Monthly Archives: July 2009

Northwest Film Forum Needs Your Help

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Northwest Film Forum [logo]The Northwest Film Forum, Seattle’s leading cinematheque, today sent out an urgent fundraising request.

All they’re asking for is a $10 donation (the price of one movie ticket or a six-pack of decent beer) — though of course if you’re so inclined more than that is totally cool, too.  They need to raise $70,000 by August 15, or make significant cuts to their core programs.

You can use this secure online donation form (there’s an “Other Amount” box at the bottom of the membership options), send in a check via snail mail, or drop by the place personally and hand someone a Hamilton.

In a message sent to 10,000 email subscribers and posted online (here, here, and here), NWFF Executive Director Lyall Bush said that income for the year was down by 30%.  “While we remain scrappy and imaginative in tough spots, this time is different,” he wrote.  “We are looking at real changes…”

The programs that Bush said could be “put on hold, shelved, or stopped altogether” are among their most important ones:

  • classes
  • filmmaker support
  • equipment rental
  • special screenings
  • film series

Readers and friends know that I’m fond of the Northwest Film Forum, which was founded in 1995.  It’s a remarkable and really pretty uniquely robust cinematheque.  In a huge, 8,000 square foot space it’s a combination art house movie theater, film university, post-production facility, rental house, distributor, producer, lending library, creative cauldron, and host for creative house guests.

As a volunteer there for five years or so, I’ve gotten a sense of just how much the Northwest Film Forum offers to the community.  The movie theaters alone are a huge asset to Seattle, but behind the screen there’s a constant flow of filmmakers, collaborators, instructors, students, people of all ages, all working on making and doing stuff.  Meanwhile, there’s working relationships with the other film organizations in town, the city government, numerous embassies and consulates, PBS, colleges and universities, and film institutions around the world.

Just get a load of this:

  • Two fully equipped theaters, both running (and hosting) shows most of the time
  • Constantly hosting screenings with directors and filmmakers
  • Production and funding support for local and regional filmmakers — for everything from shorts to features
  • Distribution support for original shorts and features
  • Film festivals, including the Seattle Children’s Film Festival and Local Sightings, devoted to northwest filmmakers
  • Special series, both bringing in traveling roadshows and producing their own
  • Commissioning and supporting new scores for historic silent films
  • Meeting space
  • Office rentals for local film groups and festivals
  • Really cheap equipment rentals for everything you need to light and shoot video, 16mm, or Super 8 film
  • Digital, 16mm, and Super 8 editing facilities, also incredibly cheap
  • Constant workshops of every description — production, writing, editing, animation, equipment training, digital media training, filmmaking workshops for kids…
  • Member discounts at local labs and rental houses
  • Doing stuff like bringing in director Gus Van Sant to work with local crews
  • A really pretty excellent private lending library of books, scripts, VHS, and film
  • One of the only places left where you can rent actual film projectors — and for cheap
  • A telecine for transferring 16mm or Super 8 film to video
  • Providing a very accommodating film venue and locus for groups like STIFF (Seattle’s True Independent Film Festival), Third Eye Cinema, The Sprocket Society, Three Dollar Bill Cinema, and many others.

Any city in the world would be lucky to have a film arts organization like that, and some do.  But I’m tellin’ ya, it’s really not that many.

I encourage you to please consider taking three minutes and 10 bucks to help support this important Seattle arts institution.

We now return you to the regularly scheduled interweb, already in progress.

Alexandre Alexeieff DVD Forthcoming from Facets

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The Animation of Alexeieff - cover of the Facets DVDI’m thrilled to serendipitously learn that July 28 late November, 2009 will see the US release of The Animation of Alexeieff, a new DVD from the good folks at Facets Video in Chicago (who also recently brought us the phenomenal and long-overdue Lawrence Jordan Album four-DVD set).

Update: release of this Facets edition was delayed for four months, for reasons I’ve not been able to learn.  Back in July, Scarecrow Video even had it on their “Coming Next Week” white board…and the following week they listed it as “delayed,” and no one there seemed to know why.  This happened again earlier in November.  At this writing (Nov. 28, 2009), the Facets web site actually lists it as “in stock,” so let’s hope they’re actually shipping, too. I’m also disappointed to see that, now that it’s finally coming out, the single-disc release has a whopping $40 price tag.

This is a North American-market re-release of the stunning (and out-of-print) 2005 French release, Alexeïeff: Le Cinéma Epinglé, issued by Cinédoc in Paris.  It brings together five theatrical shorts and 18 commercials made by Alexandre Alexeieff and his partner Claire Parker, using their remarkable invention, the pinscreen.  Also included are a couple documentaries, notably the excellent workshop film The Pinscreen, made by Norman McLaren when he brought Alexeieff and Parker to the National Film Board of Canada to do master classes and create some new work there.  (That film can also be found in the mammoth but essential DVD box set, Norman McLaren: The Masters Edition.)

One of the NFBC filmmakers inspired by those sessions was Jacques Drouin, who went on to create a number of films using the pinscreen.  His 1976 film, Mindscreen (Le Paysagiste), is also included on this DVD.

Additional enticements and goodies are a photo gallery of Alexeieff’s gorgeous engravings and illustrations, as well as an illustrated booklet.

My discovery of the pending Facets release couldn’t have been timelier — I was just about to convince myself to drop a 100 bucks (!) on a second-hand copy of the original French edition, which had just surfaced on eBay.  Alexeieff and Parker’s films are almost completely unique in film history, and I’ve been a huge fan since I first saw Le Nez as part of a “surrealism in film” program of shorts in Chicago during the late 1980s. Beautiful, otherworldly and, yes, rather surreal.

Needless to say, I recommend this DVD very highly.  (I’ve watched the original French edition, which can be rented from Scarecrow Video here in Seattle.) The only disappointment is that more of their theatrical shorts aren’t represented, and that their masterful prologue to Orson Welles’ The Trial (1962) is also omitted.

Here’s some additional stills to whet your appetite:

A still from Alexeieff and Claire's 'En Passant' (1943)

This still from En Passant (1943) shows the incredible amount of detail possible with the pinscreen, not to mention the breathtaking skill Alexeieff and Parker brought to bear.  Now imagine animating the above image, shifting one metal pin at a time…24 times per second.  Astonishing.

A still from Alexeieff and Claire's 'A Night on Bald Mountain' (1933)

One of the many darkly evocative images from their first pinscreen film, Nuit sur le mont Chauve (Night on Bald Mountain) (1933), set to the composition by Mussorgsky.

A still from Alexeieff and Claire's 'Le Nez' (1963)

From Le Nez (The Nose) (1963), an interpretation of the short story by Gogol. The wavy horizontal pattern is part of the original image and was itself animated during portions of the film.

From the pinscreen prologue to Welles' 'The Trial' (1962)

Alexeieff and Parker’s pinscreen prologue to Orson Welles’ The Trial (1962), above, is not included on the forthcoming Facets DVD, but makes that film even more worth renting that it would be on its own considerable merits.