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CalArts Faculty Member Nina Menkes Featured in NYC and LA Film Retrospectives


Trailer for her recent feature Dissolution.

Nina Menkes

Nina Menkes

Anthology Film Archives in New York and UCLA Film Archives in Los Angeles have partnered for a month-long, bicoastal retrospective of the work of filmmaker and CalArts Faculty member Nina Menkes. The celebration kicks off in Los Angeles from Feb. 18 through March 7, and in New York from March 9-16. The retrospective features showings of Menkes’s past works alongside her most recent feature from 2010, Dissolution, which screens the entire week in New York. Menkes will participate in discussions after screenings in both cities.

Menkes, who was recently named one of the “few genuinely radical American directors” by the LA Weekly, has completed six feature films in which she controlled all aspects of production: producing, writing, directing, shooting and editing. Many of her projects have involved her sister, actress and creative collaborator Tinka Menkes. Her films have been shown widely in major international film festivals around the world, and she has received many honors including a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award.

The films included in the retrospective are:

  • A Soft Warrior (1981)
  • The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983)
  • Magdalena Viraga (1986)
  • Queen of Diamonds (1991)
  • The Bloody Child (1996)
  • Massaker (2002)
  • Phantom Love (2007)
  • Dissolution (2010)

The filmmaker is currently developing a new feature, Heatstroke, which will be shot in Cairo and Los Angeles later this year. The film is being executive produced by award-winning filmmaker Gus Van Sant. She’ll also guest on Elvis Mitchell’s radio show The Treatment on KCRW 89.9 in Los Angeles and other NPR stations on Feb. 29.

Nina Menkes: Cinema as Sorcery
Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles
Feb. 28 – March 7, 7 or 7:30 pm
Tickets: General $10 per screening

Nina Menkes Retrospective
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (at 2nd St.), New York City
March 9-16, various times
Tickets: General $9 per screening

Posted by Anonymous on Fri, 02/17/2012 - 6:01pm

French Films Featured at The Tournées Festival on Friday Afternoons at CalArts

The Film Today class and screening series welcomes The Tournées Festival back to CalArts this semester. Sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the festival brings contemporary French cinema to American college and university campuses across the country.

A different film screens every Friday afternoon in CalArts’ Bijou Theater at 4 pm until March 16.

The series includes a wide variety of films that represent the best of contemporary French cinema, spanning generational and geographic borders with a range of genres and subjects. Respected, veteran filmmakers along with first-time directors are featured, showcasing innovations in style and storytelling.

The next films in the series:

  • Today (Feb. 17): Le Pere De Mes Enfants (The Father of My Children) - Director: Mia Hansen-Løve – 2009 / 110 min.

    Only 30 years old, the prodigiously talented writer-director Mia Hansen- Løve follows her assured 2007 debut, Tout est pardonné (All Is Forgiven), about a drug-addicted dad, with an even more wrenching look at another troubled, charismatic patriarch, inspired by the life and death of French film producer Humbert Balsan

  • Feb. 24: L’Illusioniste (The Illusionist) – Director: Sylvain Chomet – 2010 / 80 min.

    Sylvain Chomet’s delightful follow-up to 2003’s The Triplets of Belleville is another exquisitely animated film, one based on an unproduced script by the French comic genius Jacques Tati. The Illusionist is set in the early 1960s, the time when Tati wrote the screenplay after his huge success with Mon Oncle (1958).

  • March 2, 4 pm: Carlos: Part I – Director: Olivier Assayas – 2010 / Long version (3 Parts): 332 min.
  • March 9, 4 pm: Carlos: Part II
  • March 16, 4 pm: Carlos: Part III

    Olivier Assayas’s extraordinary 330-minute epic about international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sanchéz—better known by his nom de guerre, Carlos the Jackal—is one of the most immersive biopics in cinema history.

The trailer for Le Pere De Mes Enfants (The Father of My Children) is above. Below is a trailer for L’Illusioniste (The Illusionist).

