Thursday May 18

7:30 pm Pacific Cinematheque
CO-OPTING COOL: NEW DOCUMENTARIES FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Juice
Isabelle Lavigne, 1999 (Quebec) 35 min., video.
Une fois gonfles a bloc par ce cri de motivation, les trois colporteurs, Stephane, Jean–Francois et Bob arpentent les rues de la ville pour vendre des cartes a rabais. Jour apres jour, ils poursuivent leur travail et sacrifient loisirs et amis dans l´espoir de gravir les echelons de l´entreprise, ce qui leur permettrait d´atteindre enfin la fortune, la liberte et le succes. Reve ou illusion?

Puffed up by a motivational scream, three peddlers, Stephane, Jean–Francois and Bob, pound the city streets trying to sell discount cards. Day after day, they doggedly pursue their work and sacrifice leisure and friends, in the hopes of rising in the ranks of the business, and finally attaining money, freedom and success. Dream or illusion?

The Target Shoots First
Christopher Wilcha, 1999 (USA) 70 min., video.
In 1993, Christopher Wilcha, a recent college graduate, took a job as a marketing assistant at Columbia House, the grand–daddy of record clubs. Apparently, his qualifications for the job consisted of being a fan of the alternative rock group Nirvana, which was in the process of changing the face of the music industry. Somehow, he managed to videotape his entire tenure there, and the result is a personal video journal that puts a whole new spin on corporate America. Hired for an entry level position, circumstances conspire to create a short climb up the corporate ladder for our hero / videomaker. Soon, Chris´ usefulness to the mail order giant becomes apparent – he finds himself in the hub of the creation of the grunge catalogue. Clueless bosses, fueds between the “suits” and the “talent” – Wilcha moulds his 9 – 5 job into a hip, riveting and unlikely soap opera.

Curators: DOXA Programming Committee

9:30 pm Pacific Cinematheque
PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE

I´ll Be Your Mirror
Nan Goldin / Edmund Coulthard, 1996 (UK / USA) 50 min., 16 mm film.
“For me taking a picture is a way of touching somebody – it´s a caress. I´m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I´m not analyzing what´s going on – I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.” ––Nan Goldin
Profiling the life and work of New York photographer Nan Goldin, I´ll Be Your Mirror builds itself from candid interviews with the photographer´s friends and ex-lovers and a brilliant array of Goldin´s photographs of daily life, parties, and moments of intimacy. Meditating on both the medium of photography and the construction of memory, I´ll Be Your Mirror moves from the glamorized visions of self–abuse in the ´70s through to the inevitable ensuing disease and self–destruction of the ´80s, marking an era as well as a very intense time in the photographer´s own life. “Being suspicious of the traditional style of documentary film and photography in which the artist is outside looking in, we strived to make a document from the inside reaching out. Through tracing our specific lives, the film remains intensely personal yet speaks to the history of our generation.” –– Nan Goldin

Energy and How to Get It
Robert Frank, 1981 (USA) 28 min.
This quasi–documentary film explores the life and trials of Robert Golka, an obsessed and “outsider” inventor struggling to create an energy source from atomic fusion that would seem to play into the perpetual motion model. What begins as a portrait and document slips into questionable territory as scenes imply that the government has learned of his inventions and is trying to shut his operation down. Paranoia or a genuine threat? The closer Golka comes to his eureka, the more difficulties he has sustaining his operation. A smart, beautiful and funny film from renowned photographer Robert Frank, best known for his book The Americans and his involvement with Ginsberg, Kerouac and others of the Beat movement.

Curator: Alex Mackenzie of the Blinding Light Cinema

Curator´s Notes: The drive to document stems largely from the inspiration found in the subject. Both films in this screening are by photographers, both – Robert Frank and Nan Goldin – have wide critical as well as popular acclaim, and both work very much from the documentary tradition, having contributed significantly to the construction of an American Romantic Mythology in still photography through their work. How much these visions are construction and how much are sheer inspiration will likely never be answered, but the space between the two and the arena they share is the essential magic of these works.
Where Robert Frank´s Energy and How to Get It seeks to dissect both the creative process and the tenuous line between document and fiction by examining an inventor at work, Nan Goldin´s I´ll Be Your Mirror has a family album quality of self–portraiture and daily life that plays the role of both document and autobiography. Frank´s film is a gem microcosm of creative struggle, while Goldin´s captures this struggle through documenting the transition of an era in broad strokes, while still very much inward looking at the specific qualities of her life. By transforming the personal into the universal, both manage to engage us with the invention of times and places – histories – that simultaneously draw us in with their romantic aesthetic and emotional appeal as well as lead us to question the nature of a genuine moment, time, or emotional exchange, once it has been documented and transformed into spectacle.