THE MOVIE RUN BACKWARD: BRUCE JACKSON & DIANE CHRISTIAN’S “CREELEY” PLUS SHORT FILMS BY SHARITS, FISHER AND BANNON
Tuesday, May 19, 7PM
A free screening of Creeley-adjacent films complementing our exhibition, There’s Things, and the ongoing Buffalo-wide celebrations of Creeley’s centenary. The Movie Run Backward features four distinctly different films exploring notions of time, memory and presence.
The program opens with experimental short films in 16mm by Paul Sharits, Holly Fisher and Tony Bannon, leading into Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian’s 1988 documentary, Creeley.
Word Movie, 1966, by Paul Sharits. 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes. Fifty words visually 'repeated' in varying sequential and positional relationships/spoken word soundtrack/structured, each frame being a different word or word fragment, so that the individual words optically-conceptually fuse into one 3-and-three-quarter-minute-long word. Voices on soundtrack, Barbara and Robert Forth. -Paul Sharits
Glass Shadows, 1976, by Holly Fisher. 16mm, color, sound, 13 minutes. A sensual formalistic diary, filmed in the early morning light of my studio. The primary images are of my Bolex-filming nude reflection set within window frames, a pane of glass, and light projected by the rising sun. The film moves forward via on-going exploration of reflected and overlapping images — sustained by light, color, and the rhythmic pulse of a leaky kitchen faucet. A fusion of form and subject is inevitable within a work that is the story of its making. -Holly Fisher
Reunion, 1975, by Tony Bannon. 16mm, color and black & white, sound, 5 minutes. A friendly film that deals with time: time telescoped with flickers, opened on occasion into real time sweeps and absences of image. -Tony Bannon
Creeley, 1988, by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian. 16mm transferred to digital video, color, sound, 59 minutes. An intimate film portrait of Creeley, who reads and discusses his works, plus interviews and appearances by many members of Creeley’s “company.”
Total run time: ~82 minutes
The Movie Run Backward is the fourth in an ongoing series of film screenings at Black Rock Arts. Special thanks to The Film-Makers’ Cooperative for their loan of Glass Shadows, to Tony Bannon for locating this rare print of Reunion, and to Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian for sharing Creeley. The Sharits just appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.