Eleanore & the Timekeeper (Danièle Wilmouth, 2010). Image courtesy the artist.

Best known for her striking performance films, award-winning Chicago filmmaker and SAIC faculty member Danièle Wilmouth’s first feature is an intimate portrait of the complex bond between her aging grandmother and developmentally disabled uncle in rural Pennsylvania. Companions for the last 64 years—in times both idyllic and difficult—Eleanore and Ronnie are forced to embark on new, separate lives in the face of Eleanore’s advancing age and waning health. Ronnie finds new freedom in a group home while Eleanore copes with loneliness and heartbreak in the modest farmhouse where Ronnie grew up. Throughout this seven-year chronicle, Wilmouth meditates on the modest gestures and daily rituals that have bound the two together, tying them to the rhythms of small-town America and larger cycles of death and rebirth. The result is a clear-eyed and moving meditation on everyday life, transience, and familial love. Danièle Wilmouth, 2010, USA, 16mm on DigiBeta video, 76 min (plus discussion).

DANIÈLE WILMOUTH (1968, Pittsburgh) creates hybrids of performance art, dance, installation and cinema, which exploit the shifting hierarchies between live and screen space. Her films have screened in festivals, museums, galleries, and on television worldwide, including at the Kunst Museum, Bonn, Germany; the National Gallery of Armenia; Television Canal+(a), Argentina; Kino Arsenal, Berlin, Germany; Tampere Short Film Festival, Finland; IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht, Holland; Anthology Film Archives, New York; and the Ann Arbor Film Festival,  Michigan. A retrospective of her work toured Russia in 2004. From 1990-96, Wilmouth lived in Japan, where she co-founded Hairless Film, an independent filmmaking collective. She also studied the Japanese contemporary dance form Butoh under Katsura Kan, and performed with his troupe The Saltimbanques.  Wilmouth is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most recently the 2010-2011 EMPAC Dance Movies Commission from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is currently on faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College. More info at hairlessfilms.org.

Still from “The Indian Boundary Line” (Thomas Comerford, 2010). Courtesy the artist.

In case you missed the sold-out screening of our season opener, Thomas Comerford’s The Indian Boundary Line, the first time around, the film returns to the Gene Siskel Film Center for an encore engagement this coming Thursday, April 22 at 6pm. Find more information about the screening and RSVP on Facebook here.

Recent press:

The Films of Thomas Comerford (New City, April 13, 2010)

Return Engagement for Some Forgotten History (Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2010)

Still from “The Indian Boundary Line,” 2010. Courtesy the Artist.

Over the last eight years, local musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked/Marquette, 2005). This evening, Comerford will present the world premiere of The Indian Boundary Line (2010). The film follows, as Comerford notes, “a road very close to my home in Chicago, Rogers Avenue,” that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory.” In doing so, it examines the collision between “the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences.”  Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on history and its relationship to the landscape, with its own shifting boundaries, designs, uses and inhabitants across two centuries.  With Land Marked/Marquette. Thomas Comerford, 2010, USA, DigiBeta video and 16mm, ca. 75 min (plus discussion).

THOMAS COMERFORD (b. 1970, Richmond, VA) is a media artist, musician, and educator residing in Chicago. Trained in sculpture, performance, and the classics, he began making films in the early 1990s. In 1997, he embarked on an influential series of films, made with a handmade pinhole motion picture camera and microphone, under the title, Cinema Obscura (1997-2002). His recent films are site-specific to Chicago and explore the evidence, revision, and erasure of histories in the landscape. His work has screened at festivals and venues, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, and the London Film Festival. Comerford has also toured the United States with his films, screening in spaces ranging from church basements and backyards to regular old movie theatres. As songwriter, singer, and producer for the rock band Kaspar Hauser, Comerford has performed his music around the Midwest and eastern U.S. and released three LP records. He currently teaches film production, DIY exhibition, and punk rock history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ben Russell, Let Each One Go Where He May (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

Fresh from its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Chicago-based filmmaker and SAIC alumnus Ben Russell’s stunning feature debut is an epic road movie that draws from documentary and ethnography to imbue its images with a sense of mystery and enchantment. Set in contemporary Suriname (in northeastern South America) and unfolding in 13 extended takes, the film follows two unidentified brothers as they trek from the capital of Paramaribo to the rainforest villages of the Maroons, descendants of African slaves who rebelled against their Dutch captors 300 years ago. Retracing these ancestors’ footsteps, in the opposite direction villagers now take to pursue the global enterprise of the city, Let Each One Go Where He May charts a reverse course through urban congestion, illegal gold mines, Maroon communities, and trance ceremonies to capture a place where history, the supernatural, and modernity collide. 2009, Suriname/USA, 16mm, 135 min.

