THE STRANGE ONES A Feature Film by Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff
Director Lauren Wolkstein will be presenting the film in person
Synopsis: Mysterious events surround two travelers as they make their way across a remote American landscape. On the surface all seems normal, but what appears to be a simple vacation soon gives way to a dark and complex web of secrets.
DIRECTORS' BIOS Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein are NYC-based filmmakers best known for their award-winning short films, including The Strange Ones, Jonathan’s Chest, Social Butterfly, and Cigarette Candy which have screened at hundreds of film festivals worldwide including Sundance, SXSW, Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand, AFI Fest, and more. Their first feature film, The Strange Ones (an adaptation of their short film of the same name) premiered at SXSW 2017.
...of "Slumber Party Massacre", "Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity," "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama," and "Scream Queen Hot Tub Party" fame, directs and stars in the possibly-auto-biographical special-effects extravaganza that is "Personal Demons". ALSO, featuring scream queen Linnea Quigley of "Graduation Day" "Silent Night, Deadly Night", and "Return of the Living Dead".
Synopsis: Pandora’s party-girl lifestyle lands her in rehab… again. The actress becomes tabloid fodder, and producers are reluctant to hire her. The sole role she’s offered is in a low-budget horror movie. When her aunt dies, Pandora inherits a Victorian mansion and retreats there to study her lines. It seems that Aunt Elinor dabbled in magic, according to a local yokel. A mysterious incantation in the script unleashes a vengeful demon. He’s hell-bent on seducing the not-so-innocent Pandora, who can resist everything but temptation. With the help of her dead aunt, Pandora desperately fights for her sobriety, her sanity, and ultimately her very soul.
1:00 PM - VENERABLE RECORDINGS
Ping Pong Boys Svanhvit Tryggvadottir, 8min, Iceland, Digital
A short documentary about six foreign men that have ended up in Iceland, bound tightly through their partners and family there. They meet once a week to play table tennis where they share their experience of seeing Iceland through the eye’s of the outsider.
SAFSTOR Adam Diller, 15min, USA, Digital
SAFSTOR contrasts the physical presence of the Three Mile Island power plant with the memories of local residents of the partial meltdown on March 28, 1979. The film explores archival materials and the contemporary landscape around the plant to provoke reflections on the unintended consequences of our infrastructure. The film leads the audience to consider what role nuclear power plants have in our lives, what the plants will become as they are decommissioned, and how our thinking has changed since the 1979 accident.
Scenes from a Visit Neil Ira Needleman, 9min, USA, Digital
After being away for several months, a documentary filmmaker visits the remote home his aging parents bought. During the visit, he comes to realize that the years are catching up to his octogenarian father, an artist with a vivid imagination.
Ellis won't be Dancing Today Pam Kuntz, Juliette Machado, 11min, USA, Digital
Ellis won’t be Dancing Today is a dance/theatre piece about one woman’s story of her husband and Alzheimer’s disease. This work was originally created as a live performance piece by Kuntz and Company for the Palliative Care Summer Institute in July 2014. Directors, Pam Kuntz and Juliette Machado collaborated to adapt the piece into a short film starring Jim Lortz and Marilyn Flint.
2:00 PM - NATURAL IMMERSIONS
Flowing (for Naruse) Ross Meckfessel, 2min, Japan/USA, 16mm
“The life of a flower is short Only bitter things are many” – Fumiko Hayashi “If they don't see happiness in the picture at least they'll see the black” – Chris Marker Sans Soleil
Summer's Last Moons Kathleen Rugh, 3min, USA, 16mm
As summer comes to an end, the moon reaches towards becoming full. Over three nights the moon is captured on film through in-camera editing and multiple exposures. The moons of different nights come together in the frame, to interact and play with one another, while official NASA sound recordings from space bring us closer.
Line in the Sand Sandy McLennan, 5 min, Canada, Double 8
Double 8mm film, with its unique line down the middle, is used to reflect on divisions in thought, purpose, practice; in the world. Shot with lenses and a pinhole while visiting nearby lake access points, edited in-camera and variously hand-processed including a wash in the ice and sand of the spring-melt lake. Sound is synthesized digital scans of a depth map of the lake and of the film itself (the mid line like a vinyl record groove), mixed with location recordings. There is both a private and a public experience here. Dividing lines appear and wash away, and persist.
