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Studies in Natural Magic  /  Associations

Canyon Cinema
July 13, 2018 - 7:30 pm
In-person: 
Antonella Bonfanti, director of Canyon Cinema; Betzy Bromberg, filmmaker; David Dinnell, curator.

Los Angeles Filmforum members receive free admission at the box office!

Program One: Studies in Natural Magic

Program One features recent films by Saul Levine, Charlotte Pryce and Christopher Harris; rarely screened films by Standish Lawder and Jean Sousa; sublimely filmed and acutely perceived portraits of cities, seas, skies and landscapes by Peter Hutton, Julie Murray, Gary Beydler, Robert Fulton and Emily Richardson; Betzy Bromberg’s audacious and energetic feminist punk city symphony; Degrees of Limitation, one of Scott Stark’s earliest films, a humorous three-minute structuralist gem; and Portland, a mid-‘90s travelogue and playful Rashomon-like inquiry into the nature of truth by Greta Snider.

16mm, b/w and color, 79 min.

Program Two: Associations

Program Two is titled after John Smith’s 1975 film, a joyfully dense rebus-like image-word construction. Smith’s film is preceded by Sara Kathryn Arledge’s rarely seen 1958 work What is A Man, a film years ahead of its time, and Mark Toscano’s 2012 piece Releasing Human Energies, which utilizes film laboratory test footage of a “China Girl” set to a found text read by Morgan Fisher. The program also features Abigail Child’s classic 1989 film Mercy, from her celebrated “Is This What You Were Born For?” series; canonical works by Phil Solomon, Barbara Hammer, Robert Breer, and Robert Nelson; and two recent restorations: the humorously poignant Confessions by Curt McDowell and Akbar, Richard Myers’ extraordinary 1970 portrait of young black filmmaker and student, Akbar Ahmed.

16mm, b/w and color, 90 min.