Matthew Barney: No Restraint
Directed by Alison Chernick

Matthew Barney: No Restraint follows contemporary artist, Matthew Barney and his collaborator (singer-songwriter Bjork), through the process of his most recent artistic project: Drawing Restraint 9. One in a series of “Drawing Restraint” projects, Barney’s massive endeavor uses 45,000 pounds of petroleum jelly, a factory whaling vessel, and traditional Japanese rituals to realize a “narrative sculpture” of two characters turning from mammals into whales.

Filmed in New York and Nagasaki, the film is a close study of Barney’s creative methodology. Including interviews with Barney, Bjork, and a range of contemporary art critics and theorists, No Restraint looks, additionally, at Barney’s place in contemporary art as well as his critical and commercial reception to date.

Artist Matthew Barney surfaced in the contemporary art world in the early 90s. His work is marked by a preoccupation with the theatrical, often using elaborate sets and costumes to create fantastic environments mixing myth, autobiography, and history. His “Drawing Restraint” projects, spanning almost 20 years, explore the notion that form emerges from a struggle against types of physical or psychological resistance.

Matthew Barney: No Restraint is Chernik’s second documentary film release and was chosen as the Official Selection of film festivals in L.A., Buenos Aires, and Berlin in 2006. The film has screened in international museums and festivals, including the IFC Center in New York, SF MOMA in San Francisco, and the Jerusalem Film Festival.

Running Time: 72 min

For more information, visit www.matthewbarneynorestraint.com

 

Films selected from international call for entries plus an Encore Screening of Matthew Barney: No Restraint following a brief intermission

Glass Crow (2004)
Directed animated, and edited by Steven Subotnick

In Glass Crow, Providence, RI artist and animator, Steven Subotnick offers a poetic mediation on the Defenestration of Prague - the spark which ignited the Thirty Years' War. Bringing together the media of paint, drawing, photography, and collage, the short oscillates between textured bstractions, bold, reductive forms, and prismatic color to describe a dark comedy of Catholic and Protestant conflict.

After growing up in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, Steven Subotnick studied studio art, filmmaking, and animation at UCLA and CalArts film schools.  He has been making independent animations since 1985, and has received awards, grants and residencies for his work. Additionally, he has worked as an animator, director, illustrator, and has taught animation at the Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard University, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Running Time: 6 min 20

For more information, visit www.stevensubotnick.com

 

Pears (2006)
Written and Directed by Heidi Saman

The first short film from Philadelphia-based writer and director, Heidi Saman, Pears is an experimental narrative about couples in various stages of miscommunication with one another. Through strange events and comedic plays with language, the film examines the surrealism of life and human interaction.

Using Arabic dialogue with English subtitles Saman’s film addresses the visual depiction of Middle Eastern and Middle Eastern-American characters occupying roles of romance, comedy and intelligence. Shot in a way that calls attention to the act of filming, Pears recalls reflective stylistic conventions of 1950s and 60s French film as a means of challenging filmic conventions in the context of Arab-American perceptions and the Arabic language.

Born and raised in Anaheim, California, Heidi Saman is of Egyptian-Lebanese-Armenian descent. She attended the University of California, San Diego where she studied World Literature and Gender Studies. Saman recently completed her master’s degree in Film and Media Arts on a Future Faculty Fellowship from Temple University in Philadelphia. Her next short film, Walkers/Drivers (2006) is currently in post-production.

Running Time 9 min

 

Untitled (2007)
Artist: John Tronsor
Edited by: Jason Georgiades

Selected as an entry for Resistance to Vision, currently on exhibition at Manifest Gallery

Pittsburgh artist John Tronsor’s Untitled (2007) shows excerpted text from the works of philosophers Jacques Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein as they’re successively scrawled erased, and layered on a blackboard. In time, the text becomes a dissonance of linear forms rendered with varying quickness, legibility, and rhythm, foregrounding the viewer’s own struggle in the act of seeing, reading, and making sense of what is written.

