Hello Frameworks,My apologies for the very late notice....I missed the deadline
for the weekly calendar and wanted to let anyone in the Bay Area know about a
free film program that I'm presenting in San Franciscotomorrow, Tuesday,
December 6th at noon, in the Wattis Theatre at SFMOMA. It's titled COMMODIFIED
CINEMA, and features films by Peter Kubelka, Nagisa Oshima, Wolf Koenig and
Roman Kroiter, and Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. I've attached and copied
information about the films and the program below. Not an easy time for most to
see films, but there it is!PaulSFMOMA Free Tuesday Film Program in the Wattis
Theater December 6th at noonCOMMODIFIED CINEMA: Art, Advertising and Commodity
in filmAdebar (1957) Peter Kubelka--35mm, B&W, sound 2 min.Schwechater (1958)
Peter Kubelka- 35mm, color, sound Kubelka 1 min.Tomorrow’s Sun
(1959) Nagisa Oshima- 35mm, ‘Scope, color, sound, 6 min.Lonely Boy
(1962) Wolf Koenig and
Roman Kroitor- 16mm, B&W, sound, 26 min.Les Statues meurent aussi (1953)
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker- 35mm, B&W, 30 min, French w’ English
subtitles.Poetry and Truth (2003) Peter Kubelka –35mm, silent, color, 13
min. Total running time: 78 minutes This program of short films by
international filmmakers working in both commercial and experimental fields,
investigates the ways in which consumerism, product advertising, and
commodification directly influence the social, political and aesthetic
histories of art and society. In some manner self-referential, subversive or
critical, these films serve to comment on and critique the very basis for their
own creation, while also questioning the commercial practices of the film
industry, television and other forms of media of their time.
Peter Kubelka’s Adebar(1957) and Schwechater(1958), while rejected
commercials (in the case of Schwechater) to sell entertainment and beer, use
intricate,
metrically-patterned sound and visual montages, to create seminal works
of avant garde cinema. Nagisa Oshima’s Asu no taiyo/Tomorrow’s Sun (1958),
created for the Shochiku studios in a style unlike the groundbreaking work he
would become famous for, describes an opulently
colored widescreen post-war Japan, with gangsters, singing cowboys and girls
starring in a fake trailer for the kind of film he would never make. Oshima’s
short is both a perfect commercial for the “youth market”, and at the same
time, expert parody of one. Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor’s prescient ‘Lonely
Boy (1962), candidly and critically delves into the creation of teen pop-idol
Paul Anka, where image, identity and commerce have blurred to create an ideal
media personality. Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ Les Statues meurrent aussi/
Statues Also Die (1953), is a critique of western views on art, particularly
related to the impact of French
colonialism on African culture. Finally,
Peter Kubelka’s Dichtung und Wahrheit / Poetry and Truth (2003), studies a
collection of takes from advertising footage, but rather than finding a
critical point, discovers unlikely poetry in banal commercial
moments. SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA. 94103
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