Friday, 14 May, 8-10pm 2010

LIKE THAT WOULD EVER HAPPEN #1:
A Film Series Presented by Hiding Place and Marginal Utility

Please join Hiding Place and Marginal Utility on Friday May 14th for a night of film and music, A Constant Score, organized by Jonathan Thomas. The event will begin at 8pm with a screening of Anthony Stern's San Francisco (1968), followed by a screening of Pierre Clémenti's Visa de censure no. X (1967-1975), followed by a set of a live musical interpretation of the early, hand-painted films of Segundo de Chómon by Zugunruhe Sound (Aaron Igler) and Threadsuns (Clint Takeda). All projections are digital, dancing is optional.

Anthony Stern's San Francisco is one of the key works of the British avant-garde cinema of the late-1960s. It is a 15-minute voyage, set to the Pink Floyd's “Interstellar Overdrive,” that palpitates through the single-frame, hand-held procedures associated in the American underground cinema with figures such as Marie Menken and Jonas Mekas. Stern, first a painter who started in film as an assistant to Peter Whitehead, articulates light and color and motion in the spirit of Lázló Moholy-Nagy (or of Harry Callahan’s photographs of Detroit in the 40s); he stretches and stops and smears film time, treated here as a psychoactive sculptural material.

San Francisco will be followed by a screening of Pierre Clémenti's Visa de censure no. X (1967-1975, 43 min). Like Stern's film, Clémenti's is set to a constant score, in this case progressive rock recorded in 1975 by Ivan Coaquette and others performing as Delired Cameleon Family. Best known as a performer, Clémenti was a traveling intersection of radical artistic energies, committed as he was to the possibilities of communion as a viable artistic method. In this, his first film, composed of parts that were shown at Galerie Claude Givaudan in Paris in 1967 (a gallery that mounted a Duchamp exhibition during the same season), Clémenti plunges his project into the Dionysian arena of chromatic vibrations.

And when it comes to color, Segundo de Chómon was one of the cinema's most significant pioneers. Working in the magical mode of Georges Méliès during the first decade of the twentieth century, often in collaboration with director Ferdinand Zecca, de Chómon’s work upon film with a brush is transformative, sometimes pyrotechnic. On Friday night his films will be joined by Zugunruhe Sound (Aaron Igler) and Threadsuns (Clint Takeda).

Jonathan Thomas is a two-time alumnus of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, has an MA in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, and teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In addition to exhibiting artworks, he has contributed writings to October, Art Journal, caa.reviews, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. He’s curating a film program for Midway Contemporary Art, in Minneapolis, this June.