[Frameworks] HFA Presents MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS

Fri Mar 25 13:13:51 CDT 2011

Wish I could see this. Any chance there will be a similar show on the  
West Coast sometime?

I like the point made here about the comedic vein.  I am thinking  
Morgan connects on some level to Buster Keaton.

Myron Ort

On Mar 25, 2011, at 8:52 AM, Gravely, Brittany wrote:

> MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS
> APRIL 8 – APRIL 10
>
> CAMBRIDGE, MA: The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to screen MORGAN  
> FISHER PRESENTS from FRIDAY APRIL 8 – SUNDAY APRIL 10, 2011.
>
> An influential presence in the second wave of postwar American  
> experimental cinema that began in earnest in the late 1960s, Morgan  
> Fisher (b. 1942) has created a body of films whose lucidly complex  
> engagement with the cinematic apparatus, and with conceptual art,  
> is just beginning to be fully appreciated. Few filmmakers have so  
> presciently explored- and expanded- critical debates central to  
> Modernist art and its reception and also revolving around the  
> relationship between art and industry, and between theory and  
> practice. Fisher’s films are, in truth, only part of a more  
> expansive art practice and his Production Stills was, tellingly,  
> screened in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with  
> its historic “Information” show, among the first US museum exhibits  
> devoted to conceptual art. In 2005-06, one-person exhibitions at  
> the Tate Modern and Whitney Museum inspired renewed interest in  
> Fisher’s films, and he has recently received recognition for his  
> paintings and other non-film work that employ strategies similar to  
> those in his films.
> Focusing with rare intensity and insight upon the construction (and  
> deconstruction) of cinematic illusionism, Fisher’s earliest films,  
> such as The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing  
> Preparations for an Unmade Film (2) and Production Stills, revealed  
> the careful self-reflexivity and theoretical sophistication that  
> have remained important trademarks of his work. Fisher’s late  
> masterpieces Standard Gauge and ( ) have added another dimension to  
> his meta-cinematic concerns, channeling Fisher’s ardent love, and  
> deep knowledge, of cinema into a heartfelt, and at times distinctly  
> melancholy, searching for the essence of film. Fisher’s late films  
> offer a radical, “termite” history of the cinema from within the  
> machine, a recovery and even an ontology, of precisely those film  
> techniques and technologies that are typically overlooked and,  
> paradoxically, designed to be invisible- the insert, film gauges,  
> and the motion picture camera itself.
> An undergraduate art history major at Harvard, Fisher received his  
> formal training in filmmaking in Los Angeles, at USC and UCLA,  
> before taking a variety of jobs in the commercial film industry- as  
> an editor, stock footage researcher, assistant director and even  
> bit actor- working for the likes of Roger Corman and Haskell  
> Wexler. Typically identified with the structuralist film movement,  
> Fisher’s work must also be understood in the broader context of  
> conceptual and minimalist art, on the one hand, and, on the other,  
> the emergent “apparatus theory” of Marxist film scholars in the  
> 1970s, led by Jean-Luis Baudry. Counterbalancing and enriching the  
> theoretical rigor of Fisher’s films is their subtle and unexpected  
> humor which offers a nuanced variation of the rich yet  
> underappreciated comedic vein running throughout the work of other  
> avant-garde filmmakers in the same generation as Ernie Gehr, Owen  
> Land and Michael Snow.
> The HFA is proud to welcome Morgan Fisher back to Harvard for this  
> rare opportunity to screen and discuss his pioneering films.  
> Invited to select a film that could complete and complement his  
> retrospective, Fisher chose Alfred Hitchcock’s rarely screened  
> Under Capricorn.
>
> Screening Schedule:
> Director Morgan Fisher in Person
> Special Event Tickets $12
> April 8 at 7pm
> The Director and his Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations of  
> an Unmade Film (2)
> USA 1968, 16mm, b/w, 15 min.
>
> Documentary Footage
> USA 1968, 16mm, color, 11 min.
>
> Phi Phenomenon
> USA 1968, 16mm, color, 11 min.
>
> Production Stills
> USA 1970, 16mm, color, 11 min.
>
> Cue Rolls
> USA 1974, 16mm, color, 5.5 min.
>
> ( )
> USA 2003, 16mm, color, 21 min.
>
> TRT: 74 min.
>
> Director Morgan Fisher in Person
> Special Event Tickets $12
> April 9 at 7pm
> Projection Instructions
> USA 1976, 16mm, b/w, 4 min.
>
> Picture and Sound Rushes
> USA 1973, 16mm, b/w, 11 min.
>
> Production Footage
> USA 1971, 16mm, color, 10 min.
>
> The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm
> USA 1973, 16mm, color, 1.5min.
>
> Turning Over
> USA 1975, video, b/w, 15 min.
>
> Protective Coloration
> USA 1979, video, color, 13 min.
>
> Standard Guage
> USA 1984, 16mm, color, 35 min.
>
> Detour - The final shot only.
> Directed by Edgar Ulmer.
> USA 1945, 35mm, color
>
> TRT: 92 min.
>
> Under Capricorn
> April 10 at 3pm
> It is well known that some of Hitchcock’s films take place all but  
> entirely in a single confined space: Rope, Rear Window, Lifeboat.  
> By working within this self-imposed limit Hitchcock showed that  
> shifts from one space to another, all too easy in film and on which  
> almost all narrative films depend, are hardly a necessity. Another  
> limit in film is a material one, the length of a roll of film.  
> There can be no shot longer than eleven minutes. It is clear that  
> the staging of many of the scenes in Under Capricorn was conceived  
> of in relation to this limit, in fact working backwards from it.  
> The action in these scenes—the dialogue and how it is delivered,  
> the movements of the actors, the rhythms they all create—was  
> composed to accord with a length of time close to the maximum that  
> a roll of film allowed. This procedure inverts the way scenes in  
> almost all films are shot, where they are built up piece by piece  
> from the elements of classical decoupage—the establishing shot, two- 
> shot, close-ups—to move the story forward without regard for how  
> long each shots lasts. In a scene shot in a continuous take,  
> everything necessary has to happen but nothing beyond. And the  
> execution of the scene is as exacting as its composition.  
> Everything must happen perfectly: how the actors deliver their  
> lines, their expressions, their gestures, how and where they move,  
> how the camera moves. One mistake in the least detail, and there is  
> no alternative but to start over again. You can’t cut around  
> mistakes, you can’t get rid of lines you don’t need or add lines  
> that you do, you can’t go back and shoot pick-ups. The longer the  
> take and the more complicated the movements of the actors and the  
> movements of the camera, the more opportunities for things to go  
> wrong. Not only does everything has to happen perfectly, it has to  
> happen without apparent effort, when in fact the shot is the result  
> of a large number of people making extraordinary efforts, the work  
> of each exactly coordinated with the work of everyone else. For me  
> the sustained perfection of the long takes in Under Capricorn  
> inspires awe. - Morgan Fisher
> Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. With Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotton,  
> Michael Wilding.
> USA 1949, 35mm, color, 117 min.
>
> Harvard Film Archive
> 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
> (617) 495-4700
> http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa <http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa>
> General Admission Tickets $9, $7 Non-Harvard Students, Seniors,  
> Harvard Faculty and Staff. Harvard students free
> Special event tickets (for in-person appearances) are $12.
> Tickets go on sale 45 minutes prior to show time. The HFA does not  
> do advance ticket sales.
>
> Press Contact:
> Brittany Gravely
> Publicist
> Harvard Film Archive
> 24 Quincy Street
> Cambridge, MA 02138
> 617-496-3211
> bgravely at fas.harvard.edu
>
>
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