October 12, 1998 Volume 21, No. 4

Filmmakers, Scholars to Showcase Work

Cutting-edge filmmakers and scholars who are pushing the boundaries of independent media will show and discuss their works in a series of fall programs sponsored by the Department of Cinema and Photography in Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications. All of the programs are free and open to the public.

"We have programmed the series to showcase a wide range of work from the documentary, narrative, experimental, and digital realms in order to present a sense of the vitality and diversity of cinematic explorations at the close of the millennium," says professor of cinema and photography Patricia Zimmermann. "Their work is provocative as well as beautiful, socially significant as well as aesthetically demanding."

At 7:00 p.m. on Monday, October 19, in Park Hall Auditorium, the series will feature a talk and screening of works by Sadie Benning, who has taken a child’s toy and turned it into an intriguing — and revealing — medium of expression. With her Fisher Price Pixelvision camera, Benning began at the age of 15 to document what it was like growing up lesbian in Milwaukee. Working often in the privacy of her own room, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries, Benning utilized the camcorder’s poor-quality black-and-white images to evoke the humor and real desperation of a personality trapped and uncomfortable, just coming to self-awareness.

The youngest artist ever to be included in the famed Whitney biennial, Benning has had her works installed in a number of permanent collections.

Leighton Pierce will show Glass, The Red Shovel, Fifty Feet of Strings, and other films at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, October 20, in Studio C, Park Hall. Pierce is noted for his extraordinary work as a cinematographer, most notably with his use of the short depth of field, composition, and lighting; and with his use of sound, which is layered and unusually resourceful. He has won numerous awards for his films, which have been exhibited at MOMA and the Flaherty Seminars, among other places.

Anne-Marie Duguet, an international expert on video art, television, and electronic and digital art, will present and discuss a selection of European CD-ROMs at noon on Thursday, November 5, in Park Hall Auditorium. Duguet is professor of art and criticism at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and director of the Sorbonne Center of Aesthetic Research of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, France’s leading academic program in the combined areas of theoretical study and production of cinema and video.

"Homegrown: Theory into Practice" is the title of the presentation on Monday, November 9, as the talents of Ithaca College’s own practitioners will be on display at 7:00 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium. Showing and discussing their works will be associate professor of cinema and photography Vincent Grenier; assistant professors of cinema and photography Pierre Desir, Curt Louison, Robert Hahn, and Bob Harris; and manager of the Professional Production Unit Carol Jennings.

Experimental documentary filmmaker Marc LaPore will bring his films A Depression in the Bay of Bengal, Five Bad Elements, and India Rolls to Park Hall Auditorium at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, November 16. LaPore has often taken on in his films ethnographic subjects that he manages to treat with great awareness and subtlety. In his carefully designed but spontaneous synch sound takes, the exoticism of the places and people going about their business is matched by his own extraordinary sense of composition and spectacle. Among other places, his works have been screened at MOMA and the New York Film Festival.

The fall series concludes on Monday, November 30, with a 7:00 p.m. screening in Park Hall Auditorium of works by Evans Chan, a New York-based filmmaker who was born in mainland China, raised in Macao, and educated in Hong Kong and America. His two feature films, To Live and Crossings, both openly address issues that find only a marginal voice in the mainstream cinema of Hong Kong and the United States.

The series is programmed by Zimmermann, Grenier, and associate professor of cinema and photography Gina Marchetti. Major funding for the series is provided by the James B. Pendleton Endowment of the Roy H. Park School of Communications, the Department of Cinema and Photography, and the New York State Council on the Arts through the Central New York Programmers’ Group.