Williamstown, MA - New Berkshire-based film series “A is for AMAZING” presents its inaugural screening at Images Cinema Sunday, December 2 at 9pm. The series features work that addresses issues of gender and sexuality. The program, “XXX-Mas Movies: eXploring seXuality through eXperimental film,” spans over thirty years of avant-garde film history and includes underground cinema pioneers Kenneth Anger and Gunvor Nelson, plus works by celebrated artists Martha Colburn, Naomi Uman, Lewis Klahr, Barbara Hammer, and Zack Stiglicz. Local film submissions will also be included in the screening.
Admission is Pay-What-You-Can; Free for Williams College Students.
The artists in the program hail from different walks of life -- a practitioner of occult magic, a radical seperatist feminist, a former Williams College professor -- and reflect on a broad range of concepts.
Their film styles and production techniques are as diverse as the issues they address:
Kenneth Anger depicts 1960’s hot rod cars as a fetish object in KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS (1965). Anger was one of the titans of post-war underground filmmaking, however he gained a broader fame by authoring Hollywood Babylon, a scandalous tell-all book about Hollywood's rich and famous, and through his varied associations with eccentric figures like Anton LeVey, Mick Jagger, and Alfred Kinsey. His films draw on pop iconography and 20th century subcultures: from biker gangs to occultists. Anger himself is a high level practitioner of occult magic who regards the projection of his films as ceremonies capable of invoking spiritual forces.
Like Anger, Swedish-born Gunvor Nelson was an integral part of the West Coast avant-garde – a strong female presence in the male dominated San Francisco scene of the 1960's. In 2006 The Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective covering four decades of Nelson's pioneering film and video work, providing a comprehensive picture of her candid approach to intimate subjects like childhood, aging, memory, gender roles, and death. This characteristic approach is evident in TAKE OFF, a 1972 satirical strip tease. TAKE OFF also reveals Nelson’s carefully conceived optical effects, allowing the film’s star to surpass nudity and push the conclusion of her performance to a startling metaphysical level.
Barbara Hammer also started her career in California, but worked among the ranks of radical separatist lesbian feminists who aimed to revolutionize 1970’s patriarchal society. Hammer tried to restrict shows of her early films to female-only audiences but has long since shifted to a more inclusive, lyrical style of film practice. Her recent work, a series of feature documentaries, continues the groundbreaking investigations into gender that started with her early experimental films like.
Hammer's 1974 film MENSES provides wry humor and comedic contrast to Zack Stiglicz’s personal and politically charged cinematic essays COILED and ARISTOPHANES ON BROADWAY. While teaching political science at Williams College in the 1980’s, Stiglicz focused on international relations and the politics of war, but his films privilege themes of male bonding, narcissism, and desire. ARISTOPHANES ON BROADWAY relates the myth in which Greek god Zeus angrily splits the human body’s original form into two pieces, sending each half on an unending search for its soulmate. Images of Chicago’s 1990 Gay Pride parade are set against textual fragments of philosophy and mythology.
While Stiglicz appropriates text, Lewis Klahr, Martha Colburn and Naomi Uman salvage imagery from vintage comic books, magazines, Mexican paintings and erotic films. In REMOVED, Uman physically erases the female character from old 16mm pornography by applying nail polish remover and household bleach directly to the film. Uman’s “direct animation” technique lends her work an endearing handmade aesthetic similar to Klahr’s PONY GLASS and Colburn’s SECRETS OF MEXUALITY, both masterpieces of Do-It-Yourself collage animation. PONY GLASS implies the secret life of Superman’s sidekick Jimmy Olsen and SECRETS OF MEXUALITY explores gender stereotypes in Mexican wrestling and kitsch artwork.
A is for AMAZING provides a showcase for film and video work that fuses cinema and visual art, and at the same time provides local audiences with access to films that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to see. Each program will combine artists from a broad range of experience levels -- from first-time filmmakers to professionals of the field. A is for AMAZING presents “XXX-Mas Movies” with gracious support from the Dively Committee at Williams College.
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