Continuum Film Blog

archie & leena @ diane's circus!

We're as Pleased as Punch to be included in Diane's Circus tonight!

Lubitsch Projections: “Lebensbejahend" 2004 d. Ina Archer
Archie & Leena engage in affirmative acting!

 

 

hattie at bard college!

I'm pleased to be included in a Black History Month Film festival at the Difference and Media Project at Bard.

Just in time for the Academy Awards, I will be showing:

Hattie McDaniel: A Credit to The Motion Picture Industry 2004 6m

"I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry," McDaniel said as she accepted the 1st Academy Award given to an African-American for the film Gone with the Wind.  A continuity error in a clip of the 1939 Oscars suggests that the "documentary" footage and her speech were re-staged.

Here is the original version of the speech...

 

for the rest?  See you at Bard, tonight!!

nyff panel: avant garde influences mainstream movies!

I'll be a speaker on this panel!  Details below...

For generations experimental filmmakers have been developing new cinematic techniques that have redefined cinema. This panel of filmmakers, curators and educators looks at how the experiments and ground-breaking new filmmaking by the avant garde have influenced and been adopted by mainstream cinema. Panelists include Sara Driver, whose film You Are Not I was preserved by NYWIFT's Women Film Preservation Fund and is showing at the NYFF later in the evening.

NYWIFT
NYFF

From panelist Sara Driver's You Are Not I NYWIFT at the New York Film Festival: Avant garde influences mainstream movies Event: Thursday Oct. 6, 2011 For generations experimental filmmakers have been developing new cinematic techniques that have redefined cinema. This panel of filmmakers, curators and educators looks at how the experiments and ground-breaking new filmmaking by the avant garde have influenced and been adopted by mainstream cinema. Panelists include Sara Driver, whose film You Are Not I was preserved by NYWIFT's Women Film Preservation Fund and is showing at the NYFF later in the evening. Ina Archer's multimedia works and films have been shown nationally in Cinema Project's Expanded Frames: a celebration and examination of critical cinema in Portland, Oregon, Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, and The Contemporary Art Museum, Houston. Her awards include residences at Vermont Studio Center,  Blue Mountain Centers and Civitella Ranieri in Umbria,  Italy. Archer is adjunct faculty in Foundation at Parsons The New School for Design. She is a longtime member of New York Women in Film and Television's Women's Film Preservation Fund and a board member of IMAP, Independent Media Arts Preservation.   Sara Driver directed You Are Not I, showing in the Masterworks Section of the New York Film Festival, Sleepwalk, which won the prestigious Cinematheque Francais Prix Georges Sadoul and and was featured at the Museum of Modern Art's 1987 New Directors New Films Series. Her award-winning film, When Pigs Fly, starring Marianne Faithfull and Alfred Molina, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 1993.  She produced Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Permanent Vacation and the Jarmusch-directed Tom Waits music video It's All Right With Me.   Roberta Friedman is an award-winning filmmaker and professor of film at Montclair State University, and is a major figure in the Los Angeles Avant Garde film community.  She has worked on HBO and PBS programs and on films such as Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Days of Heaven.  The Motion Picture Academy of  Arts & Sciences is currently preserving all of her avant garde films which have been shown worldwide in venues including the Guggenheim Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Jon Gartenberg is a distributor, programmer and archivist. Formerly curator at MOMA, he acquired avant-garde movies for the permanent collection was involved in the preservation of the films of Andy Warhol.  Later, as Director of the Film Preservation Program of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, Gartenberg oversaw the restoration of films of a number of artists, including Warren Sonbert, whose last work, WHIPLASH, had its world premiere at the NYFF. Since 2003, Gartenberg has programmed experimental films for the Tribeca Film Festival at which he presented, in collaboration with NYWIFT, restoration screenings of Cinda Firestone’s Attica and Bette Gordon’s Variety, as well as in 2011, a program of restored shorts by women experimental filmmakers from the 1950s to the 1980s. MM Serra is an experimental filmmaker, curator, author, and the Executive Director of Film-Makers' Cooperative, the world's oldest and largest archive of independent media. Serra’s new film Bitch-Beauty will premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 3rd, 2011 at the “Views of the Avant-Garde” screening series. Her film, Chop Off, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight Series in 2009. In Fall 2010 Serra curated Counter Culture, Counter Cinema: An Avant Garde Film Festival, at the Pacific Design Center with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2007 - 2008, Serra was the curator of a six-part experimental film series titled “Cinema of the Unusual” at P.S.1. Serra also curated and traveled with the show “New York Experimental” in Warsaw and Paznan, Poland. Serra's chapter on the work of Carolee Schneemann, titled “Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann,” was published in Anthology of Experimental Filmmakers by Duke University Press. Drake Stutesman (moderator) is the editor of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media and the Co-Chair of The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.  She teaches Costume Design in Film at New York University. NYWIFT programs, screenings and events are supported, in part, by grants from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council New York State Council of the Arts               Last updated: Sep. 30, 2011 Back to Top

