Bill Brand in Person

For the last thirty years, Bill Brand has been both an artist and an archivist, making films while also doing highly regarded optical printing and preservation work for filmmakers and institutions under the name BB Optics. He is professor of film and photography at Hampshire College and teaches film preservation in the graduate program in moving image archiving and preservation at NYU.

Tonight's program features an array of BB Optics' projects, including a number of blowups from Super 8 to 16mm. New Left Note marries Saul Levine's two driving pursuits, political activism and experimental filmmaking. The Nixon White House Staff Super 8 Motion Picture Film Collection contains FBI-confiscated films recorded between 1969 and 1973. More than 200 reels of film were preserved for the Nixon Presidential Library at the National Archives in 2000–01. The Fallen World by Marjorie Keller and Daffodils by Katy Martin are intimate portraits of the artists' husbands. Fire in My Belly, an incomplete work by David Wojnarowicz that was preserved through the efforts of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, and Jennifer Montgomery's Home Avenue are both seething portrayals of sexuality and violence. Robert Huot's Black and White Film is an elegant study of the female figure.