Author: marktosc

Hi all –

Mark T writing –

I recently added a few more filmmaker filmographies to the site, if you’re interested in that kind of thing: for Vincent Grenier, Peter Mays, and Joseph Bernard. I was sad to hear earlier this year that Joe had passed in February – I hadn’t spoken to him in a few years, but had some great interactions with him in the mid-2010s when he was working on the digitization of many of his Super 8 films, and then passing them onto me to archive. His films are beautiful, really thoughtful and committed, and it was such a pleasure to see many folks embrace them upon their re-entry into consciousness through the release of Joe’s blu-ray Prismatic Music.

Zena and I also started a regular mailing list for news about our screenings, the link for which can be accessed via a button here and there on the website. We decided to do the mailing list manually, i.e. no email service, which was complicated to set up (they REALLY want you to just pay for a service!), but it seems to work! So please do join the email list if you’d like to hear about our shows that way.

I also added a few fun tidbits on the Ephemera section of the site – one modest page on Creative Film Associates, the early independent distributor founded by Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington (!), as well as a page on the term “experimental film” and where it may have come from. On this latter one I’d be happy to receive submissions and references if you have them.

Finally, for our screening series, we’ll very soon be announcing something properly about it, but on June 5, June 26, and July 10, we’ll be presenting three different programs in tribute to and exploration of Gene Youngblood’s iconic book Expanded Cinema (1970). We’re thrilled to have a bunch of amazing films lined up, many in rarely seen 16mm prints, and even including what is probably the first 16mm performance in over 50 years of John Whitney Jr.’s three-projector performance Side Phase Drift, with John Jr. himself operating the center projector with us! Keep an eye out for the announcement and show info, and hope to see you one, two, or all of those shows!

With our first show of 2025 last night – Good-by Keiichi Tanaami: Animation from the Pop Subconscious – we kicked off our new season, which comprises monthly screenings at 2220 Arts + Archives (as usual) through May! We’re already working out some Summer and Fall plans, but in the meantime, we hope we’ll see you at some of our upcoming shows, beginning with Zena’s Tom Palazzolo show on Thursday, February 6!

Tom Palazzolo is a Chicago legend, still very active at 87 years of age, and we’re both longtime fans. His decidedly Midwestern take on America, its complex identity, and the things about it that charm, beguile, confuse, and disturb us all intermingle in his incredibly insightful and entertaining short documentaries. Tom has been making films since the 1960s, and our show comprises only a small fraction of his incredible output, but it’s a selection Zena chose particularly to think about America and its contradictory and troubled state in our current political/historical moment. It also seemed only fitting not only to include his bitingly witty film America’s in Real Trouble in the program, but to even name the program after that film.

Ultimately, I think what we both love about Tom’s films is that they’re incisive, political, and critical, but embedded in a sensibility of incredible wit, charm, humor, and (dare I say it!) love. His curiosity and empathy for the American working-class experience is a defining quality of his work and what makes the films so effective and generous. We’re confident this program will be a rich, thought-provoking, and yet entertaining experience!

Beyond February, we have programs devoted to Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s amazing metatextual experimental feature Salaam Cinema on March 6, Ula Stöckl & Edgar Reitz’s nearly undefinable and legendary Tales of the Dumpster Kid (complete with audience curatorial participation!) on April 17, and a mixed program we’re very excited about on May 15, 16mm Brain Food, in which we’ll insist that a regular dose of imaginative and intricate 16mm film viewing can be healthy for our minds and souls. (plus if people like this program, we may just make it a regular thing!)

And beyond our Lightstruck shows, we each occasionally do screenings at other venues in other contexts, such as the Phil Solomon screening Mark is doing at the Academy Museum on January 30. You can keep track of any upcoming shows we’re doing – Lightstruck and otherwise – on our Current Screenings page.

Hope to see you at a show soon!

