40 Frames

RE-ENACTMENTS: THREE FILMS BY BEN RUSSELL

March 27, 2007 - 7PM
Whitsell Auditorium 1219 SW Park Avenue

Filmmaker in attendance.

BLACK AND WHITE TRYPPS NUMBER ONE
(2005, B&W/silent, 7 mins)
A theory of origins, a film for the stars and planets exploding all around our heads. Hypnosis is imminent.” A psychedelic op-art film that references the traditions of hand-painted Avant-Garde cinema by replacing it with something entirely different.

TERRA INCOGNITA
(2002, color/sound, 10 mins)
A pinhole film, a cheap robot voice, a makeshift history. An explorer’s tale of the unknown part of the world.Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.

THE TWENTY-ONE LIVES OF BILLY THE KID
(2005, color/sound, 55 mins)
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road. A single actor (Dave Grant as the Cowboy) plays the roles of Billy’s twenty-one victims and is covered in blood by the film’s end; with each murder comes a resurrection, and with each resurrection another bloody murder. The ghost towns of today are substituted for the frontier towns of the Old West, and the Cowboy is shepherded through this desolate landscape by the Nurse and the Soldier (Sharon Ambielli and Erik Fabian) – the forgotten souls of a violent and divisive war. Based almost entirely on historical accounts leading up to and surrounding the events of the 1877 Lincoln County War in New Mexico, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid employs a series of re-enactments that produce History as its main character in an effort to unravel it.

Ben Russell currently resides in Chicago, filmmaking and programming films for the once Providence, Rhode Island-based and now iternerant Magic Lantern Cinema. Russell’s films trace the contours of history asking us to consider the shape and form of historical accounts. His films have shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, Rotterdam Film Festival, Images Forum Tokyo, London Film Festival, Pleasure Dome (Toronto), and in Basel, Switzerland and Zagreb, Croatia. Russell currently teaches film production at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

DEMON LOVER DIARY by Joel DeMott

April 3, 2007 - 7PM
Whitsell Auditorium 1219 SW Park Avenue

"In the fall of 1975, cameraman Jeff Kreines was hired to shoot a low-budget horror movie called Demon Lover for Don Jackson and Jerry Younkins, two amateur aspiring directors from Michigan who grew up on comic books and slasher flicks. Joel DeMott joined Kreines for the trip, and with her own camera set out to document this haphazard foray into B-movie film-making. The result is a simultaneously disturbing and fascinating behind-the-scenes record, entitled Demon Lover Diary. At times scarier and frequently funnier than the film being created, DeMott and Kreines’s documentary provides unflinching insight into the chaotic and occasionally violent behavior that transpired on location."

— LA Film Forum

Born in Washington DC, Joel DeMott attended Radcliffe College and the Massachuettes Institute of Technology. DeMott, who now resides in Coosada, Alabama with her partner and long-time collaborator Jeff Kreines, has made a number of films about the South: Montgomery Songs, Down on the Farm, 36 Girls, God & Country, and Goldbug Street. Demon Lover Diary won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Independent Feature, and has screened in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Rotterdam, Sydney, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Athens, and The Hague.

Demon Lover Diary
(1980, 16mm color/sound, 90 mins)