New Works Salon I.
Echo Park Film Center
March 22, 2012 8 pm

Marcy Saude
Alternative Strategies #1 (work in progress, 16mm on video, sound, 4 minutes)
Filmmaker Robert Nelson talks about the house he and William Wiley built by hand in rural Mendocino County.

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Pablo Valencia
Films III: portraits/windows (2012, Super 8, color, silent, 3 min.)

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Rick Bahto & Casey Anderson
Casual Encounters (2012, Super 8, b/w, cassette tape, 19 min)
Scores by Mark So seen & heard.

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Sean Batton & Kelsey Brain
Occupy Los Angeles: October 1st – November 28th, 2011 (2012, 16mm, color, sound, 22 min)
“We spent around ten days at the occupation during its two-month encampment, participating in varying degrees of involvement and distance. Though we are sympathetic to the ideas motivating the protest, we found our attention more attracted to the immediate and material experience of the event: how we as protesters interacted with each other, and how we negotiated our Utopian aspirations with an environment that often reproduced the conflicts and imbalances of power of the very system we had intended to criticize.”

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Mark Toscano
WDD / CHL (2009, 16mm, color, sound, 2.5min.)
This film came out of nowhere, and very early in its brief making became, for me, a crystallization of all the confusion and amazement I feel about the creative process. Poof, it’s there (and poof, it’s gone).

Demonstration (2012, 16mm, color, sound, 2.5min.)
Simultaneous, but unrelated displays of visceral emotion; the sublimated and impressionistic rubs against the theatrical and expressionistic. Both are ritualized, demonstrative, exhibitionist, indulgent. It may be that they’re purely for the benefit of the demonstrator, in an act of self-indulgent catharsis, but that doesn’t mean they can’t communicate some of that weird emotion to an unrelated party.

Process of Elimination (2012, 16mm, b/w, sound, 4.5min.)
A rite of passage, an emptying out of things, and a process of emotional alchemy.

Releasing Human Energies (2012, 16mm, color, sound, 5min.)
A film about control. A refinement of energy for purposes of conserving resources, materials, impetus, potential, so they might all be narrowly channeled toward an unquestioned goal of maximum profit with minimum waste. Capitalism, in this example, as a process of understanding how to make use of someone as efficiently as possible to get the most out of them that is desired. Instructions for keeping people on task.