May 23 - May 29
Seattle International Film Festival presents
ALTERNATE CINEMA
co-presented by Northwest Film Film Forum
Your typical movie aims to engage your emotions through storytelling in such a way that the filmmaking becomes invisible. Alternate Cinema is different. Incorporating experimental and avant-garde elements, these films engage you on an intellectual as well as emotional level; often by making you aware that you’re watching a film. Czech director Ivo Trajkov achieves this effect by making his 8mm feature MOVIE, OR AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF AUTEUR FULM MAKING
both a road movie and an independent filmmaker's manual of advice. Other filmmakers hold their shots for long periods of time, shifting your attention from story to shot composition and encouraging you to examine motion pictures as though they were paintings, as in MILKY WAY or CASTING A GLANCE. Because themes and stories aren't spoon-fed, audiences must work to decipher a thru-line, such as the colonial self-criticism found in EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY or the city symphony of human foibles that is YOU, THE LIVING. Then there's the alternate documentaries like Marie Losier's unconventional short films about experimental artists, Hartmut Bitomsky's philosophical essay about life, death, and tiny particles, DUST, and Alina Marazzi's exquisitely edited archival films for the post-feminist WE WANT ROSES TOO. Heinz Emigholz's chronological look at modernist buildings of Adolf Loos, is given without commentary and the architecture itself becomes autobiography, in LOOS ORNAMENTAL. This year we have all this and shorts, too! We invite all adventurous filmgoers to take a look at the movies that exist in the realm of Alternate Cinema.
Program curated by Andy Spletzer and Adam Sekuler.
MAY 28, Wednesday at 7pm
CASTING A GLANCE
(James Benning, USA, 2007, 16mm, 80 min)
James Benning, the master of the American landscape film, focuses his unique cinematographic eye on the famous landscape work-of-art Spiral Jetty created in 1970 by Robert Smithson in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Sixteen visits record fascinating differences in light, time and season.
MAY 24, Saturday at 9:30pm, MAY 26, Monday at 5pm
DUST
(Hartmut Bitomsky, Germany/Switzerland, 2007, 90 min)
An ambitious documentary about the tiniest of particles, Dust is as much about the impossibility of maintaining a clean house as it's a philosophical essay about life and death. From aesthetics to illnesses, Helmut Bitomsky ponders the constructive and destructive nature of dust.
MAY 24, Saturday at 7pm; MAY 28, Wednesday at 9pm
EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY
(Michelange Quay, Haiti/France, 2007, 35mm, 105 min)
Elegant lyrical surrealism and restrained fury in a political pamphlet, all rolled into one. Haitian director Michelange Quay shows us, in breathtaking tableaux vivants, the dramatic colonial heritage of his parents' birthplace. With Sylvie Testud and a great amateur cast.
MAY 25, Sunday at 5pm; MAY 27, Tuesday at 7pm
LOOS ORNAMENTAL
(Heinz Emigholz, Austria, 2008, 35mm, 72 min)Adolf Loos helped define Modernist architecture with his 1908 essay proclaiming ornament to be a crime. This chronological look at 28 of his surviving buildings, without extraneous commentary, now defines him. The movie plays like a game, encouraging viewers to make connections, judge design choices, and chart the growth of this amazing artist.
MAY 24, Saturday at 5pm; MAY 26, Monday at 7pm
MILKY WAY
(Benedek Fliegauf, Hungary/Germany, 2007, 35mm, 82 min)
This avant-garde psychedelia, poetic minimalism, meditative, cartoon-esque sketch is a distinctively original look at the modern world. The viewer is taken to an orchestrated reality from swimming pool choreography to a mountain bike ballet.
MAY 23, Friday at 9pm; May 25, Sunday at 7pm
MOVIE, OR AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF AUTEUR FILM MAKING
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
(Ivo Trajkov, Czech Republic/Republic of Macedonia, 35mm, 84 min)
After his production company goes bankrupt, a director hits the road with stolen money and an 8mm camera. Along the way he picks up a bald hitchhiker and a sexy girl. Mixing documentary with fiction, director and star Ivo Trajkov confesses his womanizing ways while giving advice to young filmmakers.
MAY 26, Monday at 9pm; MAY 29, Thursday at 7pm
WE WANT ROSES TOO
(Alina Marazzi, Italy/Switzerland, 2007, 81 min)
A treasure trove of perfectly chosen Italian film clips from the ’60s and ’70s evokes the era, the nature of relationships between men and women, and how those relationships have changed (or not) over time. Intelligently edited and without contemporary commentary, these glimpses of the past eloquently speak for themselves.
