Name: Cinematheque at the Chazen: International Shorts
Start: 2025-04-27T14:00:00-05:00
Location: Chazen Museum of Art

Cinematheque at the Chazen: International Shorts

At the Chazen: Treasures from the WCFTR
This Sunday afternoon series at the Chazen celebrates the history of adventurous film programming in Madison and beyond with films from the Amos Vogel Collection and the Wisconsin Film Festival Collection, both archived at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Our series kicks off with Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, which Amos Vogel introduced and distributed to American audiences through Cinema 16, the influential film society he ran in New York from 1947 to 1963. Two features included in previous editions of the Wisconsin Film Festival, Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple and Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing, will highlight examples of the independent and international films that the Festival has brought to Madison audiences since its founding in 1999. And in the spirit of Amos Vogel’s wide-ranging curation, the final program will bring together 16mm and 35mm prints of seven short films that he screened or distributed through Cinema 16. The Amos Vogel and Wisconsin Film Festival collections are part of WCFTR’s ongoing “Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision” project, funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
SUN., 4/27, 2 p.m.
Chazen
A Cinema 16 Anthology
16mm + 35mm | 85 min.
Amos Vogel’s influential Cinema 16 film society is perhaps best known for introducing important avant-garde filmmakers such as Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner, and Hy Hirsh to New York audiences, but Vogel also mixed experimental films with documentary, comedy, animation, medical films, and almost every other imaginable category in eclectic programs of 16mm and 35mm shorts. This program of seven shorts that Vogel screened and/or distributed through Cinema 16 pays tribute to the breadth and diversity of his programming, with abstract film experiments, a Laurel and Hardy comedy, a documentary about a medieval dance to cure tarantula bites, and more! The program includes A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958, 12 min.), Bridges-Go-Round (Shirley Clarke, 1958, 8 min.), La Taranta (Gianfranco Mingozzi, 1961, 19 min.), Gyromorphosis (Hy Hirsh, 1956, 7 min.), Laughing Gravy (James Horne, 1931, 20 min.), Metrographic (Vittorio Speich, 1958, 3 min.), and Les Bains de Mer (Happy Days, Jean L’Hote and Charles Prost, 1959, 15 min.).