Ann Arbor Film Festival
16mm Touring Program
Friday, April 12, 7:30PM
Location: Aurora Picture Show, 2442 Bartlett
Aurora Members Free with Advance RSVP, Non-Members $10
Aurora Picture Show hosts the 16mm Film Tour program from the Ann Arbor Film Festival on Friday, April 12 at 7:30PM inside the Aurora Picture Show (2442 Bartlett Street). The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America, established in 1963 and internationally recognized as a premiere forum for independent filmmakers and artists. Aurora Picture Show is proud to bring this unique film screening experience from Michigan to Texas.
Featuring works existing at the intersection of abstraction and representation; depicting the intimate world of the pages of a children's book, an owl's eye view of suburban flora, fragmented views of a Tokyo subway, otherworldly visions of mountain landscapes, and a kinetic journey along the Bosphorus Strait and with recent films by Tomonari Nishikawa, Fern Silva, Jodie Mack, Jennifer Reeves, Rob Todd, Jonathan Schwartz, Charlotte Pryce, Linda Scobie, Norbert Shieh and Robert Schaller, this is one not to miss!
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is a pioneer of the traveling film festival concept, having launched tour screenings in Paris, Los Angeles and Berkeley in 1964. Each year the AAFF exhibits select films around the world in art house theaters, museums, universities, cinematheques and media art centers.
Films in this 16mm program include the following:
PASSAGE UPON THE PLUME by Fern Silva
Plumes dust the arid land, east to west, shapeshifting as they lift in ascension. Something lowers. An ark ran aground where revolution took root: ropes raise stones in baskets. Hearts heavier and lighter than the feather, permitted passage. Tethered or freed, resting from life or dawning anew.
TOKYO-EBISU by Tomonari Nishikawa
JR (Japan Railway Company) Yamanote Line is one of the Japan's busiest lines, consisting of 29 stations and running as a loop. The film shows the views from the platforms of 10 stations in Yamanote Line, from Tokyo Station to Ebisu Station clockwise. The in-camera visual e!ects and the layered soundtrack may exaggerate the sense of the actual happenings at the locations. The film also exhibits the shooting and recording methods.
POINT DE GAZE by Jodie Mack
Named after a type of Belgian lace, this spectral study investigates intricate illusion and optical arrest.
A PREFACE TO RED by Jonathan Schwartz
A single recording, recorded in a tunnel that one passes through after exiting a boat taking you from one continent to another, where people are selling bright colored toys and bright white sneakers. for the brief variations in the movement on the periphery.
UNDER THE SHADOW OF MARCUS MOUNTAIN by Robert Schaller
Made with a rudimentary pinhole technique, traces of a mountain landscape are captured in black and white. "The structures of our thought filter what we see, and in fact there is no seeing apart from those structures. This film is part of an ongoing project to show where I am in a natural landscape in a way that reflects those structures of thought."
CURIOUS LIGHT by Charlotte Pryce
A manuscript illuminated: illustrations retreat into the fiber of the page; a fleeting light dissolves into the emulsion of the film: an elusive story is revisited.
THE ELECTRICAL EMBRACE by Norbert Shieh
This silent, hand-processed and optically printed film shifts like an electric current between positive and negative spaces to examine the electric pylons by the Los Angeles River. The
geometric and graphic nature of these structures is further explored through double exposures, step printing, and pixelation.
CRAIG'S CUTTING ROOM FLOOR by Linda Scobie
Craig is a collage artist with an eclectic archive of 16mm prints. His floor is full of spliced o! and discarded film frames left to pile, corrode and live out their inevitable chemical life spans. After many months of collecting these deteriorating treasures, I decided to make a film. The result is an ongoing subliminal flurry of singular moments seemingly superimposed onto each other. A fragmented journey through cinema's history taken right o! the cutting room floor.
UNDERGROWTH by Robert Todd
Winne of the Kodak/Colorlab Award for Best Cinematography at 50th AAFF. About a blind predator dreams through its prey's eyes.
LANDFILL 16 by Jennifer Reeves
Exhumed 16mm film from my own landfill in Indiana, constitute the canvas of Landfill 16. After finishing my double-projection When It Was Blue I was horrified by the bulk of outtakes that would normally go to a landfill. So I temporarily buried the footage to let enzymes in the soil begin to decompose the image, and then hand-painted that film to give it new life. Within this pulsating, abstract moving painting I attempt to express my dread of man-made waste. This "recycling" is a meditation on nature's losing battle to decompose relics of our abandoned technologies (16mm) and productions.
ABOUT THE ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL
The 51st Festival will take place March 19 - 24, 2013 at the historic Michigan Theater, a 1920s era movie palace. The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America, established in 1963. Internationally recognized as a premiere forum for independent filmmakers and artists, each year's festival engages audiences with remarkable cinematic experiences. The six-day festival presents 40 programs with more than 160 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid and performance based works.