Avatar and Aether: Visionary Women and the Cinematic Occult

Wormwood Star, featuring Cameron, by Curtis Harrington

Filmmakers Betzy Bromberg and Amy Halpern in person!

Coinciding with the exhibition Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman, Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents a program of short films by visionary women that explore heightened states of observation and consciousness, transformation and transcendence, and the ecstasy of experience.

Featuring a diverse array of works spanning nearly 60 years of filmmaking, all the films in this program are presented in their original 16mm film format, which is perhaps the most appropriate medium for paying tribute to Cameron: full of texture, nuance, mystery, intimacy, and beauty, not to mention a modicum of obscurity. —Mark Toscano

Tickets: $12 General admission; $7 students with valid ID.

Advance tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/258310
FREE for members of MOCA and Los Angeles Filmforum; must present current membership card to claim tickets.
INFO (213) 621- 1745 or education@moca.org

Betzy Bromberg, Director of the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts, has been making experimental films since 1976. Her most recent film, Voluptuous Sleep (2011), premiered at the Redcat Theater in Los Angeles and had its festival premiere at the New York Film Festival: Views From The Avant-Garde. Voluptuous Sleep was listed as one of the Best Films for 2011 in both the New York Times (Manohla Dargis) and Indiewire (Andrea Picard). Bromberg’s films have shown extensively in museums, cultural venues and festivals within the United States and abroad. Previous to becoming the Director of the Program in Film and Video California Institute of the Arts, Ms. Bromberg worked in the Hollywood special effects industry for many years as a supervisor and camerawoman for the production of optical effects in major motion pictures.

Amy Halpern: Committed to encouraging a wider audience for absolute film, Amy Halpern co-founded two screening cooperatives: the New York Collective for Living Cinema (1972-1982) and the Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis (1975-1980). Coming soon is her film 4 FINGERS, 5 TOES, 6 MINUTES, which concerns the native California golden newt, Taricha torosa.

Programmed by Mark Toscano

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to the Academy Film Archive for preservation prints of Invocation, The Wormwood Star, and Aether. Additional thanks to Canyon Cinema and all the filmmakers for their participation.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA is supported through both organizations by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Additional support of Filmforum's screening series comes from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA furthers MOCA’s mission to be the defining museum of contemporary art with a bimonthly series of film and video screenings organized and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum—the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation.

For more on Los Angeles Filmforum, visit lafilmforum.org, or email lafilmforum@yahoo.com. For more information on MOCA, visit moca.org.

Invocation

By Amy Halpern

1982; 16mm, color, silent, 24 fps; 2 min.

Gesturing hands emerge from the darkness, readying us for the cinematic experience. —Mark Toscano

The Wormwood Star

By Curtis Harrington

1955-6; 16mm, color, sound;10 min.

Curtis Harrington’s singular, mystical portrait of Cameron also functions as a rare document of numerous artworks subsequently destroyed by the artist not long after the making of the film. —Mark Toscano

My Name is Oona

By Gunvor Nelson

1967; 16mm, black and white, sound; 10min.

“MY NAME IS OONA captures in haunting, intensely lyrical images fragments of the coming to consciousness of a child girl. A series of extremely brief flashes of her moving through night-lit space or woods in sensuous negative, separated by rapid fades into blackness, burst upon us like a fairy-tale princess, with a late sun only partially outlining her and the animal in silvery filigree against the encroaching darkness... Throughout the entire film, the girl, compulsively and as if in awe, repeats her name, until it becomes a magic incantation of self-realization.” —Amos Vogel, The Village Voice

Aether

Daina Krumins

1972; 16mm, color, sound; 4.5 min.

A sci-fi/occult/psychedelic performance film set to an original soundtrack by Rhys Chatham, Krumins establishes a haunting and unique visual vocabulary which blooms and unfolds in free association. —Mark Toscano

Roseblood

By Sharon Couzin

1974; 16mm, color, sound; 8 min.

The dance of Carolyn Chave Kaplan; Music from Stockhausen’s “Hymnen” and “Mantra,” Enesco’s “Sonata No. 3 in A Minor.”

“Images of a woman in dance, in flora, in picture, in eyes, in architecture, in sunshine, in color, in crystal, in space, in confusion, in danger, in disintegration, in her hand, in birth, in the Valley of Sorrow, in the sea, in repetition, in sculpture and in herself.” —Sharon Couzin

Mujer de Milfuegos /Woman of a Thousand Fires

By Chick Strand

1976; 16mm, color, sound; 15 min.

“A kind of heretic fantasy film. An expressionistic, surrealistic portrait of a Latin American woman. Not a personal portrait so much as an evocation of the consciousness of women in rural parts of such countries as Spain, Greece and Mexico; women who wear black from the age 15 and spend their entire lives giving birth, preparing food and tending to household and farm responsibilities. MUJER DE MILFUEGOS depicts in poetic, almost abstract terms, their daily repetitive tasks as a form of obsessive ritual.

“The film uses dramatic action to express the thoughts and feelings of a woman living within this culture. As she becomes transformed, her isolation and desire, conveyed in symbolic activities, endows her with a universal quality. Through experiences of ecstasy and madness we are shown different aspects of the human personality. The final sequence presents her awareness of another level of knowledge.” —Chick Strand

Elixir

By Amy Halpern

2012; 16mm, color, silent; 7 min.

A silent ritual in which an alchemy of bodies, gestures, potions, and lactations intermingle in an intuitive, organic ceremony. —Mark Toscano

Az Iz

BY Betzy Bromberg

1983; 16mm, color, sound; 37 min.

Employing a kaleidscopic variety of 16mm film stocks, Betzy Bromberg vividly suggests an ever-shifting, fragmentary, first-person consciousness drawn in, bewitched, and ultimately transformed by a dessicated, alien landscape. The searching camera, arrhythmic cutting, and diverse textures create an intimate, mesmeric vision hovering between the impressionistic and expressionistic. —Mark Toscano

“A descent into a desert underworld. A macabre tale of life and lifelessness.” —Betzy Bromberg