The Rare Shorts of Richard Sandler and Howard Guttenplan
This second screening of The Experiment in 2011 features works by two filmmakers who have been key figures in the New York independent film scene for the greater part of the last 40 years: Richard Sandler (director of underground masterpiece The Gods of Times Square) and Howard Guttenplan (director of the legendary Millennium Film Workshop). Please join us for a screening of rarely seen shorts and fragments followed by a reception and discussion with filmmakers. Drinks will be available at the bar. Thank you!
Richard Sandler
Shorts and Fragments
http://www.richardsandler.com/
Radioactive City, 2011, S8mm/Mini-DV, 20m
A diaristic portrait of Los Angeles focusing on two main events from the last six months: The disaster of the Fukushima power plant and an outbreak of sports rivalry-related violence at Dodger Stadium resulting in a man going into a coma.
Forever and Sunsmell, 2011, S8mm, 13m
Super-8 film footage meditation on New York’s East Village and Central Park set to the music of John Cage and the lyrics of E.E. Cummings
More titles TBA!
“Watching Richard Sandler’s documentary is like discovering a box of old photographs. Here are the sidewalk preachers, pleasure seekers, and urban malcontents that populated Times Square before it was cleaned up, when the theatres showed films with titles like “Horny Frat Girls.” Sandler is an accomplished street photographer, and his practiced eye does much with limited means; he builds atmosphere by framing his subjects against the oversized fashion ads and news zippers. He accumulates impressions, theologies, and rants, and presents them virtually without narration; the result is a tone poem of the righteous and the possessed…” – Michael Agger (review for The New Yorker of the Gods of Times Square)
Howard Guttenplan
Diary Film Series
http://www.millenniumfilm.org/
A selection of diary films created and curated by the filmmaker himself. Running time estimated between 45 and 60 minutes. Potential titles include Western Diary, European Diary, Dream Series: ((Part 2) Eye-Con), Caracas Diary, Haiti Diary, Laporte Diary, Middle East Diary and NYC Diary.
“He creates a visual flow of rich impressions of singular intensity. There are always surprises. Is it a blue sky or merely a small patch of color on a wall? Real objects and their shadows intermingle to such an extent that it is difficult to tell where one leaves off and other begins. The compositional space of the framed image is shifted and divided in every possible way. At times close-up and far shot become interchangeable; small clusters of repeated patterns grow and develop into larger ones with the speed and nervous twitches of an artist’s brush.” – Bob Cowan (Take One Magazine)
“For the most part, a written diary records what we do, as well as attitudes towards those actions. But a film diary can only be a record of what is seen. This fact is the basic condition of the genre. In order to present us with a sense of whom he or she is, the film diarist must work obliquely, portraying the whole person through only one aspect of life, perception. Each image is read as a decision or choice of where and how to look. The film is a string of such choices, from which the personalities of the diarist emerges through correspondences and regularities in the imagery.” – Noel Carroll
New Yorker Shorts 