REDCAT's Monday Night Screenings begin on January 19, 2004. This 13-part series will present films, in-person appearances by groundbreaking and exciting independent film and video artists, as well as an ongoing series devoted to the fine art of animation. Our first Monday Night screening, Sophie Fiennes' electrifying Hoover Street Revival, honors Martin Luther King day.

Each program will include a full-length feature or a group of short films as well as an introduction and post-screening Q&A.

All screenings are at 8 p.m. unless indicated otherwise.

ALL PROGRAMS SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

Directed by Sophie Fiennes
2003, 100 min, color, sound, 35 mm

Structured from Christmas to Easter, Hoover Street Revival weaves Bishop Jones's electrifying sermons into a passionate and eloquent thematic narrative. The ecstatic church event and its vivacious gospel play against the world outside the church. Intimate, comic, mundane, tragic and revealing moments form a kaleidoscope portrait transforming this 'ghetto' into a microcosm of the contemporary world. Through Fiennes' visual language and sensitive focus, everyday life constantly resonates and responds to Jones' inspired sermons, deliberately raising questions to which the audience must seek the answers themselves. Fiennes creates a powerful dialectic between the social reality of being poor and black in America, and the metaphysical realm of heaven and damnation. The film captures the supernatural relationship between music and praise that is particular to the Pentecostal church and pays subtle homage to the musical talent historically nurtured in the gospel choirs of African American churches across America--not surprisingly, Bishop Jones is the brother of Grace Jones. (BR)

Screening introduced by Billy Woodberry.



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Directed by Damon Packard
2002, 138 min, color, sound, DVD -- Ground-Breaker Award, Fant-Asia Film Festival, 2003

Re-scheduled from November 22, 2003. George Kuchar overdosing on sugar meets George Romero. Reflections of Evil is about the indignities of being overweight, socially irrelevant, a Mama's boy, and a pedestrian to boot -- about watching too much TV, having paranoid neighbors and seeing Steven Spielberg's career unfold from the exploitation of horror to the exploitation of the Holocaust. A collage of dizzying impressions of Los Angeles, found footage and parody of pop culture images, the film pays homage to these cheap exploitation films of the seventies we hated to love -- yet upstages them by being even cheaper, sleazier, more disjointed and having more body matters splattered on the sidewalk. It is also acutely more ambitious in its unflinching critique of contemporary media culture. Good night -- and if you find yourself on the Universal Boardwalk, it is because you're already dead. (BR)



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Engel Animation Advance Research Center (EAARC)
Animation Program 1
A journey that weaves through creative expression and the incidents of the imagination encompassing both its happy and tragic accidents.

The program will include Jules Engel's Accident, the quintessential film for this series, Engel's erasure of a racing dog creates a particular sense of loss. Michael Dudok de Wit 's Father and Daughter is a visually simple portrait that evokes another kind of loss. May Trubuhovich's Feline moves towards an awakening, exploring sexuality and desire. Georges Schwizgebel's motion painting, La Course Abime, creates a country ride that seizes our kinetic senses. Joanna Priestley's Utopia Parkway is reminiscent of Joseph Cornell box sculptures and conjures the magic within objects. Paul Driessen's The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg creates split realties to contemplate what it means to foretell an historic event.

(NOTE: This program includes adult content.) Produced by the Engel Animation Advancement Research Center (ME)



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Last Day of "LES NOUVEAUX CINEMAS" Series (February 5-9)

THE MONTREAL INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF NEW CINEMA AND NEW MEDIA (FCMM) -- NEW DOCUMENTS FROM IRAN - PART IV

Directed by Rakshan Bani-Etemad
Iran, 2002, 75 min, 35 mm, OV Farsi, Eng. ST, Los Angeles premiere

This powerful, multi-faceted documentary by one of Iran's best known directors examines the parliamentary elections of 2001, focusing on the 48 female candidates that also ran. Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (The Blue-Veiled, Under the Skin of the City) follows a group of young girls (including her own daughter) who have opened a campaign office for the successful reformist candidate Mohammad Khatami. Then, she gradually sets her focus on the life of one of the unsuccessful presidential candidates, Arezoo Bayat, an ambitious 25-year old, twice divorced woman, who takes care of her blind mother and 9-year old daughter while holding down two grueling jobs. (Vancouver Film Festival)

