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Portland vs. NYC, Plus “Views from the Avant-Garde” at this Week’s New York Film Festival

Written by Ed Halter on . Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

One night this past July, I stood under a construction awning on Ludlow St. with Matt McCormick, a filmmaker and curator in town from Portland, OR, yakking and sheltering ourselves from a sudden, street-slapping rainstorm. We had come to attend the weekly Robert Beck Memorial Cinema at Collective:Unconscious, seen the first part of a fine
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Avant-Gardist Robert Beavers, at Lincoln Center

Written by Ed Halter on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

As with the best avant-garde filmmakers, Robert Beavers crafts unique experiences of space and time that defy easy verbal description, eschewing typical movie storytelling for pleasures borrowed from other arts: the luminescence of painting, the shifting tempo of music and the casual imagist structures of poetry. His 16mm films, shot in Old World sites of
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Horror, Violence, Sociopathic Loners: The Films of James Fotopoulos Play Downtown

Written by Ed Halter on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

The films of James Fotopoulos examine heady esthetic and existential concerns through a unique hybrid of contemplative, delicate avant-garde formal effects and brutal low-budget body-horror, set within meticulously plotted structures that eschew typical experimental serendipity in favor of calculated auteurist rigor. At age 24, he’s completed 12 shorts and two features that play like the
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The Films of Jay Rosenblatt

Written by Ed Halter on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Jay Rosenblatt It may seem contradictory to propose that a director could be at once formally experimental and generally accessible, but there have been many instances in the history of avant-garde filmmaking. Many of the more well-known have worked with reassembled found footage. The proto-trippy antics of Bruce Conner, the paranoid Unabombastics of Craig Baldwin
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“The Hubley Studio Show”

Written by Ed Halter on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Recoder’s performances typically take place in small cinematheques, where often the projectors are right out on the floor with the audience. His disappearance into the booth added even more of a how’d-he-do-that spin to his elaborate and cunning trick films, which he’ll be presenting again at Pratt this week. In "Magenta," Recoder threads an old,
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Q&A With Craig Baldwin

Written by Ed Halter on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Spectres of the Spectrum directed by Craig Baldwin Working out of his gadget-cluttered basement studio in San Francisco’s Mission district, Craig Baldwin has handcrafted a unique body of subcultural cinema in the past decade. He’s the unabashed Unabomber of underground film, assembling volatile collages of found footage into paranoid stream-of-consciousness narratives that touch on conspiracy
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