Minong, I slept will show with works by Bruce Baillie, Ron Rice, and Ryan Trecartin in a program by Ben Russell and Ben Rivers at this year’s Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. Details below.
*A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS*
II. COLLECTIVITY, or UTOPIA IS A SOCIAL BODY
5 p.m. Nov. 7 & 9:40 p.m. Nov. 12 at Husets Biograf, Copenhagen.
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., from *”Thoughts of a Free Thinker” (commencement address)
Minong, I slept by Vera Brunner-Sung (5:00, 16mm, 2010) If a body of water is an imaginary space, then any island it surrounds becomes its record. Its shoreline is a map of footprints, its pockmarked woods a museum of minor industry. Both the visitor and the dreamer know: there will still be fingerprints on the windows, even once the doors have blown in. – BR
Valentin de las Sierras by Bruce Baillie (10:00, 1967) “In Valentin I just shot simply but used a telephoto lens with an extension tube on the back, which gives you a very limited focal plane, a few inches. No one I know ever uses it with a long lens, especially with a moving subject, but I really liked the way it looked. I had to get into the flesh of that town, with the merciless sun beating into the bricks of the street and all the death-every night there’d be something or somebody killed, lying in the street in the morning. I had met up with this (archetypal) young girl, riding her pony. And I was afraid to meet her father. I’d sent word out trying to see her, and he sent word back to come meet him, and I thought, “Oh, God!”. But he turned out to be a very nice fellow: Manuel Sasa Zamora, of Jalisco. They were very poor and lived behind a big gate and had a horse and a dog named Penquina. That horse didn’t like me and would not let me film. I had to give it up for a while. Later, I named my horse after the film – Valentina.” – BB
Chumlum by Ron Rice (23:00, 16mm, 1964) Pirates and belly dancers and blues and greens and mummy chase scenes and the twangling sounds by Angus MacLise with red eye make-up lovers in cots and Jack Smith in shawls and sparkle sheets and exposure of flesh over superimposition of fabric over beaded Mario Montes and the streets of bohemian New York and Gerard Malanga in dress-up dangle robes with arms becoming legs becoming cross-dressed becoming man as man as woman as both becoming star-crossed, always becoming. – BR
A Family Finds Entertainment by Ryan Trecartin (42:00, 2004) or, The Nuclear Family, Exploded. Truthfully, the most fitting description for this hyper hypertext datamosh moshpit is the following series of emoticons – pretend that this page is a computer screen and that these static icons are jumping and twisting and blinking and winking, fluttering in social-contract solidarity with your newly-exhausted optic nerves: *[?][?] [?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?] *- BR