Kurt Kren: 31/75 Asyl

Studio Visit with Filmmaker Lewis Klahr

Much has been made of the documentary renaissance over the past few years but artful nonfiction has, of course, been a crucial part of movie culture since Auguste and Louis Lumière first recorded the reality of their surroundings.

This is a 5 minute section from a 16 minute (or 22 minute) , two x 16mm projector performance work. 

Two projectors, projecting slightly offset fromone another. Each film contains a flicker printing of various sized dots. The dots were produced by ‘rayogramming’ dot screens (used in manga cartoons) directly onto raw film stock in the dark room. These are the same original rayogrammed dots I used in my film ‘Screen Tone’. As with that work, the sound you hear is the sound produced by the dots themselves (which extend right accross into the sound track area) as they pass the optical sound head of the projector. The ‘drama’ in this work is generated by the interference patterns created by the otherwise regular arrays of dots. Note, the ‘off the wall’ video documentation, let alone the massive divX compression, greatly reduces the effect of this work!

Once producing half of the nation’s sugar, the Domino Sugar Refinery was a paragon of industrialism and labor in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Reprising a screening presented at Williamsburg’s UnionDocs in July 2014, this program presents a trio of films which examine labor history and issues of power, using this iconic factory as a lens. Domino Sugar—1989, filmed by Domino employee Kenny Malcom in 1989 and recently edited by Anthony Simon and Michael Vass, is “a time capsule of home video vignettes from 1989 filmed by a Domino Sugar employee that illuminates the diversity of the Domino workforce and the empowerment they felt at the time. Featured is a picket line in front of the Domino site, [and] a union meeting dispute between the Domino workers and the ILA Union organizers.” Animator Sarah Jane Lapp’s Sweetface (2000–2013) is a “personal essay film which uses sugar production as a point of departure to explore a variety of relational moments that involve soft power, gratitude and love. The film evolved from the filmmaker’s hand-production of about 1,000 sugar packets, the majority of which she gave as gifts to workers at the Domino Sugar Refinery during their twenty-month strike in the early 2000s.” Finally, Anthony Simon’s own Third Shift(2014) tours the now desolate and destroyed factory building and presents intimate oral history accounts by Domino Sugar workers living blocks away from the now closed refinery,reflecting on their past experiences as employees and their future as residents in a rapidly changing neighborhood. Live music sets by psycho-blues-noise trip Skyjelly closes the evening.

Coming soon

Peter Tscherkassky, Outer Space, 1999

The Dazed Visionary talks about evading censorship in Thailand and speaking in code for his new London show

  A Tribute to Taylor Mead Starring in Ron Rice's The Flower Thief 

  Friday May 9, 9:30

Soho House

29-34 9th Avenue (at 14th St.)

RSVP by email only: [email protected]

  Introduction and Q&A with Priscilla Mead

Organized by MM Serra

  The Film-Makers' Cooperative presents a special tribute to Taylor Mead at Soho House. An event not to be missed!

ASL interpretation of Deborah Stratman's HACKED CIRCUIT (2014) at San Francisco Cinematheque's CROSSROADS 2014

"I took the opportunity to make a manual for shooting. These are the first few pages. As I work, new entries are added."

UK quad for TWO YEARS AT SEA (Ben Rivers, UK, 2011)

Designer: Sam Ashby [see also]

Poster Source: Sam Ashby Studio

The 1926 animated short "Koko's Queen," an "Out of the Inkwell" cartoon, is one of many American silent films found at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. (National Film Preservation Foundation )