Alternative Visions

Past Films

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  New York City: Four Shorts by Ernie Gehr

  Tuesday, November 1 19:30

  Ernie Gehr in Person. Ever fascinated with early cinema and its precursors, Gehr made these films in Manhattan in the early 1970s using archaic box cameras. The results make up a city symphony played in exquisitely minimal tones-and a lovingly detailed portrait of a lost New York.

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  The Pittsburgh Trilogy

  Tuesday, November 8 19:30

  Introduction and Booksigning by Robert A. Haller. Stan Brakhage's visits to Pittsburgh in the early '70s led to the remarkable trilogy we present tonight: eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing with one's own eyes. Our guest is the author of Crossroads: Avant-Garde Film in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. He'll tell us about Pittsburgh, the "third capital" of experimental cinema.

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  La Région centrale

  Tuesday, November 15 19:30

  For this monumental landscape film, Michael Snow, one of Canada's leading artists, had a special camera apparatus constructed, capable of moving in all directions. "The rapidly spiraling and twisting camera eye . . . transforms the desolate landscape and empty sky into a series of compositions in which space, time, and even gravity are suspended."-John Wakeman

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  Group Hallucinations: Anger, Jacobs, Snow

  Tuesday, November 22 19:30

  New films by three veteran avant-garde filmmakers: Michael Snow's SSHTOORRTY, a study in superimposition; Kenneth Anger's Mouse Heaven, a loving tribute to Mickey as demon fetish figure; and Ken Jacobs's Mountaineer Spinning, a digital record of his live Nervous Magic Lantern performance.

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  Re(collections): Three Short Films

  Tuesday, November 29 19:30

  These films variously explore the relationship of collecting to remembering: The Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) contemplates data on life in Syria during the "war on terror" in not a matter of if but when; Arshia Haq collects poetic connections in Re(collection); and Soon-Mi Yoo investigates a suppressed history through commemorative ceremony in Ssitkim-Talking to the Dead.

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  Three Short Films by Jonas Mekas

  Tuesday, December 6 19:30

  Jonas Mekas came to this country from Lithuania in 1949, picked up his camera, and never stopped filming. He revisits his compiled imagery to make new films that "quiver with the complex temporal disjunctions reminiscent of the mind's less material memories, enhanced by Mekas's distinctive cinematographic style."-Village Voice. Tonight: travels in Europe; a Brooklyn neighborhood; and a Living Theatre performance with soundtrack by Philip Glass and others.

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