May 22nd, 2015
@ Co-Lab Projects (New space!)
300 Allen St, Austin, TX 78702 (map)
8:30pm
Free / Suggested Donation
★Please note the location of this screening has changed: we will now be at the NEW! Co-Lab Projects at 300 Allen Street! SNEAK PEAK★
Infinitely ridiculed, seen as canaries for the decline of civilization, but also as kinetic/maximalist/avant-garde art films, Michael Bay’s Transformers series has ruled the world’s collective wallet for the better part of the last decade. As Bay contemplates passing on directing the inevitable Transformers 5 in favor of “a new direction [for his] movies” (apparently a film based on the 2012 Benghazi attack), this screening presents four works – including one on Super 8mm – that take the movies in disguise, as take-off point. Featuring films and videos by Bradley Eros & Tim Geraghty, Kevin B. Lee, and two works by Austin’s own Martin & Lawrence (Bryan Connolly & Tommy Swenson), who will be there in person. Programmed by Ekrem Serdar.
Mission: Co-Lab Projects is an artist-run nonprofit organization dedicated to providing resources, education, and exhibition space to artists that produce contemporary works of art, installation, and performance.
Values: Through collaboration and engagement, Co-Lab Projects encourages artistic exploration and dialogue within the community.
Program
Untitled for Michael Bay by Martin & Lawrence
3 min / Super 8mm to Digital / silent / 2013
seeing if the confusing close-ups of CGI robots in the Transformers films is more effective as self contained shapes and colors.
Transformers: The Premake by Kevin B. Lee
25 min / HD / sound / 2014
Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, will be released June 27 2014. But on YouTube one can already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.
TransTrans (Transformers Transformed) by Bradley EROS + Tim Geraghty
12 min / HD / sound / 2009
Soundtrack mix includes Francois Bayle, Frank Zappa, Einsturzende Neubauten, Terry Fox, Christian Fennesz.
All text from F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) & Manifesto on Futurist Cinema (1916). Commissioned by PERFORMA 09
“Our cinema must detach itself from reality and become deforming, synthetic and dynamic!” ~ F.T. Marinetti
A radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via synthetic collapse and critical revenge on its old & new fascist tropes > celebrating SPEED. NOISE. + DANGER. The fervent declarations & violent poetry of the Futurists are superimposed on the mythic morphology of the Autobot blockbuster’s machine mayhem. Images of death & destruction reign in a delirium of transformations as, to quote Marinetti: “We Decompose the Universe!”
Stagnation by Martin & Lawrence
42 min / HD / sound / 2013
We both loved Michael Bay films, but were left cold by the Transformers movies. Is there a good movie in there? We decided to take the CGI out to see if the human story was the more interesting one. The story that exists without the robots is a complex true telling of the plight of millennials via Shia LaBeouf’s character Sam.
Bios
Bryan Connolly is a filmmaker and writer from Austin, TX. He co-wrote Destroy All Movies: The Complete Guide to Punks On Film with Zack Carlson with whom he also writes screenplays with. For the past five years he has hosted the longest running retrospective to ever have existed of the complete works of Jerry Lewis.
BRADLEY EROS is an artist working in myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, contracted and expanded cinema & installation. He has exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, NY; The American Century at the Whitney Musuem, NY; MoMA, NY; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; The Kitchen, NY; New Museum, NY; Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Performs09, Exit Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), NY; The New York, London & Rotterdam Film Festivals, among many others. He has collaborated with the Alchemical Theater, the band Circle X, Voom HD Lab, expanded cinema groups kinoSonik & Arcane Project, and most recently with the Optipus film group. For many years he has been a manager and research at Anthology Film Archives as well as a Member of the Board of Director’s of the Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York.
Tim Geraghty‘s work has shown at Anthology Film Archives, Issue Project Room, Microscope Gallery, Flaherty NYC Migrating Forms, Light Industry and International Film Festival Rotterdam among others. He is a member of Optipus Film Group.
Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, film critic and producer of nearly 200 video essays exploring film and media. He is Founding Editor and Chief Video Essayist at Fandor Keyframe and founding partner of dGenerate Films (a distribution company for independent Chinese cinema). He was supervising producer at Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, and has written for The New York Times, Sight & Sound, Slate and Indiewire. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Film Video New Media and Animation and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tommy Swenson is the programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz and works with the American Genre Film Archive. He saw his first film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, at the historic Blue Mouse Theater in Tacoma, WA. He went to one of those ridiculous alternative colleges that let him write papers on things like “Cinema, Modernity and the Second Law of Thermodynamics”. He has been a projectionist at the Grand Illusion Cinema and is a video store veteran, having done time at Austin’s Vulcan Video and Scarecrow Video in Seattle. Before becoming the Ritz programmer, Tommy was responsible for creating the Alamo Drafthouse’s preshow entertainment. All his possessions were purchased out of the back of comic books.