Don't Miss the New Experimental Film Series at the Tang Starting March 30

Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon — Still image from Maya Deren’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon.

A new screening series starts March 30 at the Tang Teaching Museum in the Somers Room.

Whole Grain: Experiments in Film and Video is a series of three screenings of thematic and director-focused collections of canonical films meant to serve as an introduction to the filmmaking practice.

The films in the series subvert, challenge, and play with classic narrative and stylistic conventions, with featured films including Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963) – “a cameraless film in which the wings of dead moths are attached to the filmstrip to produce a gorgeous abstract flutter”.

Whole Grain: Experiments in Film and Video Series at the Tang

Handmade Films

Thursday, March 30, 2017 at 7 p.m.

Explore how experimental filmmakers have created films without using a camera. Featuring

Aleph (untitled) (Wallace Berman, US, 1958-1976, 9 minutes, 16mm)
Color Cry (Len Lye, US, 1952, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Rhythm (Len Lye, US, 1957, 1 minutes 16mm)
Free Radicals (Len Lye, US, 1958-1979, 5 minutes, 16mm)
Tal Barlow (Len Lye, US, 1979-1980, 6 minutes, 16mm)
Particles in Space (Len Lye, US, 1966, 4 minutes, 16mm)
Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, US, 1963, 4 minutes, 16mm)
At the Academy (Guy Sherwin, US, 1974, 5 minutes, 16mm)
Removed (Naomi Uman, US, 1999, 6 minutes, 16mm)
Black and White Trypps #1 (Ben Russell, US, 2005, 7 minutes, 16mm)

Subversion

Saturday, April 1, 2017 at 4 p.m.

Mine surrealist and psychedelic imagery to undermine traditional narrative film structure in

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, US, 1943, 14 minutes, 16mm)
Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, US, 1947, 15 minutes, 16mm)
7362 (Pat O’Neill, US, 1967, 10 minutes, 16mm)
Reckless Eyeballing (Christopher Harris, US, 2004, 13 minutes, 16mm)

Soft Fiction

Saturday, April 8, 2017 at 4 p.m.

Chick Strand is a pioneer in experimental documentary. The Tang calls her Soft Fiction “a remarkable work of collective representation. Each of the five women in the film collaborated with Strand to build the films rich and complex picture of female subjectivity blending poetic documentary with lyrical abstraction. It’s rare and open depiction of female sensuality was controversial when first shown but Soft Fiction is now celebrated as one of the defining films of the 1970s.”