Detailed Program

Lunatic Princess (2005, 4 min., b/w, sound, digital video on mini dv)

Kolkata (2005, 35 min. b/w, sound, 16mm) The soundtrack of Kolkata – dominated by a persistent, repetitive voice coming over a severely distorted loudspeaker whose urgency either announces immanent danger or an overwhelming desire to sell something – draws as near to the aural equivalent of overwhelming depression as I can imagine. The film’s black and white images, primarily of Calcutta streets, replace Lapore’s usual patient contemplation of individual views with a frenetic sense of accumulation. The opening images create a surrealist hallucinatory quality unusual in Lapore’s films. (TG)

The Sleepers (1989, 16 min., color, sound, 16mm.) The Sleepers mixes the sources of his sounds and images, so that images and sounds from the Sudan, Europe and New York City combine to create a stunningly incoherent geography that evokes the consciousness of the traveler (memories, dreams, associations) as much as the physiognomy of any place. (TG)

The Glass System (2000, 20 min., color, sound, 16 mm) Although [its] images derive primarily from South Asia, the film deviously slips in images from New York City that seem congruent with the exotic ones, a street vendor in front of Saks Fifth Avenue that echoes the Asian sidewalk workers, or a poster for a Chinese film that reflects New York skyscrapers off its glass frame. The dexterity small children show as they perform acts of balance or contortion, or rapidly fold printed pages for pamphlets, evoke our admiration and Lapore’s evident respect for physical processes, but they also show us young bodies disciplined into repetitive or risky actions in order to make a living. (TG)

Untitled (for David Gatten) by Mark LaPore and Phil Solomon (2005, 5 min., color, sound, digital video on dv cam or mini dv)

Shop Windows (2005, circa 5 min., color, silent, 16mm)

About the filmmaker

Mark LaPore was an experimental ethnographic filmmaker who made several films in the Sudan, India and Sri Lanka, as well as various parts of the U.S. over a period of nearly thirty years. A dedicated iconoclast and personal artist, LaPore strove to document and portray the cultures with which he connected in ways that were true to his experiences as a traveler as well as being honest reflections of people and scenes that he was witnessing. LaPore worked against conventions of ethnographic narrative, using cinema at its most fundamental level as an objective tool that could also be harnessed for personal response and expression. He was also an influential teacher at the Massachusetts College of Art, and many of his students have gone on to become significant filmmakers in their own right. LaPore’s tragic and premature death on October 11, 2005, robbed American independent cinema of one of its most original and dedicated talents. (Steve Anker)

About the curator

A film/video curator since 1977, Mark McElhatten is co-founder and co-curator of the annual "Views From the Avant-Garde" programs at the New York Film Festival and is the film archivist for Martin Scorsese. He has programmed "House of Instants" and other experimental programs at the International Film Festival Rotterdam where he presented a 10 part exhibition of the films of Stan Brakhage which was reprised at the National Gallery in Washington. He also programs for the Torino International Film Festival (Italy) as well as other international festivals. Since the mid 1990s, he has presented The Walking Picture Palace a “nomadic" and expanding series of programs. A consultant for the Whitney Biennial, he has also programmed about 100 of "The American Century Part II” for the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has held key curatorial positions at New York's Collective for Living Cinema, The American Museum of the Moving Image and Boston's Brattle Theater. He has held guest teaching positions at Bard College and taught film history, theory and production at the State University of New York. He studied with Ken Jacobs, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Tom Gunning, P. Adams Sitney, Fred Camper and Larry Gottheim.