Catherine Pancake: Film Program

  • Frederic Moffet
    PostFace 7m
    Postface examines the filmography of Montgomery Clift in an attempt to interrogate our celebrity-obsessed culture that exploits the personal downfall of stars for profit and entertainment. Clift’s personal life spiraled downward (alongside his career) after a 1956 car crash that left his face scarred and partially paralyzed.
  • Jesse McLean
    Magic for Beginners, 2010, 21m
    Magic for Beginners examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver are explored. It interpolates the production, proliferation, and consumption of televisual experience, investigating how this transfer of information creates a bind of complex relationships between maker and viewer. Interested both in the power and the failure of the mediated experience to bring us together, my work asks the viewer to walk the line between voyeur and participant
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  • Kent Lambert
    Fantasy Suite 7m and Security Anthem 4m
  • Fantasy Suite is a meditation on mainstream American heterosexual romance featuring scenes of modern day “romance” from numerous movies, magazine advertisements and TV shows, most notably the hit ABC network TV show The Bachelor. The second film screened by Lambert, Security Anthem is an “ode to flowers, fear, potatoes, and paranoia, with a special appearance by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.”
  • Ivan Lozano
    Book of the Tumbler on Fire 7m
    Invited to participate in an evening of artists’ lectures on the subject of “magic” organized for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art by the blog Bad at Sports, but unable to attend the event in person, John Neff and Ivan Lozano instead produced the collaborative “video lecture” BOOK OF THE TUMBLR ON FIRE. Improvised within a tripartate structure over three short editing sessions, BOOK… was assembled from a collection texts and video clips gathered from the web. Its montage technique and “look” were inspired by the wildly heterogeneous visual style of image-and-text based Tumblr microblogs. Using this approach, BOOK… presents a materialist interpretation of “magic,” concentrating less on concepts of magical cause and effect and more on the fantastic pleasures that can erupt in the embrace of impurity, polysemy and randomness.
  • Sade Benning
    Me and Rubyfruit 5m
    Based on a novel by Rita Mae Brown, Me and Rubyfruit chronicles the enchantment of teenage lesbian love against a backdrop of pornographic images and phone sex ads. Benning portrays the innocence of female romance and the taboo prospect of female marriage. This hard-to-find video work from the hugely influential interdisciplinary musician/artist Sadie Benning is shot on a Fischer-Price Pixelvision camera when the artist was a teenager.
  • Dani Levanthal
    17 New Dam Road 8m
    Leventhal presents an oddly humanizing house visit with a rough crowd. Within the film we witness trash littering the garden, weapons in the living room, and martial arts in the shared spaces of the home. Despite the aura of violence, Leventhal explores the groups comraderie and interpersonal connections in their alternative lifestyle.
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  • Catherine Pancake
    Kayuga (Excerpts) 10m