Vermont based filmmaker Ted Lyman visits Hallwalls with a retrospective screening. Lyman, who has been engaged with experimental filmmaking since the early seventies, creates films inspired by the American Avant-Garde—poetic works that explore the natural environment and our sense of place. Curated and organized by Caroline Koebel and Carolyn Tennant and co-sponsored by the UB Department of Media Study and the College of Arts and Sciences.

"Scotland with No Clothes (1977) is a 10-minute Michael Snow-like filmic exercise: one mesmerizing take via a 16mm handheld camera of a waterfall. On the soundtrack: the spillage of water, which gets louder and LOUDER as the camera zooms in." — Gerald Peary.

"Fla.Me (1982) is a film roughly based on a comparison between two geographic areas: Brooksville, Florida, and Sutton Island, Maine. It is a work about remembrance, a subject it treats both through the chronicling of events and the development of a specific and idiosyncratic way of seeing. The goal in this movie is to give the audience the sense of viewing these locations through the filter of time and the properties of a particular mind's eye. To this end, original scenes are used much as an Impressionist uses a landscape; visual elements are emphasized using film techniques such as animation and optical printing, and the slow rhythms and random nature of recall are simulated through sound and editing. As such, Fla.Me is a personal rendition of small sections of the past. These selected realities are the raw material for the film, but its style and structure are derived from the filmmaker's patterns of thought and memory." — New England Film/Video Festival

"Conceived as a meditation on the complex relationship of time, family, and mortality, Testament of the Rabbit (1989) uses subtitles, live action, animation and optically manipulated imagery to explore the consequences of parenthood. The film takes place in the context of a train trip through the Scottish Highlands. As the extraordinary scenery drifts by the protagonist slips into contemplation of the emotional and physical changes caused in his life by the birth of his children. Lulled by the rhythm of the wheels on the track, his dozing mind visualizes the abstract series of images which is the heart of the film. This sequence is created through photographic degeneration, a process which gradually decays the original, representational image to high contrast forms and, finally, to blackness. Animated in reverse, the phenomenon gradually pulls the audience from abstraction to reality. The intention is to create something like the childhood sensation of waking from a dream and breathlessly waiting for the formless beasts in one's bedroom to reassume their rightful identities as bureau, chair, and lamp." — New England Film/Video Festival

"First Surface (1996) is about a young boy with memories of his entire lifetime, an affliction with peculiar symptoms. He cannot separate his remembrances from reality and finds himself appearing at random moments in his own history. Events lose chronology and go backwards and forwards without logic. He senses two photographs, one of a waterfall, the other of his family, hold the key to his disease. These images gradually reveal themselves, first showing bursts of movement, then appearing as a complete motion picture scene, and, finally, becoming a massive, cycling grid which covers the wall of his room. As his recognition of this sequence evolves, the boy comes to understand his condition and the unique perspective it affords on his existence." — New England Film/Video Festival

"Flat Earth (work in progress) is a film that uses stop action and time-lapse techniques to develop geometric shapes in spaces and landscapes. The artist describes the work like this: 'The imagery of Flat Earth is based on the fact that, while the camera/lens system creates the illusion of the third dimension, it does so on a two dimensional surface. I exploit this phenomenon by beginning a shot as a normal image, then, through time-lapse or stop motion animation, generating a linear form in the frame. As this shape is in a three dimensional environment, the eye sees it in deep space…My last step is to mask out everything surrounding the form, which, at this point, reveals itself as geometrically symmetrical in two dimensions. Essentially, the image shifts from deep to flat space…Part of my interest in this effect is conceptual and aesthetic, but I also have another ambition. When Maxim Gorky, the Russian author, went to Lumiere's First Motion Picture Program in 1896, he initially saw only "a world of shadows" on a flat surface, as he had not been educated in viewing the screen as deep space. I want people to reclaim a fragment of that perceptual innocence from Flat Earth; thus dismantling an illusion they have accepted as real since childhood.'" — New England Film/Video Festival

$8 general, $6 students/seniors, $5 members


and other recent works

As an experimental filmmaker, Buffalonian Dorothea Braemer is fond of using alternative forms to explore and expand documentary. In her recent series Ten Short Videos About My Childhood Home, she explores re-enactment, silent film piano music, observational documentary strategies, and time-lapse images that are also part of an installation currently on view at the University at Buffalo Art Gallery on the North Campus. Using a gentle, subtle humor, Braemer examines her relationship to her mother, reminiscences of childhood, and the story of three daughters who struggle to find common ground as they help their mother transition from the family home to assisted care.

The screening will also feature selection of recent work from 2003-07, including: Confusing the Ballot, Debbie Rudman's take on "ballot confusion" (co-directed by and starring Debbie Rudman, starring Stephanie Rothenberg), and Flag Story, in which eminent storyteller Karima Amin tells a story about democracy and flags (these two excerpts are from The Democracy Show, produced by Termite TV Collective with visual effects by Carl Lee); Where the Saale Meets the Elbe: Three Women talk about their Lives, a documentary about three rural, formerly East German women and how they coped with reunification (produced as part of an artist residency in Werkleitz, Germany); Ways to Maintain a Healthy Level of Insanity (co-directed by Stefani Bardin and starring Ron Ehmke, Jody LaFond, Katie Young, Josephine Anstey, Lucy Anstey, Emmit Dehart, Greta Lee, Carl Lee, Holly Johnson, Jax Deluca, and more).

FREE (voluntary donations to WNY Peace Center gratefully accepted)

"It's the worst-kept secret in the world: The Bush administration would like to see regime change in Tehran, and it has prepared plans for military intervention in pursuit of that goal. Whether or not the administration seriously imagines that going to war on Iran is advisable or even feasible, it has been developing the logistics and strategy for some sort of an attack since at least 2004, according to credible reports by journalists and think-tankers around the world—most famously in a series of articles by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. A month ago, the PBS news magazine Frontline aired a provocative piece on the escalation of tensions between the Bush administration and the hardliners who control Iran's government. That report will be screened this Tuesday in Hallwalls' Cinema, followed by a panel discussion entitled 'The Role of Local Media in Waging War & Peace' and a 30-minute question-and-answer period with the audience. At issue will be how well local media serve their audience on issues like this, and what journalists and users of the media learned from the runup to the current war in Iraq. This event is presented by the Western New York Peace Center/Peace Action Taskforce, as part of their monthly screening series at Hallwalls" (Geoff Kelly, Artvoice).

Hallwalls Artist-in-Residence Project (HARP) media artist Jim Finn returns to Buffalo with his latest feature, La Trinchera Luminosa Del Presidente Gonzalo (2007, 64min).
Like a Maoist home movie from the 80's (shot in Hi-8 video in New Mexico) the film explores a day-in-the-life of a Shining Path women's prison cellblock in Peru. After capture, the Gang-of-Four Maoist revolutionaries basically ran their cellblocks as if they were training camps. It follows the inmates organizing classes, marches, criticism sessions, a dance party, and playing scenes from a Navajo-language Macbeth. Heavily researched, the film draws from many sources including video footage from the prisons and interviews with Shining Path militants and their leader Chairman Gonzalo, the former philosophy professor Abimael Guzman. "In a sense the film is a kind of socialist realism film or perhaps a failed propaganda film—one that didn't pass the Shining Path censors," writes Finn. "What has been created is a slightly stylized and fictionalized world based in fact. A women's prison movie without a shower scene, a Latin American guerrilla film without guns, and a Shakespearean drama without the dramatic ending. Though set in the late '80s, a movie about terrorist extremists locked away and forgotten in prison with nothing but their ideology has a relevance that doesn't seem to be fading any time soon."