Filmmaker Scott Stark in attendance.

In a bittersweet milestone, AFS and Experimental Response Cinema present the work of film/video/performance/installation artist Scott Stark in his farewell Austin screening. After co-founding the AFS Avant Cinema series in 2008 and ERC in 2012, as well as showing his own avant garde film and video work in festivals worldwide, Scott leaves Austin with a visual love-letter of playful, lively and often confounding cinematic explorations.
Topping the bill is Chapter One of his AFS-funded Love and the Epiphanists (2018, 35mm+, 30 mins.). Part 35mm film projection, part performance, part history lesson, part political rant, LatE is an ongoing found-film project sourced from Stark’s vast collection of 35mm Hollywood movie trailers, using a hand-made contact printing process that allows him to repeat, reorder, reverse, double-expose, stain, misalign, twist and otherwise strangle the images. The result is a chaotic narrative and love story set against a future time known as the Epiphany – the moment in history when the effects of climate change became irreversible and undeniable.
Preceding this 30 min. cine-performance are three earlier works:
Is it true what they say, 2015, HD video, 9 mins. Made for the Texas Archive of the Moving Image for “Mess With Texas” 2015, Is it true what they say uses archival films from “itinerant” filmmakers who traveled the south in the 1930s through the 1950s; the footage is re-ordered and re-presented as ghostly apparitions in modern urban Texas settings.
Angel Beach, 2001, 16mm, silent, 18 mins. Anonymous, found 3D still 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.
More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda, 2006, digital video, 20 mins. Stark “remakes” one of actress-turned-activist-turned-exercise-queen Jane Fonda’s 1980s exercise videos with himself as the performer, meanwhile chronicling the remaking of a celebrity activist and the cultural shifts that allowed it to happen.