Le Tourneau & Minty: Visiting Filmmakers

Visiting 16mm Filmmakers Alain LeTourneau and Pam Minty
Where: Center for the Arts, Room 235, @ 3:00-5:00pm
When: Thursday, November 3, 2011

All are invited to attend.

“16mm: Form & Format”
A conversation and screening with film artists Alain LeTourneau and Pam Minty to be followed by a screening at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.

Pam Minty is a Portland, Oregon based filmmaker, sound recordist and manager of the Film Education Program at the Northwest Film Center School.

Alain LeTourneau is a filmmaker, photographer and film preservationist engaged in efforts to sustain the 16mm format as a viable production and exhibition format. His film and video work has screened at media arts venues and festivals in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Toronto.

In 2000, Pam Minty began programming 16mm films with Alain LeTourneau, under the name 40 Frames which provides technical consultation and service work to individuals and organizations, exhibition of 16mm film prints, and on-going preservation work. In 2008, 40 Frames transitioned to a new scope of work involving the completion of two major projects: the web resource 16mm Directory and the film Empty Quarter, a 16mm experimental documentary about rural Southeast Oregon. The team works with 16mm black and white film, using the traditional tools of flatbed, mag film recorder, and rewind bench as well as digital video crossover. Alain LeTourneau is also engaged in film/video installation work and is in-progress on a new project about Portland neighborhoods.

Empty Quarter is a film about the region of Southeast Oregon, an area populated by ranching and farming communities and also a landscape that is rich with diversity, as seen by the presence of East Indian families, Japanese families, ancestors of Basque sheep herders, home to the Paiute tribes people, and to Latinos who have come to help work the land. Rather than subscribe to a modern form of documentary replete with talking heads and B-roll images, Empty Quarter presents stark portraits waiting to be explored and digested by the viewer. Their meaning can be felt in the slow process of accumulation and measured response.

For further information about the workshop contact:
Sarah Elder at selder@buffalo.edu or
Carl Lee at cl62@buffalo.edu

Reactionary Ensemble & Nimbus Dance: SURROUND: VISUAL

Surround: Visual
December 8th at Asbury Hall in Babeville
341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY

Surround: Audio/Visual is a brand new 2-part performance by the Reactionary Ensemble commissioned as part of Beyond/In WNY 2010. Reactionary Ensemble is a roving circuit of improvisational artists and musicians looking to merge sound and vision into an immersive, multidimensional experience. Fluid in nature, these sensory-based performances unleash streams of transitory sounds and visual images to stimulate a hypnotic, primordial, trance-like state of spontaneous free association.

Surround: Visual is the final performance of Beyond/In WNY. The show will feature a 40-ft diameter screen surrounding the audience designed by architect Brad Wales. The screen will have 8 different live mixed videos projected onto it mixed by 8 different video artists utilizing the same audio data from the instruments.

Reactionary is also working with dance company nimbus dance, following the successful collaboration radio/ACTIVE at this summer’s Infringement Festival. The dancers will wear Wiimotes to track their motion data, which will also be converted into visual data for the video artists to work with.

Surround: Visual will feature over 25 artists, including dancers Elyssa Bourke, Erin Bahn, Beth Elkins, Nancy Hughes, Laura Matteliano, Angela Lopez, Leanne Rinelli and Bonnie Jean Taylor, video artists Cory Gath, Courtney Grim, Liz Knipe, Carl Lee, Jeff Maciejewski, Tammy McGovern, Brian Milbrand and Vince Mistretta, and musicians Jim Abramson, Kathleen Ashwill, Steve Baczkowski, Michael Basinski, Gabe Beam, Kevin Obrien Cain, Jenece Gerber, Mike Kimaid, Keir Neuringer, KG Price and T. Andrew Trump and Stage Director Melissa Shanahan.

(more…)

BEYOND/IN WESTERN NY 2010 starts TONIGHT!

A curatorial collaboration of twelve regional museums and galleries, Beyond/In Western New York 2010: Alternating Currents is a contemporary, multi-venue arts exhibition. It will present the work of outstanding artists from Western New York and Southern Ontario, Northeastern Ohio and Northwestern Pennsylvania and for the first time, feature the work of artists from outside the region, blurring the local with the global and challenging the assumptions of what these distinctions mean today, when all artists are both.

Beyond/In kicks off this evening, Thursday, September 23, 2010 with a high-wire walk at the Liberty Building by reknown French tight-rope walker, Didier Pasquette.

Featuring the participation of many artists affiliated with the Department of Media Study including: Josephine Anstey, Jordan Dalton, Elyse Harzynski, Barbara Lattanzi, Carl Lee, Luke Noonan, Dave Pape, Cayden Mak, Brian Milbrand, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Anna Scime, Mark Shepard, Jessica Thompson, members of virocode and more.

http://beyondinwny.org/

URFEST Traveling Film Festival

URFest (Urban Renewal Traveling Film Festival) is a nationally touring documentary film festival from Buffalo, NY that screens films with the goal of starting community dialogues about urban revitalization. Organized by MFA Loren Sonnenberg and featuring films by Media Study folks. Check out their cross-country schedule and let all your friends know they’re coming to a town near you!

www.urfest.com/
URFest on Facebook

FILMS:
Buffalo ReUSE: Building Community by Carl Lee focuses on the multi-faceted work of Buffalo ReUSE to deconstruct houses in order to create jobs and community. Produced by Squeaky Wheel.

We Need Food Not Bombs by Ron Douglas explores how a grassroots organization in Buffalo has built community through sharing food in opposition to violence.

We Own It by Loren Sonnenberg is a story about cooperative home ownership that follows Buffalo’s Nickel City Housing Cooperative through the purchase, renovation, and setup of their second community oriented (mostly non-student) cooperative house.

PUSHing People Power: Rebuilding Buffalo’s West Side by Ruth Goldman is a story about ordinary citizens working together to create and sustain an urban community that values sustainable and equitable housing, jobs and lifestyles. More info about PUSH. Produced by Squeaky Wheel