PRIMARY FILM SOURCES
Video
Data Bank
112 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL 60603
312-345-3550
http://www.vdb.org/
Canyon
Cinema
145 Ninth Street, Suite 260
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-626-2255
http://www.canyoncinema.com/
The
Film-Makers' Cooperative
c/o The Clocktower Gallery
108 Leonard Street, 13 floor
New York, NY 10013 USA
212-267-5665
http://www.film-makerscoop.com/index.html
Facets
Multi-Media, Inc.
1517 W. Fullerton Ave.
Chicago, IL 60614
773-281-9075
http://www.facets.org/asticat
Chicago
Filmmakers
5243 N. Clark Street
Chicago IL 60640
773-293-1447
http://www.chicagofilmmakers.org/
OTHER FILM SOURCES
Appalshop
91 Madison
Whitesburg, KY 41858
606-633-0108
http://www.appalshop.org/
Center
for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310-839-5722
http://www.clui.org/
Documentary
Educational Resources
101 Morse Street
Watertown, MA 02472
800-569-6621
http://www.der.org/
FolkStreams
540-592-3701
http://www.folkstreams.net/homepage.html
Media
Rights
104 W. 14th St., 4th Fl.
NYC 10011
646-230-6288
http://www.mediarights.org/
Third
World Newsreel
545 Eighth Avenue, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10018
212-947-9277
http://www.twn.org/index.html
Women
Make Movies, Inc.
462 Broadway, Suite 500WS
New York, NY 10013
TEL 212.925.0606
http://www.wmm.com/index.htm
Bullfrog
Films
P.O. Box 149
Oley, PA 19547
610-779-8226
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/index.html
High
Plains Films
P.O. Box 8796
Missoula, MT 59807
406-728-0753
http://www.highplainsfilms.org/index.html
First
Run Icarus Films
32 Court St, 21st Flr
Brooklyn, NY 11201
718-488-8900
http://www.frif.com/index.html
Electronic
Arts Intermix
535 West 22 St., 5th floor
New York, NY 10011
212-337-0680
http://www.eai.org/eai/index.jsp
KINO
International
333 W. 39th St., Ste. 503
New York, NY 10018
800-562-3330
http://www.kino.com/
Anthology
Film Archives
32 2nd Avenue
New York, NY 10003
212-505-5181
http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/index2.html
Peripheral
Produce
P.O. Box 40835
Portland, Oregon 97240
http://www.rodeofilmco.com/peripheralproduce/
MISC RESOURCES
Re: experimental
nature films
http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw22/0570.html
Re: Landscape
films
http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw15/0163.html
The Southern
Humanities Media Fund
http://www.southernmediafund.org/productions.html
Wild Spaces,
Endangered Places
The 1996 Virginia Film Festival Program
http://www.vafilm.com/1996/program.html
http://www.vafilm.com/1996/films.html
Making Sense
of Place > Phoenix: The Urban Desert
http://www.makingsenseofplace.org/
Appalachians:
A Contemporary Cultural Perspective
Kennedy Museum of Art, Ohio University
August 26 – December 23, 2003
http://www.ohiou.edu/museum/appalachians/film.htm
Alien2 /
Video Library and Screening
A Project by Heidrun Holzfeind
Swiss Institute - Contemporary Art
http://www.swissinstitute.net/Exhibitions/2002_Lounge_Specials/Alien2.htm
The Santa
Cruz Documentary Film and Video Festival > Stories of Travel
http://www.scdff.org/programs/oct_6/
The Santa
Cruz Documentary Film and Video Festival > In the Face of Globalization
http://www.scdff.org/programs/oct_3/index.html
new americans
/ new america
october 14 - 24, 1996
http://www.filmlinc.com/archive/programs/10-96/immigrant/newamerica2.htm
http://www.hi-beam.net/cgi-bin/flicker.pl
http://www.transmissionfilms.com/tf/
http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/index.html
THE ROBERT FLAHERTY FILM SEMINARS
http://www.flahertyseminar.org/rffs_past.htm
http://www.flahertyseminar.org/rffs_past_filmlist_1995.htm
1996 LANDSCAPES
AND PLACE: Wells College, Aurora, New York.
Curated by Ruth Bradley, Kathy High, and Loretta Todd.
"Land, Landscape & Reflections on Home: Ten Short Films About Place from the University of Iowa, 1972 to the Present" is an 80-minute program of short films that consider the concept of "place" -- as tangible geography in the wry "The Measurements of Oxford," as the romance of corn or cattle in the award-winning "Husks" and "Cold Cows," or as absence felt and memory transformed as in "What's Left is Wind," "The Unbelievable Act of Totally Disappearing" and "Taiwan Video Club."
