SARATOGA SPRINGS — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery presents a new screening series called “Whole Grain: Experiments in Film & Video.” The screenings – which began Thursday, March 30 – continue on Saturday April 1, and Saturday April 8 in the museum’s Somers Room.
“Whole Grain” explores classic and contemporary work in experimental film and video. The three inaugural programs are thematic and director-focused collections of canonical films, which serve as an introduction to experimental filmmaking practice. From Stan Brakhage’s classic Mothlight (1963) — a cameraless film in which the wings of dead moths are attached to the filmstrip to produce a gorgeous abstract flutter — to Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction (1979) — a lyrically abstract film on female subjectivity — these films subvert, challenge, and play with classical Hollywood narrative and stylistic conventions.
The themes for the first three screenings are Handmade Films (Thursday, March 30), Subversion (4 p.m. Saturday, April 1), and Soft Fiction (4 p.m. Saturday, April 8).
Schedule - Saturday, April 1, 4 p.m.: Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, US, 1943, 14 minutes, 16mm); Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, US, 1947, 15 minutes, 16mm); 7362 (Pat O’Neill, US, 1967, 10 minutes, 16mm); Reckless Eyeballing (Christopher Harris, US, 2004, 13 minutes, 16mm).
Saturday, April 8, 4 p.m.: Kristallnacht (Chick Strand, US, 1979, 7 minutes, 16mm); Soft Fiction (Chick Strand, US, 1979, 54 minutes, 16mm).
Here’s a curious little clip – unconnected with this particular series, but nonetheless amusing - from an era during which mainstream America was trying to make sense of the “Underground Film” movement. Titled “The Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” it features a brief clip of the Velvet Underground and Stan Brakhage, and may be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS7knWefSiQ
The screenings at Skidmore College are free and open to the public. For more information, call 518-580-8080 or visit http://tang.skidmore.edu.
