Experimental Cinema

Monobrow VHS is a VHS tape publication, run by Julian Glander and Kevvy Metal in Brooklyn, which features contemporary artists working in film, video, and animation.

Release party/Screening: Thursday February 21 2013 20h
Molasses Books
770 Hart Street, Brooklyn 11237
Come out and see some crazy stuff from the world's best filmmakers, animators and video artists, and have a beer or two.

Contents of the first volume:

- Bobby Abate, Kitty's Nite In (1995, 2 min, 55 sec)
- Dark Igloo, Sans Crap (2012, 1 min, 23 sec)
- Emily Pelstring, Skeleton Dance (2011, 2 min, 11 sec)
- Helena Frank, Heavy Heads (2010, 7 min, 39 sec)
- Helmut Smits, About 20 Times Slower than a Sunset (2012, 1 min, 11 sec)
- Jodie Mack, Unsubscribe #4: The Saddest Song in the World (2010, 2 min, 51 sec)
- Josh Kline, Camera Attack (2000, 4 min, 9 sec)
- Jules Guérin, BANG!, MAD, and Chaosmos (2012, animation loops, 5 sec each)
- Julian Glander and Kyle Sauer, Turtle Trouble in Tiny Town (2012, 1 min, 5 sec)
- Juliet Phillips, O! (2012, 1 min, 12 sec)
- Kevvy Metal, U No U Wnt 2 Kiss ME (2013, 3 min, 3 sec)
- Michael Robinson, All Through the Night (2008, 4 min (20 sec)
- Sabrina Ratté, Data Daze (Music video for Le Révélateur) (2012, 3 min, 32 sec)
- Tara Nelson, Beautiful Secrets (2010, 7 min, 34 sec)
- Timothy Fiore, Baby (Music video for The Babies) (2012, 2 min, 59 sec)
- Tim Lahan, Passing Time (2011, 22 sec)
- Yoshi Sodeoka, Psychedelic Death Vomit (Slight Return) 3d (2010, 4 min, 21 sec)

Balagan presents... Breakwater
Tuesday, February 19 2013, 20h
Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA USA

From camera motion inspired by the fluidity of bubbling streams -- to the productive potential of organisms residing within -- to the symbolic significance of a teacup's or a storm's destructive powers -- water has given rise to some incredible cinematic images. With this small-gauge film program of works old and new, the first of 2013, we explore the form's aesthetic and figurative possibilities.

Balagan is an acclaimed screening series that hosts regular shows at the historic Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, Cambridge. It was started in 2000 by Jeff Silva and Alla Kovgan to make up for the absence of experimental programming in Boston. Since then, the series has showcased hundreds of works from unconventional artists working on the fringes of cinema. Some of the qualities that make Balagan unique are 1) a commitment to showing work in the intended format whenever possible, 2) efforts to bring artists in person, making for a more exciting interaction between artist and audience, 3) one-of-a-kind, screen-printed posters that we commission from local designers for each show.

Bozar Cinema: Michael Robinson
Thursday June 7 2012, 20h
Palais des Beaux-Arts / Studio
Rue Ravenstein 23, 1000 Bruxelles

Michael Robinson (b.1981) is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and the dangers of mediated experience. His collage films point to the mechanisms of mediation and manufactured sentiment while at the same time unlocking the power popular images exercise over us. In These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us for instance he combines footage of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 Hollywood epic Cleopatra with images of Michael Jackson’s mid-1990s Egyptomania. The result is funny but not ironic, sincere but not naïve, heartfelt but not sentimental. Robinson’s films have screened in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, museums, and cinematheques all over the world. He was listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000s by Film Comment magazine.

The veteran Ann Arbor Film Festival reaches its 50th edition (March 27-April 1) and they have set to celebrate it with an impressive programme of over 200 experimental and independent films, artist talks, round tables... Among the many highlights, the special presence of Bruce Baillie, who is the protagonist of a three-programme retrospecive, including the screening of a newly-restored copy of Quick Billy; a programme of LGBT films selected by Barbara Hammer and monographical programmes dedicated to the films of Robert Nelson, Paul Clipson, Omar Amiralay and Phil solomon. This year's jurors, Peter Rose, Michael Robinson and Kathy Geritz will also present a programme of their works (or, in the case of Geritz, a programme curated by her with films screened over the AAFF's 50 years of history). The AAFF as always will also serve as a meeting point with many filmmakers in attendance, including (apart from those rpeviously named) Craig Baldwin, Leighton Pierce, Tomonari Nishikawa, Irina Leimbacher, Scott MacDonald, Mark Toscano and many others.

The AAFF also recently published the fourth volume in its annual compilation series with a selection of films from its 49th edition, available at their store.

Click on the link to see the AAFF's extensive full programme.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) announces the awards jury and special programs for its 50th season. Independent filmmakers and artists will present a vast body of work, March 27 - April 1, 2012, including films from the past 50 years of AAFF history.