We fell in love with Bogdan Dziworski’s incredible, immersive, sensorially rich documentaries and knew we had to present a program of a few of our favorites if at all possible! Check out Zena’s trailer above to get a sense of the images and sounds in these amazing films – his audiovisual language as a filmmaker is hypercinematic, artfully stylized, wonderfully playful, and even frequently daring. We know Dziworski’s work may not be very well known in the US, and perhaps even his name obscure to many, but we VERY highly recommend giving this program a chance, as these are unforgettable films that are intensely creative, involving, artful, and quite fun. Dziworski also loves people, and his engagement with his subjects communicates a visceral, empathic connection that elevates the films even further. Hope to see you there!

Tickets here: https://link.dice.fm/Saccab63e6d2

Here’s the official spiel from our program announcement to give you a bit more encouragement!

With their wildly adventurous cinematography, editing, and sound, the short documentaries of Polish film virtuoso Bogdan Dziworski create a thrillingly immersive space for an intensely engaged, experiential approach to their subject matter, decades before Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab films would seek to do something quite similar. Graduating from the famed Łódź film school in 1965, Dziworski pioneered a revelatory language of observational nonfiction filmmaking that eschewed all claims to fly-on-the-wall realism and instead transparently engaged in an often surrealist and unequivocally stylized film language, seeking to enhance his subjects with a heightened, eccentric sensoriality that only cinema can offer.

While Dziworski’s editing is sculptural and kinetic, and his cinematography operatic and daring, his sound work is particularly extensive, using unconventional cutting and mixing techniques, and an elaborate approach to foley that guides our engagement just as powerfully as the visuals. These are documentaries unlike any others: deeply empathetic, uncommonly strange constructions that are exhilaratingly, unapologetically cinematic.

In recent years, we fell in love with Dziworski’s fantastic films, and are very excited to present a selection of four of our favorites as part of Lightstruck. The program includes: Skiing Scenes with Franz Klammer (1980), his hilarious and visually outrageous collaboration with Zbig Rybczyński and Gerald Kargl (Angst); Classical Biathlon (1978), one of his most expressive and immersive athletic films; A Few Stories About a Man (1983), a remarkable portrait of Jerzy Orłowski, armless graphic artist, in various typical and atypical sequences; and Szapito (1984), a moving and exquisitely sensitive film in which a retired circus troupe assembles to recreate some of their long ago routines. We hope you’ll join us to experience these intricate, artful, and – quite frankly – massively entertaining films, still incredibly fresh and cinematically adventurous 40+ years after their making.

Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Thanks to Marek Pelski at WFO Film Studio for providing the films.

Zena just finished this great Ximena Cuevas show trailer this weekend:

If you’re not familiar with Ximena’s work, this is a great intro to the kinds of images, sounds, and ideas you’ll be seeing if you join us Thursday 9/12! Hope you can make it!

Show info/tix here!

Thrilled to share this wonderufl-as-always trailer Zena made to give a little sense of our Fall 2024 season of Lightstruck at 2220 Arts + Archives!

We’re really excited about all of these shows, and some of our favorite artists are showcased here, including Betzy Bromberg, with whom we’re doing a three-program 16mm retrospective with her in person at all three shows! It’s a bit of an experiment, since we’d like to do more multi-show retrospectives of other artists in the future, and we’re hoping that the three-successive-Thursday structure works ok for as many people as possible. Jamming the shows into one weekend seemed a little too claustrophobic, and we worried the films wouldn’t get the proper space they deserve. Also, we liked the way that three Thursdays in a row gives it a sense of ritual and ceremony. We hope you can make it to one or all of them, as well as the other three shows in the season – the incisive, unexpected, hilarious, and provocative videos of Mexican artist Ximena Cuevas, two magical and otherworldly 3-D 16mm films by Zoe Beloff (complete with glasses and silver screen, as well as Zoe in person too!), and the unreal, vividly cinematic documentaries of Polish virtuoso Bogdan Dziworski. See you soon!

Zena and I took a couple of months off following an immensely fun first year of screenings, but we’re excited to jump back into our schedule starting July 22, with our next Lightstruck screening on July 25: Jill Godmilow’s excellent film made with Ron Vawter, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith! We’ll be screening a brand new 16mm print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive! And then on August 22, we’ll be screening Mostafa Derkaoui’s incredible Moroccan independent film About Some Meaningless Events for its 50th anniversary!