John Tronsor is an undergraduates student in Philosophy and Studio Arts and the University of Pittsburgh.  Untitled (2007) was selected as an entry to Manifest’s current exhibition, Resistance to Vision (Nov. 9 – Dec. 7).

Running Time: 5 min

Encore Screening
Matthew Barney: No Restraint (2006)
Directed by Alison Chernick

At the request of several patrons unable to attend the standing room only season opening of the Art and Design on Film Series, Manifest Gallery will present an encore screening of Matthew Barney: No Restraint, the sophomore film of documentary director Alison Chernick.

Copies of the film will be available for sale by its distributor Voyeur Films (www.voyeurfilms.net) through Nov. 19.

Running Time: 72 min

(See below for details on the film)

PES Retrospective
Directed and animated by PES

Showing films created from 2002-2007, Manifest’s PES retrospective will include over 25 films, commercials, and making-ofs directed by found-object filmmaker PES. Running from 30 seconds to a few minutes in length, the short, stop-animation films present viewers with a baroque and comic twist to everyday situations, film genres, and the conventional uses of toys, antiques, and thrift store bric-a-brac.

Already popular commercially and in international film festivals, PES films cast a unique vision onto mundane, neglected kitsch and ephemera. More than mere concept gags, the films demonstrate an interest in finding novel functions for outdated materials, a process of mining pop culture accessories in order to twist, rearrange, and reanimate them. The short film Game Over (2006), for example, shows PES re-imagining popular 80s video games like Pac Man and Asteroids with cupcakes, pizzas, and fried eggs in the role of game characters. In Kaboom! (2002), a comic rendition of old-time war movies, clusters of Christmas ornaments become stylized bomb explosions, and vintage toy planes are formed into air force fleets shooting matchstick missiles at a city of antique Persian vases.

Born in New Jersey, the filmmaker known as PES (a.k.a. Adam Pesapane) lives and works in New York where he’s had continued success directing his own short films as well as commercials for companies like Bacardi, Nike, and MoveOn.org.

Running Time 30 min

For more information, visit www.eatpes.com

 

A Boy on a Dock Blowing His Nose (2005)
Written and Animated by Barry Doupe

“Barry Doupe's lusty A Boy on a Dock Blowing His Nose features vaguely articulated, quasi-human doodles and Spirographs animated within a bizarre netherworld of its own humid imagination."

Barry Doupe  (b. Victoria, BC) is a filmmaker living in Vancouver.  He holds a Bachelor of Media Arts Degree from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design.  He is the recipient of a 2005 and 2006 Media Arts Canada Council Production Grant for emerging artists, and has recently completed a new film entitled, " AT THE HEART OF A SPARROW ". He is also a member of The Lions collaborative drawing group.  Currently, he is in production on a new animated film scheduled to be finished at the end of 2008.

His films have been screened throughout Canada and internationally including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Lyon Contemporary Art Museum, Pleasure Dome and the Tate Modern.

Running Time: 15 minutes
For more information, visit www.lionspile.ca

 

Collection of Animated Segments (2007)
Written and Animated by Jason R. Butcher

Jason R. Butcher continues the development of his collection of eerie,
self-mythological animation segments. Catch up on the escapades of the shameless ice-cream lothario, the bearded, over-bearing bastard, and the backstabbing bookworm!

Butcher holds a MFA from DAAP in Electronic Art and is based out of Atlanta, Georgia.

 

Currency (2007)
Written and Animated by Clint Woods

In Clint Woods' composited short "Currency", the artist visually relays a self-destructive ritual of obsessively spiraling into a realm of "staying current" and the monetary values associated with it.

Clint Woods is a multi-media artist. He holds a BFA in printmaking from Northern Kentucky University and a MFA from DAAP in Electronic Art.

