Marwencol

The final film of the semester in our series is Marwencol, a documentary about the fantasy world of Mark Hogancamp.

After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark builds a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populates the town he dubs "Marwencol" with dolls representing his friends and family and creates life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helps Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds of the attack. When Mark and his photographs are discovered, a prestigious New York gallery sets up an art show. Suddenly Mark's homemade therapy is deemed "art", forcing him to choose between the safety of his fantasy life in Marwencol and the real world that he's avoided since the attack.

 Marwencol was released theatrically by the Cinema Guild and aired on PBS in 2010. It has won over 25 awards, including two Independent Spirit Awards, Best Documentary of the Year from the Boston Society of Film Critics and Rotten Tomatoes, and the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The Los Angeles Times calls the film “an exhilarating, utterly unique experience” while the Village Voice says that it's “exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do.”

Please join us Thursday night, April 24, at 7:00 PM in DFAB Room 131 (The Humanities Room) for a film described by The Boston Globe as "one of those tale of all-American oddness that just keeps flowing into weirder, richer territory."

Antics Roadshow

Thursday, March 27

7:30 PM

DFAB Room 131

The second film this semester in our Art That Moves series is Antics Roadshow, a 40-minute TV special that was released on the BBC in 2011.  Banksy, the film's director, is arguably the world's most famous (and infamous) street artist.  Over the past two decades, he has managed to maintain his anonymity, with only a select few people aware of his true identity.  This film, narrated by Kathy Burke, takes a look at famous pranks and acts of activism which have become iconic.  The film follows the work of activist artists and public pranksters such as The Yes Men, Pincess Hijab, and Noël Godin--among others--who call attention to the pretensions of authority figures, racial and cultural disparity, and inequality through notorious public spectacles, acts of vandalism, and public art projects, all infused with a sense of humor and irony.

Please join us Thursday night, March 27, at 7:30 PM in DFAB Room 131 (The Humanities Room) for what promises to be a silly time with a serious message.

The Ghost Army

Thursday, February 6

7:00 PM

DFAB Room 131 (The Humanities

Our first film of the spring semester will be The Ghost Army, a film by writer/director Rick Beyer.

During World War II, a hand-picked group of American GI's undertook a bizarre mission: create a traveling road show of deception on the battlefields of Europe, with the German Army as their audience. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops used inflatable rubber tanks, sound trucks, and dazzling performance art to bluff the enemy again and again, often right along the front lines. Many of the men picked to carry out these dangerous deception missions were artists. Some went on to become famous, including fashion designer Bill Blass. In their spare time, they painted and sketched their way across Europe, creating a unique and moving visual record of their war. Their secret mission was kept hushed up for nearly 50 years after the war's end.

Released in 2013, The Ghost Army tells the unique story of how this band of artists helped the Allies win World War II through in-depth interviews of surviving members of the famed "Ghost Army" and declassified film footage, photographs, and the artists' sketchbook pages.

Please join us in Room 131 of the Dickey Fine Arts Building at 7:00 PM on Thursday, February 6, for a film that celebrates a fascinating moment in time when art helped win the war.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Thursday, October 24

7:30 PM

DFAB 131 (The Humanities Room)

The second film of the fall in our Art That Moves series will be Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, a film by director Alison Klayman.

Ai Weiwei is China's most famous international artist, and its most outspoken domestic critic. Against a backdrop of strict censorship and an unresponsive legal system, Ai expresses himself and organizes people through art and social media. In response, Chinese authorities have shut down his blog, beat him up, bulldozed his newly built studio, and held him in secret detention.

Released in 2012, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is the inside story of a dissident for the digital age who inspires global audiences and blurs the boundaries of art and politics. First-time director Alison Klayman gained unprecedented access to Ai while working as a journalist in China.

From 2008 to 2010, Klayman documented Ai's artistic process in preparation for major museum exhibitions, his intimate exchanges with family members and his increasingly public clashes with the Chinese government. Klayman's detailed portrait of the artist provides a nuanced exploration of contemporary China and one of its most compelling public figures.

Please join us in Room 131 of the Dickey Fine Arts Building at 7:30 PM on Thursday, October 24, for a film that celebrates the life and work of an artist who has made it his mission to fight social injustices in his native country.

 

Jean-Michel Baquiat: The Radiant Child

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

7:30 PM

DFAB 131 (THE HUMANITIES ROOM)

The first film of the fall in our Art That Moves series will be Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.  

Released in 2010, this film was directed by Tamara Davis and documents the meteoric rise to fame and tragically short life of postmodern neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.  Central to the film is a videotaped interview with Basquiat that Davis conducted in the 1980s only a couple of years before the young artist's death by overdose.  Davis did not reveal any of the content of the interview until the release of this film.