Look How Beautiful the Light Moves Stefanie Weberhofer, 3min, Canada/Austria, Super 8
Fascinated by the wonderful Canadian autumn light, the filmmaker was inspired to create this visual exploration of the two fundamental elements of film: light and movement. “Look How Beautiful the Light Moves” is an attempt to remain in time rather than space.
Shot in a house in Montreal, the images capture different light situations in real time and time lapse using in-camera editing. The filmstrip of the Super8 cassette was hand-processed and remains unedited.
The title refers not just to the captured light movements, but to the moving light on the screen through the projector’s bulb and to the journey the original, unprinted light media made – from the house in Montreal into the projection booth of this screening room.
A lyrical journey with super 8mm film and sound. A stream of consciousness piece conceived from dark wanderings and trance-like states in and out of the western landscape.
Heading Due North John Barlow, 6min, United Kingdom, 16mm
Shot on a 1940s 16mm camera, “Heading Due North” portrays a journey by overnight train from London to the mountain wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, and onwards by foot to the western shore of the Isle of Skye. Scrolling patterns of hazy night-time city lights melt into undulating snow-capped highland scenery bathed in the delicate light of northern winter. The rhythmic clatter of the train on the tracks is submerged by the burbling of flowing water, stone and gravel crunching beneath walking boots, wind drifting over exposed ground, and gentle waves sweeping onto a shingle beach. The fractured nature of the sequence, blending linear and non-linear elements, and with its sometimes overlapping images and sounds, reflects how our recollections of long distance, physically tiring journeys often comprise disjointed and blurred memories of experiences.
165708 Josephine Massarella, 7min, Canada, 16mm
Shot entirely in 16mm black and white film using single frame photography, 165708 employs in-camera techniques and chemical manipulation of processed film to produce an eidetic study of temporal elasticity. Techniques include flicker, time-lapse, light painting, stop motion, tinting, and toning. Combined with cycles of alternating exposed frames, these methods imbue the work with a rhythmic magnetism, apparent both in the tempo and the aesthetic of the images. Exploring the capacity of the medium to express various notions of time, the film begins with a woman looking out from the shoreline. This acts as a point of departure to disparate yet interconnected sequences, which prompt the viewer to engage in a structurally unique mode of inquiry and experience.
A dynamic original score by the acclaimed composer Graham Stewart accompanies the film.
Famous for Nothing Taryn Ward, 2min, United States, Super 8
"Famous For Nothing" is a visual response to our social obsession with famed individuals who hold undeserved celebrity status. Through the frantic, paparazzi-like use of a Super 8 camera, this film attempts to photograph celebrities that don't exist.
Film Loop 31: Shisendo Michael Lyons, 2min, Japan, 16mm
Photographed on 16mm film at Shisendo temple in northeast Kyoto and hand-developed using matcha (powdered green tea). The soundtrack is an excerpt from 'Eunoia' by Stefano de Ponti and Elia Moretti recorded in Torino, Italy. Images from the Film Loop Series were used in studio during the recording of this track.
Elisir Mireille Heidbreder, 2min, USA, Digital
Elisir is a short experimental film, which depicts the anxiety and tension surrounding the uncertainties of what is to come in our respective lives.
3:00 PM - WAVES OF VAPOR
Inactivity Ryan Wicks, 2min, USA, Digital
Soaring through nostalgic computer screensavers as an off-screen narrator warns about the dangers of the meat packing industry.
Signal Steven Lapcevic, 6min, USA, Digital
A reliable glut of misinformation.
