Light Industry

The Sky on Location, Babette Mangolte, 1982, 16mm, 78 mins Introduced by Alex Klein Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at 7:30pm Light Industry, 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn The landscape is not seen in its postcardish grandeur as captured in the photographs of Ansel Adams, nor through its shapes as in a Cezanne or Constable painting, but rather the film captures the mood of the landscape as in a Turner painting. The film attempts to construct geography of the land from North to South, East to West and season-to-season through colors instead of maps. - BM, 1982 The idea for the film came while I was traveling in 1975 on buses roaming the West. Spending often a night in the bus I was leaving a sunset in Arizona and waking up by sunrise in Wyoming. I noticed that the color of the sky changed from North to South and that color shift was what I tried to capture starting 1980 and 1981 when I shot the footage that became The Sky on Location. The unmapped vastness was compelling. I went off the road, slept in the wild and exposed myself to the elements, to feel in my muscles and bones the weariness of the first emigrants who crossed that land. Can we imagine how somebody sees some unknown and awesome thing for the first time? For once my foreignness was an asset in making a film. I had no prejudice or misconception like the ones I heard from a friend born in Douglas, Arizona, who, when I told him I was going to trace the four seasons in the landscape of the West, replied: “But there are no seasons in The West." He was wrong. The colors if not the shapes change radically from winter to summer, specifically the color of the sky. I think landscape moves because the sunlight moves across it. And if you can capture the changing light you have transformed the land and the way we look at it. Although I shot mostly static shots I could evoke movement by fast cutting which is easier to do with static shots than panoramic or tracking shots. At first I had decided to shoot only spaces that were untouched by man-made structures and also that were totally emptied of humans. But distance and scale were difficult to show in shots that were never connected to a known dimension. The image of something that is a boulder could be just the image of a small stone. I included some human figures here and there that suddenly created the surprise effect of distance or proximity. You need scale to understand what you see and jolt your viewer. A shot that suddenly revealed the vastness or smallness of what you saw was needed to create that jolt. The three voices are essential to break any possibility of contemplation and complacency and introduce the energy and excitation of being there. It also permitted to establish how much what we see is conditioned by what we know. - BM, 2004 Alex Klein is the Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE’60) Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Tickets - $8, available at door. Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. www.lightindustry.org/skyonlocation

Coming up at Light Industry: An Evening with NANG. www.lightindustry.org/nang

Coming up at Light Industry: an evening of prints from the personal collection of critic J. Hoberman. www.lightindustry.org/hobermancollection

Online bidding for Light Industry’s tenth anniversary benefit is now LIVE at Artsy: www.artsy.net/light-industry

Dyke TV Tuesday, March 13, 2018 at 7:30pm Light Industry 155 Freeman Street Brooklyn, New York Curated by Kelly Rakowski (@h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y) and Ainara Tiefenthäler You’re watching Dyke TV, television to incite, subvert, organize, and provoke — the opening line of the first show from, by, and for lesbians. Founded by Ana Maria Simo, Linda Chapman, and Mary Patierno, and based out of New York City, Dyke TV first aired in 1993 and became a weekly staple on dozens of public TV stations across the country. Its topics ranged from the killing of Brandon Teena and the conviction of Aileen Wuornos, to the latest Madonna sex-gossip and the daily joys and grievances of gay cowgirls, immigrants, athletes, cops, artists, you name it. Regular segments of the magazine-style show included Street Squad’s ”dyke on the street” interviews, Lesbian Health, Workplace, and audience favorite I Was a Lesbian Child, in which grown-up lesbians narrated their own childhood photos. The program was largely produced by the volunteer efforts of hundreds of women around the United States. Among Dyke TV’s collaborators and guests were many celebrated lesbian artists of the time, as well as some who would only later become known to a wider mainstream audience. Pamela Sneed, Cheryl Dunye, Nicole Eisenman, Sarah Schulman, Ellen Cantor, Carolee Schneemann, Guinevere Turner, and Dorothy Allison are only a few of the women who appeared on the show in its first two years. “Lesbians in cities nationwide are currently forming independent groups to produce segments,” the show’s lavender-colored 1996 website proudly declared. “Dyke TV encourages every lesbian to pick up a video camera and aim.” After an impressive nearly-300 episode run, the show virtually disappeared in 2005, just missing the popularization of digital video and online streaming; its taped archive remains widely unseen to this day. For tonight's screening at Light Industry, we will present a best-of selection of segments from 1993-1994, followed by a conversation with some of the women who captured and created this chapter of dyke history. - KR/AT Tickets - $8, available at door. Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.

