This month, the Proteus Migration Film & Video Series will host a unique cinema-performance event which will be enacted throughout our various project spaces. Brooklyn-based filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, will bring us a specially designed evening of film and integrated movement pieces based on her recent work with a group of Chinese and Puerto Rican performers. The Your Day is My Night Collective will explore “shiftbeds” through verité conversations, character-driven fictions, and multi-format film loops. A shift-bed is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Inspired by theater visionaries Augusto Boal and the Wooster Group, the collective has worked for the last year on a series of performance workshops centered around such a bed – experienced, remembered, and imagined from profoundly different viewpoints. The audience will be encouraged to engage with the characters while walking through the gallery as a “shift-bed” house, witnessing their stories of life before and after immigration to the United States.

Film loops excerpted from the upcoming feature-length film, “Your Day is My Night.”

More information can be found at Facebook.com/yourdayismynightfilm

Performers: Yi Chun Cao, Yueh (Linda) Hwa Chan, Che Chang-Qing, Yun Xiu Huang, Ellen Ho,  Sheut Hing Lee, Veraalba Santa Torres and Pedro Sanchez Tormes

Directed by Lynne Sachs
Images by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass
Writing by Rojo Robles and Lynne Sachs
Translations by Catherine Ng, Jenifer Lee and Bryan Chan
Co-editing and co-producing by Sean Hanley
Production Assistance by Madeline Youngberg, Amanda Katz & Jeff Sisson

Join us for The Wayfarers, an evening of films that will take you places. Filmmakers Bill Brown (who will join us for discussion after the films are aired), Vanessa Renwick, and Kevin Gallagher each undertook solo journeys across vast distances within the United States. The films they made documenting their experiences shows an American landscape that has changed dramatically, both physically and culturally, over the past decade. 

The Other Side by Bill Brown

The Evening’s Films: 

Green Tunnel (2011)
Kevin Gallagher
4.5 minutes
A trek over the entire 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail, shot in time-lapse photography and then condensed into four minutes.

Crowdog (1998)
Vanessa Renwick
7 minutes
A barefoot hitchhike out to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, documented on Super 8 mm film.

The Other Side (2003)
Bill Brown
40 minutes
Documenting a trip along the entire 2,000 mile border between the U.S. and Mexico, this film ponders the post-9/11 anxiety prevalent to the region.  Bill Brown will be in attendance to present his work on 16mm film.

Proteus Gowanus and Morbid Anatomy Library will co-host lantern slides of Ellis Island immigrants presented by Barbara Mathe of the American Museum of Natural History along with a screening of Meredith Monk’s short film, ‘Ellis Island’ (1981), performed and filmed in the island’s ruins before the start of renovations for the Ellis Island Museum, which opened in 1990.  Ellis Island was the gateway for the majority of immigrants to the United States, processing over 12 million immigrants from 1892 until 1954.

Part I: The Lantern Slides
The extensive lantern slide collection at the American Museum of Natural History Library includes a small collection of images taken at Ellis Island. Many of the images can be attributed to Augustus Sherman, Chief Clerk at the Immigration Station and many are hand colored.

Barbara Mathé, Museum Archivist at the American Museum of Natural History, will show a number of the original slides and talk about how these images may have been presented and perceived in the early 20th century at the time when, as noted in a 1907 National Geographic article, “No migration in history is comparable to the great hordes that have crossed the Atlantic during the past 20 years to enter our territory.”

How and why these images came to be included in the AMNH’s larger collection is unclear but are believed to be part of an extensive program of illustrated lantern slide lectures that the Museum initiated as a broad educational project.