Event Information NYWIFT at the New York Film Festival Avant Garde Influences Mainstream Movies Date/Time: Thursday, Oct. 6, 2011 7:00 PM Pricing: Free and open to the public First come, first served so arrive early Location: Elinor Bunin Center 144 West 65th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam)

my review: the black power mixtape 1967-1975

 

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 has opened at The IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema!

I was so moved by this film when I saw it at New Director's this year.  I talked about it all the time and had planned an epic post for this blog. But then I was given the happy opportunity to write a review for Film Comment Magazine!

Third Streaming is showing selected stills from the film. At the opening reception Wed. night I was thrilled to meet Göran Hugo Olsson, the director. 

I gushed and gushed.

He was VERY gracious, poor thing!

Please read my review in the Sept/Oct 2011 issue of the magazine or online and tell me what you think.  Better yet, go see the film and let's really talk!

Martin and Harry!

 

  

extended!! pop on over to governors island for 3 more weekends!

 
EXTENDED!

pop-up screening at governors island 3 MORE weekends!

sept. 10/11th, 17/18th and 24/25th, 2011

I'm happy to be included in a "Pop-Up Screening" of 3 of my short videos as part of The West Harlem Art Fund's

LOOSELY COUPLED, a group exhibition on Governors Island.  We'll be at No. 17 Nolan Park. Pop on over!

This weekend, The West Harlem Art Fund will host a “pop-up” film screening on Governors Island. What better way to enjoy a house but to watch movies. And these movies deal with the issues of home, memories and important places. These films are a part of a series called Upstairs in the Basement. Read more about each individual work and the artist.

Films: “Upstairs in the Basement”: 

My maternal grandfather was a contractor and a kind of inventor. He built our two homes in Macon, GA. The first one burned to the ground as firemen and the Salvation Army watched from several yards away.  I only knew the 2nd house, built in the early 1960s.  It was a fascinating collage made of discarded materials from my grandfather’s job sites where he did decorative plaster-work in both antebellum mansions and modern city buildings. As a child, I was fascinated by the precarious ladder-pull attic where he kept his inventions and other antiquated curios. I had never seen a house with an attic.

Granddaddy loved to tell humorous stories and jokes but he also told bible and ghost tales.  An anecdote that he would laughingly recount (to my embarrassment) was the time he and I were in the attic and my mother was calling for me from just below. I yelled; “I’m with Grandaddy! I’m Upstairs in the Basement!!” Telling this story would bring tears to his eyes.

The Macon house is in ruins now; our family home in New Rochelle where we lived for 40 years was sold after my father died, and my 1st apartment of my very own was overtaken by developers and recently razed. These 3 little films all have to do with movies, memories, spaces and lost or hidden images. And not incidentally, they were all created "at home"...

Short Films

“Leader Film (Civitella Ranieri)” (2009) 5 min. video/digital animation w/Viet Le, Vladimir Pistalo & Shyam Selvadurai. Divertissement set in the Civitella Ranieri, a castle in Italy.  This “scrappy” short video emulates a reel of discarded outtakes used as film leader and filler when learning to edit.

"The Lincoln Film Conspiracy Prologue" (2007) 15 min. “trailer”. A multi-generic short film and multimedia installation that combines archival film footage, new video segments and digital image manipulation, collage and montage.

Based on the history of African-American independent silent and sound cinema, LFC is the story of an archivist who is investigating the disappearance of a collection of technologically progressive black films. Did the films disintegrate or explode like many other nitrate films? Evidence of great heat was found in the vicinity of the studio’s site.  Conspiracy theories are outlined: Was there a government plot in conjunction with Hollywood to destroy these “positive” movies leaving only denigrating images of black people? Or have the movies been Abducted by Aliens?

"Il Giallo della Paine!" (2011) 8 min.   A “scary” montage of vanished spaces playfully using the visual tropes and aural cues of 1970s, American and British horror and of the Italian thriller films known as "Giallo" (Yello).