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ournews/2003/october/102103matthiessen.html
http://www.uiowa.edu/~thaw/
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Garden
in the Machine A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place
Scott MacDonald
December 2001, The University of California Press
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9251.html
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9251/9251.ch01.html
"This book is MacDonald's magnum opus: it represents a deep immersion in and advocacy for independent, experimental cinema."--Patricia R. Zimmerman, author of States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies
"This is a brilliant study--learned, authoritative, and often eloquent. One reads this book with astonishment at the wealth of thoughtful and playful and provocative work that has occurred in this medium--and astonishment too that most scholars of environmental literature and nature in the visual arts have had minimal contact with independent film and video. MacDonald provides an immensely valuable, readable overview of this field, profoundly relevant to my own work and that of many other contemporary ecocritics."--Scott Slovic, editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
"The Garden in the Machine is clearly MacDonald's major work. It is very original and wide reaching especially in its analysis of the relationship of American avant-garde films to the poetry and painting of the native landscape. MacDonald's authority is evident everywhere: he probably knows more about most of the films he discusses than anyone alive."--P. Adams Sitney, author of Modernist Montage : The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature
"The Garden in the Machine reflects Scott MacDonald's career-long lived engagement with avant-garde film and filmmakers. With deep respect for the artists and a rich, wide-ranging curiosity about the cultural histories that inform these films, MacDonald makes a powerful argument for why they should be screened, taught, and discussed within the wider context of American Studies. Throughout, MacDonald analyzes themes of race, history, personal and public memory, and the central role of avant-garde films in shaping our possible futures."--Angela Miller, author of Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875
DESCRIPTION - The Garden in the Machine explores the evocations of place, and particularly American place, that have become so central to the representational and narrative strategies of alternative and mainstream film and video. Scott MacDonald contextualizes his discussion with a wide-ranging and deeply informed analysis of the depiction of place in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, painting, and photography. Accessible and engaging, this book examines the manner in which these films represent nature and landscape in particular, and location in general. It offers us both new readings of the films under consideration and an expanded sense of modern film history.
Among the many antecedents to the films and videos discussed here are Thomas Cole's landscape painting, Thoreau's Walden, Olmsted and Vaux's Central Park, and Eadweard Muybridge's panoramic photographs of San Francisco. MacDonald analyzes the work of many accomplished avant-garde filmmakers: Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, James Benning, Stan Brakhage, Nathaniel Dorsky, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Larry Gottheim, Robert Huot, Peter Hutton, Marjorie Keller, Rose Lowder, Marie Menken, J.J. Murphy, Andrew Noren, Pat O'Neill, Leighton Pierce, Carolee Schneemann, and Chick Strand. He also examines a variety of recent commercial feature films, as well as independent experiments in documentary and such contributions to independent video history as George Kuchar's Weather Diaries and Ellen Spiro's Roam Sweet Home.
MacDonald reveals the spiritual underpinnings of these works and shows how issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class are conveyed as filmmakers attempt to discover forms of Edenic serenity within the Machine of modern society. Both personal and scholarly, The Garden in the Machine will be an invaluable resource for those interested in investigating and experiencing a broader spectrum of cinema in their teaching, in their research, and in their lives.
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. The Garden in the Machine
Larry Gottheim's Fog Line, Thomas Cole's The Oxbow, J.{ths}J. Murphy's
Sky Blue Water Light Sign, Panoramas
2. Voyages
of Life
Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life, Larry Gottheim's Horizons
3. Avant-Gardens
Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'artifice, Marie Menken's Glimpse of the Garden,
Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, Stan Brakhage's The Garden of Earthly Delights,
Marjorie Keller's The Answering Furrow, Anne Charlotte Robertson's Melon
Patches, Or Reasons to Go on Living, Rose Lowder's Ecological Cinema
4. Re-envisioning
the American West
Babette Mangolte's The Sky on Location, James Benning's North on Evers,
Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Ellen Spiro's Roam Sweet Home
5. From
the Sublime to the Vernacular
Jan DeBont's Twister and George Kuchar's Weather Diaries
6. The
City as Motion Picture
The New York City Symphony: Rudy Burckhardt's New York Films, Weegee's
Weegee's New York, Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y., Marie Menken's Go! Go!
Go! Hilary Harris's Organism, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing Panorama,
the San Francisco City Film: Frank Stauffacher's Sausalito and Notes on
the Port of St. Francis, Bruce Baillie's Castro Street, Michael Rudnick's
Panorama, Ernie Gehr's Eureka and Side/Walk/Shuttle Coda--Deconstruction/Reconstruction:
Pat O'Neill's Water and Power and Eugene Martin's Invisible Cities
7. The
Country in the City
Central Park, Jonas Mekas's Walden, William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm:
Take One
8. Rural
(and Urban) Hours
Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma, Robert Huot's One Year and Rolls 1971,
Nathaniel Dorsky's Hours for Jerome, Peter Hutton's Landscape (for Manon)
and New York Portrait, Part I
9. Expulsion
from the Garden
Thomas Cole's The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden, Julie
Dash's Daughters of the Dust, Carl Franklin's One False Move, J.{ths}J.
Murphy's Print Generation and Horicon
10. Satan's
National Park
Bruce Conner's Crossroads, Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, Claude
Lanzmann's Shoah, James Benning's Deseret and Four Corners
11. Benedictions/New
Frontiers
Chick Strand's Kristallnacht, Stan Brakhage's Commingled Containers, Andrew
Noren's Imaginary Light, Leighton Pierce's 50 Feet of String, David Gatten's
What the Water Said, nos. 1-3
Appendix:
Distribution Sources for Films and Videos
Notes
Index
ABOUT THE AUTHOR - Scott MacDonald teaches at Bard College. He is currently at work on volume 4 of A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (volumes 1, 2, and 3 available from California). He is the author of Avant-Garde Film/Motion Studies (1993) and editor of Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers (California, 1995).
Read the introduction and the first chapter