On Screen At Artpace: Just Add Pictures

8.31.04

For the fall On Screen at Artpace 04 San Antonio/Los Angeles-based filmmaker and former Artpace resident Jim Mendiola curates a three-part series! Just Add Pictures: Collage Essay Films and Videos is Mendiola's triad of evenings focusing on the resourceful ways that filmmakers find arresting, appropriate images to elevate stories beyond words, plot, or acting. Small budgets often prevent filmmakers from creating every shot they need, so they borrow, appropriate, and steal, rearranging leftovers from educational films, old television shows, forgotten B-movies, current blockbusters, and home movies. Such a strategy forms the backbone of the collage essay, a format that raises questions about narrative, content, and cinema itself. Mendiola's own work as a writer/director has been informed by collage strategies. His films Pretty Vacant (33 min., 16mm, 1996) and Come and Take It Day (56 min., Digital Video, 2001) have won awards and been screened at SXSW, Austin, TX (1996); Havana Biennial, Cuba (2001); Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2001); and on PBS nationwide (2002). Just Add Pictures screenings are free, and take place at Artpace on Thursdays at 6:30pm. See dates listed below.

Thursday, September 23
6:30pm

Nomads and No-Zones: 4 shorts by Greta Snider (San Francisco, CA) & 6 shorts by Vanessa Renwick (Portland, OR)
90 min., DVD, Various Dates

Ten shorts comprise this DIY series from the West Coast media underground. Gritty, romantic, frank, and poetic, the films criss-cross cinematic genres from documentary to experimental to personal narrative—often in the same movie. Ranging in subject matter from freight hopping subculture to apocalyptic messengers to first person ruminations on loss, the works serve as eloquent demonstrations of the honest power of personal introspection, genuine truth telling, and the authenticity of voices from the margins. Among the evening's highlights is Snider's 1989 16mm classic Hard Core Home Movie. Shot in subject-appropriate grainy black and white with harsh direct light, Snider's affectionate look the waning days of the San Francisco punk scene evokes a romantic nostalgia rarely associated with the mohawk and safety-pin crowd.

Thursday, October 14
6:30pm

Fronterilandia by Rubén Ortiz-Torres (Los Angeles, CA) and Jesse Lerner (Los Angeles, CA)
90 min., VHS, 1996

When Ortiz-Torres and Lerner couldn't find the right images to appropriate for their whimsical, border-hopping neo-documentary, the filmmakers did they next best thing—they made up the pictures themselves. They traveled thousands of miles documenting a Mexican Beatles tribute band, an outlaw Tijuana performance artist, a sculptor reproducing pre-Colombian objects for the black market, and a Death Metal band from Mexico City. Bouncing from the conventions of cinema verité to music video to ethnographic film, form truly follows function as the documentary's subjects dictate the shooting style. Wry, witty, and always hilarious, the film challenges traditional notions of history, identity, the US/Mexico border, and documentary itself. Frontierlandia drove Chicano nationalists in Los Angeles, CA to a near riot in the film's now-legendary 1996 US premiere.

Thursday, November 18
6:30pm

Spectres Of The Spectrum by Craig Baldwin (San Francisco, CA)
91 min., DVD – originally shot in 16mm, 1999

Craig Baldwin, the gonzo king of collage essay and director of agit-prop classics, presents his grandest work yet. In it traditional narrative takes a backseat to a dizzying and dense manipulation of found footage. The film culls from old TV shows, 1950s movies, military training films, and who knows what else to create a relentless narrative of conspiracy theories, political harangues, and the outright bizarre. In this so-called story, BooBoo, a young telepath, and her father, Yogi, are revolutionaries pitted against the 'New Electromagnetic Order." Their story, set in blighted Nevada in 2007, is interwoven with a history of the development of electromagnetic technologies. Combining a challenging, rapid-fire montage of sensory overload interspersed with no- budget special effects, the film is a true testament of Baldwin's stated desire to 'never kiss the ass of my audience.' Chosen for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Spectres of the Spectrum is what Village Voice critic J. Hoberman lovingly calls 'a mutant blockbuster…a crank call that borders on genius.'

Artpace is located downtown at 445 North Main Avenue, between Savings and Martin streets, San Antonio, TX. Free parking is available on the corner of Savings and Flores streets. ArtPace is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday, 12-5 PM, Thursday, 12-8 PM, and by appointment. Admission is free.

445 North Main Avenue San Antonio TX 78205 t 210 212 4900 f 210 212 4990 www.artpace.org