The Tournées Festival
Bijou Theater, CalArts
Fridays until March 16 at 4 pm
Free

Posted by Anonymous on Fri, 02/17/2012 - 6:01pm

Photos from 2012 Character Animation Gallery Show at CalArts

Character Animation Show

Works by CalArts character animators are on view in the Main Gallery this week.

The annual student-curated, CalArts Character Animation winter show is currently on view in the Main Gallery.

The images, characters, models and artwork—crafted by BFA students from the School of Film/Video—will be on view through Saturday, Feb. 18.

Photos: Scott Groller/Institute Photographer

Posted by Anonymous on Fri, 02/17/2012 - 6:01pm

John Cage’s 100th Birthday Celebration at REDCAT Feb. 15-16

There’s been a number of performances of avant-garde pioneer John Cage’s music lately for a reason: 2012 marks the composer’s 100th birthday (Sept. 5, to be precise). As experimental music fans around the world converge on festivals honoring Cage’s music this year, REDCAT presents the John Cage Centenary Festival tonight and tomorrow night at 7 and 8:30 pm, respectively. The two nights feature rarely played compositions, including major works by Cage and other pieces by composers responding to Cage’s oeuvre.

CalArtian musicians play a major role in the festival. Tonight, the New Century Players, the professional new music ensemble of The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts, team up with the CalArts Orchestra to bring several large-scale pieces to life. The concert is scheduled an hour and a half earlier than typical REDCAT concerts to allow for the expansive line-up of works to be performed:

  • Ryoanji (1984) solo; CalArts faculty member Rachel Rudich, shakuhachi
  • Dance/4 Orchestras (1982)
  • Etcetera (1973)
  • Renga (1976)
  • Fourteen (1990)
  • Ryoanji (1984) for ensemble

The second evening of the festival welcomes back the New Century Players  for a performance of Cage’s seminal graphic score Fontana Mix. More from REDCAT:

[Fontana Mix is] a telling example of the composer’s fascination with the ideas of indeterminacy, chance, and silence. In addition to the original Fontana Mix tape music composition itself, the program consists of solo and small ensemble works by Cage, and works composed referencing the Fontana Mix score or using the Fontana Mix materials by Cage himself, and by composers responding to Cage’s benchmark.

On the program for tomorrow night’s concert:

  • Playing continuously in the lobby: Karlheinz Essl: FontanaMixer (2004–7)
  • Cage: Fontana Mix (1958)
  • Cage: Aria (1958), with WBAI (1960)
  • Cornelius Cardew: Piece for Guitar (for Stella) (1964); CalArts faculty Stuart Fox, solo guitar
  • Cage: Water Walk (1959); Kristen Erickson (Music DMA-2), performer
  • CalArts faculty Ulrich Krieger: Unterwelten II & III, woodwind sextet
  • Max Neuhaus: Fontana Mix-Feed (1965)
  • Cage: Theater Piece (1960) with WBAI (1960)
  • Former CalArts faculty James Tenney: (Fontana) Mix for Six (Strings) (2001), string sextet

John Cage | Photo: Stephen Gunther

As previously posted on 24700, CalArts kicked off the John Cage festival on Feb. 5 with an intensive workshop that focused on interpreting, preparing and performing Cage’s classic musical/theatrical composition Song Books (solos for voice, 3–92). The large-scale performance of the piece included at least one rendition of all 90 solos—a very rare occurrence in the piece’s history.

In the video above, Cage performs Water Walk for solo television performer in January 1960, on the then-popular TV show I’ve Got A Secret. As seen in the above photo gallery, Erickson performed the same piece at CalArts on Feb. 2. She also performs Water Walk tomorrow night at REDCAT.

