Category — Film Series

Thursday, March 29, at 8pm

Please join us for the first night of the Spring Film Series — we’re going to kick things off with a pretty exciting show: local filmmaker Meghan Eckman will present Road Does Not End, her on-the-road docmentary following the band Animental as they encounter a plethora of freaks and weirdos on their US tour; followed by a series of experimental animation and shorts by many of those freaks and weirdos themselves, including members of the bands Neon Hunk, Wolf Eyes, Smegma, and Nautical Almanac.

The evening will also feature a live performance from everyone’s favorite local soundsmiths, ruckus-makers and dandy men-about-town Grand Banks. It should be pretty awesome.

Thursday, March 8 at 7pm

The evening will feature two documentaries, the first of which will be Werner Herzog’s classic film The Great Ecstacy of Woodcarver Steiner, a meditation on the limits of physical human endeavors, containing extensive slow-motion footage of ski-jumpers crashing gracefully. The film has a delicate and soaring score by legendary ambient kraurockers Popol Vuh and is accompanied by Herzog’s inimitable narration.

The evening’s main feature will be Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, the new documentary about the extraordinary French soccer player Zinédine Zidane. [Read more →]

Thursday, February 22, at 7pm

Please join us this Thursday for the continuation of the Bridge’s Winter Film Series. This week’s theme is “Hand-Made Films” the evening will feature a selection of short works by six contemporary film artists.

Making a film involves a strange confluence between personal vision and technical labor; these formally playful works will highlight the physical and formal aspects of medium, while exploring the task of literally constructing a film with one’s own hands.

The evening’s selection will include: Passage a l’acte by Martin Arnold, 15/67 TV by Kurt Kren, Perils and Mayhem by Abigail Child, Chicago Loop by James Benning, Hand-Eye Coordination by Naomi Uman, and La Plage by Patrick Bokanowski.

Thursday, February 8, at 7pm

If you’re not frozen solid by then, please make an effort to join us at The Bridge for “Tinted Love: Films and the Color Blue,” the latest installment in our Winter Film Series; curated and hosted by Sarah Lawson in anticipation / defiance of Valentine’s Day.

The evening’s schedule will include: Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell, widely acknowledged as the first collage-film; Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon a playful pan-cultural myth exploring folly and obsession; Blue Movie by Mark Street, which reappropriates pornographic imagery into an abstract and lyrical cinematic poem; and Derek Jarman’s Blue, a feature-length, monochrome sound- meditation made while Jarman was blind and dying of AIDS. Come explore the many cinematic roles of the color blue, this Thursday at The Bridge.

Thursday, January 25 at 7pm

Guest host William Wylie (UVa Associate Professor of Photography) will present a selection of films, including Pull My Daisy and True Story by Robert Frank, some films by Elijah Gowin, and Wylie’s own film Nectar (made in collaboration with Kevin Everson).

Thursday, January 11, at 7pm

Digital technology and the internt has fundamentally changed our relationship to media, and short videos on YouTube and Google Video could easily be called the 21st century equivelant of penny-arcade nickelodeons.

Host Max Fenton says, “Sharing stupid movies on the internet has become a million-dollar industry; but hidden amongst the shark attacks and schoolyard fights are the pioneering films of the American and international avant-garde.”

Audience members are invited to bring their own URLs and share their discoveries. [Read more →]

Thursday, November 30 at 8pm

A mixture of playful and political films relating to the topic of food and eating, the evening will begin with a handful of short films including Food, three delicious vignettes in which Jan Svankmajer animates human vending machines and humorously explores cannibalism, and Bestial Comforts by the inimitable George Kuchar.

The recent documentary The Future of Food will be the evening’s main course, providing an interesting and informative perspective on genetically engineered foods; and for dessert, we’ll watch Todd Haynes’ Superstar, and oddly moving bio-pic of the anorexic 70’s icon Karen Carpenter, re-enacted with Barbie dolls on shoebox-diorama sets.

A potluck of Thanksgiving leftovers will accompany the screening.

Thursday, November 16 at 8pm

Uniting classic avant-garde and experimental films with recent underground filmmaking, this assortment of short films reconfigure the definition of narrative film.

We’ll be screening Maya Deren’s classic At Land; Janie Geiser’s spooky nocturne The Fourth Watch; Madison Brookshire’s rural experiment A Shout in the Street; and Laida Lertxundi’s Wish You Were Here, a comedic critique of the concept of vacation.

We’ll also enjoy Timothy Shearer’s Dirty White South Horse, an absurd crunk deconstruction of the 1980 Travolta classic Urban Cowboy; and Lewis Klahr’s film The Pony Glass, a stop-motion queer coming-of-age tale starring Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen. We’ll conclude with Wilson Busfield’s The Spectacle, which combines a science-fiction plot, an obtuse domestic drama, a pretentious children’s theatre director, a hilarious pornographic interlude, and extensive war-reenactment footage into one stunning 25-minute epic.

Thursday, November 2 at 8pm

This night will showcase films by two acclaimed Iranian directors; host Max Fenton says: “These films are beautiful and were made in times of great struggle. They are poignant films about small moments in small places that are as small and filled as our own places we each occupy. Only, for some reason, because they were made faraway we forget that those faraway places are made up of small and poignant moments and beautiful desolate places, too. Let us watch these films about being human, while we are humans, and laugh when they are funny and cry when they are sad.”

Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 film Where is the Friend’s Home? follows eight-year-old Ahmed as he desperately tries to return a notebook to his classmate, who will be expelled from school if the book is not returned. This film is often compared to The Bicycle Thief for it’s ability to comment on responsibility and morality in an impoverished culture by following the simple quest of it’s protagonist; it’s also the first film in a rough trilogy, introducing characters that Kiarostami would return to in Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees.

The second part of this double-bill will be Bread and Flower (a.k.a. A Moment of Innocence), Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1995 film in which the director encounters various difficulties while attempting to re-enact a violent incident from his adolescence; the result is a thrilling post-modern masterpiece that also functions as a poignant statement about youth in rebellion and changing attitudes in Iranian culture.

Thursday, October 19 at 8pm

A collection of experimental and abstract films; we’ll start with several films by Stan Brakhage, including Kindering, Commingled Containters, and Mothlight, a film composed of layers of insect wings and leaves sandwiched between editing tape, with projected light shining through to create a flickering, hypnotic exploration of beauty and nature.

We’ll also enjoy such early experimental classics as Man Ray’s Le Retour à la raison, Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21, Ralph Steiner’s H20 and Oskar Fischinger’s Composition in Blue, as well as AQU and Off by contemporary video artist Ryan Connor.

The screening will conclude with Anthony McCall’s interactive film Line Describing a Cone, “a film which demanded to be looked at, not on the screen, but in the space of the auditorium. What was at issue was the establishment of a cone of light between the projector and the screen, out of what was initially one pencil-like beam of light.” (Artforum)