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MICKIE REALIZES DREAM
When Canada's entertainment conglom Alliance Atlantis announced a few months ago that it would be shuttering its film production and sales divisions, independent filmmakers wondered where its Managing Director of Motion Picture Sales Charlotte Mickie would wind up. Throughout the '90s, Mickie has been a reliable and accessible presence on the scene, picking up many noteworthy American indies and often propelling them to solid international sales. Among the many titles in her Alliance Atlantis catalog are Bowling for Columbine, The Station Agent, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and In the Company of Men.
So, we were happy to hear yesterday that Mickie has joined Celluloid Dreams, the Paris-based outfit run by Hengameh Panahi, the astute and charismatic Iranian-born sales agent. Mickie will be a Managing Director of the company and will remain in Toronto where she will undoubtedly increase Celluloid's connections with Canadian and American filmmakers. Over the years Celluloid has dabbled in the American indie waters but has built its reputation on the sales of films by such current art film gods as Abbas Kiorastami, Francois Ozon, and Takeshi Kitano.
Commented Panahi in a written press release, "I am delighted that Charlotte Mickie will be deploying her considerable skills and network of relationships on behalf of Celluloid Dreams. Her blend of artistic sensibility, intelligent risk-taking and sharp business acumen will serve us well in years to come. We are also particularly pleased to expand our activities from a base in North America."
The release also notes that Celluloid's Pierre Menahem will be leaving to start his own company.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/20/2004 04:59:34 PM
EXPRESSIVE ALIENATION
Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land
For the past few years, Los Angeles-based Catherine Sullivan, 36, has created works that combine performance, video installation and traditional theater techniques.
In both her live and filmed performances, the dramatic processes employed by the actors to re-create a scene is itself the subject of the work.
Sullivan's enigmatic, multiscreen epic Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land, currently on view at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, is based upon the Russian musical Nord Ost -- adapted from the classic Russian novel, Two Captains, about the real-life search for a lost expedition in the Russian Arctic -- that was being performed when Chechen terrorists burst into a Moscow theater in October 2002.
"This event struck me as a very brutal example of the real confronting the ideal, and a system of combat (terrorism) which appropriates the desires of the dominant class and uses the surpluses of these desires against it," says Sullivan. "Insofar as we can consider all of the individuals involved as representative," this event drew together participants of a very different order: the Moscow leisure class seeking pleasure and entertainment, and the Chechens using this same spectacle to assert their political demands. The encounter ultimately created a new spectacle which would transcend the occasion of the musical Nord Ost and simultaneously feed the theater of terrorism which currently enjoys a global audience."
The theatrical artificiality of the actors (from Chicago's Trap Door theater company) is as jumpily powerful as that found in Expressionist film of the 1920s -- which Ice Floes, shot in B&W with Russian dialogue and projected without subtitles -- consciously emulates.
"The installation creates a kind of strange visual echo with our own time," wrote one critic," as if the past were observing the horrors of the present -- or the play were watching the audience."
As in the work of playwright Richard Foreman or the films of Kira Muratova, Sullivan also uses juxtaposition, fragmentation, dislocation and repeated appearances in varying guises to emphasize the distinction between performer and the part he or she plays.
For the installation, Sullivan generated 50 pantomime-like actions based on the novel Two Captains. "The hope here was to create a system of representational impulses found in musical theater without having to make a musical.... The pantomimes were either combined into large ensemble scenes or broken into small individual scenes and were then considered as shots which could be distributed throughout the location."
"The footage plays out over five screens. One screen of a larger size depicts more didactic interpretations of the material from Two Captains. The other four smaller screens depict a series of spin-offs from the large screen in different locations, or suggest the development of the 'narrative' of an intervention into a theatrical scene. The roughly 50 actions or pantomimes culled from Two Captains are repeated and re-contextualized through change in setting and recombination of actor and character. Finally, they are moved outside and set within a mise-en-scene which does not support their theatricality -- a cornfield, and the exterior of an abandoned nightclub near Chicago called Moscow Nights. The total footage plays out through a forty minute loop on the large screen and twenty minute loops on the four smaller screens."
In Sullivan's earlier installation, Gold Standards (hysteric, melancholic, degraded, refined) (2001), two variations on a performance of The Miracle Worker, are juxtaposed on adjacent screens. On one screen Patty Duke's Helen Keller is recast as a mustachioed man and Anne Bancroft's Annie Sullivan as a black woman -- who teaches "Helen," kicking and flailing, to eat. On the facing screen, a male "Annie" is cast alongside an adult female "Helen" -- whose gestures of rebellion have now morphed into stylized movements resembling modern dance.
"In 'Tis a Pity She's A Fluxus Whore (2003), excerpts from a 1943 production of John Ford's Jacobean drama at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut and a 1964 Fluxus performance festival at the Technical Academy in Aachen, Germany, are ripped from their original contexts and juxtaposed.