John Cage Centenary Festival
REDCAT
Tonight, Feb. 15 at 7 pm
Friday, Feb. 16 at 8:30 pm
Tickets: General $20, Students $16, CalArts Community $10

Posted by Anonymous on Fri, 02/17/2012 - 6:01pm

Steve Erickson Discusses These Dreams of You at the LA Central Library’s ALOUD Series

Steve Erickson

Steve Erickson discusses his latest novel at the ALOUD series in Los Angeles on Feb. 16.

Earlier this month Europa Editions published Steve Erickson’s ninth novel, These Dreams of You, which takes readers on a journey across two continents, following the Nordhoc family as they search for truth against a backdrop of economic uncertainty.

Hailed as a key figure in postmodern and avant-pop literature, Erickson, a faculty member of CalArts MFA Writing Program and editor of the Institute’s literary journal Black Clock, offers readers another nontraditional narrative in These Dreams of You.

From New York Times Sunday Book Review (Feb. 5, 2012):

You don’t need to read a word of Steve Erickson’s new novel to figure out that it’s broken. A quick flip through its pages reveals it to be fractured into hundreds of pieces, many no longer than a paragraph or two, each island of text banked by white space and heralded by a bold capital letter, like so much typographical bling. This visual oddity is just one of many ways the novel willfully resists being read as a conventional narrative. It alerts us to Erickson’s more idiosyncratic designs and serves as an advisory for readers: not for the faint of heart.

Not that Erickson has ever written for the faint of heart. Extolled by Pynchon, likened to Nabokov, DeLillo and Ballard, he has been deemed a surrealist, a visionary, a genius. His fictions play out among the shifting landscapes of sci-fi, fantasy, postmodernism and avant-pop. Occasionally, “These Dreams of You” reads less like a book than a prose contraption engineered to pry us loose from our bearings.

Erickson is one of the featured speakers at tomorrow night’s (Feb. 16) installment of the ALOUD series at the Los Angeles Central Library, where he’ll join fellow novelist Percival Everett in conversation with Brighde Mullins, director, USC Masters in Professional Writing Program, for the discussion Two Novelists on Memory, Identity, and Place.

The ALOUD event explores themes in Everett’s murder mystery, Assumption, and Erickson’s latest work, which both delve into issues of race, their characters’ history, the places in which they live and the search for the truth.

Percival Everett and Steve Erickson: Two Novelists on Memory, Identity, and Place
ALOUD at Central Library
Thursday, February 16
7 pm
Free with reservations

In addition to the ALOUD engagement, Erickson’s upcoming appearances include:

Posted by Anonymous on Fri, 02/17/2012 - 6:01pm

Two Minutes of John Cage’s Song Books


John Cage's 'Song Books' was performed at CalArts on Feb. 5, 2012.

Last weekend, while much of America was at home watching the Super Bowl, a number of students, faculty and alumni from The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts, took over the Institute’s public spaces for a rare performance of John Cage’s complete Song Books (1970). The collection of 89 short music-theater works, includes songs, songs with electronics, directions for a theatrical performance, as well as directions for a theatrical performance with electronics.

Rob Haskins wrote the program notes A Marvelous Madness: John Cage’s Song Books for a 2001 performance at Eastman Music School in Rochester, NY:

1 From August to October of 1970, John Cage (1912-1992) completed one of his largest music-theater works, Song Books.  He conceived the work as a two-volume collection of 89 separate pieces simply called “Solos for Voice”.  Some of these solos called for singing, conventional or otherwise.  Other solos require no singing at all, but rather reproduce the word-game actions of Cage’s Theater Piece (1960).  Still other Solos are examples of another kind of theater altogether, one which clearly reflects the influence of the neo-Dadaist Fluxus movement.  Instructions for some of these Solos ask the performer simply to “prepare something to eat” or to “perform a disciplined action that fulfills an obligation to others.”

