Honoring Peter Mays, Los Angeles Treasure, part 2

Turn, by Peter Mays. World premiere.

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Honoring Peter Mays, Los Angeles Treasure, part 2

Sunday, March 31, 2019, 7:30 pm

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

Our friend Peter Mays made films and paintings in Los Angeles since the 1960s, a critical figure in the experimental film scene here.  He passed away early in the morning on March 4, 2019.  We want to honor him by screening a variety of his works made over the past 59 years.  In the second part of our retrospective, we focus on his wonderful video work.

   Peter Mays grew up in Los Angeles and attended UCLA where he majored in painting and minored in mathematics.  Fascinated by what he read about underground films, he formed a screening society in the Art Department at UCLA to which he brought Jack Smith and other figures of the New York underground films scene.  He made his first experimental film while in graduate school, for which he constructed a printer and developing tank.  Pat O’Neill and Bob Abel were on a similar path in the design division.
Mays made several experimental shorts in 16mm in the middle 60’s.    

   Inspired by the emerging counter-culture, Mays directed a 16mm feature film, Sister Midnight, in 1967.  Influenced by Warhol's Chelsea Girls, his movie made extensive use of intensely colored gels for lighting. It was structured as a mass dream.  

   In 1968 Mays was a founding member of the Single Wing Turquoise Bird light show, which performed with 4 to 7 members until 1973.  The group re-formed in 2010 to create new live performances as well as museum installations and university residencies.
   Mays took a new and unexpected path in the early 80s.  He wrote a program for the Atari microcomputer to portray large chapters of history through computer animation of geography, spending eight years on an interactive animated history of World War One.  Today he has four animated educational films distributed by Discovery Education.  During this time (the structuralist period in experimental film), he also made several long avant-garde films that gave greater weight to the sound track and "meaning."  Perhaps the most important is Astral Man, an investigation into the past, shot in the 60s but completed in 2000.
   In the 21st century Mays produced numerous digital shorts using the extensive effects available in After Effects, and based on the artifacts and symbols of ancient civilizations and esoteric mystical traditions, including those of the Vikings, Egypt, Hinduism Buddhism, alchemy, Tarot, Kabbalah and the works of Alistair Crowley.

Curated by David Lebrun, with readings from Peter Mays’s filmic autobiography Mouse Enigma.

Special thanks to Paula Achter, Amy Halpern, Mark Toscano.

Filmforum’s oral history with Peter Mays, done as part of Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980, can be read at

https://www.alternativeprojections.com/oral-histories/peter-mays/

Tickets: Free but please RSVP. Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at https://petermays2.bpt.me or at the door.