Experimentations 8.33: David Lebrun: Proteus
Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision
The UCLA Film & Television Archive and Los Angeles Filmforum present
Experimentations 8.33: David Lebrun: Proteus
Sunday November 24, 2024, 3:00pm
At the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum
More info at: https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2024/11/24/proteus
NOTE THE CHANGE IN TIME and LOCATION
Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.
Filmforum is community partner for two screenings of works by David Lebrun at UCLA that also fit in our series Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film. In a career that spans six decades and over 100 films, UCLA alumnus David Lebrun has crafted a multidisciplinary film practice encompassing animation, documentary and experimental techniques to explore different ways of seeing and being in the world. A founding member of the multimedia light show collective Single Wing Turquoise Bird, Lebrun helped create the visual language of the psychedelic era while leaning on his background in philosophy and anthropology to understand and visualize how other cultures, ancient and modern, have used available technologies to represent their own aesthetic and spiritual systems. From the hippie counterculture of the 1960s to Tibetan and Mayan mythologies, Lebrun seeks cinematic forms that draw out the radical specificity of his subjects while simultaneously revealing their interconnectedness across time and place. Beyond documentary, his films can be powerful, transformative meditations on human expression and experience, in and of themselves. The Archive is honored to host Lebrun in person at the Billy Wilder Theater for a weekend of screenings that includes the premiere of the Academy Film Archive’s new restoration of Sanctus (1966) and a special selection of works from Lebrun’s latest museum installation project Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past, which employs innovative digital animation techniques to explore the evolution of fundamental artistic forms and symbols from the Paleolithic through the late Middle Ages.
Special thanks: David Lebrun; Rosey Guthrie; the Academy Film Archive; Cindy Keefer, Center for Visual Music.
Program notes by Paul Malcolm and David Lebrun.
Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is Filmforum’s expansive film series and upcoming publication that investigates the ways that experimental and scientific films produce and question the visualization of the world. Combining artist films utilizing scientific imagery, science and natural history films, and films of indigenous and traditional knowledge, the series examines how science, nature, and technology films shape our understanding of humans, nature, gender, knowledge, and progress. The multi-venue public screening series presents analog and digital time-based media incorporating diverse scientific and experimental film traditions from across the globe. The series will include eighteen screenings between September 2024 and February 2025, with films and digital works from 1874 to today from around the world, multiple guests, panels and wonderful collaborations that will reveal the possibilities and circumstances of cinema in this realm
Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is among more than 70 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art.
Major support for Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is provided by the Getty Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional Support from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.
Tanka
Tanka
U.S., 1976, DCP (from 16mm), color, 9 min. Director: David Lebrun.
Tanka means, literally, “a thing rolled up.” Photographed from Tibetan scroll paintings of the 16th to 19th centuries, Tanka is a cyclical vision of ancient gods and demons, an animated journey through the image world of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that won the Bronze Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and other international awards.
Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision
Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision
U.S., 2004, 35mm, color, 60 min. Director: David Lebrun.
An exploration of the intersection of science and art that itself embodies a visionary fusion of art and documentary, Proteus centers on the fascinating life and career of 19th century German naturalist Ernst Haeckel and his obsession with radiolarians, a species of microscopic marine protozoa. Illustrating the infinite variety of their intricate skeletal structures, challenged Haeckel to reconcile his personal contradictions, as an artist and a scientist, as well as the larger contradictions of his age between the material and the spiritual worlds. David Lebrun delivers heady doses of philosophy, history, aesthetics, religion and evolutionary biology made all the more potent by his dazzling presentation of Haeckel’s scientific drawings.