LECTURE HALL 6 AT 7:30 (Unless otherwise noted)
Series sponsored by Filmmaker’s Coop
All artists will be on hand to present their works.

Monday Feb 25
Jeanne Liotta

Jeanne Liotta lives and works in New York City where she makes films and other ephemera, including video, photography, works on paper and live projection performances. Her latest project OBSERVANDO EL CIELO takes place in a constellation of mediums investigating the cosmic landscape. She was represented in the 2006 Whitney Biennial with her 16mm film ECLIPSE and her work has been exhibited at The New York Film Festival; KunstFilm Biennale, Cologne; The Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley; The Museum of Modern Art; and The Whitney Museum of American Art among others. She has been the recipient of awards from The Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and shared the Museum of Contemporary Cinema artist award with Taka Imura in 2006. She also maintains an ongoing research into The Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives and teaches widely and variously, including The New School, Pratt Institute, The San Francisco Art Institute, The Museum School, Boston, and is presently on the faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College.

A SELECTION of MADE and FOUND slim volumes in16MM and video on the material subjects of landscape, science, and natural philosophy etc. Hymns to the VOID, the STARS in their courses, the EARTH under your feet wobbles and DRIFTS.

Titles May Include:

OBSERVANDO EL CIELO (2007) 16mm film, 19 minutes, sound by Peggy Ahwesh. Made the 10 BEST FILMS OF 2007 by Chrissie Iles in ARTFORUM magazine

LORETTA (2003; 4m; sound by Carlo Altomare), A handmade photogram opera.

MUKTIKARA, 16 mm 11 min, silent 1999

Monday March 10
Saul Levine

“Long an under-celebrated influence on American experimental cinema, Saul Levine now receives a retrospective of his own” (Anthology Film Archives) - and again at Views from The Avant Garde at New York Film Festival-. “With a crafted aesthetic that blends avant-garde time composition, home-movie content, and overt politics, Levine's small-gauge films reshape handmade memories into emotive visual poetry.” --Ed Halter, Village Voice

Saul Levine once taught in the Cinema Department at BU. All 16 film blow ups from S8 mm originals.

Note to Pati, 1969
Something of an aesthetic convergence between the diaristic autobiographies and quotidian images of Jonas Mekas (as illustrated in his Diaries, Notes and Sketches chronicles) and the hand crafted dissonance and material violence of Stan Brakhage,

Note to Coleen, 1974
An encounter with a sidewalk portrait artist serves as the inspiration for Levine's Note to Coleen, a whimsical, playful, and frenetic composition on duality and mirror images.

New Left Note, 1968-1982
Saul Levine incisively distills the whirlwind of domestic protest, social revolution, and increasing public disillusionment over a protracted, bloody, and inextricable Vietnam War that defined the atmosphere of late 60s American culture in his magnum opus, New Left Note, a film inspired in part by his tenure as editor for - and complemented the ideals of - the progressive Students for a Democratic Society publication, New Left Notes.

The Big Stick/An Old Reel, 1967-1973
On the surface, the introductory images of The Big Stick/An Old Reel seems uncharacteristic of a Saul Levine film, a whimsical, manipulated found film featuring a beat cop in seeming pursuit of Charlie Chaplin's iconic tramp character, edited in matching continuity cuts such that the excerpted sequence unfolds in a seemingly infinite comic choreography of encounter and evasion, luckless fugitive and outwitted officer.

Note to Poli, 1982-83
Continuing in the vein of the transgressive intimacy captured in New Left Note, Note to Poli in some ways anticipates Stephen Dwoskin's expositions on fragility, ephemerality, and voyeurism (and in particular, in the transitory, almost dreamlike images Outside in).

Wednesday April 16
Leonard Retel Helmrich

The Shape of the Moon (2005, 92 minutes)

In this vivid follow up to The Eye of the Day (2001), director Leonard Retel Helmrich again visits Indonesia through three generations of the Sjamsuddin family. Rumidjah, a 62 year-old Catholic widow, lives in a working-class district of Jakarta, with her son Bakti, a new Muslim convert, and her granddaughter Tari. Since the fall of Suharto, she has witnessed the country pass through a period of socio-political chaos. Islam, Indonesia's largest religion, is trying to maintain order and discipline, while becoming increasingly fundamentalist in its tone. These changes and conflicts with her son make Rumidjah long for life in the simple country village of her birth. Mother and son’s good-natured quarrels take place against the background of anti-US demonstrations and an Islamic neighborhood watch. In this way the film continually connects small issues with large ones. There are no interviews, no voice-over. Shape of the Moon offers the kind of cinema vérite where the camera moves intuitively along with the action.

Director Leonard Retel Helmrich is a Dutch/Indonesian filmmaker who worked as a drama director and cameraman in the Netherlands before going to Indonesia to make a series of documentaries that have won awards world wide. His most famous film Shape Of The Moon won Best Documentary in the World Docs Competition at Sundance 2005 as well as at the International Documentary Film festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2004 where he won the prestigious Joris Ivens Award. Leonard developed a theoretical perspective for his work as well as a practical technique for an approach that he calls 'single shot cinema', involving long takes with a constantly moving camera. He has also designed a special camera mount that allows extraordinary stability and maneuverability in shooting called "Steadywings". Having spent years designing this technique he now also runs workshops for broadcasters and with filmmakers to share his skills, most recently in Amsterdam, Belgium, Kansas City USA, South Africa, Germany, Indonesia and Sydney Australia.

These artists screenings are funded in part by Presentation Funds from the Experimental Television Center which is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts. Series is co-sponsored by Harpur College Dean’s Office.

Info: 607-777-4998 or 777-4997