Austin Film Society Avant Cinema

The Austin Film Society is proud to continue its series of screenings of short experimental, avant-garde films and videos by regional filmmakers. Director of Programming Chale Nafus and Director of Artist Services Bryan Poyser, working with Austin filmmaker Scott Stark, UT RTF lecturer Spencer Parsons, and AMOA Art School & Laguna Gloria Site Director Judith Sims, will be curating various bimonthly programs of challenging cinematic art, often with the filmmaker in attendance. For this second in our series, Scott Stark has brought together three Austin notables – PJ Raval, Rick Reed, and Samantha Krukowski, who will each present selections from their body of work. Each artist will conduct a Q&A after screening his/her selections. – Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society

Program for 4.23.08

PJ Raval
• A Boy’s Mouth (2003, animation, 5 min) – white letters on a shifting background spell out the tragedy of a silent seven-year-old
• Clean (2002, animation & live action, 4 min) – a humorously disturbing film which examines a man’s obsession with cleanliness, which leads to the death of a fly and a battle with out-of-control bandages
• HZ202 (n.d., animation, 2 min) – shifting patterns of shades of green restfully convey the “frequency of thought”
• Net 06 (2002, animation, 5 min) – a rapid shuffle of close-ups of a circuit board reveal numbers, letters, shapes, and orderly lines, all accompanied by a purposely jarring industrial noise soundtrack

Samantha Krukowski

• Stillwater (2006, mini-DV, 5 min) – stunning images of water over rocks, forming wave patterns that dance rhythmically in reflected light

• Chalazae (2005, mini-DV, 5 min) – the hypnotic mystery of egg yolks floating, spreading, and disintegrating over a sheet of glass

• Artreading (2008, 16mm to mini-DV, 10 min) – mesmerizing interplay of extreme close-ups of the surfaces of magazine and newspaper images: textures, geometric shapes, dots of color, lines, and letters

Rick Reed
• Capitalism: Child Labor (directed by Ken Jacobs, 2006, video transfer to DVD, 14 min) – Rick Reed’s music accompanies and heightens the impact of Ken Jacobs’ manipulations of a found stereoptican dual image of boys working in a textile mill. The throbbing, rarely still view of the factory with its barefooted youngsters begins to be overlaid with close-up segments of the original shot until various portions of the photo rhythmically dance with one another, creating a visual counterpoint to Reed’s overwhelming score.

Artist Bios

PJ Raval is more recently known as an award-winning filmmaker than he is an ex-scientist, ex-vegetarian, born on tax day. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine's “25 new faces of independent film 2006,” PJ's films have won awards such as Best Narrative Short at the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Int'l Film Festival, the Betty Nowlin Award for Excellence in Filmmaking at the Cinematexas Int'l Film Festival, and the Director's Award for Most Visually Inspired Film at the Santa Cruz Film Festival. PJ's short film LEAD ROLE: FATHER was recently named the “festival programmer’s pick” and nominated for the Golden Reel award at the VC Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. In 2004 PJ's body of film work screened at the Artists' Television Access (ATA) in San Francisco sponsored by the Alliance of Emerging Creative Artists (AECA), and then again in 2006 as part of the Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival's Filmmaker Series. PJ is currently completing a new film with Jay Hodges, TRINIDAD, a feature documentary about a small Wild West outpost town turned "sex change capital of the world". PJ is also an award-winning cinematographer. His work has been showcased at both Sundance and Cannes and earned him awards such as the ASC Charles B. Lang Jr. Heritage Award as well as the Haskell Wexler Award for Best Cinematography. PJ has been featured in “American Cinematographer” and recently shot the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Documentary Grand Jury Award Winner TROUBLE THE WATER produced/directed by FAHRENHEIT 9/11 producers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. PJ's feature cinematography credits include, the 2006 Independent Spirit Award nominated ROOM, the Los Angeles Film Festival Narrative Feature Award winner GRETCHEN, and the Burnt Orange produced CASSIDY KIDS.

Samantha Krukowski loves materials, images, spaces and time. Originally
from New York City, she makes her home in Austin, Texas. Her work has been
featured in national and international exhibitions and festivals and is
included in international collections. Krukowski teaches for now at The
University of Texas at Austin but dreams of cold and rainy places. More
information about what she¹s up to is available on her website.

Rick Reed
Born in 1957, Rick Reed came to music by way of the visual arts. He had originally studied painting and graphic design during the 70's, but after moving to Austin in 1979, he was soon inspired by, but not influenced by, the liberating punk rock DIY mentality that was so prevalent in local music around this time. In the early 80's he found himself rekindling a love affair with electronic sounds that he began as a child playing with his parents’ reel-to-reel tape recorder and short wave radio. At that point in time, it seemed to be a better fit artistically for him than painting, so in 1981, he made the switch and began recording his own music of drone noise using cheap tape recorders and analog synthesizers, which by then were just starting to become affordable for the average person.

Laboring in almost total obscurity for 15 years, he was lucky enough to have had some of his music discovered by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore in 1996 and finally had his first official record released, "Experimental and Improvised Music From Austin, Texas" on Moore's Ecstatic Peace label the following year. Since then, Reed has continued to work not only as a solo act, but with various groups such as Frequency Curtain, SIRSIT and the Voltage Spooks (with ex-AMM guitarist Keith Rowe), which did an 8-city tour of the Northeast in 2007. He's also the host of an ongoing experimental music series called Toneburst, which seeks to feature new and unusual music from the Austin underground music scene.

In 2004, Reed began working with New York filmmaker Ken Jacobs on soundtracks for some of his Nervous Magic Lantern displays: "Capitalism: Child Labor" (2007), "Mountaineer Spinning" (2005), "Spiral Nebula" (2006) and the most recent "Dreams Money Can't Buy" which was shown as part of last years New York Film Festival.

Reed's work can be heard on labels such as Beta Lactam Ring, Bremsstralung Recordings, Pale Disc/Japan and Elevator Bath.
For more information check out Reed's My Space page .