BEN RUSSELL is an itinerant photographer, curator, and experimental film/video artist whose works have screened in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East India Trading Co. buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and the Sundance Film Festival to the Museum of Modern Art (solo).  Russell received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. In addition to his filmmaking, he founded the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island in 2004 and the Chicago gallery BEN RUSSELL in 2009. A 2008 Guggenheim award recipient, Russell currently teaches at the University of Illinois–Chicago.

“The Unbroken Path: Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May” by Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010 Tiger Awards Announces Let Each One Go Where He May as one of three contenders

Let Each One Go Where He May (EXCERPT) from Ben Russell on Vimeo.

Still from The Gypsy Cried (Chris Langdon, 1972). Courtesy the artist.

Experimental Sound Studio’s Outer Ear Festival of Sound and CATE team up once again to present a program of films that investigate the visual and aural possibilities of 16mm optical audio, as sounds perform images and images become sonic scores. Sound functions both as a sonic and visual element in these 6 films. Collectively they propose a new model for listening and seeing – a listening that happens with the eyes, and a seeing that happens with the ears. Curated by SAIC faculty member Michelle Puetz. Co-presented by Experimental Sound Studio. 1966–78, various artists, USA, multiple formats, ca. 65 min.

The OUTER EAR FESTIVAL OF SOUND (November 3–22, 2009) is the only comprehensive interdisciplinary sonic arts festival in the Midwest. Visit www.exsost.org.

Program details
Chris Langdon, The Gypsy Cried (1972, 16mm, 3 minutes, b/w, sound)
“When one likes something very much, or someone, it is hard to do anything but like it.  I didn’t want to take anything away or add anything to this song because I like it a lot.” (Chris Langdon)

Paul Sharits, Ray Gun Virus (1966, 14 minutes, 16mm, color, synchronous sprocket hole sound)
Ray Gun Virus consists of a series of rapidly and intermittently flickering fields of color that are accompanied by an “open system” soundtrack made possible by double perf 16mm film. Sharits wrote that Ray Gun Virus was an attempt to “allow vision to function in ways usually particular to hearing . . . rapidly alternating color frames can generate, in vision, horizontal-temporal chords . . . Just as the film’s consciousness becomes infected, so does the viewer’s consciousness: the projector is an audio-visual pistol; the screen looks at the audience; and the viewer’s normative consciousness. The film’s final ‘image’ is a faint blue; the viewer is left to his own reconstruction of self, left with a screen upon which his retina can project its own patterns.”

Robert Russett, Primary Stimulus (1977, 13 minutes, 16mm, b/w, sound)
In Primary Stimulus, the soundtrack printing process was kept completely photographic so that “the sound emitted is the sound the projector interprets from the lines which are the film’s image. What comprises the film are sixteen different ‘grates’ of varying amplitudes (sixteen compositions of black and white horizontal lines): onto each frame of film one of these patterns is printed. The sequence varies. The compositions are similar enough to one another so that the afterimage of one relates compositionally to the next.”  (Laurence Kardish)

Peter Kubelka, Pausa! (1977, 12 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
Peter Kubelka’s first and only sync-sound film, Pausa! captures a rare glimpse of the Austrian artist (and namesake of Kubelka’s famous 1960 film) Arnulf Rainer engaged in a full-body performance with a microphone. The vibrations of Rainer’s breath and highly gestural movements form a visceral sonic and visual portrait of his body.

Barry Spinello, Soundtrack (1969, 10 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
“During the first half of Soundtrack, the “sound painting” – drawn on the soundtrack – is magnified and redrawn, frame by frame, on the image track so that the viewer literally sees what he hears . . . The closing section of Soundtrack makes use of acetate self-adhesive screens and tapes. These screens and tapes, cut to fit the soundtrack, yield controlled pitch for any duration in as many different timbres as there are patterns.” (Barry Spinello)