"On side by-side projections, the same actor re-creates Wadsworth's then-director 'Chick' Austin's star turn as Ford's protagonist on one screen and a host of Fluxus artists on the other. Although Sullivan's work was filmed in the very theaters where the original productions had been mounted, tellingly the relationship of action to site is reversed: The Fluxus segments occur in the Avery Memorial Theater in Hartford, while the Ford play is performed at Aachen's Audimax. In Sullivan's hands, these seemingly Brechtian acts of fissure result not in a heightened awareness of historical forces but in the loosening of her characters from the temporal flow of history."
Sullivan's 2002 installation, Five Economies (big hunt/little hunt), is a five-screen video projection spanning the length of a gallery wall. Silent B&W footage of restaged and rechoreographed scenarios based on a variety of sources (The Miracle Worker, Marat/Sade, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?) as well as imagined scenarios from the true story of Birdie Joe Hoaks -- a 25-year-old woman who tried to pass as an orphaned 13-year-old boy to receive welfare benefits -- are juxtaposed. "The drama is reduced to movement and facial expression and character groupings are arranged according to emotional effects and affectations. This is offset by yet another layer of activity, in this case choreographed movements whose source is antiquated Irish funerary games. The result is baroque, hybrid theater for which the term postmodern is an understatement.
"What Sulllivan's performances reveal through their quirkiness, however, is a fundamental alienation which the craft of acting seeks to dispel, namely the alienation between the body as a vehicle of perception and the body as a vehicle of expression."
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 3/19/2004 05:15:29 PM
HI-DEF HISTORICAL PAINTING
89 Seconds at Alcazar is a new project by 42-year-old film/video artist Eve Sussman that brings Diego Velazquez's 1656 painting "Las Meninas" ("Maids of Honor") to life in High Definition digital video.
The 12-minute video, which premiered at the 2004 Whitney Biennial (March 11 - May 30), is a 360-degree Steadicam recreation of the salon of the Alcazar (the Palace of the Hapsburgs).
"With actors in full costume on a set that reproduces the room in the painting, Sussman imagines the activity -- bristling with the tensions of the royal household, which seem to affect even the long-suffering pet dog -- that might have preceded and followed the split-second arrangement of Velazquez's virtual photograph.
"It's a superb concept, one that reflects our hunger for back story and sequel.
"The little infanta, Margarita, her attendants and the artist himself, busy at his easel, pause to acknowledge her parents, Spain's Philip IV and Queen Mariana, who have just entered the room and are reflected in the mirror on the far wall in the backdrop. But since the king and queen occupy the position we do -- that is, of observer coming upon the scene -- it's as if Margarita and the court are acknowledging us.
"Or maybe not. Perhaps Margarita and company are actually looking in a mirror, and that's what Velazquez is painting, the king and queen being nothing more than an image on the wall. Either way, it's a fabulous conceit."
The video was shot over four days in May 2003 in a garage studio space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in HD24p by d.p. Jeff Blauvelt and Steadicam operator Sergei Franklin, and required a month of set and costume design.
Blauvelt -- an Emmy Award winner and principal of HD Cinema -- co-produced the HD24p high definition digital video production, editing and exhibition of 89 Seconds at Alcazar with Eve Sussman, Jen Heck and Cheryl Kaplan.
Equipment used for the production was a Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta HD 24p capable camera, recording1920x1080 pixel images at 24 progressive frames per second, mounted on a Steadicam. The HDCAM footage was captured uncompressed onto a Mac dual G5 2.0 GHz workstation using a Blackmagic Decklink HD card, and then composited and edited by Eve Sussman and Josh Glaser using Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects and Apple Shake software. An identical system was used for uncompressed HD24p playback, with the high def digital video playing off a Medea RTRX disk array via an ATTO UL4D dual Ultra320 SCSI card.
A Panasonic PT-D7600 DLP projects the images onto a 30-foot screen offering a stunning experience for the viewers.
Research for the construction of the set included studying the 1650 architectural plans of the palace with consulting architect Robert Whalley, in order to accurately recreate the scale of the room in the Alcazar. Costume designer, Karen Young's recreation of the Baroque wardrobe for the 11 actors began with research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute and the "Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting" exhibit.
Among the actors featured in Sussman's recreation are Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent) in the role of Maribarbola.
The video's score was composed by Jonathan Bepler, best known for his work on Matthew Barney's Cremaster film series.
89 Seconds at Alcazar was made possible with major sponsorship from HD Cinema, Smack Mellon Studios -- a non-for-profit organization in New York -- and The New York State Council on the Arts. Additional support was been provided by The University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., Dan Wurtzel Studios, NY Props, Edward Mahoney Wigs and Materials for the Arts.
In addition to the U.S. exhibition at the Whitney Biennial, a tour of venues in Europe starts in the U.K. at the University of Hertfordshire's Margaret Harvey Gallery.
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 3/16/2004 12:22:46 PM
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© 2004 Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film