Category — Film Series

Thursday, January 31, 7PM

Created between 1991 and 1995, this cine-poem by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel criss-crosses from Niger to France, Greece and the Czech Replublic, traveling in time with Robert Lax’s “silent jam sessions,” the tight-rope dancing of avant-garde circuses and the nomadic pastoralists of the Saharan interior.

The score for this film was created by Fred Frith, who will be visiting and performing at the University that same week… more details about those events can be found here.

Wednesday, January 30th, 8PM

Our friends at the Black Cat Skate Shop present a special one-off screening of The Man Who Souled the World, a recent documentary about skateboarder Steve Rocco and World Industries, the controversial skateboard company that transformed the subculture by utilizing tactics of manipulation, subversion and ambush to rewrite the rules, conquer the corporate giants who controlled the industry, and usher in a new era of skater-owned companies and skate-inspired entertainment.

The screening is free, and begins at 7PM. There will be live musical entertainment afterwards: “scuzz-rock to melt your face,” courtesy of The Unholy Four.

Thursday, January 10 at 7PM

Our first screening of the year will correspond appropriately with this month’s Audio January event; hosted by Melissa Ragain from the UVa Art History department, this evening’s selection will feature experimental films with soundtracks by noted minimalist and experimental composers, including Steve Reich, Terry Riley, John Cale, Albert Ayler and David Byrne.

The films themselves are Michael Snow’s “New York Eye and Ear Control,” Robert Nelson’s “Oh Dem Watermelons,” Tony Conrad’s “Straight and Narrow,” William Farley’s “Tribute,” Standish Lawder’s “Corridor” and “Two Films I Never Made” by Herbert Jean De Grasse.

All winter screenings are on Thursdays at 7pm, and the admission is $5.

Thursday, December 6 at 7PM
Our 2007 Fall Series concludes on December 6 with far-out animations and performance art videos by the art collectives Paper Rad and Forcefield. PaperRad synthesizes popular material from television, video games, and advertising, reprogramming these references with an exuberantly neo-primitivist digital aesthetic. Forcefield, an artist collective from Providence, Rhode Island, has forged an interdisciplinary practice that includes music, performance, installation, textiles, printmaking, and video. Oscillating between humor and menace, their willfully crude videos employ vintage analogue signal-processors and defunct electronics, the anonymous artists shrouded in knit outfits.

Admission is $5, and the screening begins at 7:00. Please stay tuned for announcements regarding the upcoming Winter Film Series!

Thursday, November 15 at 7pm

Local filmmaker Kevin Everson will be screening a selection of his short films, which are largely about responding to daily materials, conditions, tasks and gestures of people of African descent. He has completed a combination of thirty feature and short films about the working class culture of Black Americans and other people of African descent. His films focus on conditions, tasks, gestures, and materials in these communities. Everson’s artwork and films have been exhibited around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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.