FLicKeR will be making its New York City premiere on Saturday June 13 at 8pm. The film will be showing at the Anthology Film Archives, located at 32 Second Avenue, with another showing on Sunday June 14 at 8pm.
Director Nik Sheehan will be in attendance along with special guests. DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid will be on hand for the Q&A on Sunday.
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
32 SECOND AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10003; (212) 505-5181 fax (212) 477-2714
For Immediate Release May 15, 2009
Contact: Stephanie Gray at publicity@anthologyfilmarchives.org
SPECIAL FLICKER-FILM WEEKEND!
June 13 - 14
Featuring NYC premiere engagement of
Nik Sheehan’s documentary
FLicKeR
Filmmaker in person!
And, featuring classic “Flicker” films by
Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, Peter Kubelka,
William S. Burroughs/Anthony Balch & more
Anthology is thrilled to present a special FLICKER-FILM WEEKEND featuring the NY Premiere Engagement of Nik Sheehan’s award-winning documentary FLicKeR, about Brion Gysin and the dream machine, alongside two jam-packed programs of classic “Flicker” films including Tony Conrad’s infamous THE FLICKER, along with films by William S. Burroughs/Anthony Balch, Peter Kubelka, Bradley Eros & Jeanne Liotta, Paul Sharits, and more!
FLicKeR director Nik Sheehan will be there in person, along with special guests from the film.
To be screened;
NIK SHEEHAN’S DOCUMENTARY FLicKeR
“Really, I think, behind everything, he was trying to teach people to see differently.” –Genesis P-Orridge, on Brion Gysin
FLicKeR tells the story of the influential yet little-known artist Brion Gysin (1916-1986), and his amazing dream machine, a drug-free way to achieve altered states of mind through dancing pulses of light, which he and his friends believed would revolutionize human consciousness.
Featuring greats like William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin (in archival footage), singer Marianne Faithfull, rocker Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, singer/artist Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV, poet John Giorno, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, and artist/turntablist DJ Spooky, among other counter-culture superstars, FLicKeR is a hypnotic documentary that asks fundamental questions about an individual’s freedom to dream and create.
The Dream Machine looks simple enough: a 100-watt light bulb, a motor, and a rotating cylinder with cutouts. Just sit in front of it, close your eyes, and wait for the visions to come. The Dream Machine offers a drugless high that its creator – poet, artist, calligrapher, and mystic Brion Gysin – believed would revolutionize human consciousness. He wasn’t alone. William S. Burroughs thought it could be used to “storm the citadels of enlightenment.”
With a custom-made Dream Machine in tow, Nik Sheehan takes us on a journey into the life of Brion Gysin – his art, his complex ideas, and his friendships with some of the 20th century’s key counterculture figures. Taking the Dream Machine as the basis of its explorations, FLicKeR asks crucial questions about the nature of art and consciousness, and imagines a humanity liberated to explore its creativity in complete freedom.
FLicKeR has played numerous prestige international film festivals and was released theatrically across Canada in winter 2009, to rave reviews and universal praise.
“The rare documentary that jumps beyond informative and entertaining into the realm of mind-expanding, FLicKeR blends revelatory biography, energizing philosophy, and seductive trances.”
– SAN FRANCISCO WEEKLY
“Fascinating… illuminating… riveting, and eye-opening to those who thought they knew their Beats until now.”– John Griffin, MONTREAL GAZETTE
–Showing Saturday and Sunday, June 13 & 14 at 8:00 each night.
FLicKeR
2007, 75 minutes, video.
Special thanks to Ray Privett (Cinema Purgatorio).
****
TWO PROGRAMS OF CLASSIC FLICKER FILMS!
FLICKS PROGRAM 1:
William S. Burroughs & Anthony Balch
TOWERS OPEN FIRE
1963, 16 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound. Archival print courtesy of the British Film Institute; special thanks to Fleur Buckley (BFI) & Genesis P-Orridge.
TOWERS OPEN FIRE is an assault on linear narrative and good taste, bringing together readings by Burroughs, unrelated film sequences, and the pervasive image of Gysin’s Dream Machine – inducer of hallucinations and mental stimulation.