2 As in many of Cage’s works, Song Books is indeterminate with regard to performance.  Any number of singers and actors decide upon a length of time they want the piece to last, choose freely among the 89 pieces, and put them in any order they wish.  In addition, the score allows the possibility for a number of other works to be performed simultaneously with any one Song Books performance: the Winter Music (1957), Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958), Indeterminacy (1959), Rozart Mix (1965), and others.

The performances at CalArts lasted approximately four hours, but the video posted below, edited by Institute photographer Scott Groller, provides a two-minute taste of the Song Books happening.

The Long Books: John Cage’s Complete ‘Song Books’ at CalArts 2-5-2012 from Photo.CalArts.edu on Vimeo.

Posted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/14/2012 - 5:00pm

Short Films by Brigid McCaffrey and Thorbjorg Jonsdottir Screen at CalArts


A still from Thorbjorg Jonsdottir's short film, 'Gudrun'

This week’s Structuring Strategies film series features short works by Los Angeles-based alumnae filmmakers Brigid McCaffrey (Film/Video MFA 10) and CalArts faculty member Thorbjorg Jonsdottir (Film/Video MFA 09) tonight (Feb. 14) in CalArts’ Bijou Theater at 7 pm.

Brigid McCaffrey

McCaffrey’s films cover subjects “who appear to be mis/displaced in the world and the shifting regions they encounter.” Currently working with an itinerant geologist on survivalist living in the Mojave region, McCaffrey’s films have featured Sikhs in the California desert, young female truck drivers on the American interstate and nuns as riverboat captains. Tonight, she screens her half-hour film, Castaic Lake (28:30, 16mm, color, sound, 2010):

Taking its course, the camera drifts in to the coves and surveys the shorelines of a multi-use reservoir to unearth fragments of its young history and consider a series of possible relationships to this artificial environment. Visits are filled with a sense of potentials and the unseen, the lake’s surface separating what is buried and what is to come. Municipal mobilizations, recreational episodes, and small pageants trace this body’s perimeter.


A still from McCaffrey's film, 'Castaic Lake'

Thorbjorg Jonsdottir

Jonsdottir, originally from Iceland, spent most of her summers as a teenager packing lobster in the local freezing factory and “hanging out behind the kiosk with her friends.”  Her films have recently been screened in galleries and festivals in Europe and the United States, and she presents five of her short films tonight.

Óskar afi, Guðrún and Park St, 3 min each, 16mm, 2007, 2009, 2011:

Three short portrait films, of my grandfather, my niece and the neighborhood where I used to live in Newhall.

Ocean Ocean, 15 min, 16mm, 2009:

A young woman discovers a magical chamber in her house. After entering the chamber she begins experiencing a fluid movement in time; the borders of dream and reality blur and unfamiliar characters start appearing in her house.

Amazon (working title, work in progress), 15 min, 16mm on HD:

Ten years ago, traveling through South America, I befriended a family of Huitoto Indians living in the Colombian Amazon. In 2011 I returned to see if I could find them again, and to begin filming a piece on the landscape of the Amazon, the plant medicine used by its indigenous cultures, and the spirit world of the jungle.

Structuring Strategies
CalArts’ Bijou Theater
Tonight, Feb. 14, 7 pm
Free

Posted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/14/2012 - 5:00pm

Acclaimed Dutch Composer Thomas Ankersmit Performs on CalArts’ Serge Synthesizer at REDCAT


Tonight and tomorrow, the 2012 CEAIT Festival CalArts Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology), hits the REDCAT stage and features vintage electronics used in conjunction with the latest sound technology. Acclaimed Dutch composer Thomas Ankersmit headlines the two-day festival, premiering a piece written specifically for a rare Serge synthesizer at CalArts.

