"Interval": How Film Can Help Us "Think Thought"

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- They are variously referred to as "makers of art films," "avant-garde filmmakers" and "experimental filmmakers." By any name, they will travel to Buffalo next month from several nations to explore the nature of the cinematic image in relation to time.

They will join viewers, scholars and theorists in a two-day film conference Nov. 5 and 6 titled "Interval," a reference to the cinematic theories of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze that addressed what goes on in the milliseconds between the appearance of the film image and the viewer's "reading" of it.

The panels and screenings will explore, in particular, the philosopher's historical investigation of the narrative structures of film and ways in which time might be rendered spatially, and the current and historical forms of film and video that operate irrationally from within the interval.

Presenters will address their individual concerns in Deleuze's terms.

The conference will be sponsored by the University at Buffalo Department of Media Study, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center, in collaboration with the UB Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Institute and the departments of Art, Philosophy and English, and Medaille College.

The Nov. 5 session will run from 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the Screening Room (112) of the UB Center for the Arts on the North (Amherst) Campus. It will feature three panels titled, "The People are Missing: The ruin of representation, "Of History: The mediation of past as future" and "Thresholds of Narrative: Crystalline stories."

The Nov. 5 session will be free and open to the public.

On Nov. 6, Squeaky Wheel, 710 Main St., Buffalo, will host film screenings of artists' films from 2-8 p.m. There will be an entry fee of $5 for the Squeaky Wheel event.

On-site contacts on both days will be Stefani Bardin, 348-7120, and Steven Eastwood, assistant professor, UB Department of Media Study, 228-9437.

Short works featured on Nov. 6 will include those of Deborah Stratman, Paul Tarrago and William Raban. It also will include that of conference participants Romeo Grunfelder, Louise Bourque, Michele Smith, Abigail Child, Daniel Cockburn and many others.

There also will be a special screening of "The Berlin Files," a highly regarded large-scale video projection with immersive sound by Janet Cardiff and George Bures, whose compelling film images, said Artforum, "modulate the release of dramatic information across time."

Deborah Stratman is an accomplished Chicago-based filmmaker and multimedia artist whose film and video projects have been shown at international film festivals, including the 2004 Rotterdam Film Festival. She also works as a cinematographer and teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois.

London filmmaker Paul Tarrago has been part of the South London-based underground cinema for years. He is also an activist within Exploding Cinema, a collective of film and video makers that explores new ways of exposition. More than a dozen of his short films were shown this year at Rotterdam.

William Raban is a painter, independent filmmaker, a lecturer in film at the London School of Printing, a member of the editorial board of Vertigo film magazine and co-founder, in the 1960s, of the avant-garde London Filmmakers Coop. His widely exhibited single- and multi-screen short works mirror the production process, constructing, in his words, "the reflexive space in which the audience can be directly engaged."

Romeo Grunfelder studied visual communication, philosophy and classical music in Hamburg (Germany) and in 2001, founded felderfilm Filmproduktion http://www.felderfilm.de. His media projects in film, Internet and performance have been exhibited in film festivals throughout the world, and his film "s" was nominated for the 2000 German Film Award in the short film category.

Distinguished French-Canadian filmmaker Louise Bourque produces art films that address the subconscious mind, gender roles and the concept of home. They have been presented in more than 20 national and international venues, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco International Film Festival, The Toronto International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, among many others. She has received grants, honors and awards too numerous to mention.

Michele Smith's hand-made collage films employ heavily re-edited 16mm and 35mm film salvaged from libraries and garbage cans. Into assorted clips, she manually weaves additional film footage, plastic shopping bags, translucent products, View-Master slides, dead butterfly wings and other materials. The result is a master reel full of narratives with many possible readings. It is a viewing experience that film critic George Clark calls "impossible to duplicate, full of tiny epiphanies in which fascinating, new connections between familiar materials are discovered before the next burst of images and associations. The effect is a truly revelatory cinema, utterly rhythmic, non-linear, associative, and exploratory."

Another recycler of film is experimental filmmaker poet and lesbian Abigail Child. For 30 years she has been digging up footage from industrial films, vacation and home movies, porn loops and forgotten B-movies, and recycling them into her own unique work. Critic Gary Morris says, "(her) approaches to cinema have a freshness and sense of wonder that recall the movies' silent days… (It is) the subtlest form of agitprop, powerfully exploring very modern issues of gender and class through early (and present-day, for that matter) cinema's primary artistic strategy: montage, both visual and audio."

The work of Toronto-based moviemaker and writer Daniel Cockburn has been exhibited at various international venues, including Cinematexas International Short Film Festival, Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, Cinematheque Ontario and the Venice International Short Film Festival. He won the Images Homebrew Award for work by a local emerging artist, the Media City Jury Award for best Canadian film/video/installation and the Tranz Tech Media Art Biennial FAMEFAME Jury Prize. He curates film and video independently and as a member of the Pleasure Dome programming collective, and has written on media arts for a number of cinema publications.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.