[Frameworks] HFA Presents MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS

albert alcoz albertalcoz at yahoo.es
Sat Mar 26 05:09:34 CDT 2011


Morgan Fisher films are really inspiring. I recommend those screenings.
A month ago we showed some of his films in Barcelona. It was very difficult
to coordinate the copies and the subtitles, but finally the screening was really 
great:
http://visionary-film.blogspot.com/2011/02/modelo-estandar-el-cine-de-morgan.html



Thank you Morgan for your attention and your patience,
Gloria Vilches and I really appreciate it.

Best,
Albert Alcoz


________________________________
De: Myron Ort <zeno at sonic.net>
Para: Experimental Film Discussion List <frameworks at jonasmekasfilms.com>
Enviado: vie,25 marzo, 2011 22:04
Asunto: Re: [Frameworks] HFA Presents MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS

I am based in Northern California (hour  north of SF), but will be  
visiting the Los Angeles area mid May.
I too am a huge fan or Morgan (who once visited me up here some years  
back -- we have mutual friends and acquaintances --  I think I  met  
him at a private screening of Abe Osheroff's first documentary around  
the time that Thom Anderson was working on his Muybridge film, I hate  
to think how many years ago that was....


Myron


On Mar 25, 2011, at 12:58 PM, Mark Toscano wrote:

> I'm happy to say that the prints of Documentary Footage, Phi  
> Phenomenon, and Production Footage will be from the Academy's  
> preservations/restorations, which came out great, thanks to  
> Morgan's extensive collaboration.  He's really fun and inspiring to  
> work with for me as an archivist.
>
> The two videos are very rarely screened and a substantial addition  
> to Morgan's more known/circulated work - Turning Over is hilarious,  
> and Protective Coloration is unsettling and powerful.
>
> Morgan is a fantastic thinker and speaker, and I'm a huge fan of  
> his work, so I wholeheartedly recommend these shows.  If anybody  
> out there is on the fence about going, definitely go!
>
> Mark T
>
> p.s. Myron, where are you based?
>
>
> --- On Fri, 3/25/11, Myron Ort <zeno at sonic.net> wrote:
>
> From: Myron Ort <zeno at sonic.net>
> Subject: Re: [Frameworks] HFA Presents MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS
> To: "Experimental Film Discussion List"  
> <frameworks at jonasmekasfilms.com>
> Date: Friday, March 25, 2011, 11:13 AM
>
> 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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