Category — Film Series

Thursday, October 18 at 7pm

Oct 18th’s screening will be a night of spooky and sinister experimental films, including several ghastly and ghoulish short works to get us all in the mood for the Halloween season.

The evening’s debaucherous delights will include two works by legendary filmmaker Kenneth Anger: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a satanic ritual in film language, and Invocation of My Demon Brother, a mystical journey scored by Mick Jagger on the Moog synthesizer.

There will also be two avant-garde responses to the modern slasher-horror film: The Scary Movie, Peggy Ahwesh’s 1993 film in which two small girls re-enact the genre’s stereotypes, and Outer Space, in which Peter Tscherkassky re-appropriates horror-movie footage, literally deconstructing the image to implicate the viewer in a murder.

The screening will begin with The Furies, a silent work by early Hollywood auteur Slavko Vorkapich, and will conclude with Häxan, Benjamin Christensen’s feature-length Swedish pseudo-documentary about witchcraft from the 1920’s. We’ll be showing the hour long 1967 re-edit, which has a free-jazz soundtrack and narration by William S. Burroughs.

Thursday, September 27 at 7pm

An evening of intricate shadow puppet short films created by the early twentieth-century German artist Lotte Reiniger. “I believe in the truth of fairy-tales more than I believe in the truth in the newspaper,” said Lotte Reiniger, the shadow puppeteer who in 1926 created The Adventures of Prince Achmed, possibly the first feature-length animation film. Using scissors and black paper, she created silhouettes of extraordinary delicacy and subtlety. Inspired by Eastern silhouette puppetry, Reiniger began performing her own shadow puppet shows for family and friends as a child. She went on to make many beautiful films until her death in 1981. Most of her films are difficult to find outside of Europe, so we are especially thrilled to screen a series of her short animations.

Thursday, August 9 at 8pm

Community Bikes, Charlottesville’s own volunteer-run bicycle shop, has been quietly gathering crowds over the past few months with their “Bike-In Movies” series – now, the Bridge is proud to join forces with our comrades in activism and the arts to present a two-part interactive event.

First, the audience will gather at The Bridge to watch a re-screening of selections from the 2007 Portland Filmed By Bike festival, before riding their bicycles over to Community Bikes on West Main for the evening’s feature presentation, Sunday in Hell, a documentary about the 1976 Paris-Roubaix bicycle race.

Thursday, July 26, at 8pm

Click here for details about part one of this two-part travelogue series.

Part two of Experimental Travelogues will begin with Travel Notes, a rare film by noted photographer Walker Evans (provided courtesy of Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film: 1893-1941, a collaborative film preservation project between Anthology Film Archives, New York and Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, and underwritten by Cineric, Inc.)

We’ll also watch Unsere Afrikareise, Peter Kubelka’s intense critique of imperialism, filmed in safari in Africa; Munich/Berlin Walking Trip, a rare non-animated short by Oskar Fischinger, featuring a single frame taken every mile on a trip between those two cities; Going to the Ocean by acclaimed contemporary Portland-based film-maker Matt McCormick; Footnotes to a House of Love by Los Angeles-based Basque film-maker Laida Lertxundi; and Georgetown Loop by Ken Jacobs, described as an “X-Rated Landscape Film.”

Wrapping up the series are two transcendently amusing travel videos by the inimitably wonderful George Kuchar: Arizona Byways and Glaciar Park Video Views.

Thursday, July 12 at 8pm
Continuing the Bridge’s tradition of showcasing short experimental films, this two-part screening will present a selection of avant-garde travelogues, beginning on July 13 and continuing on July 26.

We’ll start off with two early films by Rudy Burckhardt, Seeing the World, part one and Haiti. (These films have been provided courtesy of Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film: 1893-1941, a collaborative film preservation project between Anthology Film Archives, New York and Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, and underwritten by Cineric, Inc.)

This first screening will also include Amarillo and Westcliffe Stampede, the two parts of Wildwest Suite, Holly Fisher’s fragmented document of a road-trip through the American Southwest; we’ll also screen The Glass System, shot on the streets of Calcutta and New York by Mark Lapore; and Cassis, a short travel film by the legendary Jonas Mekas.

The journey will conclude with The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, Peter Rose’s five-part mini-epic which combines very personal narration and self-documentation with breathtaking optical printing effects; the film’s climax involves Rose traversing the length of the Golden Gate Bridge by climbing the Bridge’s suspension cables, camera in hand.

Click here for details about part two of Experimental Travelogues.

Thursday, June 28 at 8pm

The Summer Film Series begins with two new skateboarding videos by local skate crews. The evening’s feature presentation is Anthro II by Louie Handler and the Richmond-based Anthro crew, preceded by Pid Geon Babylon, a recent production by precocious Charlottesville youngsters The Argyle Team.

These videos present a multitude of local talent as kids on skateboards slide, ollie, and grind all over the cities you thought you knew. Skating is often misunderstood and suppressed, alternately marginalized and heavily commercialized, yet it remains one of America’s most vibrant underground cultural movements, and the videos documenting the practice since its early days have become their own peculiar contemporary folk-art tradition; the Bridge is proud to begin our Summer Film Series with these two skate-video extravaganzas

This event is co-sponsored by the Black Cat Skate Shop.

Thursday, May 24 at 8pm

Host Sarah Lawson continues her mini-series begun at DUST last month. Provocative and visionary, yet often under- or mis-represented, films by female directors have helped redefine modes of cinematic representation.

This screening will include an assortment of short films by Martha Colburn; Thriller by Sally Potter; Jane Campion’s Passionless Moments; 1933 by Joyce Wieland, Shirley Clarke’s Bridges Go Round, Red Book by Janie Geiser, and Atlanta by Miranda July.

Thursday, May 10, at 8pm

Ranging in length from 2 to 20 minutes, and containing work from the early 1920’s up through today, these films eschew narrative structure and often depart from literal representation altogether in favor of exploring new ways of pure visual expression. As featured filmmaker John Whitney puts it, these films often attempt “to bypass the intellect and appeal to the emotions directly,” much like music or poetry.

But despite the lyrical and often psychedelic nature of these works, it’s difficult not to be awestruck by the amazing creativity and ingenuity at work here, as each of these filmmakers not only explore new means of representation but also new technical means of creativity as well.

All films will be shown in their originial 16mm format, and admission to this event is free. Click below to read more about the specific films: [Read more →]

Sunday, May 6

Bill Daniel, the creator of last November’s Who is Bozo Texino? The Secret History of Hobo Graffiti returns to Charlottesville to present Last Free Ride, Roy Nolan’s documentary about a floating houseboat activist community in the 1960’s, along with Daniel’s own short video Selective Service System Story.

Bill is touring the country in his hand-made combination sailboat/van, and will be projecting a two-channel work-in-progress video onto the boat’s sails in our parking lot, before we all head inside for the main feature. Don’t miss this great opportunity to see great films in a unique setting!

Thursday, April 26, at 8pm

Co-sponsored by The Bridge and the Virginia Film Society, host Richard Herskowitz will present a selection of Arthur Lipsett short films (including Very Nice, Very Nice), followed by Remembering Arthur, an intimate documentary portrait of a visionary collage filmmaker, his body of work and the troubled last years of his life.

George Lucas has said: “In terms of understanding the power of sound and picture relationships, there’s no one better than Arthur Lipsett.” The honesty and access of the film is a result of director Martin Lavut’s friendship with Lipsett and those of his inner circle, including National Film Board of Canada producers Colin Low and Donald Brittain.

This event is co-sponsored by the Virginia Film Society.