Los Angeles Filmforum presents
An Evening with Jane Wodening
Sunday, March 8, 2020, 7:30 pm
At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028
In Person: Writer Jane Wodening!
Join us for a very special evening, a first for Los Angeles, a visit from the writer Jane Wodening, (formerly known as Jane Brakhage), featuring classic avant-garde films by Stan Brakhage, Barbara Hammer, Jonas Mekas, and new films by Nathaniel Dorsky and Mark Street!
Now in her ninth decade, Wodening played an unheralded but significant role in the American avant-garde film movement. She appeared in many of Brakhage’s films during their thirty-year marriage, including Window Water Baby Moving (1959), one of the best-known works in the canon of American avant-garde film. Jane was an essential part of Stan’s construction of a transcendent mode of cinematic vision refracted through everyday life in their family home in the Rocky Mountains. She also became friends with many of the numerous filmmakers, poets, and artists who passed through the Brakhage home. She has only recently begun to talk about those years again, in a series of as-yet unpublished interviews with film scholar Jennifer Peterson. This is a rare public appearance by this great storyteller.
Jane Wodening, born Mary Jane Collom in Western Springs, IL (1936), spent thirty years as the first wife of film artist Stan Brakhage (1957-1987) then for over two years lived in her car, driving all over America, producing the book, Driveabout. She has always loved animals and has written many short stories about them and her encounters with them, including biographies and portraits, as well as numerous other short stories of people and adventures. After her Driveabout period, she lived alone in a tiny cabin at 10,000 feet elevation in the Rocky Mountains for nearly a decade, producing Living Up There while getting out several collections of short stories. In 2004, she moved to Denver and beginning in 2009 commenced publication of Wolf Dictionary, The Lady Orangutan and Other Stories, Animals I’ve Neglected to Mention, and Brakhage’s Childhood. She is now working on a brief biography of the earth.
Curated by Jennifer Peterson and Adam Hyman
“Brakhage: When Light Meets Life” by Max Nelson
Essay in NY Review of Books, reflecting on Jane and Stan’s filmic relationship.
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=2020-03-08 or at the door.
Filmforum member tickets available through Brown Paper Tickets at or at the door.
Fandango Sales:
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 show time. 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:
Cat’s Cradle
By Stan Brakhage, 1959, 16mm, color silent, 6.5 min.
“Sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a ‘medium’ cat.” – Cinema 16
“The film is both visceral and meditative. Its rapid montage ensures that no single image ever lasts for very long; each precise yet casual framing is there and then gone again before it has fully registered. And yet the cumulative mood of the film is languid rather than frenetic, despite the pace of the editing. It creates a vivid and powerfully felt impression of a lazy morning, of lovers lounging around the house, enjoying one another’s company, doing routine chores or doing nothing. The repetition of images enhances this impression: the same shots of Brakhage and Jane recur again and again, reinforcing the languor of this morning. This is a deeply affecting film, an ode to domesticity. It is sensual without being explicitly sexual; its pleasures, as in many of Brakhage’s best films, are the pleasures of the world, the pleasures especially of vision and sensation.” — http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2011/01/films-i-love-50-cats-cradle-stan.html
An excerpt from Walden
By Jonas Mekas, 1968, color, sound, 10 minute excerpt on Blu-Ray
Hymn to Her
Stan Brakhage, 1974, 16mm, color, silent, 2.5 min.
“HER” to me is always Jane, in the first place, but also Hera: “goddess of women and marriage,” naturally enough. Then, too, as it is a hymn of light, and as he/me feels the self that way, it sings of and to itself.
Jane Brakhage
By Barbara Hammer, 1974, 16mm, b&w, sound, 10 min.
A documentary on the pioneer woman, her wisdom, philosophy and common sense: Jane Brakhage as herself is the viewpoint rather than Jane Brakhage, wife of the filmmaker, Stan Brakhage.
This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.
“Hammer’s Jane Brakhage is both an homage and a rebuttal to the many films of Jane made by her husband Stan Brakhage, which relentlessly visualize her as a symbol of transcendent femininity, confined to the gendered roles of heterosexual lover, wife, mother, and birthing body. Hammer’s film of Jane, one of many cinematic studies of women she would make over the next 45 years, pursues a different set of ideas about femininity and a different kind of cinematic portraiture. Hammer’s Jane Brakhage combines a feminist portrayal of Jane’s domestic labor with an interest in Jane’s deep connection to animals, plants, and nature. The film resonates with a tension between conflicting impulses, including a critique of Jane’s role as a disempowered housewife and a veneration of Jane’s persona as a singular kind of earth mother. The finished film is an ardent and delightful portrait of Jane and Hammer together for a brief moment, and bears visual testimony to Hammer’s own working through of 1970s feminist aesthetics and politics.” – Jennifer Peterson, from a forthcoming essay on Barbara Hammer’s Jane Brakhage in Feminist Media Histories 6:2 (spring 2020)
Creation
By Stan Brakhage, 1979, 16mm, color, silent, 17 min.
“… almost like the Earth itself – the green ice-covered rocks, the slicing feeling, the compressive feeling of the glaciers. The whole time I was watching I kept thinking that you were a master of the North, the arctic landscape – the dark red flowers in the dusky light, the deep blue light, the tall trees with the running mists, and Jane looking … the ice, the water, the moss, the golden light. A visual symphony ….” – Hollis Melton
So Many Ideas Impossible to Do All
Mark Street, 2019, digital, color, sound, 11 min.
Los Angeles premiere!
Apricity
By Nathaniel Dorsky, 2019, 16mm, 18 fps, 22 min., color, silent, 22 min.
Los Angeles Premiere!
The title Apricity refers to the warmth of the sun in winter. It is an homage to the writer Jane (Brakhage) Wodening. In speaking to her I mused, “perhaps your age is the winter and you are the warmth of the sun.” N.D
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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, the Wilhelm Family Foundation, ad the American Cinematheque. 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. 2020 is our 45th year.
Coming Soon to Los Angeles Filmforum:
Feb 29 – Co-sponsoring Tribute to Carolee Schneemann events at REDCAT
Mar 7 – Co-sponsoring Isaac Julien at REDCAT
Mar 8 – Jane Wodening, at the Spielberg Theatre
Mar 10 – Tues – Luis Macias, at the Echo Park Film Center
Mar 12 – Thurs – Patterns-related show, at MOCA
Mar 15 – M68 show, at the Spielberg Theatre
Mar 21 – Co-presenting Malic Amalya & Nathan Hill, with Dirty Looks, at the Echo Park Film Center
Memberships available, $75 single, $125 dual, or $40 single student
Contact us at lafilmforum@yahoo.com.
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