Preceded by:

ZINAT, A VERY SPECIAL DAY
(Zinat, Yek Rouze Bekhosous)

Directed by Ebrahim Mokhtari
Iran, 56 min, 2000, Beta SP, OV Farsi, English ST, US premiere

In 1999, the first municipal elections in 20 years took place. Among the 330,000 candidates were 5,000 women. One of them was Zinat. Filmmaker Ebrahim Mokhtari set up his camera in Zinat's house and filmed the reactions of visitors, positive and negative, with an emphasis on their views on the position of women in society. Zinat defends her beliefs with remarkable vivacity, humor and compassion. (FCMM)

Followed by:

A conversation with Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (schedule permitting)



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Directed by Daniel Eisenberg
USA/Germany, 77 min, 2003, 16mm, camera by Ingo Kratisch., sound by Eisenberg; West Coast premiere

Daniel Eisenberg's films are evocative explorations of the interstices between memory and present reality, and of the individual in relation to society. In past films, most notably Displaced Person, Cooperation of Parts and Persistence, Eisenberg largely used his own experience as a first generation European-American to create cinematic ruminations on fragmentary identity in the contemporary world. Something More Than Night is a darkly luminous portrait of night-time Chicago that is both an homage to the earliest films by the Lumiere Brothers and the paintings of Edward Hopper, as well as a penetrating contemporary cinematic portrait of an industrial urban center at the crossroads between centuries. (SA)

"Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night."
(—Raymond Chandler, introduction Trouble Is My Business)



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

22 min 1999-2003, Los Angeles premiere

Pairing dated East German techno music with early twentieth-century film reels of cabaret lines, vaudevillean dance productions and archival footage of "exotic" dances, this tape forces the viewer to question categories of "old" and "new," "good" and "bad."

PEGGY AND FRED IN HELL -
BEGINNING, MIDDLE AND END

85 min, 1984-2003, Los Angeles premiere

Nine years in the making, the "final" version of Thornton's epic project consolidates a cycle of interrelated films, videos and installation environments focusing on two children who have been "raised by television" under the pressures of digital technologies, electronic surveillance and millennial apocalyptic fervor. Heterogeneous in its concept, now concluding with a haunting new component (Paradise Crushed, 2003), Peggy And Fred In Hell demonstrates a resistance to categorization informed by Thornton's concerns with language, and her view of media as a linguistic system that is ideologically coded and subject to the controls of culture and the market. (BR)

"Refracted through archival and "found" footage, texts and soundtracks, Leslie Thornton's rigorously experimental film and video work is an investigation into the production of meaning and form through media."
(—Electronic Arts Intermix)

This event is sponsored by the Herb Alpert Foundation.



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Engel Animation Advance Research Center (EAARC)
Animation Program 2
Representational story, image and structure gradually draws us into worlds that become new interpretations of their subjects.

The program includes three films that convince us to believe the unbelievable: Bingo by Chris Landrith, Mermaid by Alexander Petrov, and Dojoji Temple by Kihachiro Kawamoto, the last of which charms us into suspending disbelief through classically inspired dolls that tell the mythical tale of a young monk and maiden. Also included are Mariola Brillowska's unusual The Contr-Contras, in which family characters in a futuristic world find themselves searching for peace; Dissipative Dialogues by David Ehrlich; Transfigured by Stephen Arthur; Camera Takes Five by Steven Wolsohen; Life From Pluto, Saul Saguatii; Free Radicals by Len Lye; Maya by Vibeke Sorensen; Heavy Light by Adam Becket; and Lapis by James Whitney, all of which delve deeply into absolute inner states.

(NOTE: This program includes adult content.)

Produced by the Engel Animation Advancement Research Center (ME)



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Over the course of more than thirty-five years, Ernie Gehr has produced a remarkable body of films and videos that combine rigorous and original formal structures with a profound sensitivity to the sights and sounds of the physical world around him. For his first Los Angeles appearance in nearly a decade, Gehr will premiere three new works:

The Collector

(2003), Digital Video, World Premiere

"What drives the collector? Textures. Colors. Dust. Phantasmagoric memories and associations. A scattering. The present. The passage of time. Sleep."

