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FAST FORWARD FILM: Transformative Aesthetics of Eccentricity and Visionary Art

4/1/2015

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Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 3 pm 


Filmmakers Brian Comfort and David Bendiksen will screen their films, discuss their work, and answer questions.
 
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Above: Opening frame of David Bendiksen's film Lichtstark


Left: Still from Brian Comfort's film Eminent Domain

PROGRAM

Brian Comfort: Eminent Domain, 2012

Jim Bishop has been building a castle in the mountains of Colorado for more than 40 years. His seemingly limitless capacity for manual labor is matched by his fiercely opinionated diatribes about the state of the world today and how we got there. Weaving conspiracy theory rants with violent pleas for his newsworthiness and jokes about televangelists, Bishop regales, offends, entertains and frightens the thousands who come to his castle every year. As impressive as his castle is, more often the main attraction is the castle builder himself. 

David Bendiksen: Lichtstark, 2014
A young photographer recovering from personal loss turns to his craft for consolation. Lichtstark is as much a short narrative as it is a meditation on the moving and still image. Shot in full-frame digital, Lichtstark uses a setup of vintage 1960s cine lenses as a "compromise" between film and digital cinema. Its title, translated literally, means "lightstrong," a term used to describe a camera lens's ability to illuminate and create an image.  


Brian Comfort is an academic researcher, teacher, writer, and filmmaker. His film, Eminent Domain, premiered at the 2012 Boston International Film Festival, and his screenplay "Welcome to Rainbow Trout" was a finalist in the 2009 Ivy Film Festival competition. He is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is writing his dissertation on eccentric characters like the castle builder Jim Bishop, the subject of his documentary short. He hopes to incorporate documentary filmmaking as a means of presenting his historical scholarship. 

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DavidBendkisen

David Bendiksen is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he serves as a graduate teaching assistant while studying, translating, and making films. He received the 2014 University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections Fellowship in Digital Humanities for archival work of 1920s New England photography, on display now at Du Bois library. His scholarly and artistic interests include film materiality, Pictorialist printmaking, historical photographic and cinematic avant-gardes, and translation studies.

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    FAST FORWARD FILM SERIES

    Each spring and fall since 2013, Historic Northampton has hosted a series of four monthly film screenings featuring the work of contemporary film-makers.

    The fall 2015 series, Artifacts of Fixation, explores discarded objects, transformed into stimulating, moving image media.

    Featured filmmakers use artifacts not only as evidence, but as witness in uncovering personal histories.  The filmmakers vividly project their material fixations into a virtual medium.

    September 20, 2015:
    In heartbeats for conjunction, Jeremy Johnston creates a portrait of a young man through the objects he left behind when he died at 24. Sifting through letters, photographs and many 16mm student films, Johnston accesses a man he never knew and builds an imaginary friendship.

    October 4, 2015:
    Filmmaker and photographer Abraham Ravett photographs his mother’s handkerchiefs and clothes in Tziporah to access and deal with the trauma of the Holocaust.


    November 15, 2015: Hope Tucker’s fifteen year-long video series The Obituary Project transforms postcards, telephone booths, X-rays and paperclips into odes to people and places who have passed.

    December 6, 2015
    In the film Still Life, Harun Farocki connects the contemporary advertising of consumer objects to the 17th century Flemish tradition of still life painting.

    The series Artifacts of Fixation is curated by Magdalena Bermudez,  a media-artist based in Northampton, MA.

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  • About Us
    • Visit
    • Properties
    • Board-Staff
    • Legal/Financial
  • News
    • New Co-Executive Directors Appointed
    • Tribute to Nancy Rexford
    • News of the Parsons House Archaeology Dig
    • Membership Challenge Grant
    • William G. Pomeroy Foundation Grant
    • Beveridge Foundation Grant Awarded
    • The Bridge Street School Sprouts
  • What's Going On
    • Programs
    • Exhibits
    • Meadow City Historians
  • History Online
  • Donate/Volunteer
    • Donate
    • Volunteering
    • Membership
    • Acknowledgements