Screening Room

Richard P. Rogers (1944-2001) was a renowned producer and director of nonfiction films, and a gifted teacher and mentor who taught filmmaking and photography for many years at S.U.N.Y., Purchase, and at Harvard University, where he was director of the Film Study Center. His films range from political to experimental and self-reflective, and include the independent documentaries Living at Risk and Pictures from a Revolution, about Nicaragua; an award-winning portrait made for PBS of the poet William Carlos Williams; and a dramatic adaptation of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book A Midwife's Tale.

Independent animator and painter Suzan Pitt, whose surreal and psychological films have gained her worldwide acclaim, continually pushes the boundaries of the animated form, sometimes working with live actors or using animation in opera stagings. Her film Asparagus won the top prize at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival and showed in theatres with David Lynch's Eraserhead for two years. She has had major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, and the Stedlijk Museum in Amsterdam. She currently teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

Ed Emshwiller started out as an abstract expressionist painter and an award-winning science fiction illustrator before becoming a major figure in avant-garde cinema and the experimental film movement of the 1960s and '70s. Eventually a highly respected video artist and dean at the School of Film/Videoo at the California Institute of the Arts, Emshwiller was always looking for ways to push the boundaries of film and video. He was a pioneer of computer-generated video and combining technology with art. Many of his films, including Relativity, Totem, Film with Three Dancers, and Thanatopsis received screenings and awards at New York, Cannes and other major film festivals worldwide.

In this episode from 1975, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax is the guest and viewers are treated to a partitioned screening of his path-breaking 40 minute film Dance and Human History: Movement Style and Culture #1, accompanied by short interludes of Gardner/Lomax discussion before and after each segment. It is a kind of ‘lecture-demonstration’ version of the film. Skillful editing keeps viewers attention away from the fact of Gardner’s smoking most of the time.

In September 1975, Lamb returned to the program to screen and discuss the films The Last Cartoon Man and The Psychic Parrot.

Breer chats with Gardner about his approach to filmmakin'. He screens RECREATION, A MAN AND HIS DOG OUT FOR AIR, 69, GULLS AND BUOYS, FUJI and RUBBER CEMENT.

Independent animator George Griffin has dedicated himself to the pursuit of animation as an art form. Originally from Tennessee, he became a pivotal figure of New York's experimental film scene in the 1970s with his self-reflexive, irreverent and personal films that challenge traditional notions and methods of animation. He has taught at institutions including the Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and Harvard University, and his films have screened in museums and festivlas around the world. Griffin currently lives and works in New York. More information and his collected films, Griffiti, are available at www.geogrif.com.

A major figure in the American experimental film movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and a widely published theorist, Hollis Frampton made such acclaimed and influential films as Zorns Lemma, the Hapax Legomena series, and the unfinished Magellan. Retrospectives of his work have been shown at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.The journal October twice devoted whole issues to Frampton, and the entire body of his work is preserved in the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. Frampton taught at Cooper Union, Hunter College, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. In January 1977, Hollis Frampton appeared on Screening Room to discuss his work and screen Lemon, Pas De Trois, excerpts from Maxwell’s Demon, Surface Tension and Critical Mass, and footage from what ultimately became Magellan." - DER website

Drawing on traditions of 19th-century landscape painting and still photography, Peter Hutton’s contemplative, meticulously composed films unfold as a series of tableaux separated by black leader. His work, primarily minimalist, silent portraits of cities and landscapes, has been shown at important festivals and in major museums across Europe and the United States including the Museum of Modern Art and five Whitney Biennials. He has received the Dutch Film Critics Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has taught at Hampshire College, Harvard University, SUNY Purchase, and has been a Professor of Film at Bard College since 1984.

Relentless exploration of the nature of performance, the construction of meaning, and the relations of the sexes has guided Yvonne Rainer's long career, first in avant–garde choreography and dance and then in filmmaking. Her honors include Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships along with numerous exhibitions of her work, including recent retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. Her other films include Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who... (1974), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1991), and Murder and Murder (1996).

Canadian Michael Snow has worked in painting, sculpture, and music as well as film, where he has proved one of the most renowned and influential of all experimental filmmakers. He played a major role in the "structural" film movement with such works as Wavelength (1967), Back and Forth (1969), and La Région Centrale (1971), exploring the world through deliberate and explicit decisions about formal approaches. Snow has been honored with solo exhibitions or film retrospectives at the Venice Biennale, New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Paris Centre Pompidou and Cinémathèque Française, and elsewhere.

Often called "the father of West Coast independent cinema," James Broughton (1913-1999) considered himself to be, first and foremost, a poet. Writing poems and making films were, for Broughton, simply two different ways of creating images with feeling. Broughton gained notoriety as a filmmaker after collaborating with Sidney Peterson on The Potted Psalm in 1946, and he went on to make many films throughout his remaining years. He is known for his lyrical, celebratory style of dealing with everyday life, the body, and sexuality, and for blending poetry with film. He published books on film, as well as books of poems, and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute.

He returned to Screening Room in January 1979 to screen and discuss: • Organism (full film, 18:59) • The Nuer (excerpt, 6:31) • sound editing tool demo (footage, 7:09) • image generator demo (footage, 2:57) • oscilloscope imagery (footage, 3:22)

Robert Fulton was an extraordinary non-fiction filmmaker and gifted aerial cinematographer who left a legacy of remarkable films shot all over the world. He was an exceptional pilot, a devout Buddhist and a brilliant independent thinker and talker. He taught for a time in Harvard's Visual and Environmental Studies Department and worked closely with Robert Gardner on large and small projects over several decades. He won many awards, including an Emmy for work in television. Fulton died in a private airplane crash in 2002 whereupon Harvard Film Study Center established the Robert E. Fulton III Fund for new filmmakers in memorium. Robert Fulton appeared on Screening Room in April 1973, and returned in April 1979 to screen the films Street Film, Path of Cessation and Chant.

Jean Rouch appeared on Screening Room in July 1980 and screened Les Maitres Fous as well as several film excerpts including Rhythm of Work and Death of a Priest. Over a period of five decades Jean Rouch made many films about the Songhay and Dogon of West Africa. He also made, with Edgar Morin, the classic documentary, Chronicle of a Summer about the lives of Parisians. Rouch Frequently traveled with his films, showing and talking about them to a wide audience.

Brakhage returned to the program in the fall of 1980, where he showed Window, two excerpts from Short Films: 1975, Roman Numeral Series I and Creation.

Here is Jonas Mekas interview with Robert Gardner in October of 81. Fantastic insights into Mekas' work and other experimental filmmakers.