Friday October 2, 7:30pm
Ghostdance For a New Century…
A new work by Holly Fisher with live sound by Ha-Yang Kim (premiere)
followed by a screening of “Bullets for Breakfast”
admission $8 – artist in person
Still from “Ghostdance For a New Century…” (Holly Fisher, 2015) – image courtesy of the artist
We are very pleased to welcome to the gallery filmmaker Holly Fisher for the world premiere of her new video work Ghostdance For a New Century…, with live sound accompaniment by cellist Ha-Yang Kim, as well as a screening of Fisher’s acclaimed feature length 16mm film Bullets For Breakfast (1992).
In Ghostdance For a New Century…, inspired by the centenary dance performed by Native Americans to encourage times of renewal and prosperity, Fisher reworks her earlier double-projection film for performance Ghost Dance into a multi-layered, constantly evolving digital canvas enriched by a unique musical score composed and executed live by cellist Ha-Yang Kim.
The performance will be followed by the projection of Fisher’s 1992 feature Bullets For Breakfast, a 16mm film entirely made on the optical printer from about 80 rolls of original Super 8mm footage mixing Ford’s My Darling Clementine with Renaissance paintings, women workers, landscapes of Maine and poetry readings. Bullets – described by the artist as “a Western filtered through a post-feminist movement sensibility” and by Scott MacDonald as an example of feminist structuralism – won the “Best Experimental Film Award” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1992.
Holly Fisher and Ha-Yang Kim will be in attendance and available for a Q&A after the screening.
Program:
(running time: approx. 90 minutes)
Ghostdance For a New Century… (premiere)
video, live sound, 2015, 16 minutes
with live performance by composer/cellist Ha-Yang Kim
“This new work is a digital re-imagining of my 16mm film from 1980, GHOST DANCE, which back then was intended for performance, using dual side-by-side projection, played in concert while out of phase. The original project was made from a single roll of 8mm, shot while descending Canyon de Chelly, AZ –– accidentally cooked in the glove box, kept in its (un-slit) original 16mm gauge, and later re-worked cyclically on 16mm film via optical printer. Dirt, scratches, cat hairs, and splices are part of original project. With this new piece I set multiple layers of the original work in counterpoint allowing accidental relationships to play out over time while introducing variations to keep the work moving, shifting, evolving…” – HF
Bullets For Breakfast
16mm, color, sound, 1992, 77 minutes
“Images from My Darling Clementine form the basis for thought-provoking interpretation in Fisher’s Bullets for Breakfast. Combining stunning optical printing with a dense weaving of poetry, storytelling, and visual narrative, Fisher’s film explores the violent underside of another frontier – gender relations. Juxtaposing a pulp-western writer with a feminist poet, or women working at a herring smokehouse with those depicted in paintings by European Masters, Fisher reorders stories and images like musical motifs. A captivating hybrid of experimental and documentary technique, Bullets for Breakfast mines the depths of subjectivity, blurring the lines between myth and reality, fact and fiction.” – Jon Stout, Former Director, Los Angeles Filmforum
“…Bullets is, at once a work in the ‘structural’ tradition of Ken Jacob’s Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son, Michael Snow’s Wavelength, and Larry Gottheim’s Mouches Volantes, and a feminist response to the (‘masculine’, ‘phallic’) rigidity of the structuralist tradition. In its reframing of images from Ford’s My Darling Clementine and in its use of visual and auditory layering within which viewers continually detect subtle, complex, ambiguous connections and dissonances, Bullets For Breakfast could have been inspired by Luce Irigeray’s This Sex That Is Not One.” – Scott MacDonald
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Holly Fisher has worked as independent filmmaker, print maker, teacher, and film editor (Oscar-nominated documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?) since the mid-sixties. Her experimental short and long-form essay films, explorations in time, memory and perception, have been screened in museums and film festivals worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum Biennials; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Film Forum, Japan; and two world premieres in the Berlinale. Her silent film Rushlight won the Grand Prize in the 1985 Black Maria Film Festival; and her first feature, Bullets for Breakfast, received “Best Experimental Film Award” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1992. She has received grants from The Jerome Foundation, The Doris Duke Foundation, NYSCA, NYFA, The American Film Institute, and others. Fisher lives in NYC and Western MA.
Ha-Yang Kim creates new music as a composer and cellist, regularly collaborating with ensembles and artists at festivals and diverse performance venues throughout the world. Drawing from a breadth of western classical music, American experimentalism, rock, electronic, noise, avant-improv, to non-western sources (Balinese, South Indian, and Korean), Kim’s music is inspired by acoustic phenomena and ritual ceremonial processes. Kim has been artist-in-residence at Roulette Intermedium, ISSUE Project Room, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Brandeis Universities, Dartmouth College, and the Walden School for Young Composers. She composed the original score for the documentary film, “DIOR AND I” which is currently released in theaters world-wide. Awards and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, Meet the Composer, Argosy Foundation, ASCAP, and the Hemera Foundation. Kim lives in NYC and Paris.
Still from “Bullets for Breakfast” (Holly Fisher, 1992) – image courtesy of the artist
