Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman
Weekend, January 29, 30 & 31 at 7:30 pm
Eric Bricker, 2008, USA, 83 min.

January 29
Q & A by Stephen Leet (Professor of architecture Washington University) and Marlene Bricker

January 30
Q & A by Toby Weiss (architectural photographer, writer, musician, & blogger), Ken Konchel (architectural photographer), and Marlene Bricker

Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, Visual Acoustics celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman, the world’s greatest architectural photographer, whose images brought modern architecture to the American mainstream. Shulman, who passed away this year, captured the work of nearly every modern and progressive architect since the 1930s including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Frank Gehry. His images epitomized the singular beauty of Southern California’s modernist movement and brought its iconic structures to the attention of the general public. This unique film is both a testament to the evolution of modern architecture and a joyful portrait of the magnetic, whip-smart gentleman who chronicled it with his unforgettable images.

Pennies From Heaven
Herbert Ross, 1981, USA, 84 min.
Wednesday, February 3 at 8 pm
Strange Brew: Cult Films at Schlafly Bottleworks.

A lavish adaptation of the BBC series of the same name; it's a contemplative avant-garde musical in which drab everyday surroundings magically become movie sets and everyday speech suddenly turns into song. Steve Martin stars as Arthur, who sells sheet music--and the dreams promised in their lyrics--in 1930s depression-era Chicago. He's not always the most pleasant of fellows: He cheats on his wife, lies to his lovers, and seduces an innocent schoolteacher, Eileen (Bernadette Peters). But his spirit still has a sweetness and innocence--the sweetness of the Tin Pan Alley tunes he hawks and the innocence of the fantasy-filled Hollywood musicals he sees. When Arthur and Eileen set out on a series of misadventures, their bleak world turns to song and dance in a series of lavish Busby Berkeley-style musical numbers. The film features stunningly versatile performances by Martin and Peter and a striptease by the amazing Christopher Walken.

Presented in the lively atmosphere of Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest Avenue, Maplewood Mo. There is ample parking and great beer on tap!

Special Admission $4.00

Until The Light Takes Us
Aaron Aites & Audrey Ewell, 2009, Norway, 93 min.
Saturday and Sunday, February 6 & 7 at 7:30 pm
Part music scene and part cultural uprising, black metal rose to worldwide notoriety in the mid-nineties when a rash of suicides, murders, and church burnings accompanied the explosive artistic growth and output of a music scene that would forever redefine what heavy metal is and what it stands for to other musicians, artists and music fans world-wide. goes behind the highly sensationalized media reports of "Satanists running amok in Europe" to examine the complex and largely misunderstood principles and beliefs that led to this rebellion against both Christianity and modern culture. In English and Norwegian with English subtitles.

La Danse- Le Ballet de l'Opera de Paris
Frederick Wiseman, 2009, USA, 158 min.
Weekend, February 12, 13 & 14 at 7:30 pm

The Paris Opera Ballet is one of the world’s great ballet companies. The film follows the rehearsals and performances of seven ballets: Genus by Wayne McGregor, Le Songe de Medée by Angelin Preljocaj, La Maison de Bernarda by Mats Ek, Paquita by Pierre Lacotte, Casse Noisette by Rudolph Nureyev, Orphée and Eurydice by Pina Bausch, and Romeo and Juliette by Sasha Waltz. The film shows the work involved in administering the company and the coordinated and collaborative work of choreographers, ballet masters, dancers, musicians, and costume, set, and lighting designers. In French with English subtitles.

Om Shanti Om
Farah Khan, 2007, India, 162 min.
Weekend, February 19, 20 & 21 at 7:30 pm

In the 1970s, small-time actor Om (Shah Rukh Khan) falls in love with superstar Shanti (Deepika Padukone), but the two of them are later killed in a suspicious on-set fire. When he's reincarnated 30 years later, Om is determined to punish the person who ignited the blaze. In his former life, he swears he saw Shanti's secret husband (Arjun Rampal) set fire to the set, which means his only chance to expose the truth is to have the movie remade.

Modular Mazes
Saturday, February 27 at 7:30 pm

Media artist Van McElwee presents an evening of new video work in conjunction with performances of original music by James Hegarty, Rich O’Donnell, and the Semi Acoustic Noise Ensemble (SANE). In Modular Mazes video by Van McElwee, 3D animation by Casper McElwee and music will operate as one, exploring the ancient form of the labyrinth in new ways. 3D glasses will be provided for two of the pieces, Blue Snowballs and Y-Space.

