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For the final program of our yearlong Picture Restart series, curator Ben Creech has saved some of their favorite films from the whole collection for a meditation on the ways in which self, home, family, and society intersect with artmaking, across a diverse range of works. These works use home movie footage and psychedelic animated sequences to dig into deep questions about why we are the way we are and how we are positioned in our world relative to where we’re from and who we are surrounded by. The program closes with a beloved early film by Gus Van Sant that might offer a way forward. Note: This program features mature themes, some nudity, and flickering lights.
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BRADDOCK FOOD BANK - Tony Buba, 1985, 5m [silent]
A filmmaker faces his conscience: “film or food?,” i.e., at what point is the socially aware artist squandering important resources for art which otherwise could be more directly funneled into social needs? Fortunately, Buba presents this “moral dilemma” in the lightest possible terms – he turns his cut-rate documentary into an audience participation film of high comic order.
FRAMING A HOUSE - Bill Turner, 1988, 7m
The antebellum Victorian mansions of Savannah, Georgia are brought momentarily back to life as the camera circles the blocks of this old southern town, animating columns and cornices, shutters and shingles, via single-frame cinematography. Related forms and patterns of dozens of houses interact to create an illusion of movement, whipping old frame houses into a quick, nervous danse macabre.
ONE NATION UNDER TV - Ruth Peyser, 1985, 3m
Hand colored photographs animated to discordant rock music tell the story of Bob, a hopelessly bored and depressed TV addict who commits a series of irrational, self-destructive acts while glued to the tube. But Bob lives on in front of the box, immune to the violence that strikes from within and without. The music is patly composed by the filmmaker.
WHY WE FIGHT - Byron Grush, 1991, 3m
WHY WE FIGHT is animator Byron Grush’s response to televised coverage of the first Gulf War. Over colorful and grotesque images that constantly shift and change, the soundtrack repeats the phrase “fear itself,” proposing an answer to the title.
MADSONG - Kathleen Laughlin, 1976, 5m
Combines animation and live-action in a young woman’s personal reverie on being female. With a polyphonic voice track, it parallels the flow of her unconscious with the movement of the cycles of nature.
UNDERSTANDING SCIENCE - Dirk de Bruyn, 1991, 16m
A taxonomical crash course listing, ordering, classifying phrases, words, letters, and numbers. A collision course of the domestic and fragments received from “out there.” A visual assault course of home movie footage of the filmmaker’s family, drawings, and text repeated and reprocessed on film, video, and computer. A correspondence course from expatriate Australian de Bruyn. Can we ever truly understand science?
THE DISCIPLINE OF D.E. - Gus Van Sant, 1979, 9m
An early work by celebrated filmmaker Gus Van Sant based on an approach to life by William S. Burroughs called “Do Easy.” Its simple rule is to reduce all physical exertion to the absolute minimum: “Never use two actions when one will suffice. Move smoothly, never abruptly. Use your saved time and energy constructively. Do Easy and the possibilities of life will expand before you to infinitely even horizons.”
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1326 W Hollywood Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60660, Chicago Filmmakers, 5720 N Ridge Ave, Chicago, IL 60660, United States, Lincolnwood
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