Hold Me While I'm Naked Fri, Sep 22 | 7:30pm | TMT
Self Song & Death Song 1997. 4 min. USA. Color. Silent. 16mm. Panels for the Walls of Heaven 2002. 31 min. USA. Color. Silent. 16mm.
Maureen Selwood: Animating the Interior Fri, Nov 17 | 7:30pm | TMT
In person: Maureen Selwood. Over her wide-ranging career as a visual artist working in installation, performance, and particularly animation, Maureen Selwood has created a pioneering body of work that is vividly evocative and marked by a tender and intimate poetry. Often focusing on stories, memories, and dreams that reframe and foreground women’s subjectivity and experience, Selwood’s animated films employ multiple techniques and textures to showcase her highly lyrical and unmistakably personal approach to line, color, and movement. Surrealist moments of surprise and humor combine with themes of loss, grief, resistance, and empowerment, resulting in a memorable cinematic sensibility that is deeply empathetic as it externalizes complex emotions and consciousness with great awareness and beauty. The Academy Film Archive has been home to Selwood’s collection since 2016, and this program features restorations of several of her 16mm and 35mm films, in addition to a selection of digital work, including the world premiere of her latest short film, The Uncounted . Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano.
MOTHLIGHT
ONGOING SERIES AVAILABLE SPACE
Early & Late Brakhage: Academy Restorations Mon, Oct 23 | 7:30pm | TMT Since 2004, the Academy Film Archive has been the home of the collection of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933–2003). With a career that spanned more than fifty years, Brakhage’s influence and legacy as an artist of radical innovation cannot be overstated. Ultimately producing a body of work comprising well over three hundred films, Brakhage tirelessly pursued ever-evolving articulations of intimate human vision and experience, inspiring generations of filmmakers in the global avant-garde, as well as directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas. The Academy has restored several dozen films by Brakhage, but because of the sheer volume of his output, restoration work is always ongoing. For this program, in the year that would have marked his 90th birthday, we are pleased to present a sampling of restoration work of Brakhage’s films by the Academy Film Archive, with a unique focus on films drawn from his earliest years of production alongside films from his last years of activity. Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano. All films directed by Stan Brakhage. All prints courtesy of the Academy Film Archive, with thanks to Marilyn Brakhage. DESISTFILM and FIRE OF WATERS were restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. THE DEAD was restored by the Academy Film Archive with support from The Film Foundation.
Available Space is a recurring monthly series showcasing experimental and independent film and media, including artist retrospectives, historical and contemporary films, expanded cinema performance, special guest events, and restorations from international archives, as well as our own Academy Film Archive.
All films directed by Maureen Selwood. All films courtesy of Maureen Selwood and the Academy Film Archive.
frequent moviegoing represented a cathartic escape into a world of hyperbolic fantasy that felt totally alien in contrast to their daily surroundings. They began to make their own 8mm films as teenagers (first collaboratively, and soon after individually), producing numerous ambitious and elaborately designed mini-epics in eye-popping Kodachrome before Jonas Mekas and other New York experimental film denizens finally caught up with them in the mid-1960s. These films (and the hundreds more that followed) ooze with massive inspiration and creativity—not to mention infectious, often uproarious humor—and manage miraculously to be utterly earnest without naïveté and brilliantly satirical without a whiff of irony.
Total program runtime: 65 min.
As You Desire Me 2009. 10 min. USA. Color. Digital.
Flying Circus: An Imagined Memoir 1995. 11 min. USA. Color. English. 35mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive. Hail Mary 1998. 3 min. USA. Color. English. 35mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive. A Modern Convenience 2012. 6 min. USA. Color. Digital. Drawing Lessons 2005. 6 min. USA. Color. English. Digital. Blue Poodle Chair 2022. 2 min. USA. Color. English. Digital. Pearls 1990. 1 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive. This is Just to Say 1987. 4 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. New print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. The Rug 1985. 10 min. USA. Color. English. 35mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive. The Uncounted World Premiere 2023. 10 min. USA. Color. English. Digital. Odalisque 1980. 12 min. USA. Color. English. 35mm. Restored print from the Academy Film Archive.
Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano.
Total program runtime: 76 min.
Total program runtime: 94 min.
THE CRAVEN SLUCK
Desistfilm 1954. 6.5 min. USA. B&W. Sound. 16mm. The Wonder Ring 1955. 5.5 min. USA. Color. Silent. 16mm. The Dead 1960. 10.5 min. USA. B&W, Color. Silent. 16mm. Mothlight 1963. 3.5 min. USA. Color. Silent. 16mm. Fire of Waters 1965. 6.5 min. USA. B&W. Sound. 16mm. The Birds of Paradise 1999. 3 min. USA. Color. Silent. 16mm. Stately Mansions Did Decree 1999. 5.5 min. USA. Color. Silent. 16mm.
Born of the Wind DIRECTED BY: Mike Kuchar. 1962. 23 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Preserved by Anthology through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. A Town Called Tempest DIRECTED BY: George Kuchar. 1963. 33 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant- Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. The Craven Sluck DIRECTED BY: Mike Kuchar. 1967. 23 min. USA. B&W. English. 16mm. Print courtesy of Anthology Film Archives. Hold Me While I’m Naked DIRECTED BY: George Kuchar. 1966. 15 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Print courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.
The Tawdry Visions of George and Mike Kuchar Fri, Sep 22 | 7:30pm | TMT “George and Mike Kuchar’s films were my first inspiration… these were the pivotal films of my youth, bigger influences than Warhol, Kenneth Anger, even The Wizard of Oz . Here were directors I could idolize—complete crackpots without an ounce of pretension, outsiders to even ‘underground’ sensibilities who made exactly the films they wanted to make without any money, starring their friends.” – John Waters “The Kuchar brothers gave me the self-confidence to believe in my own tawdry vision.” – John Waters Twins George and Mike Kuchar were born in 1942, growing up in a working-class Bronx neighborhood where their
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