Film Love and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center present:
Fall-Apart Things
An evening of
films and videos about refusing to play along
Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, Meet Marlon Brando (1965) |
Friday, February 20, 2015
7:00 pm at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
$8 general | $5 student/senior | Free with
ACAC membership
Interview, audition, acting lesson, advertisements, publicity: all of these
media rituals have their established procedures. They assure that the film
industry, film scholarship, and polite society run smoothly. Journalist and
movie actor, talk show host and rock star, student and teacher: ask a question,
back comes a practiced response in a familiar form. Everyone wins, and we all
move on.
The films in this show are of people who in one way or another
refuse to play along. These are not stars performing calculatedly outrageous
stunts to publicize a project, or the familiar public meltdowns of celebrities.
Nor are they simply actions that subvert norms of society or art. Faced with
everyday situations that are nonetheless intolerable to their own sense of
integrity, the figures in this show resort to becoming trickster characters,
upending business as usual, often at personal cost. They offer a disruptive
counter-performance – frustrating, sometimes humorously, sometimes annoyingly,
our attempts to pin things down. In so doing they teach a deeper lesson and
inconvenience everyone, including themselves.
Included are Charlie
Chaplin’s first public appearance in his Tramp guise, in which he and crew crash
a racecar event for the purposes of filming his new character in front of an
unwitting audience. In the brilliant and hilarious I, An Actress,
director George Kuchar cannot stop himself from interjecting his own overheated
line readings into what is supposed to be his student’s audition. Peter
Kubelka's two short films are masterpieces of the avant-garde, made with utter
indifference for their original purpose as advertisements for nightclubs and
beer. In their different ways, filmmaker Harry Smith and musician Sly Stone use
the interview format to block all attempts to have themselves or their work
directly explained.
The show's centerpiece is Meet Marlon Brando,
the 1965 documentary by Direct Cinema pioneers Albert and David Maysles (of
Grey Gardens fame). Obliged to attend a press reception for his latest
Hollywood film, Brando commandeers the event to undermine his Hollywood product
and the press machine assembled to publicize it. Ironically, this relentless
attempt to dodge being defined by the Hollywood machine results in an indelible
screen performance.
Program (subject to change):
Kid
Auto Races at Venice (Henry Lehrman, 1914, 7 min)
I, An
Actress (George Kuchar, 1977, 8 min)
Adebar (Peter
Kubelka, 1957, 2 min)
Harry Smith interviewed by P. Adams Sitney,
June 3, 1977 audio courtesy WNYC Radio
Mirror
Animations (Harry Smith, ca. 1957/1979, 11 min)
Sly Stone on
the Dick Cavett Show (1971, 15 min) courtesy Daphne Productions
Schwechater (Peter Kubelka, 1958, 1 min)
Unedited:
Yul Brynner Interviews Trevor Howard, Rita Hayworth, Sylvia Sorrente and Angie
Dickinson (excerpts) (1965) courtesy the Austrian Film Museum
Meet Marlon Brando (Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte
Zwerin, 1965, 29 min)
curated by Andy Ditzler
The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
535 Means Street NW
Atlanta, GA, 30318
404.688.1970
http://www.thecontemporary.org/
Fall-Apart Things is a Film Love event. The Film Love
series provides access to great but rarely seen films, especially important
works unavailable on consumer video. Programs are curated and introduced by Andy
Ditzler, and feature lively discussion. Through public screenings and events,
Film Love preserves the communal viewing experience, provides space for the
discussion of film as art, and explores alternative forms of moving image
projection and viewing. Film Love was voted Best Film Series in Atlanta by the
critics of Creative Loafing in 2006, and was featured in Atlanta Magazine's Best
of Atlanta 2009.