REDCAT provides a rundown of both nights:

Friday is “Noise Night” featuring L.A.’s own Damion Romero and the pairing of noise pioneers Zbigniew Karkowski and Xopher Davidson. “Ambient Night” on Saturday features the debut of a new work by Ankersmit created expressly for the historic Serge analogue modular synthesizer, originally developed by Serge Tcherepnin at CalArts in the 1970s. Ankersmit, known for abstract, intensely focused electroacoustic work using hyper-kinetic synth and computer improvisation, kicks off a program that also features work by zerfall_gebiete, the duo of electronic ambient soundscape veterans Thomas Köner and [CalArts faculty member] Ulrich Krieger.

In addition to performing, both Köner and Ankersmit are lecturing at CalArts next week. Köner, a multimedia artist noted for his use of low frequencies, gives a presentation to the Music Tech Forum class in the Machine Lab tonight from 6:30-8 pm. Ankersmit is scheduled to speak about the Serge synthesizer in the Survey of Sound Art class in B324 on Monday (Feb. 13) from 10 am-12 pm.

CEAIT Festival 2012
REDCAT
Tonight & Saturday, Feb. 10-11, 8:30 pm
Tickets: General $20, Students $16, CalArts Community $10

Posted by Anonymous on Sat, 02/11/2012 - 4:00pm

The Collective Presents the I Have a Dream Project at CalArts

On Aug. 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and addressed the tens of thousands of people gathered along the Washington Mall, calling for equality and an end to racial discrimination.

His 17-minute I Have a Dream speech marked a key moment, not only for the American Civil Rights Movement, but it also marked a place for King in the annals of American history and oratory.

Who among us doesn’t recognize the speech’s climactic end?

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

To celebrate Black History Month as well as King ‘s legacy, the Collective, a CalArts student organization that cultivates African American culture through the arts, hosts a multidisciplinary, multicultural “re-envisioning” of the speech on Monday (Feb. 13) at noon in CalArts’ Main Gallery.

The I Have a Dream Project, directed by acting veteran and School of Theater faculty member Fran Bennett, features more than 30 participants, including dancers, musicians, singers, actors, artists from all disciplines as well as administrators, faculty and staff.

Many of participants—who include Theater faculty members Denise Woods and Rafael Lopez-Barrantes and Vice President for International Relations Carol Kim—have been asked to recite a passage from the I Have a Dream speech; others have been asked to interpret the phrase, “I have a dream,” through music, dance or visual pieces.

Jasmine Hughes, an MFA 3 actor and president of the Collective, says the project uses a slightly altered text of the speech, and participants are reinterpreting passages in a personal way. “The project takes Dr. King’s speech and tailors it for the CalArts community, for artists of the 21st century.”

I Have a Dream Project
directed by Fran Bennett
CalArts Main Gallery
Monday, Feb. 13 at noon
Free

Posted by Anonymous on Sat, 02/11/2012 - 4:00pm

CalArts Dancers Present Student Choice / MFA 1 Dance Concert This Week

Tonight and tomorrow night (Feb. 9 and 10), students from The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts present the Student Choice / MFA-1 Dance Concert at the Sharon Disney Lund Dance Theater on the CalArts campus. The concerts begin at 8 pm.

The Student Choice portion of the concert features works choreographed by BFA dancers, who also curated the show—by selecting work by peers they wish to see performed. These pieces are intermixed with dances by first-year MFA choreographers.

“I love Student Choice because the students vote on the pieces they want to see,” says choreographer Bianca Mendoza (Dance BFA 12). Her dance, Bleep, was selected for the concert, and incorporates the use of various theme music from Disney films.

“There was something in my piece that the students (audience) liked and that means a lot to me. In doing this, the choreographer really gets a feel for what they need to do, or should do next, what worked and what didn’t.”

Mendoza’s dance piece is one of 12 on the program. Tickets for the concert can be reserved online.

Student Choice / MFA I Dance Concert
Sharon Disney Lund Dance Theater, CalArts
Tonight & Friday, Feb. 9 & 10, at 8 pm
Tickets: $2 CalArts Community, $10 General 

Posted by Anonymous on Sat, 02/11/2012 - 4:00pm
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