SMOKE AND MIRRORS
feat. Line Describing a Cone by Anthony McCall and work by Caroline Koebel and Scott Stark
1634 E Cesar Chavez
April 8th, 2011 // 8 PM
$6 / $5 for Students
Join us at the Austin School of Film for an evening of flowing layers and reflected rays! We will be rocking out our fog machine to screen Anthony McCall’s seminal Line Describing a Cone, described as “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.” (P. Adams Sitney.) Our smoky program will also feature work by Caroline Koebel (the instructor of our upcoming avant-garde film class) and Scott Stark!
Program
Satrapy / Scott Stark
1988 / 13min / Color / Sound / 16mm
Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, injecting a note of "negative sound" every third beat against the 5-beat background. As the film progresses, contrapuntal variations of 3, 4, 5 and 7 beat rhythms blend and collide, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces.
hole or space / Caroline Koebel
2006 / 4.23 mins / B&W and Color / Silent / Digital
Pricks, gaps, dots, openings, hole or space takes its cue from contortionists of the early screen in spiraling out from conceptions of the body as whole.
The film uses early cinema and avant-garde classics as its compositional notes: Luis Martinetti, Contortionist (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1894); Crissie Sheridan Serpentine Dance (Edison, 1897); Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, 1924); An Optical Poem (Oskar Fischinger, 1938); Tarantella (Mary E. Bute & Ted Nemeth, 1940).
Sea Lion / Caroline Koebel
2007 / 2:50 / Color / Super 8 to Digital
This hand processed Super 8 film marvels at the beauty of the movement of the sea lion. It reflects the fascination of the filmmaker’s two-year-old son with this animal new to his world.
Line Describing a Cone / Anthony McCall
1973 / 30 min / B&W / Silent / 16mm
“Line describing a cone is what I term a solid light film. It is dealing with the projected light-beam itself, rather than treating the light-beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface (the screen).
The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time.
The form of attention required on the part of the viewer is unprecedented. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other. For this film every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can - indeed needs to move around, relative to the emerging light-form.” - AM
"... Anthony McCall's LINE DESCRIBING A CONE [is] a film which demanded to be looked at, not on the screen, but in the space of the auditorium. What was at issue was the establishment of a cone of light between the projector and the screen, out of what was initially one pencil-like beam of light. I consider it “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.”
- P. Adams Sitney, Artforum
Bios
Caroline Koebel makes experimental films and videos to provoke new modes of aesthetic and critical engagement with topics ranging from early cinema and the maternal body through commodity culture to world affairs and representations of violence. Screenings include MadCat (USA), Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland), dança em foco (Brazil), Ladyfest Toronto (Canada), European Media Art Festival (Germany), Camagüey Festival of Video Art (Cuba), and Abstracta: International Exhibition of Abstract Cinema (Italy). She holds a BA in Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. She has taught at the University at Buffalo, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Rochester, and is an Advisor for the Transart Institute. She has served on the board of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, curated many media arts programs, and among her publications are catalog essays on avant-garde pioneers Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer. www.carolinekoebel.com
Anthony McCall is, without question, one of the seminal artists of American avant-garde cinema. His films and installations from the seventies such as Line Describing a Cone, Long Film for Four Projectors, and Four Projected Movements, represent an extraordinarily corporeal and sensuous meditation on the medium of film and the politics of the audience's physical and conceptual relationship to it. All of these works took as their starting point the irreducible, necessary conditions of cinema: projected light, and real, three-dimensional space.
Philippe-Alain Michaud, the Film Curator at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, writing about Anthony McCall's work stated: "Instead of a perspectival, illusionist space that brings cinema close to painting, McCall's films use a projective space that makes it into sculpture. The film is no longer a projected image that bores a fictive depth into the surface of the wall, but constitutes an actual field that merges with the event of projection itself. In this way Anthony McCall's light-beams, outlined against mist, expanding upon the specifically plastic properties of film, cross the frontiers of cinema history to join the minimalist propositions of 1970s sculpture and rank alongside the geometric structures of Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt or Carl Andre, Dan Flavin's fields of color, or Fred Sandback's spans of colored yarn."
Anthony McCall's work is included in many major public collections worldwide including: the Tate Gallery, London, England; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, United States; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, United States; the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany. (via the Sean Kelley Gallery)
Scott Stark has made over 70 films and videos since the early 1980s, and has created numerous installations, performances and photo-collages as well. His work has shown nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Tokyo Image Forum, and many others. He is the webmaster for Flicker (www.hi-beam.net), the web resource for experimental film and video. More information is available at www.scottstark.com.
