Stanford Cinematheque: FILM BODIES

The ½ Core+ improvises a live electroacoustic accompaniment to films by Stan Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann in FILM BODIES at Stanford Cinematheque.

The ½ Core+ is Constantin Basica, Chris Chafe, Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi, and Fernando Lopez-Lezcano.
 

FREE | Open to Stanford Affiliates Only | Oshman Hall, McMurtry Building, 355 Roth Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Stanford Cinematheque presents FILM BODIES, an evening of short films on 16mm by Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, and Scott Stark. Psychodramas of abstraction reflected back in their collagist film form: these filmmakers see the celluloid as a site of physical construction, emphasizing the malleability of the medium and its potentials beyond static realism. Through superimposition, cutting, taping, or scratching the film strips, the filmmakers assemble provoking choreographies of bodies and light. Fuses (1967) — an avant garde pornographic work that features the artist and her lover, composer Jim Tenney — was greatly influenced by Brakhage’s own Loving (1957) and Window Water Baby Moving (1959). The latter, a short film documenting the birth of his first daughter, distills the filmmaker’s technological and allegorical experiments with bodies and technique. In Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961) Brakhage returns to the scene of birth with his third daughter, aiming to improve the emotional capture he deemed lacking in Window Water Baby Moving. Thirty years later, Stark extends the conversation of sex on screen, remixing old-school pornos and removing the obscene. In the braiding of entwined experimental legacy shared by Brakhage, Schneemann, and Stark, our program also invites viewers to consider the survival of bodies of filmography, censorship, and film legacies. 

 

This event is a collaboration between Stanford Cinematheque, Stanford Art & Art History, The Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), the Program in American Studies, and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. An informal reception will follow the screenings. Prints made available thanks to Canyon Cinema.