Archive for the ‘screenings/events’ Category

Opening May 18th, 2012 at the New York’s QUAD Cinema,  the award winning dance documentary NEVER STAND STILL starts its theatrical release.

This 74 minute documentary directed by Ron Honsa explores the pleasure, self-control, and courage one face’s when choosing a life in dance.  Live performances documented at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, interviews with exceptional artists, rare archival footage, and behind the scenes footage brings the world of dance alive, as NEVER STAND STILL visits the iconic international nexus for dance: Jacob’s Pillow.  Winner of Best Documentary at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival and the Dance Camera West Festival in Los Angeles, this remarkable dance film will be followed by openings in Los Angeles and additional cities.

Upfront and personal interviews offer an inside look at leading choreographers and dancers lives: Suzanne Farrell, one of the greatest ballerinas in the world; Tony Award-winner Bill Irwin; celebrated dancer Rasta Thomas; former Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo star Frederic Franklin; creative and imaginative Mark Morris; and Merce Cunningham, in one of his last interviews.

Narrated by Bill T. Jones, NEVER STAND STILL Features Amazing Performance Footage
& Candid Conversations w/Luminaries of Dance
Preorder the DVD

On Sunday May 6th 2012, a crowd of 100+ people came out to The Wild Project in the East Village for a screening and dance extravaganza by the Girl Walk//All Day community.

Opening the show was a performance by the flex group Street’s Finest with a guest appearance by Anne Marsen (star of Girl Walk//All Day). Sporting new pink hair, Anne danced fiercely along side the six guys in the group, who popped, locked, and dropped it as soon as they walked onto the stage. In black preppy outfits with red sneakers, they danced to some of today’s hottest songs including Ellie Goulding, Starry Eyed. In between each song mix, a comedic voice would transition into the next song keeping the audience members on their toes. Throughout the performance were movements of slow motion, acrobatics, tutting, and freestyle clumps. One particular moment that stood out was when one male dancer supported all of his weight from his arms while being on top of another partner’s back. The audience embraced the high energy of this group with their comedic styles and facial gestures. At the end everyone got to their feet to applaud. Who knows maybe we will see them on America’s Best Dance Crew?! Read the rest of this entry »

Filmmaker Amy Ruhl is fascinated by the body in film, particularly when it becomes mutated, dismembered or perverted by the cinematic medium. For her Kinetic Cinema program presented this past Monday at Uniondocs in Brooklyn, she focused on the rich history of the female body in film, especially that most intriguing of female archetypes, the femme fatale.

In her first short film, “How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body” Ruhl reimagines the famous courtesan and spy as if she lived her life the way it ended (by execution with her body donated to science and her head put on display at the Musée d’Anatomie). Ruhl’s Mata Hari is quite literally a person split in her allegiances – between mind and body, warring countries, sexualities, high and low art. There was no reconciling her contradictions, and in trying to have everything both ways, she enraged the very public she was trying to seduce and was destroyed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mata Hari, an erotic dancer and courtesan, was executed by firing squad for double espionage in World War I. After her death, she was decapitated, her body donated to anatomical study, and her head displayed at the Musee d’Anatomie in Paris. In her latest short, How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body, filmmaker Amy Ruhl takes Mata Hari’s tragic ending and reimagines her as a strip tease artist whose ability to remove her head takes Belle Époche Paris by storm. Using Oscar Wilde’s Salome as a site for narrative and historical interaction, the film draws upon the cultural phenomenon of “Salomania” among largely lesbian and bisexual female performers in order to engage with an era when Orientalism sold, scandal became success, and deviant desires equaled a crime punishable by death.

For her Kinetic Cinema program, Ruhl will show How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body, using the film as a site to examine how the female body, under the unique technology of cinema, has been the primary source of spectacle since the beginnings of film. Ruhl’s work engages with sources ranging from George Méliès’ “trick films,” to Nazimova’s Salome (Dance of the Seven Veils) to Vera Chytilova’s phantasmagoria scene in Daisies, one of the most lauded Czech new wave films. She will present examples of these influences and discuss how they have informed How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body which was made in part by collaging early film footage together with live action animation.

The program will open with two shorts by contemporary experimental filmmakers, Kerrie Welsh and Amy Greenfield.

Kerrie Welsh’s Peter, Peter… is a dark retelling of the children’s rhyme “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,” that illustrates the disparity between the narratives we construct and the realities they represent.

Amy Greenfield’s Wildfire is the final film in her acclaimed Club Midnight film cycle and depicts women “clothed” in electronically generated flaming colors, reincarnating Thomas Edison’s 1894 hand-tinted film, Annabelle Dances.

Both filmmakers will join Ruhl for a lively discussion with the audience.

Monday, May 7th, 7:30pm

$9 suggested donation – Tickets

Uniondocs
322 Union Avenue (at Maujer Street)
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Trains:
L train to Lorimer street
G to Metropolitan Ave
J train to Hewes Street

Go to our website for more information on the rest of our Kinetic Cinema season.

Anthology Film Archives presents an event celebrating the book release of FLESH INTO LIGHT: THE FILMS OF AMY GREENFIELD by ROBERT HALLER on Monday, April 30th 2012 at 7pm.

The event includes a screening of Greenfield’s pioneering cine-dance and video-dance works that span 40 years and features the premiere of BODYSONGS, a work commissioned by WGBH TV in 1979 and made in collaboration with cinema verité filmmaker Richard Leacock. At the time Greenfield and Leacock shot a clothed version and a nude version of their film, but both ended up being banned from broadcast. When Leacock passed away in 2011, Greenfield revisited the nude video dance footage, restored it on today’s technology, and found in it a new concept of timeless nude duets as moving image art: BodySongs.

Other films on the program include MUSEic Of The BODy (2010), edited from Greenfield’s 1994 multimedia performance with video art pioneer Nam June Paik, the underground classic Element, and Wildfire from Greenfield’s acclaimed Club Midnight film cycle.

Greenfield and Haller will be present to answer questions and sign Flesh into Light at the reception following the screening.

In Flesh Into Light, Haller articulates the essential principles of cine-dance through Greenfield’s films, which re-invent dance as fundamental human motion not just for the camera, but as and inseparable from cinema. “For Greenfield, the body moving with and against the close-up camera can be the concrete image of inner human nature, an instrument for its expression and a vessel containing images and actions that crystalize the meanings and mysteries of experience: movement and memory, the past and the present moment.” – Robert Haller, Flesh Into Light

Admission is $9. No reservations required.

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. (@ 2nd Street)
Manhattan, New York.

Click here for more information on tickets.

Also of Note: Amy Greenfield will be present at Movement Media’s next Kinetic Cinema event on May 7th at Uniondocs, screening her film Wildfire and taking part in the discussion.