[events-nyc] The Thing @ Pink Pony presents an evening with Jacob Burckhardt

[THE THING NYC]

The Thing @ Pink Pony Presents
an evening with Jacob Burckhardt

Pink Pony
176 Ludlow Street, NYC 10002
(between Stanton & Houston)
Tuesday December 13th, 8:30pm

Screening

I, OF THE CYCLOPS
by George Kuchar, 2006 17 minutes
A poem is read and emotions are unleashed. A book is signed and pets
pampered as this tour of talented talkers weaves its way through
Provincetown and New Jersey (with a turbulent exit in Manhattan). Enjoy
the leisurely portraits and view young and old as they chew the fat in
cozy habitats. Featuring, among others, Charles Bernstein, Susan Bee,
Mimi Gross, John Waters, and Robert Breer.
A GUIDED TOUR OF EDITH’S APARTMENT
by Jacob Burckhardt, 2010, 47 minutes
In his affecting new film, Jacob Burckhardt documents his mother, the
artist Edith Schloss, as, one after the other, and in a non-stop torrent
of commentary, she describes the many objects in her apartment,
including her own paintings and assemblages as well as works and
correspondence by her many friends, including Fairfield Porter, Giorgio
Morandi, Peter Rockwell, Meret Oppenheim, Edwin Denby, Rudy Burckhardt,
Francesca Woodman, Elliott Carter, Alvin Curran, and many others. Thanks
to her long and fascinating life, and her friendship with some of the
20th century’s most important artists, many of the pieces in her home
are of great cultural interest. But more importantly, they all embody
some sort of emotional or psychological significance for her, making
Burckhardt’s deceptively straightforward, home-movie-like film something
like his mother’s indirect autobiography, a portrait of a woman through
her own work and the belongings she’s gathered over the decades.

Jacob Burckhardt

Over the years JACOB BURCKHARDT has worked at a variety of jobs:
Blueberry picker, Steel Mill laborer, Fuller Brush man, Truck driver,
Taxi driver, camera repairman, and photographer. He has done sound
recording in North Africa and the porn industry, edited and mixed the
sound of many independent movies, and now runs a post-production sound
editing and mixing facility at Work Edit, inc. He teaches at the Cooper
Union and Pratt Institute.

He directed and produced two features: IT DON’T PAY TO BE AN HONEST
CITIZEN (1984), with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Vincent
D’Onofrio, and LANDLORD BLUES (1986). Both films screened at various
international festivals and were distributed on video, and now the
former has been released on DVD. In 1990 he began a collaboration with
the late great Mr. Fashion (AKA Frankie Lymon’s Nephew) and then Royston
Scott which has resulted in Four featurettes in the series“Black Moments
in Great History”.

Eschewing the money raising rat race, he now prefers shorts, in film and
video, where it is possible to preserve a direct relationship between
the film and the film makers, and still photography, on gelatin silver
paper. His films fall into two categories: comedies that explore the
essence of humor, and poetic documentaries concerned with texture,
atmosphere, and presence.
George Kuchar

George Kuchar ranks as one of the most exciting and prolific American
independent film- and videomakers. With his homemade Super 8 and 16mm
potboilers and melodramas of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, he became
legendary as a distinctive and outrageous underground filmmaker whose
work influenced many other artists including Andy Warhol, John Waters
and David Lynch. After his 1980s transition to the video medium, he
remained a master of genre manipulation and subversion, creating
hundreds of brilliantly edited, hilarious, observant, often diaristic
videos with an 8mm camcorder, dime-store props, not-so-special effects,
and using friends as actors and the “pageant that is life” as his
studio. He died in San Francisco on September 8th at the too-young age
of 69, and is already sorely missed.

“Makin’ movies, see, sometimes you see a very beautiful person. And the
first thing that comes to my mind is, I want to make a movie of that
person. ’Cause I like puttin’ gauzes — ah, cheap, black cloth on the
lens with a rubber band — and creating these, what look like 1940s
movies, or movies of a beautiful Hollywood style, and blowing these
people up bigger than life and making them into gods and goddesses. And
I think in the movies that’s a wonderful way of pushing them on the
public, and infusing the public with great objects of desire, and
dreams, and things of great beauty. Living human beings of beauty.”
George Kuchar