MUBI Update: 13 October 2011

Beyond Enchantment (Larry Jordon, 2010)

We’ve just added some really exciting new films to the MUBI platform. We’re partnering with San Francisco’s Canyon Cinema, one of the most important distributors of experimental and avant-garde films in the world. It’s an on-going partnership which we’ll add to as time goes on, and here’s our first update. Since most of the films are probably unknown to our audiences, I thought it might be more useful to inform you about the filmmakers.

Films by Gary Adlestein:

Gary Adlestein has been making short experimental films and videos since 1974. His first film which he co-directed, Reading 1974 was a feature-length, award winning documentary, in the city-symphony tradition, of his hometown, Reading, PA. After working for years in 16mm and later super-8mm making short, lyrical films inspired by the works of Storm DeHirsch and Tom Chomont, he, like many independent makers, shifted to the much more affordable – thus congenial to the idea of true independence – medium of video. His work has been screened nationally and internationally in festivals, and at media art venues across the country (eg. Millennium Film Workshop, LA Filmforum, Pacific Film Archives, Chicago Filmmakers) and a number of his films and videos were presented in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films” exhibition at MoMA, 1982-2001. In 1975 he co-founded Berks Filmmakers which has been screening experimental works and continues to do so. He teaches film and poetry at Albright College in Reading.

Films by Kate McCabe:

Kate McCabe lives near Joshua Tree, California where she founded the art collective Kidnap Yourself. She graduated from the University of the Arts and obtained her MFA in Experimental Animation from Cal Arts under the innovative Jules Engel. An award winning filmmaker, Kate’s work has shown globally since 1995 in film festivals and galleries. Her films often explore the themes of celebrating the beauty in the everyday and unveiling the twilight world between daydreams and reality. Technically, Kate is a hybrid animator combining live action photography and animation, with time manipulation techniques both in-camera and with optical printing. Her current work includes paintings, photography, short fiction, and art books, her most recent being a sketch comic book “Mojave Weather Diaries.” Kate has taught film as a visiting artist at CalArts and UC San Diego.

Films by Gregg Biermann:

“My work comes out of the avant-garde tradition of film as visual art. I believe that artists inspired by the spirit of historical avant-garde film can, by embracing new technologies, remain vital. The development of new tools has often determined innovative aesthetic developments in art and music. Consequently, I’ve looked to new technologies to discover vast unspoiled frontiers no longer available to small gauge filmmakers interested in exploring form. Most my works could not have been achieved in earlier periods and are deeply rooted in digital technology. The meaning of digital technology for cinema lies in its ability to copy, alter, mask, fragment, super-impose, mutate, reflect, transmit and reframe.”

Films by Larry Jordan:

Known principally as a maverick spirit in the world of avant-garde American cinema, Lawrence Jordan played an important role in the late 1950s and early 1960s San Francisco art scene. Jordan has made over fifty experimental films, including a number of fanciful, filmic animations made from collaged cut outs of Victorian engravings. The animations extend dreamlike imagery of collaged landscape into a cinematic realm of transformation and free form symbolism. Jordan Seeks to delve into the deep structures and Jungian connotations of the mythological images his films reference. His alchemical approach to imagery creates what he has called the “theater of the mind, which you construct. That is the Underworld… the realm of the imagination. You have to have a place to work with images” (Duncan McKenna, Semina Culture Wallace Berman and His Circle).

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