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.
(Photo by Janet Van Ham)
Film Love’s Black History month program, “Civil Rights on Film: Rare Films on African-American Life, 1941-1967,” continues on Friday and Saturday. The third evening, “The Fierce Urgency of Now” (Fri., Feb. 27, 8 p.m. at Eyedrum) puts the spotlight on such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. “My Name is Jason Holliday…” (Sat., Feb. 28, 8 p.m. at Emory University’s White Hall) offers a showcase of Portrait of Jason, a recently restored, cinematic portrait of a loquacious gay cabaret performer and raconteur.
In addition to the entirety of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, one of the liveliest films on the Feb. 27 bill is Santiago Alvarez’s six-minute “NOW!” which dates to 1965 yet qualifies as an early example of the music video form. Alvarez juxtaposes two swinging versions of “Hava Nagila” (one sung passionate political lyrics by Lena Horne) with shocking images of police brutality and other moments from the Civil Rights movement. It loses a little bit in the Youtube window, but remains a striking call to action:
1) Brooks and Company Dance stages Crux at Theatrical Outfit’s Balzer Theater at Herren’s.
2) Creative Loafing hosts Tut After Dark at the Civic Center.
3) Comedian Colin Quinn performs at the Punchline.
4) Icy Demons play 529.
5) Film Love’s Civil Rights on Film kicks off at Cyclorama.
(Photo by J. Hawthorne Photography)
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.
1) Eyedrum hosts Film Love’s Minutes to Go, an exploration of beat icon William S. Burroughs.
2) The We No Fun Fest kicks off at Drunken Unicorn.
3) Vorcan collaborates to create live visual art at Smith’s Olde Bar.
4) The Killers and M83 play the Atlanta Civic Center.
5) Homage to the Atlanta Artist opens at Huff Harrington Fine Art.
(Photo by Larry Corse)
One of Atlanta’s best cinema series, Film Love, will continue a winning streak on Friday with Minutes to Go, a night of rare films and ephemera from William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch, perhaps Burroughs’ best-loved transgressive cut-up novel, Minutes to Go will
[explore] the surprisingly wide range of artistic experiments undertaken by Burroughs and Gysin during their Paris stay. Rare books and other items from the Danowski Collection at Emory University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library will be on view. Also featured are the short films The Cut-Ups and Towers Open Fire, two collaborations between Burroughs, Gysin, and filmmaker Antony Balch which encapsulate on film the cut-up technique and its powerful, hallucinatory effects.
Check Eyedrum for more details.
1) Parts and Labor play Star Bar.
2) Film Love: Surrealist Classics kicks off at Eyedrum.
3) Grails and Silver Apples play Drunken Unicorn.
4) Comedian Larry Miller stops in at the Punchline.
5) Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band play Variety Playhouse.
(Photo by Francesca Tallone)
1) Wicked continues at the Fox Theatre.
2) Atlanta Horror Film Festival kicks off.
3) Eyedrum hosts part three of the Film Love series.
4) Pendulum plays the Loft.
5) Slogans continues at Kiang Gallery.
(Photo © Joan Marcus)