Towards the Experimental Control of Dreaming Ryan Betschart, 2min, USA, Digital
A visual prose poem on a missed encounter during a brief period of altered states of consciousness. The "Monroe Techniques" of outer body travel can be found in Robert Monroe's 1971 book “Journeys out of the Body”, or summarized in D Scott Rogo's “Leaving The Body” (1986). The title "Towards the Experimental Control of Dreaming" is taken from a chapter in a book of essays collected by Professor Charles T. Tart called “Altered States of Consciousness” (1961) The footage glitched from Dario Argento's “Susperia” (1977).
anexperimentalviralvlog - the movie remix #1 Vasco Diogo, 13min, Portugal, Digital
A unique short experimental remix of 15 vlog episodes, originally posted on youtube, based upon a reflection on identity, manipulation, truth and beauty, that blurs popular influences with performance video and video art processes and ideas. Self-representation document made with a DIY spirit and an urge to work on basic communication principles, such as the confrontation between the artist and the viewer and speech awareness. The audiovisual manipulations function mainly as an expression of repressed emotions in the context of a confessional aesthetics.
This is a remixed version of the original video: "anexperimentalviralvlog the movie", 2015, which continuous to be the first autonomous work that appropriates the material I posted on my youtube vlog.
Recording Device David Finkelstein, 25min, USA, Digital
A poetic exploration of the ways we store our memories. A collage of words, images and music, showing how we scratch and etch our impressions onto paper, film, vinyl and other media, shaping our view of the world. A journey through an interior landscape filled with snakes, saxophones, pyramids, the film’s two narrators explore the effects of stored memories, both corrosive and illuminating.
Ominous passages of time and light provide a fleeting glimpse into the unknown. --------- An exploration of the mystery film that investigates the atmospheric and the ominous. Composed of the peripheral moments that often surround or seek to complement the action of a traditional narrative, the film builds upon an overall sense of uncertainty while exploring the perceptions of a mystery told in light and tone.
Aleatoria Christopher Spencer-Lowe, 5min, Canada, Super 8
Chaos is incarnated as Aleatoria, the goddess of chance. Created through aleatoric and random processes, including randomizing images and decision making, using social networking to create shotlists and cameras set up in random locations and spun on constructed wheel mounts.
Zablah Rachel Nakawatase, Ryan Betschart, 4min, USA, 16mm
A fever dream of anti-boomer angst told through disjointed and aggressive sound, picture and edit; Zablah demon baby boomer seeks to convince a millennial that eating at Applebee's is a worthwhile experience. 16mm optical track hum and tonal pops are layered over pop music and the satanic mass vinyl along with gritty images shot on dirty Agfachrome color reversal stock of a young person with a demon eating soup.
The Collector Matthew von Dayton, 3min, USA, Super 8
The solitary life of a post-apocalyptic scavenger searching for organic matter in the perpetual soak of a coastal woodland.
Out Back, Behind the Shrubs Kyle Mangione-Smith, 3min, USA, 16mm
An experimental horror film following a group of masked figures through a world unknown.
Freedom Ayaka Furukawa, 3min, USA, 16mm
Girl A sneaks out of her repressive town and meets Girl B, who opens her eyes to the world around her. After that magical night Girl A decides to leave the town she’s always know to be with someone she truly loves.
Isolamento Carmelo Zucco, 6min, Canada, Super 8
Isolamento is a grand culmination of the themes: isolation, fear, beauty, gluttony, assimilation, environment and sexuality, merged into one great stream of consciousness; an ever-changing zoetrope of scenes flowing from one to another.
At its heart is a mother who feels like she’s enabling her son’s mental illness with any action she takes, driving him further into darkness. A father who grinds away at a life that has him on his knees. He yearns for the way out, wishing to return to a more natural way of life. A son who’s so fed up with the world he wants to simply end it all in flames, regardless of the pain it would cause those closest to him.
This absurd reality is cradled by the plights of other people, caught in their own struggles; both aware and oblivious to the bubble they’ve put themselves in. Some will struggle against it and some are perfectly content to stay within it. A symbolic farce of the human condition, which embraces the question… What is this all for anyway?
Entropia Marinah Janello, 15min, USA, 16mm
Loneliness and an obsession with vanity have pushed one woman to take unconventional measures to find happiness. After her daily beauty regimen she decides to perform more drastic procedures on her body, which trigger her inner thoughts to drive her mad. She finally leaves her home to venture into the outside world only to find more sadistic ways to enhance her beauty regimen.
Symbols of birth, death and rebirth grace the film and ask the audience to ponder the question: How far would you go to turn back time?