Passage

(2003), 16mm Film

"Nothing extraordinary. Just a ride on the S-Bahn (elevated train) through a small section of what used to be East Berlin. An anxious journey fraught with projections. A ride very much in the present, but due to history and family history, also a journey into and out of time."

The Morse Code Operator (or The Monkey Wrench)

(2004), Digital Video, World Premiere

"A convoluted "western" where magic takes center stage and a set of characters that seem to have sprung out of the pages of a Harvey Kurtzman 50s Mad Magazine, attempt to breathe life into their roles and exercise their bewitching powers. Ah, the phantasmagoric powers of the movies!"

(All quotes by Ernie Gehr)

Also, Rear Window(1991). (SA)



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Directed by Christopher Münch
2000, 107 min, color, 35 mm, Los Angeles theatrical premiere

A precious gem, fallen through the cracks of distribution after its Sundance premiere, is finally given the theatrical screening its gorgeous cinematography and insightful exploration of the female psyche deserves.

The Sleepy Time Gal has charisma galore -- from a resplendent Jacqueline Bisset as the title character in her best role in years, to Martha Plimpton as the daughter she gave up for adoption, Nick Stahl as her reluctant son, Seymour Cassel as her ex-lover and Amy Madigan as her wise-cracking (gay) nurse. Münch paints the portrait of a woman who lived to the fullest -- even if she turned out to sometimes make the wrong choices. The film unfolds two parallel narrative strands -- a daughter looking for her mother, a mother fighting a battle against cancer and trying to make sense of her life. Bisset's Frances reconstructs her life like a puzzle, through many disparate pieces that jump back and forth in time and space (Washington Heights; Daytona Beach; San Francisco) and that are collaged through meticulous iconographic and historical research. Münch's first film in color is a shimmering texture of different film stocks and countless visual references. (BR)

Christopher Münch, the acclaimed director of The Hours and Times and Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day, and star Jacqueline Bisset will be present at the screening.

Bisset's role as an independent woman in The Sleepy Time Gal follows a long list of complex, seductive performances by the British-born actress, who has graced such films as The Grasshopper, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, High Season, and worked with auteurs such François Truffaut (Day for Night), George Cukor (Rich and Famous), John Houston (Under the Volcano) and Claude Chabrol (La Cérémonie).



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Yvonne Rainer was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s, a group that profoundly influenced modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe. Since 1972 Rainer has completed seven experimental feature-length films. Her latest dance, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan had its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in June 2000.

Since the 1960s, Rainer has challenged boundaries, repressive ideologies, traditional narrative, conservative politics and conventional representation of the body, of women, of sexuality. Whether she's dealing with Schönberg and the raise of nazism in Vienna or a woman's internalized rage and conflicted emotions in downtown Manhattan, Rainer keeps astonishing, delighting and challenging audiences.

Covering a span of almost 30 years, the evening at REDCAT will start with Rainer's first video:

AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN: HYBRID

2002, 31 min, video, Los Angeles premiere

A combination of dance and literary fragments, Yvonne Rainer's first video includes footage from videotaped rehearsals of her recent choreography for the White Oak dance project (commissioned by the Barishnikov Dance Foundation), as well as text and images dealing with art and politics in fin-de-siècle Vienna. These elements are juxtaposed to highlight the current state of the avant-garde - a period of art-making with complex relations to a prolonged historical crisis. (Rotterdam Film Festival, New York Video Festival)

Followed by the legendary classic:

FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO

1974, 105 min, 16 mm, b/w, sound

"This is the poetically licensed story of a woman who finds it difficult to reconcile certain external facts with her image of her own perfection."
(—excerpt from the soundtrack)

This elegant, breathtakingly beautiful 'reworking' of a pre-existing multi-media dance performance "pushes further Rainer's thoughts on representation, narrative, sexual relationships, and the politics of personal power manipulations. Contradiction is the basic grammar of the film, dialectic its movement, cliché frequently its vocabulary. From the first opening scene, Rainer plays upon audience expectations of filmic traditions and foils its fulfillment." (B. Ruby Rich).

Other related public programs

Getty Center:
"Structures and Systems: Minimal Art in the United States" (Saturday 1 May 2004) and "An Evening of Dance with Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti" (Saturday May 8, 2004, 7:30 p.m. and Sunday May 9, 3:00 pm) Reservation and information: (310) 440-7300 or www.getty.edu

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions:
"Yvonne Rainer - Radical Juxtapositions 1961 - 2002" (5 May - 8 August 2004)

For more information: (323)957-1777 or www.artleak.org.



