Foundational New Ager IASOS in first-ever multimedia show in L.A., at Cinefamily July 26… via Cinespia, Numero Group and Spaceways Radio…
MORE INFO: Cinefamily website
1979 documentary…
Tag Archives for cinefamily
Arthur co-presents Tues Dec. 14 at Cinefamily: HENRY JACOBS SPECTACULAR
We are positively giddy to be co-presenting this evening at Cinefamily that dublab has put together to celebrate the work of Henry Jacobs (pictured above). Arthur readers with fine memories will recall that Henry was lovingly profiled in Arthur No. 26 (August 2007) by Joel Rose (read “One Man Goofing” ) and saluted by filmmaker/artist Mike Mills in the same issue (“Red Goo, Paper Cut-Outs and Conscious Digressions: Henry Jacobs’ handmade absurdism”). Two episodes of Jacobs’ early ’70s PBS show “The Fine Art of Goofing Off” (memorably described as “Sesame Street for adults”) were screened on the main stage between music bands at ArthurFest in September, 2005. But enough about the past. Here are the details for this Tuesday’s event…
TUESDAY, December 14
dublab, Arthur and Cinefamily present
THE FINE ART OF GOOFING OFF AND OTHER WIDE WEIRDNESS OF HENRY JACOBS
All Ages / 8pm / $12
the Cinefamily
611 N Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, 90036
From Cinefamily:
What happens late at night when the television fuzz melts together with your subconscious mind? They become one entity and blossom into bright bursts. The TV channels the waves of your id and every unknown notion your cerebrum has hidden away in dusty recesses becomes a glowing explosion of sight and sound. Does this ultimate, brain-tickling television program sound too good to be true? In this day and age of narrow focused broadcast beams it is, but open your eyes wide because in 1972 a few episodes of this magic was made real. Sound artist Henry Jacobs got together with producer Chris Koch and visual artist Bob McClay to create a series of half-hour television programs for San Francisco public television station KQED. This show titled “The Fine Art of Goofing Off” is an ultimate revelation. It is like Sesame Street’s psychedelic, philosophical cousin who lives on the top floor of a tenement on the weird side of the road. It’s a wild, tangential ride through richly layered imagery and hypnotic, non-matching sources. One familiar voice heard on the program is that of Zen philosopher Alan Watts. This is no strange coincidence as Henry Jacobs was as tight with Watts as tight can be. Jacobs is somewhat the voice behind the voice behind the voice behind the voice of Zen. As the co-founder and manager of the Alan Watts archive he has continued spreading his pal’s Eastern Philosophy to the world.
Jacobs is the living, breathing, acting, thinking, laughing, swimming expression of life lived with a mind wide open. This vibe made him fast friends with Alan Ginsberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ken Nordine, Lenny Bruce, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and many other luminous minds in motion. In the company of stellar collaborators Henry’s creative output has influenced modern music with its inventive twists. He is often considered the originator of modern surround sound due to his “Vortex: Experiments in Sound and Light” which came to life at the San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium and at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels. He also hosted the very first ethnographic radio show on American radio and released an album “Radio Programme No 1 Audio Collage: Henry Jacobs’ Music and Folklore” on the legendary Folkways Records in 1955. He even provided improvised soundtrack material and background dialogue for George Lucas’ film “THX 1138″ and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1964 for his work on the short film “Breaking the Habit.”
Wow, we could go on and on and on but the point is, you should not miss this screening. We’ll be showing Henry’s favorite moments from “The Fine Art of Goofing Off”, some amazing short films and excerpts from “THX 1138.” We’ll also share audio snippets from Vortex and other moments from “the Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs.” We’ll even have Henry on the line for a live remote Q&A from his wild outpost on the Northern California Coast. Oh yeah, there will be a live tape loop performance and probably some left-handed ping pong action happening as well.
Henry Jacobs: official website
Henry Jacobs: Important Records
Henry Jacobs: Locust Music
April 22 SF, April 24 LA: "Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow" screenings
Presented by the always brilliant Numero Group of Chicago, who have released a dvd compling some of Mr. Jarnow’s wonderful work. Info here.
