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Hallwalls to screen Koebel's films
By CAROLYN TENNANT
Reporter Contributor
"Shots and Cuts: Films by Caroline Koebel," a screening of experimental short films by multimedia artist and UB faculty member Caroline Koebel, will be presented by Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center at 8 p.m. Jan. 18 in the Hallwalls Cinema, 341 Delaware Ave, Buffalo.
"Puss! The Booted Cat" is one of several films by UB multimedia artist Caroline Koebel that will be screened on Jan. 18 at Hallwalls Cinema.
Koebel will introduce the films and take questions from the audience.
"Shots and Cuts" spans two decades of experimental filmmaking and will include several early 16mm films by Koebel, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study, College of Arts and Sciences.
The screening also will feature the premiere of Koebel's recent work, "Berlin-Warszawa-Express."
An interdisciplinary artist who works with a variety of media, including film, video and digital art, as well as installation and performance, Koebel's films explore relations of form and content, and highlight her commitment to conceptual art, feminist film and literary theory. Her work often embraces pleasure and desire as tactics to corrupt commodity culture and authoritarianism. Koebel's experimental cinema practice reflects a punk, "do-it-yourself" ethos, a commitment developed during her teenage years as a punk in Columbus, Ohio.
Motivated by the global movement for progressive social change, her work focuses on questions of political agency and how individual artworks are themselves agents of power.
Koebel also is a widely published writer and an accomplished curator. Most recently, she programmed the "Forum on Torture"-a speakers series held at UB during the fall semester that drew a variety of international speakers, among them Amy Goodman, executive producer and moderator of the public radio program "Democracy Now! War and Peace Report."
The films to be screened during "Shots and Cuts":
"hole or space," 2006, miniDV, silent, 3:23. Pricks, gaps, dots, openings, "hole or space" takes its cue from contortionists of the early screen in spiraling out from conceptions of the body as whole. The film is based entirely on archival material.
"Berlin-Warszawa-Express," 2006, miniDV, 19:50. In this film, a disappearance becomes a departure, but rather than attempting to reconstitute what is lost, the filmmaker follows the clues and signs framing the site and scene with an anticipatory gaze. She meets the same train day after day, yet the eye is aligned with not just any body, but with the distinctly maternal body. Her pregnant self a decoy, the filmmaker takes in the world around her and makes contemporary the tradition of the city film.
"Puss! The Booted Cat," 1995, 16mm, 13 min. "Puss! The Booted Cat" is an erotic short that laps up the various incarnations of the classic fairy tale "Puss-In-Boots." The tale, popularized in 17th-century France by author Charles Perrault, is transformed here into a contemporary adventure of unrequited love; lands, titles and goods to be conquered; identities to be claimed; and feminine feline power.
"Calm Calm Calm Calm," 1990, 16mm, 8 min. A woman chews steak and gazes onto a scene of kids in boats circling to the repeated sound of a chorus asking "Father" for permission-or knowledge or approval or power. Through novel and unruly interplays of sampled picture and sound, this film takes a critical, yet humorous stab at patriarchy.
"Stephanie Stairs," 1986, 16mm blowup from super8, 6:30. This early film chronicles two summers of a best friendship between the filmmaker and Stephanie Oxley. It was shot as a collaborative adventure-first in Columbus, Ohio, and then in San Francisco and the East Bay.
"Inflorescentia," 1997, 16mm, 13 min. This film uses poetics, humor and erotics as means to voice "the body" and to take stock of cinema as one of the multiple transgressive sites for female pleasure.
"Knucklebones: Self-Sustaining Members of the Human Species," 1992, 16mm, 13 min. "Knucklebones" follows the course of hysterical outburst to instances of alienation and isolation. The film combines archival with super8 and 16mm original footage and intertext in an experiential exploration of gender, sexuality and identity.
Tickets for "Shots and Cuts" are $7 for general admission, $5 for students/seniors and $4 for Hallwalls members. For more information, call 854-1694.