Richard Lerman, Sections for Screen, Performers and Audience (1974, 6minutes, 16mm, color, live accompaniment by Art Lange, Guillermo Gregorio, and Brian Labycz)
“I was always fascinated by music scores and often imagined how concerts might be changed if performers were not hidden behind music on stands. In the 1960’s, I made several films that used oscilloscope imagery and, in doing so, learned to ‘play’ various synthesizers to generate images. For this film, I used colored gels while filming and chose to optically print a few visual phrases, allowing for repeated sections. I also super-imposed hi-contrast notation over the film. So, Sections became a kind of feedback piece: sound generated the images for the score and performers created new sounds and a new piece from these images.” (Richard Lerman)

About the artists
Guillermo Gregorio is a composer, improviser, and visual artist in Chicago. Trained in architecture and music, he was associated with the Madi movement in Argentina in the 1960’s, and the spirit of experimentation across forms continues. He is especially noted for his compositions that combine improvisation and composed elements through graphic notation.

Peter Kubelka was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1934 and is an “artist and theoretician who has worked in the art forms of film, cuisine, music, architecture, speaking and writing.  In 1964, Kubelka co-founded the Austrian Film Museum and has been its curator ever since. In 1978, he became professor in film at the Art Academy in Frankfurt, where he also served as Rector in the period of 1985-88.  Kubelka’s theoretical work in cooking began in 1967, and in 1980 his teaching position was expanded to include ‘Film and Cooking as Art.’  He is a co-founder of the Anthology Film Archives in New York.” (Hong Kong International Film Festival)

Brian Labycz is a Chicago improviser primarily performing with electronics.  He draws from a variety of sources including analog systhesizers, acoustic instruments, digital manipulations, field recordings, and self-made devices to produce and explore various expressive forms.

Chris Langdon is from the middle of the country somewhere. He studied art (and a little film) at the California Institute of the Arts roughly between 1972 and 1976, during which time he made somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 films. He collaborated with Fred Worden and worked with Jack Goldstein and John Baldessari on several of their early films.

Art Lange has produced more than two dozen recordings for artists like Matthew Shipp, Ellery Eskelin, Ran Blake, and Guillermo Gregorio, and he has directed ensembles in the music of Cornelius Cardew and Anthony Braxton. His writings on music have been published across the U.S., England, and Europe. He teaches at Columbia College, Chicago.

Richard Lerman has been creating electronic music and interdisciplinary art since the 1960’s and has performed and exhibited his artwork and film in North and South America, Asia, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. For the last 30 years, he has been designing and building microphones using piezo disks. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the NEA, the Asian Cultural Council, among many others. A 2-CD set of his early audio work, including “Travelon Gamelon” and a performance of “Sections for Screen, Performers and Audience,” is available on EM Records. For more information please visit http://www.sonicjourneys.com

Robert Russett holds degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and Cranbrook Academy of Art. Following his graduate work at Cranbrook, Russett continued his studies in Paris at Atelier17. His films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Whitney Museum (NYC), the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, as well as on PBS, The Learning Channel, and Spanish National Television. His tapes and video installations have been shown at SIGGRAPH, the American Museum of the Moving Image (NYC) and the International Symposium on Electronic Art in the Netherlands. Awards include 3 MacDowell Colony fellowships, a Media Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and a production grant from the American Film Institute. John Libbey and Co. has published his new book, HYPERANIMATION: Digital Images and Virtual Worlds (2009), in association with the University of Indiana Press. Formally an Honors Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Russett is now Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts and a full-time artist and writer.

Paul Sharits is widely considered to be the first American filmmaker to make “pure-color” flicker films. He was involved with Fluxus in the 1960’s and worked in a variety of different mediums including film, sound, sculpture, drawing, performance art, typography, and printmaking. His film work investigated visual and aural modes of perception by examining the intersections between shifting fields of color and sound, the mechanics of film projection and optical sound reproduction, and what he referred to as “the operational analogues constructed between ways of seeing and ways of hearing.”

Barry Spinello came to animation from painting, and completed a number of films in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (Soundtrack, Sonata for Pen, Brush and Ruler, and Six Loop-Paintings) that explored various techniques of painting and drawing images and soundtracks directly onto 16mm film.  His films have been shown at the Whitney Museum and at various international film festivals, and he taught animation at the University of California at Berkeley.

Image: László Moholy-Nagy & ID students, Design Workshops (1944).

“The illiterates of the future,” the pioneering Hungarian artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy once famously proclaimed, “will be ignorant of the camera and pen alike.” Founded in Chicago in 1937 and modeled after the German Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy’s groundbreaking Institute of Design [ID], now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, was one of the first American schools to develop an art-film program. Its influence on photography, art, and design was unparalleled at the time and still resonates today.

