It’s been a while since I’ve been to a zoo, but in recent years, I’ve noticed a trend of zoos hosting evening events with music, food, and beer. Zoo Brews in Portland and Brews at the Zoo in Los Angeles are valiant efforts to lure childless adults to the zoo with adult beverages.
For one reason or another, I’ve failed to go to any of these events. But just about every nerdy synapse was activated when I learned of Project! World’s Fair night at the New York Hall of Science to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the World’s Fair in New York City. The building housing the science center was part of the World’s Fair campus, and they invite you to “leave the kids behind” and designate a driver.
Project! World’s Fair celebrates this advent with a fresh perspective on the buildings created as a result of the Fair and the subsequent museum and exhibits that have come to define NYSCI. We invite you to leave the kids behind and come out for a night illuminated by images of the past, present and future, inspired by the Fair, and experience the NYSCI of today against a backdrop of rockets and large-scale artist projections and installations on, in and around NYSCI’s building and exhibits. Participants will have the opportunity to interact with museum exhibits anew with a sample of a 50-year-old cocktail, beer or wine, as well as partake in workshops. Tickets include workshops, beer/wine and samples of cocktails inspired by the turn of the century.
The only time I’ve been to the Hall of Science was last October when they hosted the Empire Drive-In, part–art installation and part–drive in theater. I’m dying to know what fifty year-old cocktail they will be reviving, but like those other nights at the zoo, I will miss this night at the Hall of Science. I’ll be out of town.
Project! World’s Fair at the New York Hall of Science
The first is Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1950), a camp celebration of Hollywood glamour that reminisces about the old silent era. In addition to being an absolutely beautiful and haunting parade of dresses featuring a stunning actress, Yvonne Marquis, it also offers glimpses of the Hollywood Hills. Though I never lived there or spent any significant time looking down on the Los Angeles basin, I am overcome with nostalgia every time I see it. I’m not sure whether that feeling comes from being an LA native or from watching a lifetime’s worth of Hollywood movies.
The film also has the only two known recordings of 1960s psychedelic folk musician Jonathan Halper. You can hear the two songs, “Leaving My Old Life Behind” and “I am a Hermit”, in recordings apparently ripped from the film’s soundtrack. Those songs speak to me now more than ever before.
And if that’s isn’t gay enough for you, they are also screening Alla Nazimova’s Salome (1922). This silent film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play has been appropriated as a canonical queer film. According to the program notes for the screening, Kenneth Anger proclaimed the film to be “Nancy-Prancy-Pansy-Piffle and just too queer for words.”
Light Industry screened two compilation films last week. It had been a long time since I had gone to a screening there, despite that it is a five-minute bike ride from my home in Long Island City. But as the couch surfing tour brings me to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I am now only a few hundred feet away from Light Industry’s space on Freeman Street. I really had no excuse to miss this screening.
The first one, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, was a video that I saw for the first time on Tuesday. It was more tame than I had expected. It consisted almost entirely of screen tests, where an off-screen producer, apparently from the West, asks the hopeful actors probing questions about their sexual behavior and preferences. The men all nervously respond but understand that they are doing this for a job and submit to his inquisition. The filmmaker posits this was a reflection of Eastern Europe’s subjugation after decades of Soviet rule. But looking at it today, given the recent resurgence of Russia against the West in the Ukraine, I wonder if the off-screen producer from the West represented just another dominating presence behind the former “iron curtain.” Did one new master simply replace the old one?
The second film, Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99, a film I had not seen since an Experimental Film class I took as an undergraduate student at UCSB in 1998, turned out to be another artifact of the Cold War. Unleashed in 1991, Baldwin’s film stitched together footage from an treasure trove of films in his personal archive. Having not seen the film in a very long time, I had not remembered all the references to American activities in Latin America during the Cold War, at the behest of aliens who controlled everything deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The film mentioned all the major milestones of US interfering in Latin American sovereignty: the overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion against Fidel Castro, the assassination of Che Guevara, the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the rise of Augosto Pinochet in Chile, and the cozy relationship between the CIA and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Looking back at it now, I might want to incorporate this film as a preface to my work on US television and Latin American in the Cold War.
While the two films were likely selected for their appropriation of existing footage to create a political work, it was productive to reflect on the Cold War again. Men and women of a certain age can appreciate how we were consumed by the Cold War, only to forget about it twenty years later with the “end of history” and that whole “war on terror” thing. But, lest we forget that “history repeating itself” axiom, the Cold War always has a chance of making a comeback.
Back in June, my friend John had an extra ticket to see King Khan and the Shrines at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, which he gave to me in exchange for some favor or another. (Or maybe he owed me money. I don’t remember.) King Khan and the Shrines put on a terrific, butt-shaking show. No one was standing still, and King Khan (nee Mark Sultan) commanded everyone’s attention including getting everyone to put their hands in the air. It wasn’t James Brown on the TAMI Show, but it was darn close1.
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The TAMI Show was a live show recorded forty years ago next month in Santa Monica, California that was released theatrically at the end of 1964. James Brown’s performance was so electrifying that the Rolling Stones, who followed Brown, reportedly said that choosing to follow Brown was the worst decision of their careers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show↩
Rose Hobart (1936) was a seminal compilation film demonstrating the capability to create a new work from an existing film.
