EXPERIMENTAL FILM CLUB SCREENING!

THIS FRIDAY MAY 5th at 8pm

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FILM STUDIES CENTER 5811 SOUTH ELLIS AVENUE, COBB HALL, 3rd FLOOR FREE!!! 773-702-8596 for more information or visit

http://filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu/navevents.html

NOT TO BE MISSED!
HARRY SMITH’S RARELY SCREENED LAST FILM

MAHAGONNY

Experimental filmmaker, anthropologist, painter, and musicologist Harry Smith (1923-1991) worked on MAHAGONNY, his final film, for over ten years. Obsessed with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Smith would play it over and over in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. MAHAGONNY transforms the caustically satirical opera into an allegory of contemporary life, inter-cutting portraits of important avant-garde figures (including Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, and Jonas Mekas), New York City landmarks, and Smith’s visionary animation. Shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for the next eight years, the film also translates the Weill opera into a numerological and symbolic system derived from a mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. Infinitely complex and equally rewarding, MAHAGONNY is a virtuosic assemblage and a work of true originality. (35mm, 1970-1980, 141 m)
Notes: Harvard Film Archive, adapted from the Getty Research Institute’s 2002 symposium on the film which was organized by Rani Singh. This 35mm print is a composite of the original four-projector film work, the product of an ambitious preservation project by the Harry Smith Archives with the assistance of Anthology Film Archives.

The Experimental Film Club is supported by the University of Chicago Student Government Organization and the Student Government Finance Committee, the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies, and the Film Studies Center. This screening has been generously funded by the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. Many thanks to Julia Gibbs and Andy Uhrich.

Upcoming Experimental Film Club Events: FRIDAY May 12th – KALEIDOKODASCOPIC: AN ORGONE INVENTORY (1918 – 1942)

16mm Films from the Orgone Archive (Pittsburgh 13) , presented in conjunction with Chicago Filmmakers