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Contact for Press: Tamar Fortgang
REDCAT’s Publicity and Promotions Manager fortgang@muse.calarts.edu / 213.237.2873 (Do Not Publish)

Film at REDCAT Unveils its Spring Program Featuring Narrative and Experimental Films from Around the World

Click here to see the Spring Schedule

December 21, 2005, Los Angeles -- The Jack H. Skirball Screening Series, curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud, kicks off its spring schedule with a rare archival print of German pioneer female filmmaker Lotte Reiniger. Her classic animated silent film is accompanied by a live performance by contemporary music ensemble Otociné. International artists include the French avant-garde couple Patrick and Michèle Bokanowski, Iran’s premier woman filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and the award-winning Liu Jiayin, a 23-year-old female student from the Beijing Film Academy.

Film at REDCAT 06 also exhibits two prominent visual artists working at the boundaries of photography, installation and the moving image, introducing their most recent work: a meditation on the globalized economy of the sea by Allan Sekula and a quiet exploration of youth in rural American by Sharon Lockhart.

The series includes the latest experimental narrative from Herb Alpert Award recipient Jem Cohen and a documentary by Barbara Hammer that reveals yet another hidden page of lesbian cultural history. In addition, two evening’s screenings demonstrate the diversity of filmmaking practices in the Bay Area, with a subtle semi-documentary narrative by Britta Sjögren and the intricate experimental textures of veteran avant-garde artist Nathaniel Dorsky.

REDCAT, CalArts’ downtown center for innovative visual, performing and media arts, is located at the corner of W. 2nd St. and S. Hope St., inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Parking is available in the Walt Disney Concert Hall parking structure and adjacent lots. All Screenings begin at 8pm.Ticket prices range from $8-6, with student discounts available. Tickets may be purchased at the REDCAT box office--located at the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets, by calling 213.237.2800, or by clicking here

Screenings, dates and times are subject to change. For the most updated information, visit www.redcat.org.

A REDCAT Program Curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud

Monday, January 23
Lotte Reiniger: The Adventures of Prince Achmed
Featuring Otociné
Germany, 1926, 65 min., b/w tinted and toned, silent, 35mm archival print

The first full-length animated feature in movie history, Lotte Reiniger’s Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed is a dazzling and sensuous rendering of fables from The Arabian Nights: Tales From a Thousand and One Nights made with silhouette cutouts set on illuminated glass backdrops. This historic film is accompanied by a live performance by the experimental music ensemble Otociné, which uses conventional instruments, objects and recorded material to create an unpredictable score.

Monday, January 30
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab: Gilaneh
Los Angeles premiere
Iran, 2005, 84 min., 35mm

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Iran’s premier woman director, and long-time collaborator Mohsen Abdolvahab condemn the horrors of war in a new film that is as emotionally intense as it is timely. In 1988, peasant widow Gilaneh (Fatemeh Motamed Arya) sees her son Ismaeel drafted into the Iran-Iraq War. Meanwhile her pregnant daughter decides to go to Tehran to look for her husband who has stayed behind. The film’s second half jumps ahead 15 years: Gilaneh is now caring for the bedridden Ismaeel--a war veteran ravaged by chemical weapons--as the United States begins its assault on Baghdad…

Screening organized with the collaboration of the UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with The 16th Annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema (Jan 13–Feb 11). See www.cinema.ucla.edu for more information.

Monday, February 6
Britta Sjögren: In This Short Life
Los Angeles premiere
USA, 2004, 96 min., 16mm

Shot with non-professional actors (including the filmmaker herself) in the intimate black-and-white palette of older home movies, In This Short Life works the blurry margin between documentary and fiction. The film follows four mysteriously intertwined lives in Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles: an elderly woman ambivalently embarking on an affair; a mentally unstable man being evicted from his home; a frustrated actor waiting for his breakthrough; and a young female artist forced by a much-desired yet inconveniently-timed pregnancy to reassess the priorities in her life…

In person: Britta Sjögren

Monday, February 27
Patrick and Michèle Bokanowski: Angel’s Flight
L’Ange (The Angel, France, 1977–82, 70 min., 35 mm), directed by Patrick Bokanowski.
Preceded by Pour un pianiste, composed by Michèle Bokanowski

L’Ange, the legendary opus by French filmmaker and artist Patrick Bokanowski, offers new adventures in perception in its depiction of the climbing of a giant stairway--where the characters seem to be prisoners of an endlessly repeated action on each floor. The film features a score by Michèle Bokanowski, whose intricately composed musical textures endow the visuals with a mysterious meaning. Defying all traditional boundaries, this distinctive collaboration between the Bokanowskis opens cinema to alternative possibilities of expression: a purely mental vision and a radical metamorphosis of reality.

In person: Patrick and Michèle Bokanowski

This screening was made possible in part bythe French Film & TV Department, The French Embassy, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Air Tahiti Nui for their support.

Monday, March 13
Jem Cohen: Chain
Los Angeles premiere
USA/Germany, 2004, 99 min., DigiBeta

In this provocative mix of documentary and fiction, the Alpert Award-winning filmmaker lays out beautifully composed images shot throughout the United States, Europe and Australia, and links them through two loose narratives: A Japanese executive, Tamiko (Miho Nikaido), travels to America on business while a runaway, Amanda (Mira Billotte), haunts a shopping mall, looking for work and a place to crash. Cohen’s collage of spaces cut off from their original (sub)urban surroundings produces an uncanny repetition: two nearly affectless women trapped in the generic byproducts of globalization.