This two-evening program brings together a remarkable collection of experimental, documentary, and design-focused films by ID faculty and students, dating from the school’s beginnings through 1970. Featured are works by Moholy-Nagy, Nathan Lerner, Marvin Newman, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Ken Josephson, and Millie Goldsholl, including a number of rarely-screened prints from the Chicago History Museum.

Presented in collaboration with the Chicago History Museum. This series is part of the “Learning Modern” exhibition at SAIC Sullivan Galleries, and a program of Living Modern Chicago, organized by SAIC and the Mies van der Rohe Society/Illinois Institute of Technology. Visit www.livingmodernchicago.org.

Vision in Motion, Program 1
Thursday, October 1
(1944-1970, USA, various artists, various formats, ca 75 min)

Do Not Disturb (László Moholy-Nagy & students, 1945, 16mm on DVD, color, sound, 19 min.)
Outtakes “Light Machine” (László Moholy-Nagy & Nathan Lerner, 1944, 16mm, color, silent, 4 min.)
Motions (Harry Callahan, 1948-49, 16mm, b/w, silent, 10 min.)
Licht Spiel Nur 1 (Robert Stielger, 1966, 16mm on HDV, color, silent, 6 min.)
DL #2 (Larry Janiak, 1970, 16mm, color, sound, 11 min.)
George & Martha Revisited (Wayne Boyer, 1967, 16mm, b/w, silent, 8 min.)

Followed by a discussion with Hattula Moholy-Nagy, scholar and daughter of Moholy-Nagy; Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Wayne Boyer, filmmaker and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Vision in Motion, Program 2
Friday, October 2
(1950-1968, USA, various artists, various formats, ca 75 min)

Chicago Morning (Boris Yakovleff & students, 1952, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min.)
A Motion Control Drawing (Len Gittleman & Faythe Nelson, 1953, 16mm, color, silent, 5 min.)
Night Driving (Millie Goldsholl, 1957, 16mm, color, sound, 9 min.)
The Church on Maxwell Street (Yasuhiro Ishimoto & Marvin Newman, 1951, 16mm on BetaSP, b/w, sound, 8 min.);
Nebula 2 (Robert Frerck, 1969, 16mm on HDV, color, sound, 6 min.)
33rd and LaSalle (Ken Josephson, 1962, 16mm, b/w, silent, 8 min.)
Adam’s Film (Larry Janiak, 1963, 16mm, color, sound, 12 min.)

Read the Chicago Reader capsule by Andrea Gronvall here.

Miranda Pennell, Tattoo (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

In an effort to dispel the notion that the dance film is largely a decorative and apolitical genre, The Dance Camera: Locked & Loaded is an international collection of films and videos that confront the camera’s power to manipulate identity, create celebrity, and automate the viewer’s gaze. Curated by filmmaker and SAIC faculty member Danièle Wilmouth, these charged works serve as compelling activist documents against a range of global injustices, including sexism, xenophobia, and colonialism. Works include: Je Suis Une Bombe (Elodie Pong, Switzerland, 2006), You Made Me Love You (Miranda Pennell & John Smith, UK, 2005), Dansons (Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Algeria/France, 2003), Element (Amy Greenfield, USA, 1973), Tattoo (Miranda Pennell, UK, 2001), Black Spring (Heddy Maalem, Algeria/France/Nigeria, 2002), Familie Tezcan (Nevin Aladag, Turkey/Germany, 2001), Elegy (Douglas Wright & Chris Graves, New Zealand, 1993). Special thanks to Kali Heitholt, who assisted with this program. 1973–2006, multiple artists, multiple countries, multiple formats, ca 80 min.

——

You Made Me Love You
Miranda Pennell & John Smith UK, 2005, 3.5 min
Twenty-one dancers are held by your gaze. Losing contact can be traumatic.
“…On the one hand, this is like looking at a group of aliens who have never seen anything like the camera (or you) before. The concentration of the faces on what is before them takes away their self-consciousness, and like a series of Thomas Ruff portraits, they have an unsettling air of insouciance. But ultimately, the thought one is drawn to, and the allegory the title suggests, concern the contemporary obsession with becoming visible through some sort of brush with celebrity, however brief, demeaning or meaningless that might be.”  — Dr. Stephen Riley

