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Media Arts Preview: Godard, Herzog and More

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LA-based artists Betzy Bromberg and Madison Brookshire investigate film as a medium for the exploration of time and memory, while local venues pay tribute to iconic international filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog in this week's media arts scene.

Thursday, March 31

The Double Life of Veronique

In conjunction with the exhibit at MOCA titled Rodarte: States of Matter,Cinefamily presentsAn Evening With Kate & Laura Mulleavy, for which the sibling fashion designers have selected two movies to screen, each featuring dopplegangers. The screening will include The Double Life of Veronique, Krzysztof Kieslowski's extraordinary 1991 feature about a doubled life, and Brian de Palma's Sisters, which Kate Mulleavy describes as a favorite film. "Identity is shattered... split... and severed." The show starts at 8:00 p.m. LA-based filmmaker Madison Brookshire will present Color Series, a set of six films made without a camera with color fading from one sequence to the next. "The fades are slow enough that they engage the viewer in a dialogue about the border between the work and his or her own perception of it," writes Brookshire. "The subject of the work is duration and color is the medium through which we experience it. The converse is also true: the subject is color and duration is the medium. The effect is a direct experience of time and vision." The screening begins at 7:00 p.m. in the Ray Stark Family Theatre, Room 108, George Lucas Building, School of Cinematic Arts, USC.

Every Man for Himself

Friday, April 1
LACMA presents Jean-Luc Godard's celebrated Every Man for Himself this weekend, with a new print and multiple screenings (7:30 and 9:30 p.m. tonight, and tomorrow, April 2, at 5:00 and 7:30 p.m.). Described as "a poetic, comical, and incisive portrait of sex and work in the modern world," the 1980 film, which stars Isabelle Huppert and Nathalie Baye, marked a shift in Godard's work from avant-garde experimentation to a more mainstream approach and remains important today, more than 25 years later, as a political and provocative exploration of the relationships between men and women.

Herzog

Cinefamily and the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles present a dazzling collection of 12 documentary films by the great filmmaker Werner Herzog with The Ecstatic Truths of Werner Herzog: Documentaries, 1971-1992. Write the curators, "Herzog's docs show an appreciation for imagination, poetry, adventure, and - most of all - how documentaries at their best can be an expression of one artist's vision of the world." The show kicks off tonight with La Soufriere at 7:30 p.m., followed by Lessons of Darkness at 8:00 p.m.; the show continues through April 8.Saturday, April 2
The Hollywood Heritage Museum presents a full day of screenings of early silent films with a tribute to the era's "leading ladies," including Mabel Normand and Norma Talmage. Michael Mortilla will provide live musical accompaniment for the five films, with The Innocence of Ruth from 1916 starting the show at 1:30 p.m.

Betzy Bromberg

Monday, April 4
LA-based filmmaker Betzy Bromberg returns to REDCAT with her newest film, Voluptuous Sleep Series, described as "an emotional tour de force that serves as a rapturous antidote to the fragmentation of modern life and a new experience of cinematic time and memory." Bromberg, who has been a key figure in the LA avant-garde filmmaking scene for many years and has screened her work internationally, continues to explore sound as well as the visual with her new project, uniting the film with two soundtracks created in collaboration with Dane A. Davis, Zack Settel, Jean-Pierre Bedoyan, Pam Aronoff, James Rees and Robert Allaire. Media artist George Legrady will offer an overview of his work at my Digital Studies Symposium tonight starting at 7:00 p.m. Legrady's interactive installations and web-based artworks make use of data collection, data processing methodologies and data visualization. "I have integrated digital processes into my artistic work since the mid-1980s, investigating two different directions: methodologies for new forms of visualization through the organization of cultural data, and implementation of algorithmic processes," he explains. The presentation will take place in School of Cinematic Arts Room 112.

Ugetsu

Tuesday, April 5
Melnitz Moives and the UCLA Center for Japanese Studies present Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi's masterpiece of Japanese cinema which mixes "brutal wartime realism and haunting ghost story" in a tale about two ambitious brothers and their unfortunate wives. Dubbed "one of the great experiences of cinema," by critic Dave Kehr, the film screening, a benefit for Japan, will take place in the James Bridges Theater at Melnitz Hall at UCLA at 7:30.

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