love relationship. The film is a devastating exorcism, as the viewer sees and hears the film approximate the interior memory of the experience.”
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
Mills Folly Microcinema is programmed by James Kreul from Madison Film Forum. Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at at Project Projection events.
Mills Folly Microcinema is funded in part by a grant from the Madison Arts Commission, with additional funds from the Wisconsin Arts Board.