April 22: Red Vic in San Francisco
April 24: Cinefamily in Los Angeles
TONIGHT, March 4, L.A. 8pm: Arthur co-presents "A Night With TVTV" at Cinefamily
(3.03.10) JUST ADDED: Dosa Truck will be at Cinefamily from 6pm-on!
The original guerrilla TV pioneers return! See Lily Tomlin, Bill Murray, Steven Spielberg, Abbie Hoffman and a host of other personalities as the TVTV guys invade the 1975 Academy Awards, the Superbowl, presidential conventions and anywhere else they can bring their radical comedy. Join us for a one night only show of rare footage with the original members in person…
March 4, 8:00pm
A Night With TVTV
Co-presented by Arthur Magazine
Buy advance tickets here: $12
Before The Daily Show sent their “reporters” out into the world for satirical newscoverage, before Christopher Guest and This is Spinal Tap utilized cinema verité’s natural deadpan to devastating comic effect, and before American Movie and Heavy Metal Parking Lot popularized the comic documentary form—there was TVTV. Radical, hilarious and influential, “Top Value Television” was an ad hoc collective of documentarians whose pioneering use of portable, low-tech video gear allowed them unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to everything from presidential conventions to the Super Bowl.
Their philosophy,articulated in co-founding member Michael Shamberg’s 1971 manifesto Guerrilla Television (wikipedia, Amazon), was to “demonstrate the potential of decentralized video technology” as a means to break free from the ideological stranglehold broadcast technology had on American culture—forecasting the media free-for-all that’s rapidly becoming our day-to-day lives.
Tonight, the Cinefamily, Cinema Eye and Arthur Magazine celebrate the TVTV spirit, and the top-notch documentary filmmaking they produced, with a panel discussion/reunion of TVTV members, a video “primer” of past works, and a screening of Lord Of The Universe, an expose of 16-year-old Guru Maharaj Ji and “Millennium ’73,” a three-day national gathering of his followers at the Houston Astrodome.
This evening marks the first time that all principal members of TVTV have been reunited at a retrospective event—do not miss it!
This Sat, Feb 6, L.A.: "DAISIES" screening at Cinefamily
Poster by Alia Penner
From Cinefamily:
“Daisies is a bubbling and buoyant spring of irrepressible female creativity; it is an overflowing audio-visual bouquet of color, music, and texture; it is a freewheeling and effervescent farce, a formal free-for-all, a paradoxical mixture of bourgeois indulgence and cultural critique, and it’s your next favorite movie.
“Two young Czech girls (both named Marie) decide that the world is so corrupt that they might as well join in, and they do so with wild abandon — prancing, food-fighting, pranking old men, carousing in nightclubs, and creating anarchy everywhere they go.
“Director Vera Chytilova’s love of cinema’s potential is both playful and palpable, as exuberant as the spirit of the two ‘daisies’ whose misadventures have surprising weight and meaning. Banned upon its release by the Czech government, Daisies has become a major cult favorite thanks to its dazzling setpieces, the charismatic and fashionable art-girl heroines, and an infectious sense of fun that’s as potent today as it was when it first premiered behind the Iron Curtain.
Dir. Věra Chytilová, 1966, 35mm, 74 min.”
Extract:
he loves me. he loves me not.
cinespia & cinefamily present DAISIES, a film by Věra Chytilová. I made this poster for the event & will be selling a very limited run, also the original painting will be for sale at the event. Seeing a print of this movie is going to be amazing, the colors are going to be glorious!
http://cinefamily.org/calendar/saturday_early.html#czech
LOVE
Sunday, September 27th at The Cinefamily Silent Movie Theatre in L.A.