McElwee’s body of work encompasses over 40 video installations and single channel works. He is the recipient of multiple awards and grants including The American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award and seven fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has exhibited his work extensively worldwide, and is currently Professor of Electronic and Photographic Media at Webster University.

Beat Street
Stan Lathan, 1984, USA 105 min.
Wednesday, March 3 at 8 pm
Strange Brew: Cult Films at Schlafly Bottleworks.

The troubles of ghetto life are dramatized in this cinematic time capsule, one of the first films to celebrate hip hop culture. Shot it the Bronx, in a kind of ghetto neo realism the characters and locations retain their street cred, with graffiti covering subway cars and abandoned buildings populating the mean streets. Rapper Kenny (Guy Davis) and his break dancing brother Lee (Robert Taylor) are up and coming soul artists. They only need a few good connections and one big break to make it. When they meet a beautiful college music professor (Rae Dawn Chong), who can help them expand their horizons, everything starts to fall into place. Musician Harry Belafonte teamed with David Picker to produce.

Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, 2009,Switzerland, Luxembourg, Senegal, 103 min.
Weekend, March 5, 6 & 7 at 7:30 pm

A vibrant, soulful and in-depth look at one of the worldʼs most popular and inspiring musicians, Senegalese hero Youssou Ndour, Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love was shot over two years and across three continents. Following the Grammy-winning African icon as he releases his most ambitious album, Egypt, a best-selling record in which, for the first time, Ndour sings about Islam. Upon release in Senegal, the album was considered blasphemous, bringing Ndour, perhaps the most popular Muslim artist in the world, face to face with the contradictions of his own religion. Balancing the religious and personal with Ndour's extraordinarily beautiful and inspirational performances, I Bring What I Love takes us on a cinematic journey alongside one of the most important figures in contemporary Africa. Ndour was lauded by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and is the highest selling African pop musician of all time.

Intangible Asset 82
Emma Franz, 2008, Australia/Japan, 90 min.
Weekend, March 12, 13 & 14 at 7:30 pm

The story of a respected jazz drummer (Simon Barker) and his search for an elusive South Korean shaman and grandmaster musician. The journey becomes a rite of passage as Barker meets engaging and exotic characters, and overcomes cultural obstacles and the march of time to eventually meet the master only days before his death. The film takes us inside the thoughts of a dedicated musician as he explores the tools of self-expression. It is a road movie, a philosophical encounter, a showcase of fascinating musicians rarely heard outside of Korea, and a tribute to the universal language of music.

With One Voice
Eric Temple, 2009, USA, 78 min.
Thursday, March 18 at 7:30 pm

Mystics from the world’s great spiritual traditions come together in one venue for the first time. A compelling, life-affirming documentary that addresses the profound questions about the meaning of life and love, the existence of God, the path to spiritual awakening, and the way to true peace in the world.

Sponsored by AWE: Alternatives With Education in Eastern Missouri Prisons

Free Screening

Emails from Bangkok
Sunday, March 28 at 7:30 pm
By R D Zurick
Featuring Ashley Tate, Anna Lum, and Robert Fishbone

Emails from Bangkok is a multimedia event that features live dance, music, and tai chi, in which Zurick pulls together a talented array of St. Louisans for an evening of spectacular visual and sonic art. Conceptually, Emails from Bangkok arose from Zurick’s quest to connect with two, very famous, Thai artists: Khun Chalermchai and Bruce Gaston. On a 30-day journey to Thailand in 2007, Zurick sought a meeting with the artists to ask their permission for the use of their work on a video he was creating, entitled White Wat (which will be shown in Emails from Bangkok). Over the course of his travels, Zurick wrote three emails to friends in the United States, which documented his journey. These emails will be used as a narrative, read by Zurick live during the event and interspersed between films.

Presented by the HEARding Cats Collective
Special Admission: $8 regular, $5 seniors/students

Neil Young Trunk Show
Weekend, April 2, 3 & 4 at 7:30 pm
Jonathan Demme, 2009, Netherlands, USA, Canada, 82 min.

Jonathan Demme—who already immortalized Neil Young in the easygoing 2006 concert film Heart of Gold—returns to mine the folk-rocker's more deliriously hard-rocking side, utilizing handheld DV and Super 8 to give the film a rough bootleg feel. It's Neil at his blistering, sonic best, stretching single-note white-noise guitar solos into 20-minute monster jams of searing intensity. The man still plays like he means it.

