Verge: New Films by Amy Halpern

Ginko Yellow

Los Angeles Filmforum and Livonian Cinema present

Verge: New Films by Amy Halpern

Saturday September 16, 2023, 7:00 pm

At the Zorthian Ranch, 3990 N Fair Oaks Ave, Altadena, CA 91001, https://zorthianranch.com/

Allow time to drive up to the top of Fair Oaks and find it.

Free parking at the ranch; a short walk from the parking lot to the screening space

More notes: Outdoor screening.  Dress accordingly, and bring refreshments that you might like.  Screening will start when it is dark enough (roughly 8 pm).  Bring a flashlight and wear comfortable shoes for the path (not a long path, but gravel and sloping, and dark after the show).  I’ve also just been told that there are mosquitoes, so bug spray can be good.  Also feel free to bring a favored lawn chair; we’ll have folding chairs.

Note the change in day and location!

Tickets: $10 general, $5 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members at

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/verge-new-films-by-amy-halpern-outdoor-night-screening-tickets-708357605667

Masks are highly recommended at Filmforum shows - N95 or KN95 are available at the door

For more event information: www.lafilmforum.org, or 323-377-7238

The Los Angeles-based filmmaker from New York, Amy Halpern, is the hand behind a bewitching and powerful group of films that harness cinema’s associative and sensory power to the utmost. Halpern, who began making films in the early seventies, uses light, the elements (substances and objects of different densities, textures and colours) and different kinds of beings in films with a special conception of framing and mise en scène, establishing powerful primary associations in the montage. There are physical sensations of all calibres covering all the senses; synaesthesia, gestures and sensuality flow together in compositions that sometimes suggest tales on the fly. It is a set in which sound (or silence) sometimes intervenes in imaginative and unexpected ways, with poetic titles adding another layer of meaning. Films in 16mm almost always concentrate on a single motif or on a carefully selected group of interconnected images. This is rooted in the symbology of such images, and in the timeless magnetism emanating from them.

Halpern began making 8mm films in 1972 and moved to Los Angeles in 1974, where she studied film at UCLA. She has alternated her own 16mm filmmaking with work on other productions in and out of Hollywood as a director of photography, lighting and in the sphere of special effects. She has also collaborated with other filmmakers, as in her participation in films like My Brother’s Wedding by Charles Burnett, The Decay of Fiction by Pat O’Neill and Illusions by Julie Dash, and in the early 1970s in Ken and Flo Jacobs’ 3D shadowplay group, the New York Apparition Theater. She has also worked alongside the likes of Shirley Clarke, Chick Strand and Barbara Hammer, and with her colleague David Lebrun on various films, as well as some of the recent light shows by the psychedelic expanded film collective Single Wing Turquoise Bird. She studied dance, an art she practised alongside Anna Sokolow and Lynda Gudde. She has also worked as an archivist, programmer and founder of the legendary Collective for Living Cinema and the Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis, and as a lecturer in cinema at the University of Southern California, UCLA and other institutions. 

The program we are presenting today covers her past and present filmography. Invocation (1982) introduces us to the session by concentrating on the gestures of two hands that move, stroke us and drag us from out of the darkness. They are Halpern’s own hands (who sees the film as “a temporary sculpture in space”) inviting us into her domain. Next is Palm Down (2012), a film that proves the power of cinema based on footage of a palm tree being cut down against an implacable blue California sky. The action of inverting and seeing the action in its simplicity demonstrates the potentials of the matter we are dealing with. 

The rest of the program which Amy named Verge for its premiere screening in Spain last year, presents a series of films finished before and during the pandemic. Many of them will be seen for the first time in the world here. Most are unique images and gestures, like 16mm miniatures: a curtain moving in the breeze; the lights projected by trees pierced by the sun; portraits of people, like her mother, and Jane Wodening (AKA Jane Brakhage). There are atavistic actions that unite us with the entire history of human civilization. In short, it is a look inside a particular cinematographic and symbolic universe, that of an artist who should be on any hypothetical list of the most influential filmmakers of recent decades, if only we had been aware of her films earlier. - Elena Duque, s8 festival