Je Suis Une Bombe
Elodie Pong, Switzerland, 2006, 6:12 min.
A figure in a panda bear costume performs an erotic pole dance. On removing the panda’s head, a woman is revealed, and she addresses the camera. She delivers her own praises of a complex image of woman, simultaneously strong and vulnerable—a potential powder keg. Performer: Carine Charaire. Music: Michael Hilton

Element
Dir: Hilary Harris, Choreography/Performer: Amy Greenfield, USA, 1973, 12 min
“Element raises issues of the active image of a woman’s body on film. Greenfield’s body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle, which is both birthlike and deathlike, and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal concept of female sensuality.” — Canyon Cinema

Elegy
Dir: Chris Graves, Choreography/Performer: Douglas Wright, New Zealand, 1993, 10 min
Douglas Wright is an openly gay dancer and choreographer from New Zealand. He danced with Limbs Dance Company of New Zealand (1980-1983), the Paul Taylor Company of New York (1983-87) and DV8 Physical Theatre of London (1988) before forming the Douglas Wright Dance Company in Auckland in 1989. In 2004, his first book Ghost Dance was released, part love story, part memoir, a deeply felt meditation on the art of performance. The 2006 season of his stage work Black Milk was accompanied by the publication of his second book Terra Incognito. In October 2007 a poetry collection, Laughing Mirror was published, at which time Wright announced his retirement from dance.

“The self-confident innovator, the prime mover with an incredible athletic ability, Douglas Wright, in the late 1980s and early 90s established himself as possibly the best—the most profound—choreographer New Zealand has ever produced. Certainly, he is the most visceral, the most gutsy, creating dance works that combined a kind of unstoppable callisthenic zest with philosophical ideas done out as images: dance as an articulation of the human condition.” — David Eggleton

“Anger is not just mine, anger is like petrol if somebody gets angry someone nearby will catch fire. It’s about exploring the way energy can be transformed through art. I’m lucky, I’ve been given more than my share of anger, so I’ve got a lot of it to transform.” — Douglas Wright

Tattoo
Miranda Pennell, UK, 2001, 9 min
Trees, insects and birds look-on as the countryside is invaded by a lost regiment of soldiers engaged in a repetitive display. The senseless beauty of a military drill dwarfed by the landscape, is by turns absurd and disturbing. The choreography of military drill here is entirely drawn from the tradition of the Light Division of the British Army. Soldiers and band of the Light Division filmed on Salisbury Plane. Music for military-band scored for the film by Graeme Miller.

Dansons (Let Us Dance)
Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Algeria/France, 2003, 5:35 min
The brilliantly concise Dansons shows in a single take the midriff of a woman belly-dancing to La Marseillaise. It is a startlingly clear image of the clash of colonialism with indigenous culture. The military relentlessness of the anthem is in deep contrast to the sensuousness of the body wrapped in the colours of the French tricolour.

Familie Tezcan (The Tezcan Family)
Nevin Aladag, Turkey/Germany, 2001, 6:40 min
A video portrait of a German family with Turkish heritage, practicing breakdance and singing in four different languages.

“Aladag, born in 1972 in Van in eastern Turkey and now living in Berlin, often focuses on foreignness and self-determination as they are experienced by young people of Turkish origin in Germany today. Demarcation and amalgamation, the search for cultural roots and social connection: Aladag is trying to create individual meaning within the larger context of the production of identity.”  — Harald Fricke, Artforum

Black Spring
Dir: Benoit Dervaux, Choreographer: Heddy Maalem, Algeria/France/Nigeria, 2002, 26 min
“Born in Algiers to a French mother and Algerian father, now living in Toulouse and creating tribal-infused contemporary choreography for dancers from Francophone African countries, Heddy Maalem creates stark investigations of race and identity. — Sharon Hoyer

——

Danièle Wilmouth creates hybrids of performance art, dance, installation and cinema, which exploit the shifting hierarchies between live and screen space. Her works—Curtain of Eyes (1997), Tracing a Vein (2001), Round (2002), Hula Lou (2007), and A Heretic’s Primer on Love and Exertion (2007), have screened in festivals, museums, galleries, and on television worldwide. In 1990 she began a six-year residency in the Kansai region of Japan, where she cofounded “Hairless Films,” an independent filmmaking collective. While in Japan, she also studied the Japanese contemporary dance form Butoh under Katsura Kan, and performed with his troupe “The Saltimbanques.” She is currently on faculty in the film and video departments of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College. More info at Hairless Films.

