ROOFTOP FILMS

Home Movies
Friday, June 25th, 2004
8:30 - Live Music by Tom Warnick (details below)
9:00 - Movies remembered and mis-remembered

On the roof of The Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street, in the Gowanus Section of Park Slope, Brooklyn.
In the event of rain the show will be indoors at the same location.
Dress warmly (it's cooler on the roof than in the street).

Home Movies
In Joe Quinn's Can't get To Heaven, one of the videos in Rooftop Films' 2004 Home Movies program, Joe's mom speaks to him about the newest models of digital cameras. "I remember when I was in Spain and stuff," she says, "and everyone was carrying around those big huge cameras, making sure that they recorded every moment that might happen, and all I could think was that I would never want to record those things when these are actual moments that could be lived." Joe's only response is a flat "yeah," but he continues shooting, trying to record everything his mother says as he videotapes her face through the bulbs of a pink plant on the table.

Certainly, her point is valid. Every photographer or videographer has wondered at one point whether the presence of a camera interferes with the moments we are meant to capture, or, even more seriously, whether a camera interferes with the very life of the people who operate it, driving us towards abstraction and away from most intimate emotions of our own lives. The sudden popularity of digital media products—still cameras, video cameras, portable audio recorders, and audio and video editing software—has exploded, and the ubiquity of such products has altered many mundane activities, if only because such mundane activities are now documented exhaustively, re-edited and distributed amongst interested parties. Weddings, vacations, picnics, drunken late nights and crimes against military prisoners are now reliably photographed and video-taped, put on hard disk, transferred to DVD or CD, emailed about the internet and mounted in virtual on-line photo albums. But are these new media documents of any genuine value, even within the lives of the people who participate in them? Does the constant documentation of personal moments actually help to preserve our memories, or are they like the phone books in our cell phones and palm-pilots, destroying the very faculties of memory they are meant to supplement? And does any of this actually facilitate or at least transform the production of contemporary art?

The works in this year's Home Movies program deal with these problems of memory and with the impact that documentation has on personal moments. Though the camera may intrude and change moments from time to time, the resulting footage is invaluable to the filmmakers, as they use it to organize scattered moments of their lives: a son recalls the simple satisfaction that ritual provided his deceased father; a tormented young man stares at his own confused past self; a neurotic comes to a realization about his own worst fears; a struggling artist works out his anxieties and jealousy; a forsaken woman replays her heartache against a backdrop of rural decrepitude. While the rest of the world shoots haphazardly and indiscriminately or complains about the flash cameras going off in bars and at weddings, these filmmakers do what artists have always done: take the means at their disposal and use them to bend the most important bits of their lives into meaningful works.

THE FILMS:
Can't Get To Heaven: My Mom and My Ant-Filled Knees (Joe Quinn, 3:00)
"At Purchase, I slowly started figuring out how to express myself without being absolutely mortified. I also became more involved in music. My degree-attainment was postponed by a series of indescribable experiences that various doctors have told me were bouts with 'manic psychosis.' I was diagnosed with 'bipolar disorder' and put on a medical leave. Now I am living in New Paltz, NY with my girlfriend. I've been unable to get a job and running out of money, but trying to stay positive and focused on art and fun and expression. I'd like to go back to Purchase because they have some wonderful teachers in the film department, but they may not let me back unless I agree to take psychiatric medication that makes me unable to do anything but sit around and sleep."
—Joe Quinn

The Times I Smoked Pot (Lev, 1:00)
An animated biography of a kid who smoked a little marijuana in his life.

Filibuster (Matt Lenski, 1:00)
Richard Simmons and a battalion of fatties sweat to the oldies. By oldies, we mean a Sonic Youth song from the early nineties.

Resolutions (Terry Cuddy, 5:00)*
What do we remember when we see snapshots? What do we see when we take them?

The Self Portrait: Part I (Songyi Kim , 1:30)
Songyi Kim returns to the roof to continue documenting of her own face, this time with drawings.

Good Looking (Lev, 1:00)
I guess we can assume that Lev does not think that he is very good-looking.

I'm With Stupid Too (Ben McCormick, 4:00)
Ever wonder what your cell phone would say to your cordless home phone? Well it isn't very nice. But it's nicer than the things your Ronzoni pasta does when no one is looking.

'44 (David Resha, 11:00)
The sad, sweet story of an embalmer with a warm heart who learned the value of life as a paratrooper medic during WWII and learned the value of dead squirrels in the basement rec room of his funeral home.

I Promise Africa (Jerry Henry, 2:30)**
A sweet short song of regret dedicated to a very troubled place.

Shower (Randall Good, 25:00)
A film about the quiet melancholy of lost love and of the indefinite boundaries of time and space within the world of memory.

INTERMISSION

Richard's Cash Register (Lev, 1:00)
Lev bitches about pretty girls.

Girl Shoots Two Boys Brawling (Potter-Belmar Labs, 2:00)
An obscured and abstracted loop alternately lovely and desperate.

My Father's Lunch (Tony Mendoza, 7:00)
Some of the great moments in videography come about when you set off to record a ritual that hasn't changed in decades only to find that you have recorded an epochal shift and that nothing will ever be as it was. And then you have to go to McDonalds.

Untitled (Benning Purren, 6:00)
Benning's grandmother explains the last bits of meaningful communication between herself and her dying husband of 50 years.

A Walk in the Park (Michael Goodier, 4:00)
The viewer is led with a series of eerily pulsing still images on a journey through the surreal landscape of DeCordova Sculpture Park, where the vibrant animism of the sculptures is balanced by the ominous presence of human life.

Dear Gary (Sara Cough, 10:00)****
A woman adjusts to having lost her lover, vacillating between poeticizing and ranting about her lost love, but the images that unfold before us are all of a world of slow and perpetual decay.

Sensitivity (Matthew Brown, 1:00)
Matthew Brown examines his fear of death and decides to change the battery.

Pickle (Lev, 1:00)
Lev explains how he found out he wasn't homosexual, even though the kids at school said "you are gay, man, you are so fucking gay."

The Beautiful and the Fine (Rob Tyler, Adrienne Leverette and Eric Schopmeyer. 9:00)
Mike Wilder keeps in his home Drosera Nitidula x Pulchella and Pingucula Agnata x Moranesis, some of the most resilient and wondrous carnivores in the world. The Portland, Oregon film collective Archipelago returns to Rooftop (A Thing Of Wonder, 6/18/04) with a stunning documentary about a passionate and thoughtful bio-collector.

THE MUSIC:
Tom Warnick & the World's Fair play a mixture of carnival music, country waltzes and '50s style rockers. Song topics include con men, double-crossers, impostors and everything else that makes the film-noir-world go 'round. www.tomwarnick.com