All My Life

“All My Life” is a program of short experimental films from the 60’s-80’s, all screened on 16mm. The program is built around works that engage with some of the foundational questions about filmmaking: What is shown on screen, and how has it been shaped by the filmmaker? Dana Hodgdon’s Dialectic Defintions uses what is unseen and implied in a cinematic cut as an extended joke on the suposedly indexical nature of cinema. Arthur Lipsett’s 21-87 approaches the cut less cynically, in an exploration of the emotional power of montage techniques. A parallel thread in the program is films that use the direct method of presentation of documentary and actuality filmmaking in unexpected ways. French Surrealist Jean Painleve’s late film Love Life of the Octopus presents the titular animal as something of a psychedelic alien. In John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum a street scene that is being directed by an offscreen voice is not quite what it seems. Ray and Charles Eames’s Powers of Ten is a classic exercise in scientific visualization that functions both as documentary and structural film. Bruce Baille’s All My Life, from which the program takes its name, allows a picturesque if mundane moment in the California landscape to become a elegant visual epiphany. The eight films in this program are by turns humorous, challenging, and transcendent. The screening will be introduced by curator Alexander Stewart, who has presented several screenings of experimental films at Pioneer Works, including the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation the past three years.

Dana Hodgdon, Dialectic Definitions, 8:00, 1977
John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum, 12:00, 1976
JJ Murphy, Sky Blue Water Light Sign, 9:00, 1972
Jean Painlevé, The Love Life of the Octopus, 13:00, 1967
Daina Krumins, Babobilicons, 16:00, 1982
Ray & Charles Eames, Powers of Ten, 9:00, 1977
Arthur Lipsett, 21-87, 9:30, 1964
Bruce Baillie, All My Life, 3:00, 1966

78 mins.