James Hollenbaugh, 6min, USA, Super 8 For the past 20 years, New York based, self-taught artist Bill Mayer has been creating an exuberant and startling body of work that captures the gritty street life of pre-Bloomberg New York City and reimagines classical painting genres inspired by lifelong visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mayer invites us to his studio—housed inside a 200-year old hotel in Davenport New York—for an intimate look at his art as formal practice, expressive therapy and a way to create the worlds he wants to see.
"1st Day and Next Minute"
Sara Koppel, 3min, Denmark, Digital A new animated micro-short film by Sara Koppel/Naked Love Film. A rush adventure into a gender-fluid persons zone of desires where lust & responsibility are constant dividing & demanding needs.
RUMINATIONS
Ruminations follows Rumi Missabu, the iconoclast cofounder of San Francisco's infamous Cockettes. Through archive footage, animation and new interviews with stars from SF's queer art past, his lurid tales in and out of the spotlight are revealed as he reinvents himself at the end of his life.
Fingerilla - Feature Film - Area Premier with Filmmakers in Person!
Moviate Presents a very rare screening of Micah Vassau's S-VHS Feature "Fingerilla", a not-to-be-missed Acid-Trip adventure through one girl's depraved conscience. Lead actress Betsey Brown live in person plus the film's Director and other cast/crew to present and answer questions!!!!
PLOT: A nymphomaniac must navigate her nightmares to free her newborn son from the Devil.
Made in part with the 2017 SXSW award winning film ASSHOLES, starring the lead actress of that film, Betsey Brown and from the creators of THE PANTY SYMPHONIC.
Moviate Underground says:
"Shocking!" "Vivid!" "Surreal!" "It has Puppets!"
"A Liberating Revelation!" "S-VHS Has never looked so good!!"
"Like if John Waters created a mashup of The Little Mermaid and Rosemary's Baby... on S-VHS... With puppets"
WARNING: Not Suitable for Young Children
Trailer:
Plus!!! ...presented with Non-Films' beautiful short film "Collapsing"
An exquisite corpse about the end of the world, made with found 8mm footage. Words by Daniel DeVaughn. Music by Small Craft.
A neon noir western in which a rancher's daughter witnesses the death of her father, and then stops at nothing to attain splendid vengeance years later.
Camera Threat Bernd Lützeler, 30min, India/Germany, Super 8/Super 16/35mm/Digital
Somewhere in the dreary nooks of Mumbai's film industry, Camera Threat explores the ambivalent relationship this film city has with the moving image. Seated on a casting couch, two actors are getting stuck in impromptu conversations on the side effects of a world that no longer bothers to tell facts from fiction.
1:00 PM - WAKING REALITY
Phototaxis Melissa Ferrari, 7min, USA, Digital
“Phototaxis” draws parallels between Mothman, a prophetic and demonized creature in West Virginia lore, and Narcotics Anonymous, the main treatment program in West Virginia’s addiction epidemic. Rooted in nonfiction, this film contemplates synchronicity and the role of belief systems in perception; the tendency to assign supernatural meaning to tragedy and the unknowable; anonymous and apocryphal oral histories; and the moth to the flame.
To visualize these narratives, natural materials and pastel-on-paper palimpsest animation are woven together using a multiplane and analog overhead projection. First year film at CalArts Experimental Animation MFA
“Unforeseeable disasters can raise questions of theodicy. A vacuum of meaning is created that invites religious interpretation.” - Joseph Laycock, Mothman: Monster, Disaster and Community
“The nature of our belief will determine the manifestation of our perception.” - Narcotics Anonymous
Beth's three o'clock with Dr. Harlow Emma Penaz Eisner, 2min, USA, Digital
Beth discloses a recent dream to her analyst. A vivid study of casual brutality and failed empathy, this surrealistic film intermixes stop motion animation with live action sequences.
The Man in the Bushes Emma Piper-Burket, Vasilios Papaioannu, 6min, USA, 16mm
The distance from the Moon to Earth averages 238,855 miles. Both astronomical bodies are made up of the same elements in different proportions; one supports life, the other does not. A filmmaker follows a man as he searches for clues to understand the father he never knew. Armed with a stack of photographs, a street address and the knowledge that the man's father was an astronaut, the two explore their surrounding environs in order to unravel the mysteries of living on planet earth.
