Woodland Pattern™ |
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| Book Center |
| Experimental Film and Video Archive |
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| Friday, March 30, 7pm, $2 Woodland Pattern Experimental Film/Video Series Presented by the UWM Department of Film Beautiful, Wary: The Films of Michael Robinson Filmmaker Michael Robinson in person! In a series of films both deftly beautiful and exquisitely suspicious, Michael Robinson unfurls captivating imagery as a means of surveying the landscape of a possible romanticism. Bracingly smart and a pleasure to behold, his films offer a consideration of the valence of beauty and the chance of sincerity. Currently based in Chicago, Robinson has presented his prize-winning films all over: at, for instance, the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant Garde, the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, Images (Toronto), the Media City Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Onion City Film Festival in Chicago, and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival.
to screen: You Don’t Bring Me Flowers (8 minutes, 16mm color film with optical sound, 2005) Viewed at its seams, a collection of National Geographic landscapes from the 1960’s and 70’s conjures an obsolete romanticism currently peddled to propagate entitlement and Individualism from sea to shining sea; the slideshow deforms into a bright white distress signal. The General Returns from One Place to Another (11 minutes, 16mm color film / digital video with stereo sound, 2006) Learning to love again, with fear at its side, the film draws balance between the romantic and the horrid, shaping a concurrently skeptical and indulgent experience of the beautiful. A Frank O'Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.
And We All Shine On (7 minutes, 16mm color film with optical sound, 2006) An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, spreading deception and myth along its murky path. Conjuring a vision of a post-apocalyptic paradise, this unworldly broadcast reveals its hidden demons via layered landscapes and karaoke, singing the dangers of the mediated spirit. Light is Waiting (11 minutes, digital video with stereo sound, 2007) A very special episode of television’s Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy from which neither will survive. Chiquitita and the Soft Escape (10 minutes, 16mm color film with optical sound, 2003) What began as an effort at proving nostalgia and sentimentalism to be purely mechanical processes became an argument for the opposite through its assembly. Twin attempts at structuring images of home and loved-ones break down in the face of the romantic. |
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