Memescapes
(Ann Michel and Phil Wilde, United States, 2007; 80 min.)
Original live music score composed and performed by Judy Hyman, Jeff Claus, Rick Hansen, Jay Olsa, and Robby Aceto A collaborative partnership with the Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian Institution Opening Night
March 26, 2007
8:00 p.m.
Park Hall Auditorium
Ithaca College
World Premiere
Memescapes bursts open the 2007 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival with archival film, digital imaging, lighting, spoken word, and live music. Memescapes expands and explodes our ideas and preconceptions about the environment. A special original multimedia performance commissioned for this year's festival, Memescapes takes spectators on an immersive voyage through our programming streams: metropoli, soundscaping, panic attacks, and maps and memes.
In a collaborative partnership with the Human Studies Film Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, digital multimedia artists Ann Michel and Phil Wilde map the liminal zones between the old and the new, the digital and the analog, the machine and the natural, the screen and the embodied. Actress Cynthia Henderson performs spoken word, embodying concepts and creating environments with her voice.
Four members of the bands Boy with a Fish and the Horse Flies-Judy Hyman (electric violin and programming), Jeff Claus (electric guitars and sound design), Rick Hansen (keyboards, accordion, and sound design), and Jay Olsa (bass)-join guitarist Robby Aceto to create new original music in accompaniment of a sometimes wild, sometimes funny, and sometimes moving split-screen montage exploring the past, present, and future of society's relationship with constructed and natural environments.
Expect to hear a convergence of Boy with a Fish's haunting, edgy, and artful indie alt-rock; the Horse Flies' driving, minimalist, neo-primitive roots music; and Aceto's atmospheric and inventive alt-rock guitar, combined with soundscapes, spoken word, samples, and more. Reception to follow.
A special commission by the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
His People
(Edward Sloman, United States, 1925; 91 min.)
Original score composed by Peter Rothbart
Live music performed by Laptop Orchestra and IC Klezmorim
A collaborative partnership with the National Center for Jewish Film
Sunday, April 1, 2007
2:15 p.m. and 7:15 p.m.
Cinemapolis
$15 ($12 with a festival pass)
World Premiere
Benefit for the 7th Art Corporation, Operators of Cinemapolis and Fall Creek Theaters With evocative images of the Lower East Side in the 1920s (reproduced on a Hollywood soundstage in Los Angeles!), His People shows how metropoli are sites of combustion between immigrants, ethnicities, and religions. In this world premiere, composer Peter Rothbart has created a moving, engaging score that brings to life the triumphs and struggles of immigrant and Jewish life in this recently rediscovered and rarely screened landmark silent film. The score combines electronic music with klezmorim, as well as other instrumentation and sound design, to explore the themes of assimilation and the continuity of culture. With its contemporary approach and structure, the score provides a counterpoint to the film, suggesting an aural exploration of the larger story of ethnicity in the United States.
The two sons of a poor Russian-Jewish pushcart peddler on New York's Lower East Side are both causing their father grief. Morris, a selfish, ambitious student, wants to become a lawyer-and hides his background from his friends. Sammy gets a job to help pay his brother's college education, and to his father's horror, becomes a prizefighter and plans to marry an Irish girl. As Morris and Sammy stray from traditions cherished by their parents, each generation learns to accept change in order to preserve the family as a source of love and respect.
Film historian Lester Friedman has observed that "Sloman's compelling vision of the painful depths and joyous heights of immigrant life endow the film with an exuberant vitality that captivates modern filmgoers and enlightens film historians."
A special commission by the Finger Lakes Environmental Film FestivalMan with a Movie Camera
(Dziga Vertov, Soviet Union, 1929; 80 min.)
New original improvisational score composed by Chris White and Peter Dodge
Performed by Chris White, electric cello and sequencer and Peter Dodge, electronic keyboards, trumpet, soprano sax and percussion
Closing Night
Monday, April 2, 2007
8:00 p.m.
Park Hall Auditorium
Ithaca College
World Premiere
This year's festival closes with the most exuberant and visceral city film of all time, the legendary silent film Man with a Movie Camera, pumped up with the world premiere of an avant-garde jazz improvisation by electric cellist Chris White and electronic keyboardist Peter Dodge. Inspired by Vertov's ideas to "film life as it is," with the camera responding to what it interacts with, White and Dodge create a soundscape of "sound as it is," responding to and interacting with the visual and conceptual structures of Man with a Movie Camera.
As Man with a Movie Camera begins, the cameraman climbs out of the head of the camera. This path-breaking, self-reflexive documentary feature film is a kaleidoscopic, humorous excursion through Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. It creates a futuristic city where electrification, industrialization, and workers triumph. These themes of electrification and new technology reverberate in tonight's world premiere performance of a new score, an experimental, plugged-in, amped-up, improvisational duet between Chris White on electric cello and Peter Dodge on synthesizer and keyboards.
Man with a Movie Camera creates a meme where the moviemaker, the factory workers, and the filmmaking process are all represented as labor-but as labor that is celebratory, explosive, and dynamic. By aggressively deploying all available filming strategies-superimposition, split screens, moving camera, montage, and varied speed-Vertov revolutionized cinema with his defiant deconstruction of cinematic language, dramatic norms, and metropoli. Vertov embraced documentary, deploying technology for more astute vision-the kino eye. He issued punchy polemics promoting his radical ideas. Vertov said, for example, "The film drama is the opium of the people-down with Bourgeois fairytale scenarios-long live life as it is!"
Vertov, a pseudonym medical student Denis Kaufman adopted thatmeans "spinning top," was influenced by futurist and constructivist art that saw machines and assemblage as a way to map a new vision of the world. After the Bolshevik Revolution, along with his wife/editor and brother/cameraman, he made films and wrote manifestos that called for the death of filmmaking involving artifice and drama. Ever the socialist utopian, Vertov asserted the kinoki, an objective cinematic eye, would help to imagine and build a new proletarian society.
This new score by White and Dodge, inspired by Vertov's ideas about the utopian possibilities of new technologies, responds as much to the elaborate, moving cinematography of the film as to the reactions of the audience to create an exhilarating new experience of Man with a Movie Camera.
White and Dodge's riveting improvisations combine with virtuoso technique to re-read Man with a Movie Camera through the aural contemporary soundscape of electrified modes and interactive improvisation. Their mix of jazz, post-minimalism, sequencers, and tonal and textural experimentation create a montage within a montage of this documentary masterpiece. Reception to follow.
A special commission by the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
