Under The Stars

Thursday, July 28, 2011, 8:30 pm
SilverShed

119 West 25th Street PH
New York NY 10001

PROGRAM
Matthias Müller, Home Stories, 16mm on dv, 6min., 1990
Glen Fogel, Quarry, digital video, 3.5min., (exhibition edit), 2008
Luther Price, A Hallow Kiss for Mark Lapore, 16mm, 10min., 2008
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, A Separate Peace, digital video, 4min., 2009
Lewis Klahr, Her Fragrant Emulsion, 16mm, 10min., 1987
Joseph Cornell, Rose Hobart, 16mm., 19min., 1936
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, The Maids, digital video, 4min., 2011
Marie Menken, Andy Warhol, 16mm on dv, 18min., 1964 - 65

Read the intro on the L Magazine

Dirty Looks presents Under the Stars: Experimental portrait films of stars and their makers. These distinct, experimental works take stars and other filmmakers as their starting point, working with found footage or reportage style camera work, these seven filmmakers explore star text and the particular form of personal obsession that such heavenly bodies engender. The screening will be Dirty Looks' first rooftop screening of the season and will be accompanied by a complimentary publication produced with Birdsong Micropress.

Matthias Müller's Home Stories culls from classic Hollywood Woman's Films like Written on the Wind, Madame X and The Birds, re-editing footage shot off the tv to examine the finite gestures and the repetitive interplays of genre (and gendered) cinema. In Quarry, Glen Fogel submits himself to an act of revisionary portraiture, inserting himself into a particularly unsettling episode of "Law and Order." A Separate Peace reconfigures brief sequences of homoerotic longing hidden in this coming of age teen drama, A Separate Piece, the 1972 film adaptation of the John Knowles young adult novel. "It is fraught with admiration, competition, and (un)conscious attempts to contain the other."

Luther Price's A Hallow Kiss for Mark LaPore is an elliptical portrait film made after the passing of the late, namesake experimental filmmaker. Price's typically masterful use of found-footage is embellished by a cinematic stutter effect that brings the screen to life with a frenetic luminosity. Lewis Klahr's Her Fragrant Emulsion is an obsessive homage to B-starlet Mimsy Farmer. “The images I use are outmoded, and there’s a way that they’re dead. By working with them I’m kind of re-animating them, so I don’t really think of myself as an animator, as much as a re-animator that’s bringing these things back into some kind of life.” Made by Joseph Cornell in 1936, Rose Hobart is one of the most important films in the history of experimental cinema. Cornell reduced the adventure film East of Borneo to longing takes of its star, Rose Hobart. Placing a blue glass before the projector, the film is a wondrous rabbit hole of dreamy obsession. The Maids submits the 1975 film adaptation of Jean Genet's play to the same technique used to create A Separate Peace. Marie Menken's Andy Warhol *captures the elusive artist in a delirious candor, at work in the studio, at exhibition openings, rarely has Warhol been caught this unguarded as in close friend Marie Menken's lens.

*The print screened at Under The Stars, supplied by and © the Museum of Modern Art, will feature an alternate, rose tint, as per Cornell's later print specifications.