Entering its tenth year in the fall 2012, Film at REDCAT plays an enthusiastic homage to different forms of cutting-edge filmmaking new and old, from here and afar. While embracing novel forms of creativity made possible by digital media, such as the disturbing, minimalist and mysterious long takes, haunted by the words of The Unabomber, of James Benning's Stemple Pass (October 1), or Thom Andersen's merging of Muybridge techniques with the form of the essay film to decipher the work of Portuguese architect Souto de Moura (November 19) - Film at REDCAT is also showcasing the work of artists dedicated to mining 16mm film's continuing expressive possibilities: Los Angeles-based Timoleon Wilkins's romantic and diaristic experiments on reversal stock (September 24); David Gatten's archival explorations of the intersection between the printed word and the moving image (October 29); and the vibrant pixilated nature compositions of French experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder (November 5). We are also happy to organize the revival screening of one of the major classic of post-colonial and experimental cinema, 23 years later, Trinh T. Minh-ha's Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (November 7).

Animation is given center stage this season, with a weekend of innovative programming from The Platform Festival, showcasing artists such as Michaela Pavlatova, Stephen Irwin, Eamonn O'Neil, internet sensation PES and pioneering stop-motion master Ladislaw Starewicz (October 26-28). Each with her distinctive, witty style, both Kathy Rose (October 8) and Laura Heit (October 15) combine experimental animation and performance, pushing further the relationship between flatness and multi-dimensionality. Film at REDCAT is also proud to partner with the UCLA Confucius Institute and host two screenings of the inaugural China Onscreen Biennial, including Animated, Golden and Restored, a program of classic animation shorts by the Wang Brothers, Te Wei and A Da, restored by the China Film Archive (October 22).

A second China Onscreen Biennial screening brings back to Los Angeles one of the most audacious auteurs of the new Chinese cinema, Zhang Yuan, with the US premiere of his latest film, Beijing Flickers (October 23).

Mon Sept 24 | 8:30 pm
Jack H. Skirball Series
$10  [members $8]

Edge Effects: Color Reversal Films by Timoleon Wilkins

The sublime 16mm films of Los Angeles experimentalist Timoleon Wilkins trace their roots to the romantic and diaristic traditions of the American avant-garde. Making a virtue of working on the edge of celluloid history, he is among a handful of cinematographers still using reversal film. His sumptuous Kodachrome and Ektachrome images resonate with an ecstatic love of color and contrast, relentlessly uncovering beauty amid the untenable realities of modern life across the Americas. Wilkins' magnum opus Drifter (1996-2010)-winner of the Ann Arbor Film Festival's prestigious Stan Brakhage Film at Wit's End Award-is "the ballad of a lone wanderer, an atmospheric anthology of places and faces." The program also includes Los Caudales (2005), The Crossing (2007) and a series of in-camera originals.

In person: Timoleon Wilkins

Funded in part with generous support from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud

"Timoleon is not only in love with film, but is the love of film." - Nathaniel Dorsky

"Simply honest, personal work of art. Escritura del alma." - Bruce Baillie (On Drifter)

"Wilkins discovers abstractions found in macro-shots of nature, and the mysterious evanescent play of light and color that hint at a higher meaning." - Robin Menken, Cinema Without Borders

"Eschewing issues of contemporary frivolity, Wilkins has grounded his work in the central concerns of experimental cinema's most productive phase: the development in cinematic terms of Romantic imagination and passion." - Brecht Andersch

Mon Oct 1 | 8:30 pm
Jack H. Skirball Series
$10  [members $8]

James Benning: The Second Cabin.
Stemple Pass
(USA, 121 mins, video)
World PremiereComposed of four static shots of the same landscape, each taken from the same angle but during different seasons, Stemple Pass is the last installment in a series of films by James Benning-following Two Cabins (2011) and Nightfall (2011)-made in relation to cabins he built in the Sierra Nevada. His two cabins are replicas: one of the retreat described by Henry David Thoreau in Walden and the other of the hideout of Ted Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber, where he fabricated explosive devices from the early 1970s to 1995. The Kaczynski cabin is seen at a distance, with smoke from the chimney indicating an unseen human presence; on the soundtrack, in between moments of pregnant silence (inhabited by natural sounds), Benning's voice can be heard struggling with Kaczynski's texts- including a very disturbing diary.

In person: James Benning

Funded in part with generous support from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud

"Over the past thirty-five years James Benning has played a central role in the history of American independent cinema by offering his rigorously structured yet wonderfully graceful films as extended meditations on the American landscape and its social and environmental histories." - Harvard Film Archive

"The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back." - James Benning.

"The Cabins Project, James Benning's tribute to the American vernacular yard art tradition, is equal parts design-build demonstration project, historical echo chamber, political statement, conceptual-outsider art installation, living museum, artists' retreat and secessionist compound. It remains, at its core, stubbornly recalcitrant and singular." - Dick Hebdige