Serious fans of experimental cinema have a few benchmarks among them – not just a fervent love of unusual work in filmmaking and performance – but good transportation and a librarian’s sense of investigation. You need to be a fucking art detective at times in order to find great events.
There are many established outlets for the experimental world but consistency is difficult. Museums and film festivals are often event based and deal with high profile press and premieres to get folks in the door. Underground microcinemas are great but bills are tough to keep up with and getting the word out to fans across a big city is not cheap or efficient.
Which is why the new venue
Light Industry is so exciting. Based in Brooklyn, the multimedia space is being invented by stalwart experimental cinema champions
Thomas Beard and
Ed Halter. Focusing on a weekly schedule, each event will be organized by a different artist, critic or curator. You may see an artists’ own collection of shorts, or a writer’s favorite lost film, or a collection of silent boxing movies discussed by a curator working in an entirely different field.
"There's such a rich and varied body of film and electronic art being shown in the city right now, but the audiences for, say, contemporary art or experimental cinema or new media don't overlap nearly as often as they could and should," says Beard. "I feel like there's something really exciting about the prospect of having all this different work under one roof, with the freedom to do things that might not make as much sense in more institutional contexts."
Even in New York where experimental worlds have flourished. Series like the Robert Beck and Ocularis are defunct, MOMA and the Whitney create a single explosion and push it for months, and the New York Underground Film Festival is having its last fest this April.
"Right now, there's nothing happening like this on a consistent, weekly basis,” Halter adds. “Particularly in Brooklyn, where is where the majority of these artists and curators now live."
Beard and Halter have been pillars for experimental work for years. Beard is formerly a Program Director of Ocularis and a programmer at Cinematexas. Halter programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival from 1995-2005, wrote for the Village Voice, currently teaches at Bard College and wrote the book
Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. Both are currently editing books on aspects of experimental film exhibition – Beard on
Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader and Halter on
Small Cinemas: American Avant-Garde Film Exhibition from Ciné Clubs to Microcinemas with
Andrea Grover.
All events will take a place on Tuesdays at 8PM in Industry City, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn that's home to a cross-section of manufacturing, warehousing and light industry. As part of a regeneration program intended to diversify the use of its 6 million square feet of space to better reflect 21st century production, Industry City now includes workspace for artists.
Opening night March 25 features the program “The Blazing World,” compiled by Beard and Halter. Pitting the love-all world of the avant hippie with AA-meeting views of today, the compilation is stunning, from 70s work by
Kurt Kren,
Nancy Holt and
Robert Smithson to a 2007 short by wunderkid
Michael Robinson.
Get more info on all upcoming shows at Light Industry:
www.lightindustry.org
# posted by Mike Plante @ 3/20/2008 09:25:00 PM
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