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
D.A. Pennebaker, 1973, UK, 90 min.
Wednesday, April 7 at 8 pm
Strange Brew: Cult Films at Schlafly Bottleworks

The quintessential moment in glam-rock history, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is David Bowie at his best. This film of the 1973 concert (released 10 years later) documents the hallucinogenic collage of kitsch, Warhol/Pop irony, and flamboyant excess that was the Bowie phenomenon: his trademark synthetic androgyny is a musical symbiosis of feminine passion and masculine dominance that define his funky, gender-bending art and, ultimately, the glam-rock genre as a whole. Early on, the film cuts to elaborate backstage costume changes between sets, highlighting a playlist that includes such classics as "Changes," "Space Oddity," "Time," and "Suffragette City."

Presented in the lively atmosphere of Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest Avenue, Maplewood Mo. There is ample parking and great beer on tap!

Special Admission $4.00

April 8-10
Multicultural Film Series

Prodigal Sons
Kimberly Reed, 2008, USA, 87 min.
Thursday, April 8 at 7:30 pm

Kimberly Reed returns home to a small town in Montana for her high school reunion, hoping for reconciliation with her long estranged adopted brother. But along the way Prodigal Sons uncovers stunning revelations, intense sibling rivalries, and unforeseeable twists of plot and gender. Reed's rare access delicately reveals not only the family's most private moments, but also an epic scope as the film travels from Montana to Croatia, from jail cell to football field, from deaths to births and commitments of all kinds. This unflinching look at identity and the past challenges us to wonder if we can ever truly become someone new.

Prom Night In Mississippi
Paul Saltzman, 2008, USA, 90 min.
Friday, April 9 at 7:30 pm
With director Paul Saltzman

In 1997, Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for the senior prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi under one condition: the prom had to be racially integrated. His offer was ignored. In 2008, Freeman offered again. This time the school board accepted, and history was made. Charleston High School had its first-ever integrated prom - in 2008. Until then, blacks and whites had had separate proms even though their classrooms have been integrated for decades. Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman follows students, teachers and parents in the lead-up to the big day. This seemingly inconsequential rite of passage suddenly becomes profound as the weight of history falls on teenage shoulders. "Billy Joe," an enlightened white senior, appears on camera in shadow, fearing his racist parents will disown him if they know his true feelings. Prom Night in Mississippi captures a big moment in a small town, where hope finally blossoms in black, white and a whole lot of taffeta.

Taqwacore: The Birth of Islamic Punk
Omar Majeed, 2009, Canada, 80 min.
Saturday and Sunday, April 10 & 11 at 7:30 pm
With director Omar Majeed

When he was 17, Michael Knight left his mother’s home in Rochester to study Islam at a Pakistani madrassa. It was his first act of rebellion—against his abusive, schizophrenic, white-supremacist father. Years later, burned out on the demands of religious dogma, Mike rebelled once more—by penning a Muslim Punk manifesto called "The Taqwacores." His work of fiction struck a chord with young Muslims around the world and before long, real-life Taqwacore bands were creating a scene. This film follows Michael and his band of Muslim punks as they journey across the U.S. and Pakistan, transforming their worlds, their religion and themselves through the spirit of Taqwacore.

Mighty Uke
Tony Coleman 2009, USA/Cananda, 2009
April 16, 17 & 18 at 7:30 pm

Born in Hawaii in the 1880's, the easy playing ukulele became the most popular instrument in the American home by the 1920’s. The rise of the rock and roll guitar pushed the ukulele into nerdy obscurity. UNTIL NOW! In the Internet age, the ukulele is making a comeback and a new generation is rediscovering a unique musical voice. Mighty Uke travels the world to chronicle the amazing comeback of a musical underdog.

New & Selected Work by Peter Rose
Thursday, April 22 at 7:30 pm

The man who could not see far enough
(1981) - 33min.

16 mm film, color, sound uses literary, structural, autobiographical, and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception, and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it "stunning" and "hallucinatory." The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic. The man who could not see far enough has won major awards of distinction at numerous festivals both here and abroad, including the Oberhausen, Edinburgh, American, and Sydney Film Festivals, has been broadcast nationally, and is in collections at Centre Pompidou in Paris and at Image Forum in Tokyo.

Secondary Currents
(1982) - 16min. 16 mm, B&W, sound

Secondary Currents is a film about the relationships between the mind and language. Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of nonsense, it is an "imageless" film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and subtitled narration constitute a peculiar duet for voice, thought, speech, and sound. A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language and has been the subject of a number of articles on the use of language in the arts. Percussion is by Jim Meneses.

