AFS Avant Cinema: Getting Nowhere Slow

The Austin Film Society is proud to begin a new series of screenings of short experimental, avant-garde films by regional filmmakers. Director of Programming Chale Nafus and Director of Artist Services Bryan Poyser, working with Austin filmmaker Scott Stark, will be curating various bimonthly programs of challenging cinematic art, often with the filmmaker in attendance. To kick off this new series, AFS presents an evening of films and videos by renowned media artist Scott Stark. The recently-arrived Austin resident will present a program of 16mm films and video work spanning nearly three decades, including such diverse topics as 1994's I'll Walk With God, which charts a flight attendant's "stoic transcendence through and beyond worldly adversity"; the lush and provocative Angel Beach (2001), which animates 3D photographs of bikini-clad women from the early 1970s; and More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda (2006), a remake of one of Fonda's mega-selling exercise videos from the 1980s, featuring Stark himself as her stand-in.

Scott Stark has made over 65 films and videos since the early 1980s, and has created numerous installations, performances and photo-collages as well. Originally from the Midwest, his work has shown at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Tokyo Image Forum, and many others. His 16mm film Angel Beach was invited into the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He now lives in Austin, Texas. He is the webmaster for Flicker (www.hi-beam.net), the web resource for experimental film and video.

The program, with descriptions by Scott Stark:

Degrees of Limitation
(1982, 16mm film, color, silent, 3 min.)
The limitations that appear to restrict our lives are often self-imposed.

Air
(1986, 16mm film, color, silent, 8 min.)
Shot in an airline terminal, Air studies the movements of people and airplanes across and through the "planes" of the film's surface. An obsessive geometric structure is formed with camera angles and tracking shots.

I'll Walk with God
(1994, 16mm film, color, sound, 8 min.)
Using emergency information cards surreptitiously lifted from the backs of airline seats, I'll Walk with God pictorially charts an airline flight attendant's stoic transcendence through and beyond worldly adversity. Through an elaborate system of posturing and nuance that evokes an almost ritualistic synergy, the female protagonist(s) are shuttled toward a higher spiritual plane, carried aloft on the shimmering wings of Mario Lanza's soaring tremolo.

Angel Beach
(2001, 16mm film, color, silent, 18 min.)
Found 3D photographs of bikini-clad women from the early 1970s are compressed into a two-dimensional cinematic space, triggering an exuberant visual dance and revealing a troubling and elegiac voyeurism. (Shown in the Whitney Biennial, 2002.)

Chop
(2003, digital video, color, sound, 4 min.)
What it takes for a man to cry.

To Love or To Die
(2003, digital video, color, sound, 5 min.)
Made with two parallel cameras, To Love or To Die is a brief binocular odyssey through a suburban wonderland of desire and fulfillment.

More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda
(2001/2006, digital video, color, sound, 20 min.)
In the early 1980s, the celebrity actress/activist Jane Fonda, who was by then known for her sharp anti-war statements and revolutionary idealism during the Vietnam War, produced a series of exercise videotapes, in which she starred. The videos became among the best selling videotapes of all time, and helped usher in a cultural transformation from the communal and political thinking of the 1960s and 70s to the “me-decade” of the 1980s. More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda is a remake of one of her exercise videos, with Scott Stark as the performer, set in a variety of locations, both public and private, that underscores a sense of supposed embarrassment a male might feel by inhabiting what is essentially a feminine landscape. By overlaying the diligent exercise imagery with provocative and pointed quotations from Jane Fonda's activist days, as well as her thoughtful ruminations from her recent autobiography on war, political transformation, female anxiety, and the "need to be perfect," the remake gives voice to Stark’s own feelings about the criminality of contemporary war-making and our own complicity in a world that gives rise to a kind of cultural bulimia. In the process, the video becomes an indirect chronicle of the remaking of a celebrity activist and the cultural shifts that allowed it happen.

More info about Scott Stark