H.C.E.: A Dream of Western History by Richard Sylvarnes
2006, DVD NTSC, color and b/w, 87 min.
“We are prepared to go to the gates of hell…but no further.” It is night. It is dark. Out from this night emerges the voice of a six-year-old girl who becomes our guide through the hours of darkness as we dream of western history. She leads us through the tumultuous centuries from Napoleon to Jesus, Socrates to Superman. As we descend deeper into the dream we bounce around wildly from images and stories of love, war, pain, joy, resistance, and quest. The film has the appearance of being conceived in the nineteenth century and born in the twenty-first, as if constructed by some modern digital zoetrope. “H.C.E.” is a tragicomedy where mythology, history, literature, and comic books all collapse into dream logic as a testament to our human endeavor. “H.C.E.” premiered in THE New York competition at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival and is part of a larger exhibition that includes 80 photographic prints and a mutoscope under the title “Here Comes Everybody”.

DVD NTSC Rental: $50.00

More Video

Millennium Film Workshop
66 East 4th Street, New York, NY
Saturday December 17, 2011
8 p.m. | $10

FILMS INCLUDE:

“Amorous Interludes” (Ken Jacobs, 2007-2008)
Video, B/W & Color, Sound, 14 minutes
-A series of 7 shorts:
–His Favorite Wife, Improved or, The Virtue of Bad Reception
–Hanky Panky
–Alone At Last
–Love Story
–We Are Charming
–The Discovery
–Nymph

“Sacre Coeur” (Peter Cramer, 2001)
Video, Color, Sound, 8 minutes
-A haunting near death travelogue that descends in a spiral landscape tracing streets, subways and cemeteries of Paris.

“Oracle/Coracle” (Terry Ellis, 2009-2010)
Video, Color, Sound, 1 minute
-“A shallow ceramic bowl filled with rainwater foretells rough seas ahead.”

“Ghost Train” (Terry Ellis, 2009)
Video, B/W, Sound, 4 minutes
-“Are they ghosts, or are we? Two sounds–a sob, an echoing shout–are repeated at intervals throughout, together with short phrases taken from the soundtrack of the Pompeii sequence in Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954)”.

“Meet Me In Wichita” (Martha Colburn, 2006)
16mm transferred to Video, Color, Sound, 7 minutes
-An indictment of America’s dangerous foreign-policy naivete, this film is a play between fact, fiction, politics, fantasy, terror and morality. Using colorful cutout animation, this film features Osama Bin Laden (as several characters from the Wizard of Oz) and Dorothy in a battle of dark forces and faces of Evil.

“The Optic Melon” (David Baker, 2008)
Video, B/W, Sound, 8 minutes
-Strobic intermittercy and dilation as seen through the eye of a spinning watermelon. A derivation from Ken Jacob’s Star Spangled to Death.

“FM/TRCS” (Coleen Fitzgibbon, 1974-2011)
16mm transferred to Video, Color, Sound, 11 minutes
-FM/TRCS is a study of image destruction and its subsequent effect on recognition and suggestion of new images. The film is a series of images and recorded sound of a woman getting dressed re-edited into short sequences and optically printed until the high contrast characteristics of the film refuses to carry the image.

“Night Sweat” (Siegried A. Fruhauf, 2008)
35mm transferred to Video, Color, Sound, 10 minutes
-The sky’s blue hanging above the black of a forest. Lightning flashes over a clearing. And the white ball of the moon with dark spots. These are the three suggestions that make Night Sweat an examination of a visual effect’s technical aspects.

“Peel” (Elle Burchill, 2004)
Video, Color, Sound, 4 minutes
-Peel are intimate cravings opened wide. When clichéd fantasy becomes grotesque reality. A woman, a banana, and a secret.

“Knickerbocker Glory” (Smith & Lowles, 2010)
Video, Color/Sound, 4 minutes
-”Footballers have become modern day archetypical gods, their fans their disciples. Here demystified of their god-like status the footballers and their fans become the spectators, cheering on an assortment of semi-naked men, the toppings of a ice cream sundae. The men sensually drenched in whipped cream, sprinkles and strawberry sauce, playfully brawl and caress one another’s bodies, a layer upon layer of sexual and hedonistic pleasure.” – Smith & Lowles 2010

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011, we are holding our fifth annual Film-Makers’ Coop Benefit Concert and Art Auction at Santos Party House, 96 Lafayette Street (between Walker and White streets), from 7:00 until midnight. Tickets are $40 and are available at the door or online here.

Music icons Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson will headline a night of incredible music and film to benefit the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the artist-run, non-profit organization that supports the best in avant-garde and experimental cinema.

The FMC Benefit Concert, a bi-annual event, is always a highlight of the season, and will feature live performances by Glass and Anderson as well as David Barton’s band, Liquid Blonde; Little Annie; Transgendered Jesus; The Love Butchers; and DJ Spencer Sweeney.

One-hundred percent of the proceeds will help the Coop maintain, restore, and promote the films in its collection, the largest assemblage of avant-garde and experimental film in the world, featuring 4,300 rare and unique works as well as new media by established filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Taka Iimura and emerging artists.

Additionally, guests will have the opportunity to bid on artwork by Peggy Ahwesh, Jonas Mekas, Bradley Eros, Mark Street, Guy Maddin and a host of other amazing works, with proceeds going to benefit the Coop.

Please come out and support us!