Subject: Looking for Food/eating films
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 16:47:39 -0500
From: Jeff Silva
Reply-To: Experimental Film Discussion List
To: FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM

Greetings fellow Frameworkers. This is Jeff Silva here, co-curator of Balagan Experimental Film Series in Boston http://www.coolidge.org/balagan/.

I'm in the process of finalizing the program for a show in May titled "TV Dinner". It's an experimental film/video show combined with a performance/installation of an actual dinner performance taped and projected simultaneously in the theatre by Anthropologist and Artist Elaine Belsito and Video collective PIXONIK LABS and Co.

I'm looking to intersperse several short experimental films/videos within the evening as part of the show and the performance. I'm seeking Experimental works on or about food and or eating. I'm hoping to assemble a wide range of short works (1 up to 15 or 20 minutes) that on some level, focus on the act of eating/dining whether it be from an ethnographic, comedic, sensual, vulgar, social, etc....... perspective.

If any of you have a piece or know of some works that might fit into this show please email me .

Below is some information regarding the performance aspect of the show.

cheers,
Jeff
http://www.coolidge.org/balagan/

TV Dinner
The "audience" will be encouraged to talk with its mouth full at this very special TV Dinner, where live videography of the performance/installation (Pixonik Labs), Dinner Party will be interspersed with a smorgasbord of film/video on food and eating. Come scramble the line between viewer and viewed and eat it with some hotsauce in this high-stakes version of the brew and view.

An anthropologist and artist, Elaine Belsito has been throwing dinner parties and making art for many years now, so when the opportunity arose to conceptually join the two, how could she resist? Dinner Party will presented again at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in April 2001, along with excerpts from "Jane and Joe: A Domestic Odyssey on Napkins," a multi-piece collage project exploring the blandishments and scariness of 1950s domestic life through the medium of vintage wedding napkins and vintage magazine advertising. In other arty rivulets, Ms. Belsito has been seen on stage in Chicago, performing with fringe theater stalwarts Theater Oobleck, and here in Boston with her early jazz ensemble, Frank and the Girl.

Jeff Silva
MIT Video Productions
Center for Advanced Educational Services
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave. Building 9-423
Cambridge, MA 02139
tel. 617-253-1730
fax 617-253-8301
Splice@mit.edu
__________________________________________________________________

Subject: Re: Looking for Food/eating films
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 17:52:28 -0600
From: Fred Camper
To: Experimental Film Discussion List

Tony Conrad has a bunch of food films that I saw 25 years ago at Millennium Film Workshop. I think they are probably more interesting than many films that simply show people eating. Some have food encrusted on them, producing patterns in projection. Others are so heavily encrusted that they can't be projected, so he showed them in jars. Then, for the "piece de resistance," he showed a sukiyaki film, in which he chopped up and friend vegetables and film strips, and then "projected it," which he defined as "flattening it against a screen," which in this case meant he hurled stuff from the frying pan onto the screen, which was a bedsheet hung for the occasion rather than the usual Millennium Screen. Presumably you'd have to bring him in person.

Is Conrad still at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo?

Fred Camper
Chicago
__________________________________________________________________

Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Looking for Food/eating films
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 09:43:43 -0500
From: Tony Conrad
To: Experimental Film Discussion List
CC: Fred Camper

Dear Fred,

Thanks so much for your sizzling-hot remembrance of that Millennium show! I am completely impressed that your recollection is almost eidetic in its detail; almost my sole amendation would be to change 'flattening' to 'casting', a slippage that could even be attributable to a failure of elocution on my part at the time.

That series of works was intended at its core to play out an endgame in the (then doggedly ongoing) progressive exploration of the formal boundaries of cinema. However, cinema was not ready for concessions, then or now, as you know. So the films went down instead as jocular footnotes, much in the way that the Fluxfilms were never carefully absorbed into the canon of alternative media art.

In a decade or so, when "celluloid" is finally tipped over the brink into blind obsolescence, perhaps these histories will be capped off, like the "Pickled Films", and treated to a set of terminal exegeses.

Till then!