The Factory aka The Dreams We Dream When No One is Watching aka Cockroach II Paul Ouellette, 20min, USA, 16mm
A young woman wanders deeper and deeper into a strange world...
The Dead Souls - Desert Lands official video Paul Ouellette, 5min, USA, 16mm
2:00 PM – SIMPLE STORIES
Mata Laya Pata Kevin Vu, 12min, USA, Digital
An underachiever takes part in a bizarre women's self-help. Will she succeed?
A Great Fall Jez Leather, Jonny Cola, 17min, United Kingdom, Digital
These days, Alan lives alone, barely moving from his armchair, in a room, which is gradually fossilizing. When erstwhile associate Jonny shows up asking questions, the pair find the complex dynamic between them shifting, as Alan exploits the weak points in the troubled ex-singer’s fractured psyche for his own ends. Unconventional, unsettling and blackly comic, “A Great Fall” is the second short from Jukebox Headaches, the creative partnership between Jez Leather and Jonny Cola. It both follows and prefigures “Restricted Vision”, a film which has screened at underground festivals across three continents.
Robo Greaser Dakota Arseneault, 9min, Canada, Digital
On the closing day of his beloved roller-rink, Robo Greaser does his best to skate through his final shift.
3:00 PM - EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATIONS
601 Revir Drive Josh Weissbach, 9min, USA
A series of spatial limits are defined while a maker imbibes. Interdependence is inherited after a substance cannot be shook. An animal carefully guards an outlined space as a river runs backwards.
Even in Paradise it is Not Good to Be Alone Lorenzo Gattorna, 8min, Italy/USA
In memory of Nonno Pierino
Sound: David Menke, Coll Anderson, Yle, Felix Blume, klankbeeld, Emanuele Caro, Lucio Lepri, SFX Bible, Mario Conte, Pietro Bonanno, alesonica, Jillis Molenaar Music: "Quel mazzolin di fiori", Coro della Bassa Romagna, 2012
Demonstration Mary Billyou, 4min, USA, 16mm
Self-defense techniques demonstrated and repeated to the creeping pace of Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are." Self-aware performers remix violence into complementarity, inspiring movement into the promise of a dance. A pink print inspires informed movement, now as it was then.
Becoming Ariel Teal, 8min, USA, Digital
Embodying a body after trauma. Blowjobs, memory and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are interwoven in attempt to process and find bodily autonomy. CW: Sexually explicit language and text dealing with sexual trauma.
Farewell Transmission Mike Rollo, 14min, Canada, 16mm
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation opened the doors of the CBK Transmitter Station in 1939 to serve the prairie region of Canada. Farewell Transmission is equal parts indexical record of the demolition of CBK in 2015 and subjective response to the residual media documenting the event. The building is framed with tension preceding its destruction: emulsion pulsates as if with decades of radio transmission, creating an unsettled eulogy for a cultural institution.
4:00 PM - STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE
Exquisite Corpse Pat Doyen, A. Moon, Rebecca Reynolds, 6min, USA, 16mm
This silent experimental film, made in the tradition of a surrealist "exquisite corpse” collaboration, features randomly spliced together shots photographed by three different filmmakers at locations across Maryland. The exposed footage was hand-processed using a coffee-based developer and old US Army processing tanks.
Vapor Kyle Whitehead, 6min, Canada, Super 8
Vapor is an insubstantial film - diffused matter suspended in air - a cinematic dew point where time and space are distorted and compressed. Pinhole images coalesce into something recognizable and just as quickly fade into the mist of emulsion from which they came.
In Search of Lost Time Jason Younkman, 8min, USA – Newvicon VHS
My life recapitulated as a phantasmagoria of nostalgia and neurosis. Capricious memories and sensory impressions collide, coalesce and collapse.
