Culture Surfing

Film Love curator Andy Ditzler, who brings experimental and avant-garde cinema to Atlanta, needs your help setting up his for his screening at Landmark Midtown Arts Cinema this week. If you have a half-hour to kill around 1 p.m. or 6:30 p.m. tomorrow (Thursday) please e-mail info@frequentsmallmeals.com.

This week’s Film Love is part of the Out on Film Festival. The weeklong event of contemporary films dealing with LGBTQ themes concludes by delving into two of Andy Warhol’s most influential works of the 1960s.

Blow Job (1964) features the titular sex act performed on an anonymous jacketed male. But don’t get too excited … the camera is focused on the man’s face for the film’s 36-minute running time. For this reason, the work reads as an intimate of exploration of human sexuality and excitation rather than an explicit portrait of oral sex.

The second film, My Hustler (1965) focuses on the same themes as Blow Job but in a vastly different way. Largely improvised by its actors, the raucous comedy focuses on Ed Hood, a Harvard grad student out for a weekend on Fire Island with the beautiful (but rented) Paul America.

$10. 7 p.m. Thurs., Oct. 8. Landmark Midtown Arts Cinema. 678-495-1424. www.landmarktheatres.com.

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NO MAN'S LAND: Money Changes Everything

“I normally feel like I’m in total control of my films,” Roger Beebe says. Watching some of Beebe’s films — which range from spliced-up 8mm visions of strip malls to laser-printed black-and-white animations — you get the impression that “total control” might be an understatement.

A tall, lanky professor at the University of Florida who wears a permanently disheveled beard, Beebe makes films on his own terms and budget. One film, TB TX Dance, cost about 30 bucks. Beebe’s films are both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape.

Beebe visits Eyedrum with the Film Love series Films for One to Eight Projectors. His latest technique involves using multiple projectors to create “expanded cinema” by combining 16mm and 8mm film with digital formats. One of the films he’ll screen, Last Light of a Dying Star, uses no less than eight projectors. Attempting to run all the machines simultaneously is a performance in itself, with Beebe changing films and keeping all of the projectors functioning properly. The scope of the approach has changed something fundamental: “It exceeds my ability my totally control it.”

Continue reading “Roger Beebe loses control at Eyedrum”

(Image courtesy Roger Beebe)

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1) Bill Maher performs at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre.

2) Museum of Design Atlanta hosts Peaceably to Assemble: Protest in Film and Video, 1961-2006.

3) Atlanta Symphony Orchestra performs the music of Led Zeppelin at Chastain Park Amphitheater.

4) Georgia Shakespeare’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens at Conant Performing Arts Center.

5) Jennie C. Jones’ Red, Bird, Blue opens at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

See more Atlanta events.

(Photo by Janet Van Ham)

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PICTURE THIS: From Curt McDowell's Loads (1980)

There’s a moment near the end of Tricia’s Wedding, after a bowl of punch is spiked with LSD, that the film quits being about a politically incorrect re-imagining of President Nixon’s daughter’s wedding, and becomes, instead, the incomprehensible document of a queer, orgiastic party. Atlanta’s queer arts festival MondoHomo might not look exactly like that classic San Francisco film, but it’s certainly flying the same anarchic, fun-loving flag. A sprawling, five-day celebration, MondoHomo will feature performances, dance parties, workshops, and film screenings throughout Memorial Day weekend. Film Love’s Andy Ditzler curates this year’s film series, Queer San Francisco 1970-1980.

Continue reading “MondoHomo films are a San Francisco treat”

(Photo courtesy 2nd Floor Projects Gallery)

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Atlanta’s best film series, Film Love, returns tonight with a rare screening of the Andy Warhol classic from 1965, Poor Little Rich Girl. The best known collaboration between Warhol and his most mythical muse, Edie Sedgwick, Poor Little Rich Girl is a completely unrehearsed and unscripted film of Sedgwick going about her daily routine, listening to the Everly Brothers, drinking orange juice, and smoking cigarettes.

Few people are able to embody style the way Sedgwick and Warhol could. Sedgwick is known for little more than taking pills, drinking, living in the Chelsea Hotel, and probably sleeping with Bob Dylan while she was there. Yet, her image is one that has lasted in the popular consciousness much longer than her short life. She died of an accidental overdose in 1971.

More details about the film after the jump.

Continue reading “Edie Sedgwick is a Poor Little Rich Girl at Eyedrum tonight” »

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GUIDING LIGHT: Andy Ditzler and one of his beloved projectors (Photo by Joeff Davis)

Film Love curator Andy Ditzler treats old short films, and even film projectors, with the care and attention most people reserve for their children.

Before screening “Movies of Local People: Kannapolis” in the basement studio of his Grant Park home, he uses a cotton swab to clean his 16-mm projector. “You should always do this. There’s a lot of motion of the film inside the gate, where the buildup of emulsion takes place. That’s how film starts to get scratches. I love film, but it’s stressful to work with it.”

After threading the film onto the reels, Ditzler dims the lights, switches on the projector and soaks up “Kannapolis’” vision of a segregated North Carolina town in 1941. Throughout the Great Depression, photographer H. Lee Waters traveled the South, filming people on the streets and then showing the images at the towns’ movie theaters so they could see themselves on the big screen. (It’s a far cry from the online exhibition of snapshots on, say, today’s Flickr photo sites.) Selected for the prestigious National Film Registry, “Kannapolis” first shows the blue-collar white neighborhoods, then the more impoverished African-American ones. The film serves as a kind of silent slide show of faces, the vivacious and the dignified, the camera-shy and the camera-hogs, and how one community lived in the Jim Crow South.

“What a beautiful print!” Ditzler says when he first sees the crisp, sepia hues of “Kannapolis.” In part he’s relieved because he programmed the film, sight unseen, as one of the introductory subjects of this month’s installment of his 6-year-old film series, Film Love. For February, Ditzler curates four evenings of Civil Rights on Film: Rare Films on African-American Life, 1941-1967, which offer richer and more complex glimpses of the civil rights era than we get from history books.

Continue reading “Film Love curator Andy Ditzler screens black history at 24 frames per second” »

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