Los Angeles Filmforum at the Egyptian presents
The Festival of (In)appropriation #11
Sunday, December 8, 2019, 7:30 pm
At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028
In person: Filmmakers Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Kate Lain, curators Jaimie Baron, Greg Cohen, and Lauren Berliner!
Collage or compilation. Found footage film or recycled cinema. Remix or détournement. Whatever one might call it, the practice of incorporating preexistent media into new artworks engenders novel juxtapositions, new ideas, and latent connotations… often entirely unrelated to the intentions of the original makers. In that regard, such works are truly “inappropriate.” Indeed, the act of (in)appropriation can reveal unimagined relationships between past and present, here and there, intention and subversion, artist and critic, and perhaps even compel us to reexamine what it means to be the “producer” or “consumer” of visual culture itself. Fortunately for our purposes, the past decades have witnessed the emergence of countless new kinds of audiovisual material available for artistic (in)appropriation. In addition to official state and commercial archives, resources like vernacular collections, home movie repositories, and digital archives now provide the artist with a wealth of fascinating matter to reprocess, repurpose, and endow with new meaning and resonance.
Founded in 2009 and curated by Jaimie Baron, Greg Cohen, and Lauren Berliner, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a yearly showcase of contemporary, short-form, audiovisual works that appropriate existing film, video, or other media and redeploy them in “inappropriate” and inventive ways. The Festival’s 11th edition gathers a self-reflexive experimental biopic, a surreal Frankenstein collage animation, a YouTube-sourced musical supercut, a queer reframing of Mexican and Hollywood films, an acousmatic exploration of online beauty standards, a canine-based critique of capitalism, a playful quantum animation of old 16mm film, an interrogation of the dismantling of the major opposition newspaper in Hungary, a deconstruction of our popular culture obsession with female corpses, and a performative rejection of the gender politics of a cult film.
Watch this conversation about Festival of (In)appropriation #8 between Curator Greg Cohen and film scholar Constance Penley at UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center (10/27/2016): https://vimeo.com/191083847
Read this review of Festival of (In)appropriation #7 (2015) in Artillery magazine: https://artillerymag.com/festival-inappropriation-7/
Check out this interview by Laura Wissot with curators Jaimie Baron and Greg Cohen in Filmmaker magazine: https://filmmakermagazine.com/84086-the-festival-of-inappropriation-6-at-los-angeles-filmforum/
Note the change in ticketing for our events at the Egyptian Theatre. Advance paid tickets will be reserved through the American Cinematheque site; Filmforum members will reserve through Brown Paper Tickets. At the theatre on the night of the show, tickets will be available through the Egyptian Theatre ticket window.
Tickets: $12 general; $8 students (with ID)/seniors; $8 for American Cinematheque members; free for Filmforum Members. Paid tickets available in advance through the American Cinematheque from Fandango at https://www.fandango.com/egyptian-theatre-hollywood-aaofx/theater-page?date=2019-12-08 or at the door.
Filmforum member tickets available through Brown Paper Tickets at https://festivalofinappropriation.bpt.me or at the door.
Fandango Sales:
https://www.fandango.com/egyptian-theatre-hollywood-aaofx/theater-page?date=2019-12-08 Please note that student/senior tickets are not available online. Please bring your student ID and/or California ID or license to the box office to receive the discount.
Filmforum members will reserve in advance through Brown Paper Tickets. All Filmforum member reservations will be administered to by Filmforum.
At the theatre on the night of the show, tickets will be available for purchase from the Egyptian Theatre box office. Filmforum members will pick up their tickets from the box office as well. The list will close four hours prior to showtime. Available Filmforum member tickets will be available at the box office on the day of the event.
The box office opens 90 minutes prior to showtime. More information about American Cinematheque ticketing can be found here: http://www.americancinematheque.com/information/
For more information: www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238.
Screening:
She Collage by Kate Lain
US, 2015, digital video, color, sound 9:55
She Collage is part response to the work of California-based collage artist Terry Braunstein, part reflection on the practice of art-making. Like Braunstein’s art, the film is itself a collage—in this case, frame-by-frame hand-manipulated images of Braunstein, paper cutout stop motion animation, archival footage, and an assemblage of sounds. (Kate Lain)
The Edge of Alchemy by Stacey Steers
US, 2017, digital video, color, sound, 19:00
The actors Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor are seamlessly appropriated from their early silent features and cast into a surreal epic with an upending of the Frankenstein story and an undercurrent of hive collapse. The third film in a trilogy examining women’s inner world, this handmade film is constructed from over 6,500 collages. Music by Lech Jankowski of the Brothers Quay. (Stacey Steers)
Lorde – Supercut (Supercut) by Duncan Robson
US, 2017, digital video, color, sound, 3:44
This unofficial music video for Lorde’s “Supercut” from the 2017 album Melodrama is made from covers found on YouTube and Instagram, revealing the diversity of Lorde’s fans as they earnestly channel themselves through Lorde’s song and the internet.