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Made with Bobby Abate

2004, 75 min, video

Peggy Ahwesh has produced a body of films and videos that defiantly blur the boundaries between drama and documentary and public spectacle with intimate revelation. Bobby Abate is a New York based film and video artist, whose Real Video Trilogy (1999 - 2001), based on the sex-n-death thrills and anxieties of the internet and technology, premiered at the New York Underground Film Festival.

"Certain Women is based on the 1958 novel of the same name by populist Southern genre writer Erskine Caldwell. Caldwell's pulp storytelling, his proto-feminist stance, and his unabashed social dramatization of the lives of his characters inspired us in our visual style. Caldwell,s broadly drawn themes of small town hypocrisy and restrictive moral values contextualize each woman character's struggle for sexual expression, stability and independence.There is no redemption in the town of Claremore, but there is humor, over-the-top despair and wickedness. Shot in a variety of low-res video formats and produced with a limited budget we have used friends and acquaintances as the characters, each chosen for their unique personalities, stock character looks and on screen magnetism."
(—Peggy Ahwesh and Bobby Abate)

Preceded by

THE STAR EATERS

2003, 24 min, video

"The Star Eaters is a short and inconclusive treatise on women and gambling. The allure of risk taking, the contradictions of excessive behavior and a penchant for failure combine in this fairytale set in the abandoned decay which was once a glamorous Altantic City."
(—Peggy Ahwesh)

This event is sponsored by the Herb Alpert Foundation



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Engel Animation Advance Research Center (EAARC)
Animation Program 3

This program includes several recent as well as historical animations that celebrate the variety of styles, cultures, political struggles and folk tales of many regions of the world. Films include The Trial of the Floating World, by Alain Escalle; in which a Hiroshima man dreams of the past in the present and sees visions of the future in the past; Renzo Kinoshita's Japonese, a satirical send-up which wonders what it is to be Japanese; Jin Qing Hu and Yun Chu Wu's Snow Fox, which through traditional ink and paint on rice paper expresses an appeal for wild life protection; Martine Chartrand's Ame Noire, a trip through the history of the black race; Lotte Reiniger's Papageno, which Jean Renoir called " the best visual equivalent to Mozart's music." Also: Raoul Servais' Nocturnal Butterflies and The Fox and the Hare, and Yuri Norstien's The Heron and the Crane.

(Produced by the Engel Animation Advancement Research Center (ME)



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Eric Saks and Patrick Tierney will premiere several new videos, including Saks' Hung Up, Dirt, Come To See Ya and Nation Elevated; Tierney's Disnotopia; and their collaborative Neglectosphere (revised version) and Don From Lakewood: A Lost Episode.

"Eric Saks has been at the forefront of digital media culture for over a decade, fashioning an eclectic film and videography that combines live action, animation, and digital manipulation; .With a keen eye for the roiling anxieties disrupting contemporary America's relationship to all forms of technology, from the seemingly innocuous telephone to the more insidious surveillance devices dotting urban street corners, Saks has built a body of work that deftly limns the contours of an evolving technoculture."
(—Holly Willis)

Patrick Tierney is a third generation Angelino and multi-disciplinary artist and writer whose work draws much of its nutriment from his expeditionary probes into what (he insists) is popularly and unjustifiably perceived as the "culturally fallow prairie land" of Los Angeles suburban fringe. His new focus is on a compilation of drawings, writings, charted data, and photographs with the working title Mouse Latitudes in which he will demonstrate why Disneyland matters. He has a year round pass to Disneyland. (SA)



For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts, please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

REDCAT is located in downtown Los Angeles at the corner of W. 2nd St. and S. Hope St., inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Click here for directions.

General admission is $8.00 for each program. Students and seniors receive a 50% discount with valid ID. Tickets my also be purchased by calling 213-237-2800 or in person at the REDCAT Box Office

The Film and Video Series at REDCAT is funded by Wendy Keys and Donald A. Pels.

Special Thanks: Thom Andersen, James Bond, Gwen Deglise, Cindy Keefer, Dorna Khazeni, Gordon Kurowski, Patti Palmer, Joel Shepard, Craig Smith and Billy Woodberry.