This year's AAFF jurors are avant-garde filmmaking legend Peter Rose, Whitney Biennial artist Michael Robinson and renowned curator and scholar Kathy Geritz.

Peter Rose has made over thirty films, tapes, performances and installations since 1968, many of which have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival over the past four decades. His works raise questions about the nature of time, space, light, perceptionand language. Rose has been widely exhibited, both nationally and internationally, having been included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the Centre Pompidou, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and many more. As part of his free juror screening (all juror screenings are free to the public) Rose will show new work in addition to earlier works including Secondary currents, which played in 1983 at the 21st AAFF.

As the winner of the Most Promising Filmmaker award at the 45th AAFF, Michael Robinson has garnered critical acclaim for his work and most recently he's been chosen as one of this year's Whitney Biennial artists. Robinson's work strives to cultivate new resonances between seemingly disparate elements, harnessing the surface connotations of specific landscapes, television shows, texts, songs and sounds as psychological triggers, ripe for reconfiguration. His work has been discussed in publications such as Cinema Scope, Artforum, and Art Papers, and he was listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000's by Film Comment magazine.

Oporto apresenta #23: You don't bring me flowers
Friday, April 8th, 22:30h
Oporto, Salvador Correia de Sá, 42, 2 frente, 1200-399 Lisboa

"You don't bring me flowers"
by Michael Robinson
16mm film, colour, with optical sound, 8', 2005

Since the beginning of this millennium, Michael Robinson has been making film and video as trigger-objects for basic emotions. His work is a compilation of complex riddles, trails leading to ambiguous regions, places meant for the hard task of feeling. His narratives are deeply sensorial, warranting themselves difficult to translate into words.
Oporto is now presenting the film "You don't bring me flowers", a sublime diving experience into a succession of nostalgic images, centerfold pages from vintage National Geographic magazines.

"on deep image reading and other symmetry laws" - Alexandre Estrela

Ananda Pellerin interviews Michael Robinson for online magazine Wheel me out.

Close-up: Michael Robinson - 8 Films
January 19th 2009, 20h
The Working Men’s Club, 44-46 Pollard Row, E2 6NB, London. Ticket: £5/£3 Close-Up members
Doors open at 7.45 pm

This programme features 8 films by experimental filmmaker Michael Robinson followed by a Q&A with the artist. Since 2000, Michael Robinson has created a body of film, video and photography work exploring the poetics of loss and the dangers of mediated experience. His work has screened in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, cinematheques and galleries including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, The London Film Festival & Anthology Film Archives.

“Robinson’s collaged films thus do double duty: while pointing to the mechanisms of mediation and manufactured sentiment, he unlocks the power popular images exercise over our psychological and emotional makeup, reconfiguring them in a way that is funny but not ironic, sincere but not naïve, heartfelt but not sentimental.” - Henriette Huldisch, Aurora 2008: The Infinite Measure

 

- And We All Shine On (2006, 7 mins, 16mm, Colour)
An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, spreading deception and myth along its murky path, singing the dangers of the mediated spirit.

- If There Be Thorns (2009, 13 mins, 16mm & DV)
A dark wave of exile, incest, and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole. Three star-crossed siblings wander in search of one another as a storm of purple prose and easy listening slowly engulfs them.

- Hold Me Now (2008, 5 mins,, DV)
Plagued by blindness, sloth, and operatic devotion, a troubled scene from Little House on the Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism.

- You Don’t Bring Me Flowers (2005, 8 mins, 16mm, Colour)
Viewed at its seams, a slideshow of National Geographic landscapes from the 1960’s and 70’s deforms into a bright white distress signal.

- Light Is Waiting (2007, 11 mins, DV)
A very special episode of television’s Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.

- The General Returns From One Place To Another (2006, 11 mins, 16mm & DV)
Shaping a concurrently indulgent and skeptical experience of the beautiful, the film draws an uneasy balance between the romantic and the horrid. A Frank O’Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.

- All Through The Night (2008, 4 mins, DV)
A charred visitation with an icy language of control: “there is no room for love”. Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a shimmering prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.

- Victory Over The Sun (2007, 13 mins, 16mm, Colour)
Dormant sites of past World’s Fairs breed an eruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever even cold November rain.

Online journal Incite! opens up its Back & Forth interview section with Michael Robinson, interviewed by Cat Tyc.

Summer Knowledge
Artists Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York
December 4-19, 2009

Curated by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, Summer Knowledge is a series of one-person screenings presenting a multi-generational selection of artists working in the moving image. In keeping with the project of Beard and Halter¹s Brooklyn venue Light Industry, each event will allow time for dialog and discussion.

William E. Jones
Anne Charlotte Robertson
Michael Robinson
Paul Sharits
Leslie Thornton
Emily Wardill

Summer Knowledge launches the first in a series of programs with Beard and Halter through December 2010.