Some Poetic and Political Currents

In Which There Appears Trains, a Carousel, and Rain, by Jason Halprin

Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Some Poetic and Political Currents: Works by Jason Halprin, Jennifer Hardacker, Brett Kashmere, Kevin McCarthy, Jennifer Proctor, Wenhua Shi, and Simon Tarr

At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028

Filmmakers Jason Halprin, Jennifer Hardacker, Brett Kashmere, Kevin McCarthy, Jennifer Proctor, Wenhua Shi, and Simon Tarr in person!

Several fabulous filmmakers are coming to Los Angeles for the University Film & Video Association’s 2017 Conference, from July 30-Aug 2.  Filmforum is taking advantage of the opportunity to host a screening of recent experimental works.  It’s quite an array of work, with political, poetic, personal, and essayistic expressions from around the country.  Jason Halprin’s July 8th, 2016 and Brett Kashmere’s Cleaning the Glass explicitly address current political and social issues. McCarthy’s Official Teaser #2 Reaction!!! returns to Filmforum with its humorous and emotional responses to a Star Wars trailer.  Jen Proctor’s Am I Pretty? raises serious issues of self-image concerns of teenage girls.  Jennifer Hardacker’s films used varied techniques to express inner questions.  Halprin’s In Which There Appears Trains, a Carousel, and Rain and Wenhua Shi’s Walking Cycle both find more poetic approaches to complicated movements.  And Simon Tarr’s live cinema performance Blood Lust of the Wolf dissects the classic “ethnographic” film Nanook of the North, which Filmforum screened a couple of years ago in our Polar series.  

Special Thanks to Simon Tarr for organizing the screening

Tickets: $10 general admission; $6 students (with ID)/seniors; free for Filmforum members.
Tickets available at http://bpt.me/3046023 or at the door
For more event information: www.lafilmforum.org, or 323-377-7238

Filmmakers:

Jason Halprin is an experimental film & video artist based in Oakland, California, who explores how geography, history, and politics manifest in the moving image while borrowing tropes from home movies, travelogues, structuralist film, and new media. His work has been presented at venues including Media City 14 (Windsor), the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), MCA Chicago, the Images Festival (Toronto), L'Etna (Paris), and in an alleyway in Buenos Aires. Originally from the small ranching town of Beulah, Colorado, he graduated from the University of Colorado with a BFA in Film and a BA in History, earned an MFA in Film Production from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches cinema production at City College of San Francisco.

Jennifer Hardacker is an award winning filmmaker and educator living in the Pacific Northwest. She has been making short experimental films for over 15 years, and her films have been screened all over North America and some of Europe.  Hardacker is interested in re-imagining and re-imaging existing images. She has used many different processes to manipulate the film image to this end including film scratching, optical printing, direct animation, projection of the image and other post-production processes. Hardacker enjoys her day job as a professor at a small liberal arts college where she gets the chance to foster the next generation of filmmakers. She is also a busy mom of a blended family that includes four boys, 2 dogs and a supportive partner. She is an avid novice road bicyclist and gardener.

Brett Kashmere is a filmmaker and writer living in Oakland, California. Combining archival research with materialist aesthetics and hybrid forms, his work explores the intersection of history and (counter-) memory, sports media, and popular culture. Kashmere is currently a PhD student in Film + Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also the founding editor of INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media.

Kevin McCarthy: I am a non-fiction filmmaker living in Watertown, Massachusetts. My works range from lyrical short docs to experimental films and video art exhibitions. I dabble in narrative documentary, most recently serving as a producer and videographer for the feature documentary film, STUMPED, which is currently making the festival rounds, and director of a short documentary film about a supermarket boycott, SCENES FROM A PROTEST. In addition to filmmaking, I am an educator, teaching documentary and narrative film production, sound design, and screenwriting courses at Fitchburg State University, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

Jennifer Proctor is a filmmaker, media artist, and scholar whose work focuses on appropriation of popular and online media, experimental film remakes, representations of gender in popular film, and inclusive media pedagogy. She is an Associate Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and a co-founder of EDIT Media (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Teaching Media).

Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Recently he presented a solo show, A Year from Monday, at Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center in Buffalo, NY and a solo screening, Autumn Air, at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA.

Simon Tarr is an artist, researcher, and educator in South Carolina. His films have screened on every continent (yes, even Antarctica), and he has performed expanded cinema at Carnegie Hall, LaMaMa, and around the world from Tokyo to Cairo.

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This program is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and Bloomberg Philanthropies. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.