Loose Ends

9/14/04 to 9/28/04

Frank Film |September 28

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The Early Years
Tuesday, September 14 7:30
The first of three Tuesday evenings of collage films in which artists use existing imagery in unexpected ways, from the poetic to the political. Len Lye was doing it as early as the 1930s; Joseph Cornell followed in the '40s, and Bruce Conner in the '50s. All are featured in tonight's program, along with Hy Hirsh, Arthur Lipsett, Harry Smith, and Carlos Vilardebo.
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The Sixties
Tuesday, September 21 7:30pm
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The Seventies
Tuesday, September 28 7:30pm
Artists often recycle "previously used" imagery because, in our media-saturated world, there are just too many images already. Perhaps Bruce Conner's 1976 Crossroads is the most poetic and thought-provoking expression of this idea, a cinematic collage of atomic bomb blasts. Shown with Conner's Valse Triste and works by Robert Breer, Frank Mouris, and Chick Strand.
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Loose Ends

9/14/04 to 9/28/04

Presented in conjunction with the BAM exhibition Collage, on view in the Theater Gallery through December 19.

Walking down the street, watching TV or a movie, we are bombarded by images, overlapping and colliding, competing for our attention. Today advertising and cinema reuse images in an everyday postmodernism in which appropriation is often a fad, not a political or aesthetic stance. This contrasts with the imperative, once the province of experimental filmmakers, to recycle existing images, in part in the belief that there are too many images already. In our series Loose Ends, we look back at early examples of film collage from the 1930s through the 1970s, all from PFA's collection, constructed by filmmakers with an interest in probing questions of authenticity and meaning, and in examining overlooked aspects of the film medium itself.

Collage films might be composed of found footage, such as Santiago...

Presented in conjunction with the BAM exhibition Collage, on view in the Theater Gallery through December 19.

Collage films might be composed of found footage, such as Santiago Alvarez's film poem 79 Springtimes, chronicling the life of the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh with still photos and archival footage; Bruce Conner's legendary A Movie, a brilliant montage of newsreels, educational films, and old movies; or Chick Strand's Loose Ends, which gives our series its title and which creates a dreamy, disturbing work from fragments of films. Others use cutout imagery, as in Lawrence Jordan's intricate and magical reworking of Victorian engravings in Our Lady of the Sphere; Frank Mouris's autobiographical Frank Film, constructed from a breathtaking array of images culled from magazines; and Robert Breer's whimsical combination of wildly diverse images-from his own drawings to bits and pieces of newspaper-in the aptly titled Rubber Cement. Whether their style creates unity between the disparate images or emphasizes the ruptures between them, whether they use the moniker collage, compilation, found footage, or appropriated film, these films recontextualize existing imagery in unexpected ways, constructing new associations and connections that range from the poetic to the political.

Kathy Geritz

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Loose Ends

9/14/04 to 9/28/04

Past Films

The Early Years

The Sixties

The Seventies