 

John Wayne meets his own “Heart of Darkness”. In reference to the 1968 propaganda film “The Green Berets” that he made in response to the Vietnam War, John Wayne engages in a series of tribulations that involve demonstrations of masculinity, autoeroticism, seduction, castration, and necrophilia. For generations, John Wayne served as the model for young men and soldiers to follow; further widening the gap between Hollywood’s perception of war and war’s reality. This film specifically references the Vietnam War era, and the complete inversion of the idyllic American mythologies that John Wayne created. Vietnam became the nightmarish version of the American dream, and John Wayne’s manly frontier idealisms could not be more out of the place. In the end, the “Duke” can only engage with reality and history in a perverse way.

Running time: 6 minutes 32 seconds

Vivian Wong is a young Asian-American artist living in New York City. She currently attends Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art concentrating in photography, drawing, and video/film.

Dhrupick (2006)
An Animation by Adam Stoves

In his animation, Adam Stoves explores the untamed imagination and sensory perception in relation to youth. What commences can be viewed as a sort of dream sequence. The scenes within the sequence are a disjointed series of interactions with an absent companion. The projectiles highlight the primary sensations often associated with recounting a dream, or any other sort of personal memory: what you saw, what you heard, and what you said. The narration is part of the well integrated nature of oddity into the unconscious.

Just Browsing: A Screening of Online Shorts and Video Art

The remainder of Friday's screening will consist of hand-picked Internet film shorts and video art as curated by Manifest's all-volunteer Art and Design on Film Research Team. These works will consist of found videos as well as older works now out of print and available solely online.

Approximately 45 minutes

 

Quiet City
Written and directed by Aaron Katz

Jamie is lost. She’s come to New York to visit her friend Samantha, but Samantha is nowhere to be found, and now Jamie is alone in the city. Charlie just quit his job, and isn’t sure where he’s going next. Their paths cross late at night on an empty subway platform, and from this chance encounter an unlikely connection is formed. Together they share twenty-four hours drifting from late night diners, to city parks, to abandoned apartments, to a party and art gallery deep in the heart of industrial Brooklyn.

Written in a week in a half by director Aaron Katz, Quiet City is an introspective look at a chance and fleeting relationship in the midst of New York City’s hurried and often impersonal urban environment. As its title suggests, the film looks at the potential for intimacy in New York’s overlooked corners, in parks, restaurants, and private art spaces far from the overcrowded streets of Manhattan.

Says Katz of his film:
One of the most important things to me was to show New York in a different way than it's usually seen. I wanted to show a side of New York that is still and beautiful. It's a New York that I see all the time in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, but that I rarely see in films.

Director Aaron Katz was born in Portland, OR. In high school he became interested in film and  acting and later attended film school at North Carolina School of the Arts. Immediately after graduation he and two of his college roommates drove a 1963 Chevy Nova from North Carolina to Portland in order to make Dance Party, USA, his first feature. Dance Party, USA premiered at SXSW 2006. Subsequently it played at several other festivals and had a critically acclaimed run in New York. Quiet City is his second feature.

Touring film festivals since early 2007, Quiet City has been the official selection at several film festivals including the South by Southwest Film Festival, the Sarasota Film Festival, the Independent Film Festival of Boston, and the Maryland Film Festival. Screenings have included dates at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum and New York’s IFC Film Center.

Running Time: 78 min

For more information, visit www.quietcitymovie.com

 

Moon and Road by Christie Blizard

Two stop motion animation montages with music by Gabriel Chavera. Blizard's animations incorporate many disparate, colorful segments into a kaleidoscopic whole.

Total Running Time: 5:16

Reconstructing Mayakovsky by Pelin Krca

A computer animation combining delicately drawn surreal and scientific imagery in relation to the life of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian poet and playwright.

Total Running Time: 3:20

Just Browsing: A Screening of Online Shorts and Video Art
20 minutes

The remainder of Friday's screening will consist of hand-picked Internet film shorts and video art as curated by Manifest's all-volunteer Art and Design on Film Research Team. These works will consist of found videos as well as older works now out of print and available solely online.