THE CLEARING July 28th, Grand Illusion Cinema

Our friend Portland filmmaker Karl Lind will bring his Odd and Ends screening series, The Clearing: A selection of new Portland made experimental and otherwise unclassifiable moving images to the  Includes Kurtis Hough, Jason America, Ian Lucero, Sam Pirnak, Carl Diehl, Miles Sprietsma and more.

Grand Illusion Cinema,  July 28th, 7:00 pm.

 Spatial, Miles Sprietsma

Crossroads: an Evening of Seattle History

How will the current shifts in population affect the personality of our city? We at EXcinema have gathered some films and videos that offer a glimpse of our past that range from indigenous and frontier histories, to a performance inspired by the gentrification of an artist's neighborhood in the 80s.  Works by Jon Behrens, Debra Bouchegnies, Drew Christie, Salise Hughes, Chuck Iffland, Britta Johnson, Georg Koszulinski, Reed O'Beirne, and Tracy Rector.

VENUE CHANGE. Event will take place at Northwest Film Forum, June 16th, 7:00 pm

Still from Drew Christie's Fire, Fire, I Heard the Cry

Still from Salise Hughes' Tall Trees

Still from Tracy Rector's Humming Bird

Below is a review written in 1989 of "Civilization" (Meg McHutchison, ReFlex ), an ambitious multi-discipline art project addressing the then changing face of Seattle.  A project and article that could have easily been created to address our current wave of gentrification. We will be screening a rare showing of Seeing and Remembering,  documenting a performance from that project featuring visual artist Chuck Iffland and poet Jesse Bernstein. And as a bonus we will show another Jesse Bernstein performance made the same year where he reads to the public from inside the display windows of the Bon Marche (Macy's). Thanks to Chuck Iffland, Larry Reid, Debra Bouchegnies, and Kurt Geissel for helping me track down these videos.

May 12th: Hallucinatory Maps: films & videos by George Koszulinski

Experimental non-fiction filmmaker, Georg Koszulinski, presents a collection of recent work. Collectively, these films & videos meditate on the radical possibilities of the cinema as a hallucinatory space where a critical engagement with the past can inform alternative visions of the future. The program includes his experimental science-fiction epistolary essay, Message from My Centenarian, collaged together from 16mm film scraps to depict the state of the World in the year 2079. An entry from Koszulinski’s Frontier Journal Series engages the influential found footage filmmaker, Craig Baldwin, in Aztec Baldwin Collage (2014). The final film in Koszulinski’s Florida Trilogy, Last Stop, Flamingo (2014) investigates a region defined by imaginary histories and landscapes, from the drained and dredged river known as The Everglades to the man-made & artificial beaches that make up Florida's coastline. Exactly 500 years after Ponce de Leon's European discovery of Florida, Last Stop, Flamingo reflects on the many ways in which Florida's landscapes have been irreversibly shaped by human desires. The program includes a twin 16mm projection, Home Movie Heterochrony (2015), where visions of American landscapes, orphaned 16mm home movies, ghosts, lawnmowers, roadside dinosaurs, the faces of men carved into mountains, chainsaws, and children culminate into a cross-temporal collage of American mythos.

Georg Koszulinski is an assistant professor of Film Studies at Seattle University and a nationally recognized social justice documentarian. With nearly forty films to his credits, Koszulinski has presented his work at hundreds of colleges, universities, and film festivals around the world. The first two films in his Florida trilogy, Cracker Crazy: Invisible Histories of the Sunshine State and Immokalee U.S.A., were widely programmed, earning numerous film festival accolades and a Notable Video of the Year nomination from the American Library Association in 2008. His experimental works have screened at festivals and microcinemas worldwide, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Dallas Videofest, Harvard Film Archive, UK's National Media Museum, and the Images Festival in Toronto.

EXcinema

Tuesday, May 12th, 7pm

Grand Illusion Cinema

1403 NE 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105

http://www.grandillusioncinema.org/

EXcinema Group Screening (28 April)

Join us for a collection of contemporary experimental, surreal and emerging short films from local and national filmmakers – including: Adam Sekuler, Caryn Cline, Eric Ostrowski, Jennifer Hillman, Kate Lain, Linda Fenstermaker, Luke Sieczek, Reed O'Beirne, Salise Hughes, Sofía Córdova, and Ted Grudowski.

Films include a surrealist 3D music video, found-footage assemblages , a behind-the-scenes look at a camgirl, an exploration of female consciousness, and more.

EXcinema

Tuesday 28 April, 7pm

Grand Illusion Cinema

1403 NE 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105

http://www.grandillusioncinema.org/

Roger Beebe, March 29th

As a complement to his March 28 multi-projector show at the Northwest Film Forum, Roger Beebe will be presenting a second program of single-channel work spanning his 20-year career in experimental films. These films include a wide variety of formats from super 8mm ("The Strip Mall Trilogy" (2001)) and 16mm film ("S A V E" (2006)) to SD ("Famous Irish Americans" (2003)) and HD video "(Congratulations (One Step at a Time)" (2014)); they also include a wide variety of strategies including original shot film (“rock/hard place” (2005)), found footage (“Dirty Harry and the Hendersons” (1998)), and even experimental karaoke (“Touch Me Karaoke” (2008)). The films and videos share Beebe’s interest in the contemporary landscape, both literal (i.e., the America of strip malls and SUVs) and figurative (i.e., the pop cultural media landscape of Tommy Hilfiger commercials). They also share Beebe’s hybrid approach to experimental films that combines a rigorous approach to form with a gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) humor.

Grand Illusion Cinema, March 29th, 7:00pm

EXquisite Corpse Cinema Travels

 

Exquisite Corpse Cinema will travel this month. On January 14th it will screen in Newcastle, UK at Star and Shadow Cinema. On the 25th it will go to Ruma, Serbia, then to Belgrade at Academic Film Center. On January 30th filmmaker and program curator Salise Hughes will present it at San Francisco's Artists' Television Access.

Trailer for EXquisite Corpse Cinema

EXquisite Corpse Cinema premieres Tuesday, December 9th at Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle.
See the trailer now

What is Exquisite Corpse Cinema?

Exquisite Corpse Cinema is a collaborative film project that incorporates randomness and chance. Thirteen filmmakers were asked to make films between 2- 5 mins long on any subject they wish. Their only requirements were the use of prompts, an interpretation of a prompt given to start their film and another to end it. The prompts would become seques leading to the next film.  There are thirteen prompts for thirteen films, and each filmmaker randomly picked their prompts, unaware who's film would come before or after theirs.

For example one of the prompts was Whistling Tea Kettle/ Naked Foot . The filmmaker was challenged how to connect the dots of this random pairing. The following filmmaker had Naked Foot/ Burning match
 which lead to another random pairing and other possibilities.

Many of these filmmakers have never met, and live in different cities and countries. They have no idea how their films fit into the finish project. On Tuesday night six of the filmmakers will be in the audience at Grand Illusion seeing the entire project for the first time!