Yours,
Tony Conrad
Department of Media Study
University at Buffalo, SUNY
__________________________________________________________________

Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Looking for Food/eating films
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 17:40:36 -0600
From: Fred Camper
To: Experimental Film Discussion List , Tony Conrad

Dear Tony,

Thanks much for your response. I guess I remembered that show so well because I liked it a lot, and also because it was certainly pretty different than the average show at Millennium. Now that I know more about Fluxus and other related movements than I did then, I appreciate the show more, even though it doesn't strike me as exactly a Fluxus event, nor did you claim it was.

It's funny, I was sure you had said "flattening," but I don't claim a perfect memory here.

Your comments on the show from the perspective of the present were fascinating. I agree, in a way: the exploration that that show of yours took could have easily become one of the main lines of avant-garde filmmaking, but it did not, and so it might now be read as a "jocular footnote," though I think it was, and is even in the recounting, much more interesting than that, though jocular all the while too.

Was that the only presentation of those works? Do the films, projectible and not, still exist? Would you ever consider doing the presentation again?

Best wishes,

Fred Camper
Chicago

Tony Conrad wrote:
>
> Dear Fred,
>
> Thanks so much for your sizzling-hot remembrance of that Millennium
> show!....
__________________________________________________________________

Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Looking for Food/eating films
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 00:37:08 -0500
From: Tony Conrad
To: Fred Camper , Experimental Film Discussion List

--On Monday, March 12, 2001, 5:40 PM -0600 Fred Camper wrote:

> Dear Tony,
>
> Thanks much for your response. I guess I remembered that show so well
> because I liked it a lot, and also because it was certainly pretty
> different than the average show at Millennium. Now that I know more
> about Fluxus and other related movements than I did then, I appreciate
> the show more, even though it doesn't strike me as exactly a Fluxus
> event, nor did you claim it was.

NO--WAS NOT; BUT PERHAPS BORE SOME EMPATHIC RELATION TO THE MACIUNAS ETHOS...

>
> It's funny, I was sure you had said "flattening," but I don't claim a
> perfect memory here.

AH, WELL.....WHO IS RIGHT; WHO IS WRONG..... IF THERE WERE ONLY A TAPE! ---BUT WAIT; WHERE...JUST A MINUTE...HMMMM....OH WELL....

>
> Your comments on the show from the perspective of the present were
> fascinating. I agree, in a way: the exploration that that show of yours
> took could have easily become one of the main lines of avant-garde
> filmmaking, but it did not, and so it might now be read as a "jocular
> footnote," though I think it was, and is even in the recounting, much
> more interesting than that, though jocular all the while too.

BUT THE CONCEPTION WAS TO CONSUMMATE THE "A-G" IN AN APOTHEOSIS OF FORMAL OMPHALOSCOPSIS!

> Was that the only presentation of those works? Do the films, projectible
> and not, still exist? Would you ever consider doing the presentation
> again?

1. NO, THERE WERE MANY. 2. OF COURSE. 3. MAYBE THEIR TIME HAS PASSED. THEN AGAIN;.....

>
> Best wishes,
>
> Fred Camper
> Chicago
>
>
>

Tony Conrad
__________________________________________________________________

Subject: Re: Looking for Food/eating films
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 16:50:52 -0800
From: MWP
Reply-To: Experimental Film Discussion List
To: FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM

So why doesn't somebody simply make a film itself out of edible materials? We have edible panties, why not edible film? With organic dyes and such applied to something like a clear gelatin-base it might even look pretty good, and would give the audience the chance to eat the art after they view it (the projector making it nice and warm!), thus incorporating both its spirit and body into themselves, which is many an artist's dream.

The Fugal Gourmet

Fred Camper wrote:

> Tony Conrad has a bunch of food films that I saw 25 years ago....
__________________________________________________________________

Subject: Re: Looking for Food/eating films

Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 10:00:56 +0100
From: Doc Heure Exquise Manu
Reply-To: Experimental Film Discussion List
To: FRAMEWORKS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM

Hello,

Maybe you can see "Messe pour un corps" by the french performer Michel Journiac. In "Messe pour un corps", Michel JOURNIAC organizes a real religious service and makes the participants receive communion with a black pudding made from his own blood.

"MESSE POUR UN CORPS" by CAIRASCHI Gérard, JOURNIAC Michel, ROUSSOPOULOS Carole
1975 - FRANCE - 21 min
availaible from Heure Exquise ! - France ww.exquise.org / exquise@nordnet.fr