 Ina Archer — Artist

Ina was born in Paris, France. She earned a BFA in Film/Video from RISD and a MA, in Cinema Studies at NYU focusing on race, preservation, early sound cinema and technology.  Ina’s multimedia works/films have been shown  nationally including Cinema Project’s EXPANDED FRAMES: a celebration and examination of critical cinema in Portland,OR. and “Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970” at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, GA. and The Contemporary Art Museum, Houston. Her awards include residences at Vermont Studio Center,  Blue  Mountain Center and Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy. Ina was a Studio Artist in the Whitney Independent Study program, a NYFA multidisciplinary Fellow and a 2005 Creative Capital grantee in film and video, and 2010 nominee for the Anonymous Was A Woman award. She is a member of New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund and a board member of IMAP, Independent Media Arts Preservation.  

Ina’s film writing includes reviews for Film Comment, The NY African Film Festival, Framework, The Journal of Cinema and Media, and Black Camera. She is an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School for Design in the Foundation Program of the School of Design Strategies.

I'll see you in the basement!

 

 

happy birthday, cole!

I love sharing a birthday with Cole Porter! ("I was a humdrum person" until I discovered this coincidence)

Here's fellow Gemini, Judy Garland (June 10th) singing a medley of Porter tunes.

 

But Ethel and Bing will always be among my favorite interpreters of Porter;

Anything Goes

and of course Ella and Nat!

 

black x: african diaspora experimental film series, sat. may 14th!

I will have 2 short videos in this series screening Saturday, May 14th at 3pm. A panel discussion with the filmmakers and a reception will follow the screening.

Black X: African Diaspora Experimental Film Series
Curated by Bill Jennings
This marathon intends to present the work of black filmmakers working in experimental film styles and establish a supportive and authenticating audience for the work. These rarely seen and compelling films represent an uncompromised and revolutionary commentary on the cinema and black identity.

Dialectic Dialation Dir. Tocarra Thomas, 2009, 4 min. A mesmerizing, formal abstraction based on the mechanics of human perception. Rope Tricks Dir. Tocarra Thomas, 2008, 4 min. A beautifully filmed, but disturbing allegory about repression and self-liberation. ReProgram: Episodes 1-10 Dir. Shani Peters, 21 min. A group of 10 videos which unites characters from The Cosby Show and Good Times with members of the Black Panther Party. The sitcom families, both icons of economic extremes within the black community, are inexplicably united as one family. These figures, both fictional and historical, interact in "episodes" that loosely relate to the Panthers' Ten Point Program, which called attention to issues such as healthcare, housing, and police brutality. Reckless Eyeballing Dir. Christopher Harris, 2004, 14 min. Taking its name from the Jim Crow-era of black criminals staring at white women, this hand-processed, optically-printed amalgam reframes desire by way of everything from D.W. Griffith to Foxy Brown and Angela Davis. "RW" Dir. Ina Diane Archer, 2004, 3 min. "RW" creates a dreamscape comprised of characters from American gangster movies, black musicals, and 1950's era black women that questions the nature of racial identity. Hattie McDaniel Dir. Ina Diane Archer, 2002, 6 min. A media collage meditating on the legacy and cultural meaning of the academy award winning actress Hattie McDaniel. X – The Baby Cinema Dir. Robert Banks, 1992, 4 min. A media collage commentary on the legacy of Malcolm X and the commercialization of it through the film by Spike Lee. MPG: Motion Picture Genocide Dir. Robert Banks, 1997, 4 min. A visually stunning, hand-painted, film collage responding to the violence toward women and people of color as depicted in the mainstream cinema. The Fullness of Time Dir. Cauleen Smith, 2008. 52 min. In Smith's groundbreaking science fiction allegory, A "sister from another planet" is sent to earth to explore the terrain and learn our ways. In the process, she must make sense of the passage of time, the enormity of loss, and the new landscapes of New Orleans.
Panel Discussion: with directors Cauleen Smith, Tocarra Thomas, Shani Peters, Ina Archer, Christopher Harris. Moderated by Bill Jennings, Professor Radio, Television, Film at Hofstra University.

top of world, ma/s!!

Miss ya, Ma!

 

White Heat (1949) d. Raoul Walsh

Happy Mother's Day, where-ever you may be!

temple university film & media arts visiting filmmaker series!

So the date is wrong (below) as I had to postpone earlier but I was pleased to be invited by Elisabeth Subrin to present at Temple University and I will be there on Wed. March 30th, 2011. I feel lucky to be in such good company! See you in Philly!

Oh this old thing!

Trailer for 1/16th of 100%? (1993/6)(2009) d. ina archer