The other day, I ran out of time to screen Rose Hobart (1936) in my Experimental Film class. As an early example of a compilation film, Joseph Cornell made this film using footage appropriated from a Hollywood B-Movie, East of Borneo (1931), to create a new work that featured only the actress Rose Hobart. He also tinted the image blue, but then screened in the 1960s with a rose tint. A version available on Treasures from American Film Archives is set to a couple of Brazilian musical recordings.1
Usually, when I run out of time to screen things, I direct students to watch it online. But, instead, I am going to screen Rose Hobart in class today. Screening it will serve as an introduction to other compilation filmmakers, which we will screen later in the semester, such as Bruce Conner, but also for an upcoming screening at Light Industry.
Light Industry in Brooklyn will be screening two compilation films from the 1990s on Tuesday, September 30. The first one, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), by William E. Jones, recomposes Eastern European gay pornographic videos to locate how, according to the program notes, the fall of the Soviet bloc came not from the “seduction” for a Western life but to escape the “coercion” of the State. The second is Tribulation 99 (1991), a film by Craig Baldwin, appropriates a variety of footage to make 99 paranoid diatribes about America being invaded by aliens. When I first saw this film back in the late 1990s, all I could think was how much this seemed like The X Files, a popular TV series of the time, with an absolutely certifiable narrator.
Details
Tuesday, September 30
7:00 PM
Light Industry, 155 Freeman St, Brooklyn
7.00
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Experimental filmmaker Carolee Schneeman will be giving the fifth annual Experimental Film Lecture, jointly presented by the departments of Cinema Studies and Undergraduate Film & Television, two departments that coordinate much less that you would expect.
The 5th Annual Experimental Lecture
Presented by the Departments of Cinema Studies and Undergraduate Film & Television
Carolee Schneemann is a visual artist and moving image maker known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She has been a leader and provocateur in the American avant-garde community since the mid 1960s when she created her groundbreaking performance Meat Joy. From Interior Scroll to Plumb Line to Mortal Coil to Vespers Pool, Schneemann’s work pushes form and consciousness like no other artist working today. Ever since Fuses (1965), her landmark exploration of the female body, Schneemann has pushed visual perception in radical directions that awe, disturb and mystify audiences.
In her Experimental Lecture, Schneemann travels backwards and forwards in time. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she will analyze recurring formal properties in her film, sculpture and installation work. The mysteries of a notched stick, paper folds, indentations, the slice of line in space are followed as unexpected structural motives, up to and including her recent photographic grids and objects.
In 1966, Gregory Markopoulos filmed portraits of notable figures in the New York art world, including painters, poets, critics, filmmakers, and choreographers. Markopoulos populated his Galaxie with a remarkable constellation of personalities, ranging from those in his immediate circle of filmmakers (Jonas Mekas, Storm de Hirsch, the Kuchar Brothers) to luminaries from other art forms (Jasper Johns, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg). Each is shot with a single roll of 16mm film and, though edited entirely in-camera in the moment of filming, comprises many layers of dense superimpositions that build a complex portrait of the sitter. The subjects were invited to pose in their home or studio, together with personal objects of their choice: Parker Tyler is a seen with a drawing by Tchelitchew, Susan Sontag with photographs of Garbo and Dietrich, Shirley Clarke and Maurice Sendak both with children’s toys, Gregory Battcock with a Christmas card and zebra rug. The film is silent except for the sound of a ritual bell, its number of rings increasing incrementally until 30 chimes accompany the final portrait.
As I don’t have a class on Tuesday evenings, I certainly plan on attending.
Details
September 16, 2014
7:30 PM
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
7.00
I wonder if this statement was influenced by the seminal French New Wave film, Á bout de souffle, which translates to “out of breath” or Breathless. ↩
An old friend, Matt Dunn, will be showing some new paintings, drawings, and sculptures at a show called “Anti-Analogy” at the Hill Street Country Club, in Oceanside, California.
I won’t be able to the opening since I won’t be in California for the foreseeable future, but if you’re in the area, please stop by and say “hi” to Matt for me, and tell him I sent you.
Lest I be accused promoting only men filmmakers at the expense of women, allow me to inform you that Millennium Film Workshop will be screening a collection of films by Tessa Hughes-Freeland, a filmmaker closely associated with the Cinema of Transgression.
The Cinema of Transgression was a 1980s film movement that documented the underground arts and culture scenes of New York City. The movement disavowed the production style and principles of the commercial cinema. Some of the films are not for the faint of heart.
The following Hughes-Freeland films are scheduled to screen:
Baby Doll, 1982, 3 mins
Hippie Home Movie, 2013 , 2 mins
Joker, 1983, 5 mins
Kind, 2013, 1 min
Rat Trap, 1986, 12 mins
Gift, 2010, 6 mins
Playboy Voodoo, 19991, 12 mins
Western Tests, 2011, 2 mins
Nymphomania, 1994, 9 mins
Instinct: Bitches Side, 2007, 13 mins
Of these, I’ve only seen Baby Doll and that was at least a decade ago. You can watch it as a low-quality video on YouTube, but it’s NSFW. However, as the video is about the working girls of the long-gone Baby Doll lounge in Tribeca, I guess it really depends on what you do for work, right?
Having vacated their old theater on East 4th Street in Manhattan, Millennium Film Workshop now holds their screenings in Bushwick, at the Brooklyn Fireproof, at 119 Ingraham Street.