Flingco Sound System releases “textures in the shape of sound.”–Dublab

Since its 2007 launch, Chicago’s Flingco Sound System label has played host to a slate of musicians who work collaboratively with visual artists to create darkly mesmerizing videos and richly textured live performances. Tonight, CATE teams up with FSS to present not-to-be-missed live collaborations by the drone-based Chicago trio Haptic (Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg) and real-time video artist Lisa Slodki; the end-of-days strings and digital soundscapes of Interbellum (Brendan Burke), with multi-media artist Annie Feldmeier Adams; as well as the short video Avici (2008), by SAIC alum Clayton Flynn and the experimental Richmond, VA trio Cristal (Jimmy Anthony, Greg Darden and Bobby Donne). 2005–09, multiple artists, Austria/USA, multiple formats, 90 min.

Flingco Sound System was started by Bruce Adams, the co-founder of kranky, an independent record label that Pitchfork recently lauded for its “hard earned niche” and “uncompromising spirit.” The new label is equally innovative, supporting and releasing its musicians’ audio-visual collaborations—FSS’s forthcoming Haptic LP will include a DVD of rotating fourth member Lisa Slodki’s album-length video; FSS’s Interbellum release features media produced by Brendan Burke, the man behind Interbellum, and Annie Feldmeier Adams using Burke’s handheld video footage from a transatlantic sailing voyage; among others. The label is designed to adapt to and take advantage of new digital distribution streams and tap into the rejuvenated market for vinyl. FSS releases DRM-free high sample rate downloads, limited edition LPs on 180 gram vinyl with download coupons, and a subscription service.

The work of celebrated Chicago filmmaker and SAIC professor Jim Trainor revels in the world between playfulness and prurience with shaky, line-drawn animations of animals, humans, and their habits. Tonight he presents two new films alongside some favorites and obscurities. Premiering are The Presentation Theme (2008), the story of a Peruvian POW outmaneuvered by a hematophagous priestess, and The Little Garden of Herbert S. Zim (2008), in which a school library’s science section comes creakily to life. Also featured: zoo denizens fail to strike a healthy balance between impulse and rationality in The Animals and Their Limitations (1998–2004), a naturalist shares his prizes with visiting scholars in The Skulls, and the Skulls and the Bones, and the Bones (2003), and a novice bicyclist pedals without incident in Serene Velocity (2004). 1998—2008, Jim Trainor, USA, multiple formats, ca 80 min.

Jim Trainor has been making animated films since he was thirteen. In that time his medium has changed little – his preferred technique is black magic marker on typing paper. He grew up in Washington DC, and lived in New York City in his 20s and 30s. The Fetishist (1997), a portrait of a serial killer, took him eleven years to make and is highly unpleasant, though perhaps not in the way you might expect. A series of films about animals - The Bats, The Moschops, The Magic Kingdom and Harmony – followed, and have been widely screened, sometimes under the collective title The Animals and Their Limitations. The third-mentioned was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. In 2000 Mr. Trainor got a teaching job at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now lodged happily. Beyond filmmaking, his passions include looking closely at birds and insects and reading forgotten anthropology books of the 1920s.

More
The Chicago Reader: Jim Trainor (Fred Camper)

The Experimental Sound Studio’s Outer Ear Festival of Sound and CATE team up to present a special preview of award-winning filmmaker Deborah Stratman’s latest film, O’er the Land (2008). Completed in part through a residency at ESS, Stratman’s film meditates on our notions of freedom in an era of elevated threat by interweaving footage from our national pasttimes—football, war re-enactments, machine gun festivals—with the incredible story of Marine Lt. Col William Rankin who, in 1959, was forced to eject from his fighter jet at 47,000 feet without a pressure suit, only to be trapped for 40 minutes in the up and down drafts of a massive thunderstorm. Accompanied by Stratman’s Paranormal Trilogy: It Will Die Out in the Mind (2006), How Among the Frozen Words (2005), and The Magician’s House (2007). The Outer Ear Festival of Sound (November 3–22, 2008) is the only comprehensive interdisciplinary sonic arts festival in the Midwest. For more information, visit exsost.org. 2005—08, Deborah Stratman, USA, 16mm, ca 65 min.

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker whose work plies the territory between experimental and documentary genres. Her films and frequent work in other media, including photography, sound, drawing and sculpture often explore the history, uses, mythologies and control of highly varied landscapes: from Muslim Xinjiang China, to rural Iceland, to gated suburban California. Her works have been exhibited internationally and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Pythagoras Film
Cinemad: Deborah Stratman