Our Screenings page will feature not only all the info you might be looking for about our Lightstruck shows, but also any other shows Zena and/or I might be doing outside of our regular series. So if you’re interested in the shows we do, it’s a one-stop info page for that kind of stuff. Additionally, as things get confirmed, I add them to a calendar that then populates in the sidebar of every page on the site, so even some TBA shows we can’t announce just yet will be visible there if you want to save the date.

Beyond screenings, I recently wrote an elaborate essay of sorts on the making of Stan Brakhage’s film The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981). I was initially just writing a much simpler description of the process of the film’s creation to include in the Brakhage filmography hosted here, but it grew quickly out of control and I decided to make it its own page. Hope you enjoy it!

Just a quick note to say that after debating making it public or not while it’s still VERY MUCH in progress, I decided to go ahead and make my Stan Brakhage filmography-in-progress public. It is here.

I’ve been working as the archivist on Brakhage’s (and numerous other artists’) films since 2004, so this filmography will be based more than anything on the precise firsthand data and other anecdotal info I’ve accumulated since 2004 inspecting every single one of his films (meaning his camera originals, not just prints!), and also restoring and printing many many dozens of them. But because the data I have planned to include here is substantial, and the filmography is massive and complicated, this will take a while. So please be aware it’s not nearly complete, but there’s already a lot of data here that may be of interest, especially if you’re a hardcore experimental film nerd like me!

Thanks to everyone who came to our pair of Nobuhiro Aihara shows last night – we had an amazing time, and it seemed like everyone else did too. It was the culmination of a bunch of work – this was a Lightstruck show we put more time and work into than any other thus far, and was really meaningful for us! One of the projects we worked on for this show was a 24-page zine containing a previously untranslated interview with Aihara and a complete filmography. We are immensely thankful to filmmaker Tetsuya Maruyama for doing the translation work, and Hirofumi Sakamoto for supplying the original Japanese interview as well as compiling and caring for Aihara’s filmography through Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive.

We still have copies of the Aihara zine left, so please get in touch if you’d like one! We’re selling them at cost ($5) plus shipping.

Thanks to everyone who came to our screenings this past Fall, it was a really fun first season for us and we were thrilled so many folks attended screenings! Our next season (4 shows, January-April) is all set and listed at 2220’s site (with ticket links), as well as here, of course. And we’re already formulating programs for beyond that, after we take a month off in May!

I’ve continued to work on this site in little ways as a reference resource. I haven’t added or posted a ton more actual public data, but behind the scenes I’ve been gradually getting some complicated filmmaker filmographies put together to eventually host here. In particular, the Stan Brakhage filmography is a big undertaking, because I’m not only making sure it’s hyper-accurate, but I’m also adding anecdotal and technical data about each film wherever possible, which is taking a LONG time. (I’ve gotten as far as 1965 as of this writing!) But once posted, I’m confident it will represent the most accurate Brakhage filmography available, with a good amount of additional info about many of the films.

Also, in considering the possible research value of the Ephemera section of the site, I’ve made some plans to do some research digging into a few long-gone Los Angeles based experimental film exhibition entities, with the ideal aim of documenting all of their exhibition activities here. Stay tuned, if you’re into that kind of thing! (-Mark)

We were thrilled by the sold-out turnout for our most recent program, Estonian Animation: Radical Liberation! Thanks so much to everyone who came, it was really extraordinarily moving to hear the audience so responsive to the films – laughing, whistling, engaging – the energy conjured in the space that evening was wonderful.

For some years I’ve been wanting to do a periodic series that focuses each time on a different country or region’s experimental animation output, and the unexpectedly big success of this show told us we’re not the only ones who would be into that idea, so we’re going to try it again with a program of Hungarian animation on April 18, 2024! Hope to see you there!

Big thanks to the Estonian Film Institute and especially Triinu Keedus there for her immeasurable help in making this program happen!