Davis intertwines this footage with 2010 interviews with others who knew Basquiat, such as  Julian Schnabel, Larry Gagosian, Bruno Bischofberger, Tony Shafrazi, Fab 5 Freddy, Jeffrey Deitch, Glenn O'Brien, Maripol, Kai Eric, Nicholas Taylor, Fred Hoffmann, Michael Holman, Diego Cortez, Annina Nosei, Suzanne Mallouk, Rene Ricard, Kenny Scharf, and many others.  The resulting takes pays definitive, and unflinching, homage to the life and artistic process of Jean-Michel Basquiat while also examining his status as an iconoclast leaving an indelible mark on the history of art.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who began his work as an obscure graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s and quickly rose to fame as he evolved into an acclaimed Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s.  Basquiat combined the visual language of the Abstract Expressionists (such as Jackson Pollack) and the influences of Bebop and street graffiti to create a unique style of painting that was quickly recognized by the international art world as an important contribution to the burgeoning postmodern movement in art.  Temporing Basquiat's amazing success were his battles with personal demons, depression, racism, and misunderstanding.  The artist died of an overdose in 1988, at the tragically young age of 27.

Please join us in Room 131 of the Dickey Fine Arts Building at 7:30 PM on Thursday, September 12, for a powerful film that explores the life of an extraordinary artist, as well as the rewards and perils of rapid stardom in the art world.

WASTE LAND

Our second film of the year in the "Art That Moves" series will be WASTE LAND.  Released in 2011, and filmed over nearly three years, WASTE LAND follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz’s initial objective was to “paint” the catadores with garbage. However, his collaboration with these inspiring characters as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Director Lucy Walker (Devil's Playground, Blindsight, and Countdown to Zero) and co-directors João Jardim and Karen Harley have great access to the entire process and, in the end, offer stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit. 

Vik Muniz was born into a working-class family in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1961. As a young man he was shot in the leg whilst trying to break up a fight. He received compensation for his injuries and used this money to fund a trip to New York City, where he has lived and worked since the late 1980s. He began his career as a sculptor but gradually became more interested in photographic reproductions of his work, eventually turning his attention exclusively to photography. He incorporates a multiplicity of unlikely materials into this photographic process. Often working in series, Vik has used dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup and garbage to create bold, witty and often deceiving images drawn from the pages of photojournalism and art history. His work has been met with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and has been exhibited worldwide. His solo show at MAM in Rio de Janeiro was second only to Picasso in attendance records; it was here that Vik first exhibited his “Pictures of Garbage Series” in Brazil.  You can visit his website by clicking HERE.

Below is a trailer for the film:

Please join us in Room 131 of the Dickey Fine Arts Building at 7:30 PM on Thursday, March 15, for a powerful film that showcases the ability of art to change people's lives!

Rip!: A Remix Manifesto

Thursday, February 2
7:30 PM
DFAB Room 131

The first film of the new year in our "Art That Moves" series is the controversial mash-up film Rip!: A Remix Manifesto.  Released originally as an open-source film (meaning it was only offered on the Internet--and a few festivals--and could be downloaded and altered by anyone without penalty), Rip!, directed by Brett Gaylor, explores the nature of copyright rules in a new and constantly changing digital world.

Of particular interest to Gaylor is how the Internet has been the arena for the explosion of a global, cross-cultural, creative pastiche which builds largely on the sharing of ideas, concepts, and media and the remixing and re-contextualization of those ideas.  This creative process, according to Gaylor, is the exact same creative process used by human beings throughout history, only supercharged and accelerated by the Internet.  However, those who own the copyright to the ideas being remixed have begun to threaten this free exchange of creativity.

As you read these words, Congress is debating two bills with bipartisan support, called SOPA ("Stop Online Piracy Act") and Protect-IP, that would, if passed, essentially give corporations the right to block--or shut down altogether--any website that they even BELIEVE to be guilty of copyright infringement.  Laws like these threaten the very type of creativity that Gaylor is talking about in his film.  As a result, Rip!: A Remix Manifesto is every bit as relevant and timely today as it was when it was released in 2009.

The film's website offers this description:

Immerse yourself in the energetic, innovative and potentially illegal world of mash-up media with Rip!: A Remix Manifesto. Let web activist Brett Gaylor and musician Greg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, serve as your digital tour guides on a probing investigation into how culture builds upon culture in the information age.

Biomedical engineer turned live-performance sensation Girl Talk, has received immense commercial and critical success for his mind-blowing sample-based music. Utilizing technical expertise and a ferocious creative streak, Girl Talk repositions popular music to create a wild and edgy dialogue between artists from all genres and eras. But are his practices legal? Do his methods of frenetic appropriation embrace collaboration in its purest sense? Or are they infractions of creative integrity and violations of copyright? You be the judge by watching RiP: A remix manifesto.

Below is a trailer for the film:

Please join us in Room 131 of the Dickey Fine Arts Building at 7:30 PM on Thursday, February 2, for an in-depth and entertaining (and admittedly one-sided) look at creativity in the new digital age and the forces that threaten it.