Next week at Light Industry: An Evening with Walden. www.lightindustry.org/walden

The Smoker: A Brief History of the Stag Film Tuesday, February 20, 2018 at 7:30pm Light Industry 155 Freeman Street Brooklyn, New York www.lightindustry.org/thesmoker

Hail the New Puritan, Charles Atlas, 1986, digital projection, 85 mins Introduced by Tobi Haslett Friday, February 9, 2018 at 7:30pm Light Industry 155 Freeman Street Brooklyn, New York Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan now looks like a glinting frieze from a vanished London, a film that hymns the beau monde of the demimonde while tracking a day in the life of the choreographer Michael Clark. Atlas, valiant practitioner of dance for camera, here presents a kind of faux cinéma vérité as he snatches up samples of Thatcher-era cool: nightlife icons like Leigh Bowery, Trojan, and Rachel Auburn primp and bicker; the drag queen Lana Pellay gives Clark a regal kiss on the cheek; and Clark himself, smirking through an interview with a square reporter, gives a little summa of why he loves the Manchester post-punk band The Fall. Mark E. Smith, the rat-faced raconteur and mastermind of the group, makes his own cameo. Joined by his then wife and bandmate Brix, Smith wears tweed and delivers a few lines of gnomic, jagged dialogue with put-on pomp. Brix chimes in, as does a slick-looking Clark. The whole thing sounds like a Fall track: “Pop art, nor ghoulish tinkering, is not science.” “How can we quantify the mongrelization of class and soccer?” “Computer trust will be the death of the American brain.” “Some wash so much, their features are eroded.” Text is stamped across the screen: “speaks in semantic ciphers.” The line is, of course, a perfectly adequate description of Smith, who died on January 24. This screening is a memorial to him. Hail the New Puritan may be a shining portrait of Clark, but the film bristles with Smithian sensibility: Atlas lifts his title from “Spectre vs. Rector,” one of the four Fall songs to which Clark and his dancers perform (in costumes made by Bowery). And it’s Smith’s presence that shoves the film brusquely into its political moment—that is, the shredding of the welfare state under Tory rule. Here, then, is a punk ballet, set against the malevolent backdrop of neoliberal technocracy. As Smith himself says, “Computer hamlets, inefficient in their cock-ups, are not something to dance past.” The Fall is no longer with us—but the technocrats are. One of the film’s scenes has a stunning poignancy, a bitter accuracy, and a special relevance to a world made by Thatcherites but now without a Smith. Clark struts into a dressing room and starts fussing with his mohawk, as his friend Trojan makes the sneering remark: “Punk’s dead, Michael.” - TH Tickets - Pay what you wish ($8 suggested donation), available at door. Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.

THE CINEMA WILL CROAK! Raymond Rohauer's exhibitor manual for Isidore Isou's Traite de bave et d'eternite (1951): https://cinefiles.bampfa.berkeley.edu/cinefiles/DocDetail?docId=37964 Catch a rare 35mm screening this weekend at Metrograph, where it's showing with early Stan Brakhage films: http://www.metrograph.com/film/film/1330/venom-and-eternity