La Mesa by Adrian Garcia Gomez
US, 2018, digital video, color, sound, 9:45
La Mesa explores the intersections of memory, identity and queer desire. It recreates fragmented and romanticized stories of a childhood in rural Mexico as told by the filmmaker’s father. These disjointed vignettes are interwoven with queered reenactments of scenes from popular culture. The filmmaker casts himself in the old Mexican films and American Westerns he grew up watching with his family in California. He appears as the romantic lead opposite the male actors, including Pedro Infante, Mexican national hero and the filmmaker’s childhood crush. The animations are laid over footage of the old family home in Mexico which now sits alone, slowly being consumed by the surrounding countryside. By centering queer desire in his family’s history, the filmmaker validates his childhood experiences while challenging popular representations of masculinity as well as traditional notions of power and vulnerability. (Adrian Garcia Gomez)
Am I Pretty? by Jennifer Proctor
US, 2017, digital video, color, sound, 10:00
A visually silent film appropriating audio from YouTube videos uploaded by tween and teen girls primarily in 2012 as part of a meme. In these videos, the young women entreat viewers to evaluate whether or not they are pretty and post their responses in the comments. Am I Pretty? seeks to call attention to the act of spectatorship invoked in these videos, and what results when the visual basis for judgment is withheld – an acousmatic reduction through the denial of the promised image. (Jennifer Proctor)
Mark Zuckerberg’s Dog by Hawk Martha
US, 2017, digital video, color, sound, 1:34
A very serious critique of capitalism centered on the canine-in-chief of Facebook. (Jaimie Baron)
Light Plays by Anne-Marie Bouchard
Canada, 2017, digital video, color, sound, 7:17
Old footage from 16mm film is scratched, drawn upon, experimentally animated with a quantum dots solution. The film seems at first about sound, the moon, and exotic birds, but it is also about narration, experimentation, and playfulness. (Anne-Marie Bouchard)
8th October 2016 by Péter Lichter
Hungary, 2017, digital video, color, sound, 2:00
The title of the film is the date on which the editorial staff of the Hungary´s largest opposition newspaper, Népszabadság, was fired. The filmmaker tore up copies of that day’s issue, layered them, and then turned them into an urgent collage expressing his yearning for the free expression of opposition viewpoints. The visible edges of the film emphasize the impossibility of presenting information in a complete context. (Péter Lichter)
What Happened to Her by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
US, 2016, digital video, color, sound, 14:00
What Happened to Her is a forensic exploration of our cultural obsession with images of the dead woman on screen. Interspersing found footage from films and police procedural television shows and one actor’s experience of playing the part of a corpse, the film offers a meditative critique on the trope of the dead female body. The visual narrative of the genre, one reinforced through its intense and pervasive repetition, is revealed as a highly structured pageant. Concurrently, the experience of physical invasion and exploitation voiced by the actor pierce the fabric of the screened fantasy. The result is recurring and magnetic film cliché laid bare. (Kristy Guevara-Flanagan)
me and my army by sair goetz
US, 2017, digital video, color, sound, 9:00
me and my army re-imagines the experiences of the actress Adrienne Corri — most famous for her role as a rape victim in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange — as feminist performance art. (sair goetz)
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Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is an Assistant Professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television where she heads the MFA Directing Documentary concentration. She has been making documentary films that focus on gender and representation for nearly two decades, starting with a 1999 experimental documentary about a blow-up doll (which screened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other venues). Her first feature-length film, Going on 13 (2009), covers four years in the lives of four adolescent girls; it premiered at Tribeca and was broadcast on PBS. Kristy also produced and directed several short films, including El Corrido de Cecilia Rios (1999), winner of the Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area Short Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which chronicles the violent death of a 15-year-old girl. It was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and subsequently broadcast on the Sundance Channel. Her feature, Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines (2013), includes Lynda Carter, Lindsay Wagner, and real-life superheroines such as Gloria Steinem and Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) to trace the evolution and legacy of the comic book hero Wonder Woman as a way to reflect on society’s anxieties about women’s liberation. Her recent short, What Happened to Her (2016) premiered at Hot Docs, where it received an honorable mention for best short. https://www.chuparosafilms.com/
Kate Lain
Jaimie Baron (Festival Director) Jaimie Baron is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her work on documentary, experimental film and video, audiovisual appropriation, and digital media has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her first book, The Archive Effect: FoundFootage and the Audiovisual Experience of History, was published in 2014. She is also a co-founder of Docalogue, an online space for scholars and filmmakers to engage in conversations about contemporary documentary.
Greg Cohen is an artist, Associate Programmer at Los Angeles Filmforum, and Lecturer in Latin American Cinema and Visual Culture at UCLA. His work in video, photography, and multi-media installation has been exhibited nationally, internationally, and online, and draws on interests ranging from landscape theory to the history of architecture and from experimental archives to the intersections of art and politics. As a founding associate of REASArch (group for Research on Experimental Accumulation and Speculative Archives), Cohen has produced The Valaco Archive, an ongoing visual research project (https://valacoarchive.com), parts of which were featured in Limn magazine (http://limn.it/). The first iteration of his current project, Grupo Anarquitectura. Rama Argentina, was recently exhibited at the SALON 02_PLAN group exhibition, organized by UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative.
Lauren S. Berliner is an Assistant Professor of Media & Communication and Cultural Studies at University of Washington Bothell. Her research focuses on participatory media production practices, gender and sexuality, and pedagogy. Also a filmmaker, she has screened her work internationally and has facilitated video production programming for girls and queer youth. She earned her PhD. in Communication from UC San Diego, an MA in Visual and Media Art from Emerson College, and a BA in English and Anthropology from Wesleyan University.
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Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2019 is our 44th year.
Coming Soon to Los Angeles Filmforum:
Dec 5 – Thurs – Teo Hernandez’s Salome with live music by Dorian Wood, at the Philosophical Research Society
Dec 8 – The 11th Festival of (In)appropriation, at the Egyptian Theatre
Memberships available, $70 single, $115 dual, or $50 single student
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