UCLA Film & Television Archive and Filmforum present
11.2.05 - 11.9.05
The Most Typical Avant-Garde: Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (series)
“In his new book, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), David E. James points out that besides being the center of the commercial film industry, Los Angeles has nourished a dazzling array of avant-garde, minor and minority cinemas: Socialist cinema in the early teens and the 1930s; formal experimentations from the margins of the film industry in the 1920s; amateur cinemas with various relations to the industry in the 1930s; personal cinemas of psychic self-investigation begun by Maya Deren in the 1940s and continued by Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington and Stan Brakhage; the tradition of radiant abstract visual music that runs from Oskar Fischinger and John and James Whitney to contemporary digital works; the counterculture’s utopian visions of the 1960s; and the attempts by African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos, women, gays and lesbians to create cinemas of their own in the 1970s and since.
“With these and other movements keeping the city in the aesthetic and social vanguard in all periods of cinema, James argues that Los Angeles, rather than New York or San Francisco, is the true center of avant-garde cinema in the United States and hence the prototype of all 20th-century attempts to create emancipatory alternatives to capitalist culture.”
_____
Friday, November 4 2005, 7:30PM, UCLA Film and Television Archive presents: Film & Cultural Revolution
“During and after the political polarization of the 1930s, a variety of distinctly countercultural minor cinemas emerged in Los Angeles. Some of these grew out of an anti-capitalist class consciousness, such as that exhibited by KERN COUNTY COTTON STRIKE and REPRESSION. But more often, radical cinema regarded the cultural sphere as the primary source of significant social reconstruction.”
“Remember My Forgotten Man” sequence from gold diggers of 1933
(1933) Directed by Busby Berkeley, 35mm, 12 min.
Kern County Cotton Strike
(1935) Directed by the Los Angeles Workers Film and Photo League, 16mm, 14 min.
THX1138: 4EB (STUDENT VERSION)
(1967) Directed by George Lucas, 35mm, 15 min.
Now That the Buffalo’s Gone
(1968) Directed by Burton Gershfield, 16mm, 8 min.
Aleph
(1967) Directed by Wallace Berman, 16mm, 10 min.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Movie
(1966) Directed by Thom Andersen, 16mm, 11 min.
Tanka
(1976) Directed by David Lebrun, 16mm, 9 min.
Repression
(1970) Directed by Los Angeles Newsreel, VHS, 10 min.
Filmforum Film
(1980) Directed by Craig Rice, 16mm, 3 min.