José Antonio Sistiaga: Ere Erera Baleibu Icik Subua Aruaren
(w/ new live score by Savage Republic)“Basque abstract artist José Antonio Sistiaga painted directly onto film with homemade inks to create this silent 1970 feature. But Sistiaga’s strangely titled work… is different from the films of Stan Brakhage, who didn’t come to film from painting and had his own rhythm. […] [I]ts combination of color and 35-millimeter ‘scope (with about half an hour in black and white) yields the kind of spectacle one associates with musicals and [science fiction] epics.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum
A hand-painted masterpiece of the 1970s; a legendary band of the 1980s. Sistiaga’s rarely-screened ere erera baleibu icik subua aruaren is a work of uncompromising beauty that absolutely deserves a wider appreciation. Savage Republic, one of the unrecognized godfathers of post-rock, formed roughly three decades ago in the midst of the Los Angeles punk rock scene and abruptly disbanded in 1989. In recent years, they’ve reformed and their unique sound (somewhat akin to a Middle Eastern surf band backed by the rhythm section from Joy Division) is as compelling and inexorable as ever. Original members Ethan Port and Thom Fuhrmann, joined by Alan Waddington and Kerry Dowling, will perform their newly commissioned score to Sistiaga’s prodigious work (presented in a stunning 35mm print from Paris.) DJ Michael Stock of Part Time Punks will be on-hand to man the decks, spinning tunes during the pre-show!
Sunday, September 27th – 7PM
The Cinefamily Silent Movie Theatre
611 N Fairfax Avenue / Los Angeles, 90036
$14
Buy tickets here.
Tonight at Cinefamily in L.A.: Midnight screening of Muppet History 101 & Muppet Music Moments
Due to the high demand for tickets for our sold-out Muppet History 101 + Muppet Music Moments double feature at 8pm tonight, we’ve added a second show — of Muppet History 101 only — tonight at midnight!
Tickets will be available at the box office from 7:30pm onwards, on our website starting now…
Tickets – $12
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcqY66chhCA
Friday, July 31st at MIDNIGHT
The Cinefamily Silent Movie Theatre
611 N. Fairfax Avenue / Los Angeles, CA 90036
Buy tickets here.
R.I.P. Bob Mitchell, longtime L.A. Silent Movie Theater/Cinefamily organist
Bob Mitchell (1912-2009)
from Cinefamily:
I have sad news. Our organist, Bob Mitchell, has passed on at the age of 96. I did not know Mr. Mitchell well, but I did have the pleasure of seeing him play many times over the past year and a half. Mr. Mitchell, who started playing at the Pasadena Playhouse at the age of only 12 years old, had actually played for silent films in the ’20s. It was a pleasure and a privilege to witness someone who wasn’t just a master at his craft, but was a human portal to another time. There will be wonderful silent musicians continuing the tradition of live, improvised accompaniment, but there was a certain unforgeable authenticity that comes from not simply recreating another time, but being of it. Bob’s entire musical background and earliest memories lent a texture to his performance that was quite unique; his musical quotations, his sense of humour, his reference points were all of the era. He knew and remembered the songs and themes that were contemporaneous with the films he accompanied, and would weave them into the scores at natural points. If you were watching William Hart’s silent western Tumbleweeds — sure enough, he would play the hit song “Tumbleweeds” as the credits rolled.
It is short notice, but tomorrow, before our screening of Greta Garbo’s Love, we will have a short memorial for Bob.
Click here to buy tickets for Love, and for a complete schedule of Cinefamily’s Silent Wednesdays program.
May 23rd – Lucky Dragons & asDSSka perform a live score to The Red Balloon at The Silent Movie Theatre in L.A.
This Saturday, experimental sound-collagists and noise-makers Lucky Dragons and asDSSka will be performing a live score to the classic The Red Balloon at The Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles (co-presented by Dublab and L.A. Record). Recent performances I’ve seen by Lucky Dragons have been nothing less than magical, unifying experiences where audience members left with smiles beaming from ear to ear. Give yourself the treat of reflecting on this childhood film as the duo taps into your heart and mind in this special musical collaboration with the classically trained pianist Aska Matsumiya and David Scott Stone (The Sads, The Melvins). The film will be followed by a sing-a-long with the L.A. Ladies’ Choir.
The Cinefamily Silent Movie Theatre
611 N Fairfax Avenue / Los Angeles 90036
7:30pm
$12
Buy tickets here.
Arthur Magazine 