Paul Sharits
RAZORBLADES
1965-1968, 25 minutes, double-screen 16mm, color/b&w, sound.
“A mandala opens to the other side of consciousness. Since the film ends as it begins and because its inner fabric is made up of loops, an infinite loop is suggested.” –P.S.
“This complex and controversial experiment utilizes two screens and the simultaneous projection of two separate films working in tandem. Each consists of unrelated, compulsively recurring images, not more than a few frames in length, interrupted by carefully-spaced blank or color frames.” –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART
Anthony Balch
THE CUT UPS
1966, 18 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound. Archival print courtesy of the British Film Institute; special thanks to Fleur Buckley (BFI) & Genesis P-Orridge.
With THE CUT UPS, Burroughs and Balch oversaw the creation of a cinema that attempted nothing less than the savage deconstruction of the relationship between image and reality. The film negates even the loose narratives of underground film in favor of a jarring mathematical cut-up technique that attempts to create an estrangement between sensory and psychological conceptions.
Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.
–Saturday, June 13 at 6:00.
FLICKS PROGRAM 2:
Tony Conrad
THE FLICKER
1966, 30 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound.
Conrad studied the physiology of the nervous system at Harvard. Through this film, consisting of only alternating black-and-white film images, he invents a new film image. By implicating the retina rather than sight – that is, by stimulating physiological rather than psychological impressions – the film displaces the centers of reception from the sensory to the neural.
Bradley Eros and Jeanne Liotta
DERVISH MACHINE
1992, 10 minutes, Super-8mm-to-16mm blow-up, color/b&w, sound.
“Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin’s Dream Machine, Sufi mysticism and early cinema.” –Eros/Liotta
“DERVISH MACHINE reminds us that the cinema is a ferris wheel, a zoetrope and a time bomb.” –Mark McElhatten
Peter Kubelka
ARNULF RAINER
1960, 7 minutes, 35mm, b&w, sound.
Combines an image track consisting of black-and-white frames with a soundtrack alternating white noise and silence. The effect is a flickering screen image and a pulsating sound that is not directly synchronized to the visual pattern. In reducing cinema to its essentials, Kubelka illustrates that “cinema is not movement but a projection of still images – and that it is not between shots but between frames where cinema speaks.”
Victor Grauer
ARCHANGEL
1966, 10 minutes, 16mm, color, sound.
“[It] is a color flicker film that was finished about the same time as THE FLICKER…an extension of [Grauer’s] concepts of music into the spectrum of color, a transposition. So I think each person – Kubelka first, Tony and Victor and myself in the same year – came to it from different angles.” –Paul Sharits
Total running time: ca. 60 minutes.
–Sunday, June 14 at 6:30.
**
Check out these sites for more info on FLicKeR!
Official website (with clips, credit list & more):
http://www.flickerflicker.com
Blog:
http://flicker.myfilmblog.com/
Press screening of the selected “Flicker” films will be held:
Wed, May 27, 1pm – 2pm
Tony Conrad: The Flicker (30 min)
Peter Kubelka: Arnulf Rainer (7 min)
Victor Grauer: Archangel (10 min)
Press screening of FLicKeR will be held:
Thurs, May 28, 1pm – 2:15pm
FLicKeR SCREENERS AVAILABLE
FLicKeR director available for interviews
IMAGES AVAILABLE for FLicKeR & other films
To RSVP to a press screening, request a screener, an image, an interview or further info, email Stephanie Gray: publicity@anthologyfilmarchives.org
About Anthology Film Archives: Founded in 1970, Anthology’s mission is to exhibit, preserve, collect documentation about, and promote public and scholarly understanding of independent, classic, and avant-garde cinema. Anthology screens more than 900 film and video programs per year, publishes books and catalogs annually, and has preserved more than 700 films to date.
Directions: Anthology is at 32 Second Ave. at 2nd St. Subway: F or V to 2nd Ave; 6 to Bleecker.
Tickets: $9 general; $8 Essential Cinema (free for members); $7 for students, seniors, & children (12 & under); $6 AFA members.
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