SpiritMatters
(1984) - 5 min. 16 mm, silent

SpiritMatters is a silent monologue on the simultaneous perception of space and time. The film was constructed without a camera by writing directly on clear celluloid, and then "translated" by re-filming the resulting strips on a light table so that they appear as "subtitles" beneath the original inscription. The film functions as both process and object-an interactive experiment in reading, writing, and seeing. SpiritMatters has won prizes at the Baltimore, Ann Arbor, and Experimental Film Festivals

Metalogue
(1996) - 3min. digital video

Metalogue has been described as a cross between a “speech” and a “fireworks display.” Digital editing techniques have been used to reflect and refract a complex monolog about memory, time, and language. By embedding the corresponding gestures in a spectacular diachronic array, Rose creates a new form of poetry. Metalogue won a Bronze Award at the New York Short Film and Video Festival and has been shown at the Oberhausen International Film Festival, the Hamburg Film Festival, and the World Wide Video Festival.

Pneumenon
(2003) - 5min. two-channel video installation (a document)

Pneumenon was commissioned and exhibited by the Fabric Workshop and Museum. It is a two-channel video installation that offers dramatic visible metaphors for ideas about appearance and reality, sign and referent, cause and effect. The heart of the piece is a video shot on the Rio Grande in southern Texas. A blue tarpaulin hangs from a line of rope and sways in an intermittent breeze. The shadows from the leaves on a tree in the distance are projected onto this surface by the sun, and they grow and decline in size as the tarp sways back and forth towards the camera. When the wind occasionally lifts the tarp, the entire landscape behind is revealed- a tree, some RV vehicles, a road. And then the curtain falls again, fluttering. This image is projected from behind onto a large silk screen that hangs in front of the viewing audience. A small fan is positioned in front of this screen and has been slaved to the chapter numbers in the DVD so that it goes on and off on a pre-programmed basis. When it does so, the projection screen itself (onto which the image of the tarp is being thrown) rises in a complex furl and reveals a hitherto unseen image projected on the back wall of the space. This is a piece about phenomenon and noumenon, about air, wind, breath, and light, and it operates at an odd juncture between video art and a theatre of objects.

Omen
(2001) - 10min. video

In a set of invocatory stanzas, encounters with the underworld, calligraphic illuminations, flames of shadow: a premonition. It presents us with a series of slow transformations that elude language and that can only be watched with patience, simple moments of observation that witness mysterious conjugations of light and shadow and that seem to speak the language of metaphor. Sound is extremely important. There are moments of grand opera and there are faint suggestions of music, heard way in the back of a distant space and that are on the edge of inaudibility. The viewer is carried along by a current of sounds, images, ideas, and metaphors into an unknown territory of feeling. Omen has been shown at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and at the San Francisco Cinemateque.

Studies in Trans-falumination
(2008) - 5:30min. video

Studies in Transfalumination exploits modified flashlights and stripped down video projectors to explore the visual complexities of the ordinary world: a tunnel, a clump of grass, a discarded table, the underside of a bridge, fog, a piece of rock, and a tree. All images were shot in real time- there is no animation. The video is the third in a series of works that explore light and darkness.

The Indeserian Tablets
(2009 - 10) 13 min., video installation

An annotated nocturnal portrait of the Indeserians- their language, technology, religious practice, art and poetry as told in stories, diagrams, notes, jokes, obscenities, salutations, performances, and riddles reconstructed from fragments found in the archive at Kiens. The video presents 12 of the 32 modules of the work.

Gogol Bordello Non Stop
Margarita Jimeno, 2008, USA, 90 min.
Weekend, April 23, 24 & 25 at 7:30 pm

A lo-fi, high-energy portrait of musical phenomenon Gogol Bordello (and its magnetic frontman—and sometimes movie star—Eugene Hütz), Margarita Jimeno’s documentary follows the self-described “gypsy punk band” on a five-year journey from underground legend to international phenomenon, featuring exclusive backstage interviews and copious concert footage.

The Yes Men Fix The World
Andy Bichlbaum & Mike Bonanno, 2008, France/USA, 90 min.
April 30 & May 2 at 7:30 pm

A screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world's most outrageous pranks. From New Orleans to India to New York City, armed with little more than cheap thrift-store suits, the Yes Men squeeze raucous comedy out of all the ways that corporate greed is destroying the planet. Brüno meets Michael Moore in this gut-busting wake-up call that proves a little imagination can go a long way towards vanquishing the Cult of Greed. Who knew fixing the world could be so much fun?

Webster University Student Film Festival
Saturday, May 1 at 7:30 pm

Another fascinating installment of recent work from Webster’s talented film and video students proves to be even better than the last. A broad representation of genre and theme, the program is a strong showcase of some the School of Communication’s brightest minds. Curated by the Webster Film & Video Society. Admission is free.