This screening is funded in part by a generous grant from The Herb Alpert Foundation.

In person: Jem Cohen

Monday, April 3
Barbara Hammer: Lover Other
Los Angeles premiere
USA, 2006, 55 min., Beta SP

In her latest work, prolific filmmaker, archivist and commentator Barbara Hammer examines an intriguing chapter in lesbian cultural history. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore cut mythic figures in the art world: They were stepsisters and lovers who, as key participants in the Parisian Surrealist movement in 1920s and ’30s, collaborated on collages, photographs and installations exploring gender-bending and lesbian eroticism. The pair later settled on the Isle of Jersey, where they went on to perform heroic acts of resistance against the Nazi occupation during WWII.

In person: Barbara Hammer

Monday, April 17
an Sekula: Lottery of the Sea
World premiere
USA, 2006, 180 min., DigiBeta

Iconoclast photographer and documentarian Allan Sekula unfolds a series of variations shot in the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Japan and other maritime countries around two of his major obsessions: globalization and the sea. In this rumination on the sea as “primordial source of sublimity,” Sekula explores a matrix of narratives--Greek myths, American movies, and stories of longshoremen, lost sailors and displaced populations--and reflects on the globalizing effects of Adam Smith’s notion of the seafaring life as a form of gambling.

In person: Allan Sekula

Mon May 1, 8 pm | $8–6
The Devotional Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky

In these intimate and deeply affecting works, veteran avant-garde artist Dorsky utilizes light and color to create films that are silent, non-narrative and forged by seamless editing of astonishing precision. The evening features the “Devotional Songs” Threnody... (2004, 20 min., 16mm) and The Visitation (2002, 18 min., 16mm), as well as the “Cinematic Song” Love’s Refrain (2000–2001, 23 min., 16mm). All three exemplify beauty through delicate framing, subtle interplays of shadow and light, and highly expressive movement.

In person: Nathaniel Dorsky

Monday, May 8
Liu Jiayin: Oxhide
U.S. premiere
China, 2004, 110 min., Beta SP

The multiple prize-winning feature Niupi (Oxhide) is an extraordinary tour de force by 23-year old Liu Jiayin, who shot it (in CinemaScope!) in the 50 square meters of her family apartment--playing her own role while her parents played theirs. The film, however, is entirely scripted and designed with unflinching rigor. Liu staged 23 static shots and kept her small DV camera in claustrophobic proximity of her subjects, often showing only parts of their bodies with an on-screen conversation. With a sure hand and a mundane-yet-lyrical inspiration, Liu reinvents the kammerspiel for the one-child families in contemporary China.

In person: Liu Jiayin

Monday, May 22
Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat
Los Angeles premiere
USA, 2006, 135 min., 16mm

Artist and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart has crafted an exquisite, meditative portrait of youth in the small rural village of Pine Flat in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Pursuing and expanding her fondness for long takes and static compositions, she captures in 12 shots moments of fragility, innocence, playfulness and sometimes sadness. Shot over the course of two and a half years, the film explores the tension between documentary portraiture and narrative desire. Pine Flat is a singular film as complex as it is spare, as endearing as it is demanding.

In person: Sharon Lockhart

REDCAT benefits from an endowment created through the generosity of The Walt Disney Company; The Sharon D. Lund Foundation; Robert B. Egelston; Lee and Lawrence J. Ramer; and Dorothy R. Sherwood.

REDCAT’s 2005-06 season programming is generously supported by The Herb Alpert Foundation; American Composers Forum of Los Angeles; The Annenberg Foundation; Anonymous; Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund; Barry Blumberg; California Community Foundation; Campari; The Canadian Consulate General, Los Angeles; The Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation (Corporate matching gift); CEMAT (Centri Musicali Attrezzati, Rome); City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department; CONACULTA; The Consulate General of the Netherlands, Los Angeles; Margit Sperling Cotsen and Lloyd Cotsen; Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Delphi Capital Management, Inc.; Tim Disney; e-flux; Étant donnés, The French-American Fund for the Visual Arts, a program of the French American Cultural Exchange; Ford Foundation; The French-American Fund for Contemporary Music, a program of FACE; French Cultural Services, Los Angeles; French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Harriett and Richard Gold; Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg; Elyse and Stanley Grinstein; Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater; IIC (Instituto Italiano di Cultura, Los Angeles); The Japan Foundation Performing Arts JAPAN; La Colección Jumex; kurimanzutto; L.A. Louver Gallery, Inc.; The Sharon D. Lund Foundation; Steve Martin; Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam; National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts; National Endowment for the Arts; E. Nakamichi Foundation; Phaedrus Foundation; Vicki Reynolds Pepper and Murray Pepper; The Puffin Foundation, Inc.; Barry Sanders; V. Joy Simmons; The Skirball Foundation; SONORA, in collaboration with Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Italy; Catharine Soros; Eve Steele and Peter Gelles; Dallas Price-Van Breda; Viacom Outdoor; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and White Cube Gallery, London.

As CalArts’ downtown center for innovative visual, media and performing arts, REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in the Los Angeles region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT is a center for experimentation, discovery and charged civic discourse.

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