Barbara Mathé has worked in Special Collections in the American Museum of Natural History Library since 1988.  Her research focus is photographic collections as seen through the historical contexts in which they were created and subsequently viewed.  She was co-curator with Thomas Ross Miller for a major temporary exhibit at the AMNH in 1997, “Drawing Shadows to Stone: Photographing North Pacific Peoples” and they are co-authors of a volume of the same name produced to accompany the exhibit.  She is presently working on a book about the photographs taken by Jessie Tarbox Beals of the ethnographic displays at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

Part II: “Ellis Island”, a 1981 film by Meredith Monk
A film about the experience of immigrants entering America at the turn of the century, Ellis Island was performed and filmed amid the island’s ruins. The film was awarded the CINE Golden Eagle, special jury prize from the Atlanta and San Francisco Film and Video Festivals.

Ellen Fisher and Pablo Vela, performers in the film, will be in attendance at the screening.

Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, choreographer, filmmaker, and creator of new opera and music theater works. During a career spanning five decades, Monk has been acclaimed by audiences and critics as a major creative force in the performing arts. www.meredithmonk.org

An Evening of Appropriation and Experimental Animation, with short films by Lillian Schwartz, Toshio Matsumoto, Steve Cossman, LJ Frezza, Douglas Goodwin & Rebecca Baron.

Proteus Gowanus is happy to announce the first screening in the Migration Film & Video Series. This program of shorts includes films from two unique eras: the present and the 1970s. Both time periods were and continue to be turning points in the artistic use of the computer. With appropriated source material like Muybridge’s Running Man photographs, the Mona Lisa, or John Wayne’s peculiar performance as Ghengis Khan, these filmmakers transport visual data from the analog realm to the digital, and vice versa.

Lillian Schwartz and Toshio Matsumoto, worked in the 1970s to expand the early aesthetic of computer-driven experimental animation. Douglas Goodwin, Rebecca Baron, and LJ Frezza follow in their footsteps by re-structuring the very pixels of classic American films. Steve Cossman, on the other hand, creates an entirely new way in which we can “watch” a still image. Throughout the evening, you’ll witness the migration of visual data throughout multiple mediums and across timelines. Filmmakers will appear in person for a post-screening discussion.

Admission: $5

Program:

APOTHEOSIS
Lillian Scharwtz
1972, 5 min., 16mm

ALAE
Lillian Schwartz
1975, 4 min., 16mm

OLYMPIAD
Lillian Schwartz
1972, 3 min., DVD

CRUSHER
Steve Cossman
2010, 11 min., 16mm

MOUNTAIN CLIMBER
Steve Cossman
2011, 4 min., Video (Silent)

NUKE EM, DUKE
LJ Frezza
2009, 4 min., Video

MONA LISA
Toshio Matsumoto
1973, 3 min., Video

LOSSLESS #3
Douglas Goodwin & Rebecca Baron
2008, 10 min., Video

LOSSLESS #5
Douglas Goodwin & Rebecca Baron
2008, 3 min., Video

Total Run Time: approx. 50 mins

Please join us for our 2011 Benefit Party and Performance. This year we present Paradise Bizarre, a Fairground of Acts, Exhortations and Seductions, a carnival-bazaar designed to save your soul or make you forget you ever wanted to. Free booze and food thanks to our friends at Aliseo on Vanderbilt Ave, Cotta Bene on 3rd Ave, Joya Thai on Court St, Marquet Patisserie on Court St, Stinky Brooklyn on Smith St. and Brooklyn Fare on Schermerhorn.Tickets are available online now through Paypal. You can also pay by sending a check to us at 543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215. Or you can pay at the door.

Ticket Prices:
$60 for one
$100 for two
$120 for a family of four
$200 for four
$500 for four includes the opportunity to return for a private curator-led history tour of the Gowanus Canal for up to 16

True believers, heathens, skeptics, pagans, atheists and heretics all welcome!

Paradise Bizarre is the culmination of our yearlong exploration of Paradise through art, artifacts, books, performances and events, bringing together old and new Protean collaborators. For details of the many performances, special guests, and collaborating angels, click here.

Proteus Gowanus is a non-profit organization under Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)3. Your donation is tax deductible.