Oct. 26th – THE ERC SPOOKTACULAR!

October 26th, 2012
7.30pm
29th Street Ballroom at Spider House (map)
$7 general/$5 students with ID

Avant garde cinema has never been so creepy, or so fun! Experimental Response Cinema presents an evening of spooky celluloid and demented digital video from beyond the grave by cine-sorcerers Kerry Laitala, David Sherman, Janie Geiser, Peter Tscherkassky, Ben Russell, Stephanie Barber and others. PLUS! Halloween home movies, horror trailers, and spine-tingling surprises.

Partial list of films:

Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 16mm film, 10 mins.)
“A young woman, night, an American feature film. She enters a house, a dark corridor, a thriller. While she forces her way into an unknown space together with the viewer, the cinematographic image-producing processes go off the rails. The rooms telescope into each other, become blurred, while the crackling of the cuts and the background noise – the sound of the film material itself – becomes louder and more penetrating… In ten minutes OUTER SPACE races through the unsuspected possibilities of cinematographic errors – a masterpiece.”- Stephan Grissemann

The Fourth Watch (Janie Geiser, 16mm film, 9 mins.)
The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last section before morning was called the fourth watch. In these hours before dawn, an endless succession of rooms is inhabited by silent film figures occupying flickering space in a mid-century house made of printed tin. “A small masterpiece of the uncanny.” Mark McElhatten, curator, New York Film Festival.

Secure the Shadow, ere the substance fade… (Kerry Laitala, 16mm film, 8 mins.)
The title “Secure the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade…” comes from a 19th century photographer who advertised his services photographing corpses. Laitala’s film is a meditation on disintegration and mortality. The film utilizes antique Medical stereoscopic images from the Victorian era, which are simultaneously disturbing and beautiful. The filmmaker’s intention is to reveal universal truths about the overwhelming quality of disease to render us ultimately mute, immobilized within a corporeal shell that has succumbed to imminent forces beyond our control.

Tuning the Sleeping Machine (David Sherman, 16mm film, 13 mins.)
“TUNING THE SLEEPING MACHINE maintains a dreamy oscillation between visual abstraction and a disjointedly submerged narrative of sexual menace. … [It] recalls our shared experience of late-night television in which lambent images emerge from the screen and turn strange as they percolate through our half-conscious thoughts and reveries.” – Paul Arthur, Film Comment

Trypps #6 (Ben Russell, 16mm film, 2009, 12 mins.)
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It’s Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set. – BR