MAY 25, Sunday at 9pm
WHO’S AFRAID OF KATHY ACKER?
(Barbara Caspar, Austria/Germany, 2008, 80 min)
Kathy Acker was a pro-sex feminist author whose life became inextricably blurred with her experimental fiction. Barbara Caspar's documentary about Acker mixes interviews of friends and colleagues with archival photos, television interview footage, animated adaptations of her work, and interviews with girls who were inspired by her.
MAY 23, Friday at 7pm; MAY 29, Thursday at 9pm
PORTRAITS IN CINEMA
Specializing in unique short 16mm film portraits, director Marie Losier gets intimate with people by recording their performances, inserting herself into their worlds, or by inviting them to participate auspiciously in hers. (69 min)
EAT MY MAKE UP!!
USA, 2005, 6 minutes, with George Kuchar
Five winsome damsels picnic on the roof of a warehouse in charming Long Island City, but when a swarm of flies interrupts their feast the young ladies run amok.
ELECTROCUTE YOUR STARS
USA, 2004, 8 minutes, with George Kuchar
Kuchar travels through snow confetti, strobe flashes, and artificial wind in this dream-portrait that includes Janet Leigh in the shower, a red raincoat, and comic books.
JAYE LADY JAYE
USA, 2008, 15 min with Genesis P-Orridge Lady Jaye
The pandrogynous partners share their home, a visit to the MoMA, and their tour with Thee Majesty and Throbbing Gristle. A work-in-progress in celebration of the life of Lady Jaye, who died suddenly October 9, 2007.
MANUELLE LABOR
USA, 2007, 10 minutes, a collaboration between Marie Losier and Guy Maddin
Two sisters, five brothers, a doctor, two nurses and the miraculous birth of a pair of hands ... but whose hands are they?
SNOW BEARD
USA, 2007, 3 minutes, with Mike Kuchar
In-camera edited, a 3-minute dance with Mike Kuchar as the snow falls and his beard turns into a snow tree.
Tony Conrad, DreaMinimalist
DREAMINIMALIST
USA, 2008, 27 minutes, with Tony Conrad
Two years of Conrad’s life playing with costumes, practicing his violin, cooking pickled films, performing at Tonics in NYC, and his involvement with Flaming Creature.
MAY 27, Tuesday at 9pm
THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
A look at place and space, past and present, personal and impersonal, literal and figurative, intentional and unintentional. (82 mins)
What the Water Said, Nos 4-6
(David Gatten, USA, 2007, 17 min)
Encased in crab traps, fragmented filmstrips harbor mystical messages from the underwater world.
Smells Like Teen Spirit
(Jem Cohen, USA, 2007, 7 min)
A portrait of Patti Smith and her son, William Blake’s death mask, Kurt Cobain, and cats as household saints as America moves from guitars to dirty dishes.
Shiny Things
(Salise Hughes, USA, 2008, 5 min)
Seattle filmmaker Hughes uses found footage to give Neil Young's classic “Heart of Gold” a re-orchestration.
Interpretive Site: Kosmos
(Karn Junkinsmith, USA, 2008, 6 min)
A town swallowed by a river in 1968 reemerges barren. Rediscovery begins with Frisbees and a native dancer.
The Production and Decay of Strange Particles
(Jon Behrens, USA, 2008, 8 min)
This film experiments with the film’s emulsion and image bleaching before using the bleached film as a canvas for a short filmic poem about the abstract history of cinema.
Beirut Outtakes
(Peggy Ahwesh, USA, 2007, 8 min)
Film found in the cellars of a long-since closed classic cinema in Beirut becomes a true time machine with an eloquent montage of old Lebanese dramas and western action films.
Between 2 Deaths
(Wago Kreider, USA, 2006, 7 min) Singular tension emerges between the familiar VERTIGO images shot in 1957 and images from the cemetery of Mission Dolores in San Francisco that remains almost unchanged today.
The Boy Who Died
(John Price, Canada, 2007, 7 min)
Impressions of Saskatchewan after hearing that one a documentary film’s subjects barely managed to survive a devastating skidoo accident. Her friend who was driving was not as lucky.
Observando el Cielo
(Jeanne Liotta, USA, 2007, 19 min)
Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth. This work is neither a metaphor nor a symbol, but is feeling towards a fact in the midst of perception, which time flows through.
Meteorites
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2007, 15 min)
Meteorites is made as a gift for the auspicious occasion on the Eightieth Birthday Anniversary of His Majesty King of Thailand.
