Visiting Artists

Cinema Visitors Series

At Binghamton University

All Shows are free and open to The Public

Series Sponsored by Cinema Department and Harpur College Dean's Speakers Series.

Wednesday, 2 May 2012 EMILY KUNSTLER (In Person) SHOW AT 5:30

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe 2009, 85 min.

documentary. Digital Video. Color & Black & White. Distributor: Arthouse Films. An Off-Center Media Production.
Produced and Directed by Emily Kunstler & Sarah Kunstler.

William Kunstler was one of the most famous and controversial lawyers of the 20th century. In the 1960s and 70s, Kunstler fought for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr. and represented the famed "Chicago 8" activists who protested the Vietnam War. When the inmates took over Attica prison, or when the American Indian Movement stood up to the federal government at Wounded Knee, they asked Kunstler to be their lawyer. He represented civil rights and anti-war activists, as well as accused terrorists and murderers. In William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe filmmakers Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler explore the life of their father, from middle-class family man, to movement lawyer, to the most hated lawyer in America. Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe is an award-winning feature documentary, which screened at over 50 festivals nationally and internationally and was released theatrically in 26 cities, opened the 2010 season of POV on PBS, and was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2011. A wonderful, inspiring film. – Howard Zinn A superior documentary. – The Los Angeles Times A fascinating portrait. – The Washington Post Shatteringly good. – The San Francisco Chronicle

Emily Kunstler runs Off Center Media, a production company that produces documentaries exposing injustice in the criminal justice system. She co-founded Off Center Media with her sister Sarah in 2000, and with Off Center Emily has produced, directed, and edited a number of short documentaries, including Tulia, Texas: Scenes from the Drug War (2002), which won Best Documentary Short at the Woodstock Film Festival, and was instrumental in winning exoneration for 46 wrongfully convicted people; and Getting Through to the President (2004), which has aired on the Sundance Channel, Current TV, and Channel Thirteen/WNET. These films have contributed to campaigns to stay executions, convince decision makers to reopen cases, and exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

www.off-center.com
www.disturbingtheuniverse.com

Emily Kunstler graduated in 2000 from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA and honors in Film and Video. She was a video producer for Democracy Now!, an independent national television and radio news program, and a studio art fellow with the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004. Emily is also a co-founder of the Kent State Truth Tribunal, founded in 2010 to bring out and record the truth of what happened at Kent on May 4, 1970.

Tuesday, April 17 2012 JENNIFER MONTGOMERY (In Person)

THE AGONAL PHASE: 2010, TRT 42 minutes, HD with Christopher Montgomery, Laszlo McKenzie, and Vivian Montgomery
In the aftermath of a death things may seem very quiet, but there are struggles going on so deep not even those who struggle can recognize them. This film looks and listens for signs of those struggles. Psychoanalytic interjections consider the nature of time and rumination, and are used to step outside of the terribly interiorized state of mourning. "The agonal phase: the visible events that take place when life is in the act of extricating itself from protoplasm too compromised to sustain it any longer. They are like some violent outbursts of protest arising deep in the primitive unconscious raging against the too-hasty departure of the spirit; no matter its preparation by even months of antecedent illness, the body often is reluctant to agree to the divorce." Sherwin Nuland, How We Die

TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS 2000, TRT 19 minutes, 16mm & video Distributed by Video Data Bank (vdb.org <http://www.vdb.org/> )
"The video takes its title from D.W. Winnicott's theory of children's use of transitional objects to negotiate the gaps between internal reality and the shared reality of people and things. Remarkably layered, Transitional Objects weaves together considerations of splicing, Winnicott, sewing, motherhood, new technology and loss of mastery." –Carl Bogner "Playtime with psychoanalytic theory mischief-maker Jennifer Montgomery, who toys with the boundaries between self and other, and sutures together chimeras before your eyes." –New York Video Festival Montgomery's work has shown at international festivals, as well as the 2008 Whitney Biennial (NYC), MoMA (NYC), the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), the ICA (London), and the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis). She has been the recipient of many grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. She currently lives in Arlington, MA.

Tuesday, April 24 2012 KEN JACOBS (In Person)

KEN JACOBS' OPTIC ANTICS, AND SEEKING THE MONKEY KING

Celebrating the publication of OPTIC ANTICS, a collection of essays on Ken Jacobs film, video and performance works, as well as the recent release of SEEKING THE MONKEY KING. Jacobs received a National Film Critics award (2011) for Seeking the Monkey King. It is his second. He got his first National Film Critic Award for Razzle Dazzle, in 2008. Ken Jacobs is a Binghamton University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, from the Cinema Department which he co-founded with Larry Gottheim.

Seeking The Monkey King, 2011, 40 min., color, Music by J.G. Thirlwell
"Ken Jacob's Seeking the Monkey King, A national Treasure" – David Phelps. Premiered at the New York Film Festival's Views from the Avant-Garde program, and screened at Sundance and Zuccotti Park in New York. "An exhilarating audiovisual workout that simultaneously engages multiple parts of the brain, Jacobs's 40-minute movie is a sort of hallucinatory jeremiad. The basic imagery seems derived from close-ups of crumpled metallic foil; this material, which oscillates in color between rich amber and deep blue, is subjected to a barrage of cyclical digital manipulations and married to J.G. Thirlwell's clamorous score. The sound surges; the screen is a roiling imaginary landscape of frozen fire and burning ice. Intermittently, Jacobs superimposes the text of a caustic anti-capitalist, anti-patriotic harangue addressed to a figure he calls "The Monkey King": "Oh, mighty lord of deception, America has always kissed your hairy ass."

It's a '60s vision happening today—beautiful, terrifying, and determined to storm the doors of perception." – J Hoberman, Village Voice

Jacobs has been a major figure in the New York Avant Garde since the 60's as well as the object of many retrospectives including at The American Museum Of The Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, The Museum Of Modern Art in New York City, The American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin. He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, etc. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Berlin's DAAD award, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant.

These artists’ screenings are funded in part by Presentation Funds from the Experimental Television Center, which is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts. Series is co-sponsored by Harpur College Dean’s Speaker Series.
Info: 607-777-4998 or 777-4997