Daybreak & Whiteye, Stan Brakhage, 1957, 9 min, 16mm + Venom and Eternity, Isidore Isou, 1951, 132 min, 35mm Metrograph No. 7 Ludlow Street, New York Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 5pm www.metrograph.com/film/film/1330/venom-and-eternity Out of print for over 40 years, Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision has recently been reissued by Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry. Originally published by Jonas Mekas as a special issue of Film Culture, Metaphors is Brakhage’s major theoretical statement and remains, as J. Hoberman dubbed it, “one of the great documents of American cinema.” To mark the occasion, Metrograph presents two rarely-screened early works by Brakhage alongside Isidore Isou’s Venom and Eternity, a film that made an indelible impression on the young Brakhage when he first saw it at Frank Stauffacher’s Art in Cinema series in San Francisco. Isou’s Lettrist provocation launches an extended assault upon cinematic conventions—sound divorced from picture, shots presented upside down, and even the celluloid itself abraded—in order to break down the art form so that it might be reconstituted anew. Below are letters from Brakhage to Isou: Stan Brakhage 650 Shotwell St. San Francisco 10, Calif. U.S.A. November 5, 1962 Dear Isidore Isou, This is a long overdue letter to express grateful thanks for all you have given me. Some, almost, 10 years ago I saw what is here titled “Venom and Eternity.” It immediately worked one of the most profound and lasting changes upon all my development as a film-maker. It still continues to inspire (if you’ll pardon these big, usually phoney, words) me and to re-direct thoughts (break up past cinematic ideology) whenever they start to crowd out my own filmic development. It is, and always has been, particularly marvelous to me that “Venom and Eternity” does actually free me without, as so many other sources of so-called freedom, imposing its own new forms upon that freedom. That is why it is, to my mind, an absolutely unique touchstone for anyone with sensitivity enough, filmwise, to see it. In that sense, it remains a film-maker’s film at the present deplorable state of lack-of-vision generally -- that is, that only film-maker’s (and very few of them) have, at this blind time, enough vision to put themselves under your cine-magic, and altogether unharmful, spell. Later, hopefully, it will be recognized, even generally, as the land-sea-air-mark in film history which it is. When I was at Brussels (World’s Fair Exposition of Experimental Film) in 1958, I named you as not only a major influence in my own cinematic development but as one of the most important film-makers in this 20th-century world. Much to my surprise, your name was not recognized. Well, this is to let you know that it is recognized here in San Francisco and, generally, in the U.S. and very specifically among my closest friends, including poets, composers, painters, etc., and most gratefully within myself. I have gone out of my way to view “Venom and Eternity” some 15 to 20 times; and I would, as always I’m sure, go out of my way to see it again. Have you made any further films, or are there any earlier -- i.e. any other films at all? Well, I do very much hope so; and I also wish your writing were available here in the U.S. If I can be of any help in that respect, and/or especially regarding films and film-distribution (where I do have some authority), let me know. Best, Stan Brakhage - Stan Brakhage ℅ Collom Silver Spruce Nederland Star Route Boulder, Colorado U.S.A. March 20, 1963 Dear Isidore Isou, I was very pleased to receive a letter from you, and especially glad to know that you are still working, considering making a new film, and that there still is a group of lettristes -- so much that I have loved, so many friends, groups, even entire “movements,” have vanished, been vanquished by the difficulties and pressures of the forces-of-destruction in the world of this time... many individuals of The American Film Movement haven’t made a film in 6 or 7 years; but then there seems to be new incentive, springing from heaven-only-knows-where, for suddenly, this last year, a number of people have begun to work again...and this is a joy. Unfortunately, however, we have no real recognition from the society in which we live, therefore no where-with-all, money or other power to extend to each other either in this country or abroad -- we have not even enough to properly extend our own works to the ignored public around us...so each film-maker works alone, supporting himself, his family, his films, as best he can, with commercial jobs, etc., often (as I now am) separated from his comrades by 1000 miles of wasteland, a cultural (as well as actual) desert, continuing his own work with no thought of having it really seen, perceived, in his life-time, often editing film material (as I now am) which he has no money to print when the work is finished. So, you see, you cannot really say there is an American film movement; but there are at least 30 individuals known to me, and friends of mine, whose films I very much respect, each one of whom is currently making, or has just made, a film, all working and living in various parts of this large country. Now, the situation is somewhat different in New York City: there are a number of film-makers (and some of the best) who work together (even, occasionally, collaborate on films) and meet quite often, and are involved in publicity and public recognition. (Please understand that when I say “public” I mean “the very small segment of the people interested in the arts” -- recognition of “the public-at-large” is unthinkable.) But New York City is, after all, just a large Market Place; and the NY film-makers are always running the risk of being led very much astray from their actual works by the commercial considerations they are constantly surrounded by and prey to. But they have, this last year, formed THE FILM-MAKER’S COOPERATIVE, 414 PARK AVE. SOUTH, N.Y. 16, N.Y. and are distributing their own films, as well as mine and many other film-makers in this country, and are very interested in trying to get films from abroad. I suggest you write to them. It is a non-profit organization (and, indeed, so far has made no profit for the film-makers.) The New York people also produce the very finest film magazine in the country: FILM CULTURE: and it is unquestionably the efforts of these people which has made my work in film as widely known as it is and my films as distributed as they are...altho’ I should add that this public recognition has probably cost me as much money as it has brought in. I have also devoted a lot of time to helping the N.Y. group by getting them films for distribution from film-makers all over the country, by writing articles (and they probably would very much like to print an article by you -- tho’ again, they cannot afford to pay) etc. Now -- you asked about the U.S. Distribution of “Venom and Eternity.” The man who says he owns the prints is RAYMOND ROHAUER, 7165 BEVERLY BLVD., LOS ANGELES 36, CALIFORNIA. He distributes the film thru a regular distribution company (write MR. WILLARD MORRISON, ℅ AUDIO FILM CENTER. 406 CLEMENT, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA). It is only fair to warn you that any number of American Film-Makers have considered, and even tried, to sue Mr. Rohauer and have failed. Mr. Rohauer is a very clever, and many would say “ruthless,” businessman with “good” (i.e. bad) lawyers, and has generally proved very successful in court. The major trouble, however, is that (considering the expenses of a trial) it simply is not worth the cost of suing anyone over a breach of contract in the area of the “art films,” or “experimental film,” etc. While “Venom and Eternity” has has some good distribution by American “art-film” standards and has been comparatively widely seen, I would guess that it probably hasn’t yet made enough money to pay Mr. Rohauer with the whole field of “the art film” (thank heavens); and he recently gave me back the ownership of a film I had been cheated (in my opinion) out of some six years ago… to him, you see, it (business: i.e. “cheating people legally”) is all a game. Your best bet is not to attack him (as he lives to defend himself) but simply to ask him for your rights (giving him the chance to be magnanimous.) We had to leave San Francisco, due to lack of money, and are now living (as before) in the mountains. We just had a baby boy, our first boy in 4 children, and are finding life difficult, as always, but very exciting and beautiful. I would like to hear more of your life and, especially, your (to me) wondrous ideas on film, and (of course) to see more of your work. -- Best Stan

Light Industry's 2018 season begins next week with a rare screening of Jorge Sanjinés's The Secret Nation. wwww.lightindustry.org/thesecretnation