Nonoko/Kaos No Ma Michael Lyons, 3min, Japan, Super 8
Dancer Nonoko Sato at Gallery Kaos No Ma in Kyoto. Shot in ambient light on 30 year old Kodachrome and developed in Caffenol, each frame of the film was exposed for up to a second. Nonoko Sato (Japan) is a member of Kiraza Butoh Company and is also active as an independent artist.
Blank End David Colagiovanni, 5min, USA, 16mm
An end resulting in no score. Hand colored, laser printed, sanded, scratched 16mm clear leader transferred to video while being processed, with optical sound. Made with the support of The Athens Center for Film and Video, Athens, OH
An Empty Threat Josh Lewis, 8min, USA, 16mm
A sequence of truces, a personality test offering mostly slippage.
Technical: When a drop of photographic developer hits the surface of a fully exposed 16mm film strip, it makes a black mark occurring at the atomic level that is richer and denser than any ink or marker. If one strikes a print of this blotted 16mm strip twice--once on each opposing side--the result is the equivalent of a “Rorschach” inkblot--an inverted white symmetrical shape against a black ground.
An Empty Threat consists of series of these mirror-images in various shapes and sizes, sequenced into a variety of visual rhythms that add up to a sort of uneasy animation working both in tandem and against the projector. The blots flicker, morph, and fall through the frame lines, but not necessarily in that order and often at the same time.
A Documentary About Fred Lane And Raudelunas With Filmmaker Skizz Cyzyk In Person Presenting His Film!
19 years in the making, ICEPICK TO THE MOON is a feature length documentary about obscure stripmine crooner, Rev. Fred Lane, the pants-less, Band Aid-adorned performer who achieved a worldwide cult following starting in the Eighties when the Shimmy Disc label made Lane’s records easier to find. Lane is described by his obsessed fans as “subversive,” “completely satirical,” “the Dada Duke Ellington,” and “Demon Frank Sinatra.” His fans have spent years examining every detail of Fred Lane’s albums, and yet whatever information they have found out about their hero has only led them deeper into blissful confusion. ICEPICK TO THE MOON not only examines the cult of Fred Lane fans, but also pulls the curtain back on the mysterious artist who is Fred Lane, from his early involvement with the Raudelunas arts collective in Alabama in the Seventies, to his current occupation making whirligigs to sell on the arts and crafts show circuit.
Escape from Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith
with director Jerry Tartaglia In-Person
Midtown Cinema A U.S. PREMIERE of "ESCAPE FROM RENTED ISLAND: THE LOST PARADISE OF JACK SMITH" will finish the 20th annual Moviate Underground Film Festival.
“I call it a ‘Film Essay,’ but it’s really a non-documentary film document that gives Jack SMITH the chance to be heard without the intervention of talking heads, critics, and had-been friends.” (JT)
For more than twenty years, Jerry TARTAGLIA worked on restoring, preserving and exhibiting the film legacy of Jack SMITH. His work as restorer, done with the support of Jack’s friends, The Plaster Foundation, and The Gladstone Gallery, has made it possible for Smith's films to be available for future generations.
Now, having completed that work, Tartaglia has created a Film Essay that consists of twenty-one short illustrations of Smith’s Aesthetic and Political principles including Capitalism, Glitter, Performance, Chance, Boredom, Thievery, Injustice, and Maria Montez.
“Jack SMITH left behind a cache of audio recordings that he made in the 1970s, 80s, and earlier, in which he reveals much about his ideas of artmaking, Cinema, politics, and life. Some of the recordings are solo readings of his published writings while others are documentations of his ‘Live Film’ performances. Some are recordings that document rehearsals for his films and others are impromptu recitations on a theme.
These recordings have been made available to me by the owner of the Jack SMITH Archive, The Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, for use in my film Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack SMITH.
I’ve culled the most daring and engaging of these recordings with images from his films and photography that exemplify or illustrate his ideas.The unique feature of the film is that there are no “talking head” interviews with anyone. The only spokesperson for Jack SMITH is Jack himself! ”(JT)"
"Moviate is a volunteer operated, not for profit organization, dedicated to bringing independent, underground, and avant-garde Cinema and Sound events to the Harrisburg, PA area."
DATE: Friday May 25th 2018 @ 8pm
