Media Arts Preview: Summer Continues to Get Stranger...
Summer 2011 continues to get stranger with a giant moth monster movie, an all-night cemetery screening and an evening of '70s folk music paired with animated visuals.
Friday, August 12
Mark Moore Gallery presents shorts films on each second Friday of the month, and this month's selections were chosen by artist Jeremy Fish. Look for the amazing logo-filled Logorama, the award-winning spoof of the branded city by the French collective H5, as well as works by Spike Jonze and others. The screening starts at 8:00, and will include the Dogtown food truck and a live set by DJ Ghostkick.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive, the UCLA Latin American Institute and the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese together presentPerpetual Motion, a retrospective of five films by the celebrated Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Pereda. Pereda returns to similar themes and experimental techniques in his films, and boasts a "fascination with crossing boundaries and blurring categories," cheerfully merging fact and fiction, documentary and narrative. Pereda will attend the screenings tonight and tomorrow (both at 7:30 p.m. at the Billy Wilder Theater). Screening tonight: Summer of Goliath, which brings together interviews and snippets of story to create a portrait of a rural Mexican town.
Saturday, August 13
Yoshua Okón recently undertook a residency at the Hammer Museum, where he created a two-channel video installation featuring Guatemalan day laborers photographed on location at a Home Depot store in downtown LA. The project will be on view through November 6, 2011.
Cinespia presents outdoor screenings of films from dusk until dawn this week at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. Screenings include D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 film Monterey Pop, as well as rare concert footage, psychedelic animation, visual music and rare ephemera films. Organizers recommend bringing a picnic dinner and drinks, pillows and blankets, and they note that DJs spin before and after the screenings. Gates open at 7:30 p.m., and the screenings will start at 9:00 p.m. and continue until 6:00 a.m.
LACMA's incredible summer film screenings continue to amaze! The curious film Mothra, part of the ongoing Saturday Monster Matinees, screens today at 2:00 p.m., and is described in this way: "After foot-tall twins are kidnapped from a tropical island where they guard a sacred egg, a giant larva (and soon-to-be-moth) travels to Japan to rescue them." The 1961 film was directed by Ishro Honda, and is part of the larger genre of Japanese monster movies from the 1960s, and oddly enough, includes sequences shot by the Toho studio in Los Angeles.
Sunday, August 14
Folk singer Linda Perhacs, known for her 1970 album Parallelograms, will perform live with her band in conjunction with films devoted to visual music in a show titledLiving Light: An Evening With Linda Perhacs & Friends. It's going to be a truly trippy evening of sound and image psychedelia. Don't believe me? See the image at the top, and check the trailer.
Monday, August 15
This month's installment of Doc U at the International Documentary Association focuses on "the rewards, challenges and opportunities women face in producing and directing documentary films." Producer Lucy Webb will moderate the discussion, which will include Lesley Chilcott, Michele Ohayon and Lauren Greenfield. The talk starts at 7:00 p.m. at Cinefamily.
Tuesday, August 16
What better way to spend an August evening than watching a new 35mm print of Federico Fellini's extraordinary La Dolce Vita? You'll find it screening tonight and tomorrow night at Cinefamily at 7:45 p.m.