Regional Support Network, Loop Collective and Pix Gallery present

A Gathering of Crystals
by R. Bruce Elder and Ajla Odobasic
(Canada, 2015, HD video, 139 minutes)
Introduction by Ajla Odobasic

Friday, July 21, 2017
BBQ @ 7:30pm (RSVP: rsntoronto at gmail dot com)
Screening: Outdoors @ Sunset 
Madi Piller’s backyard
140 Three Valleys Drive, Don Mills, Toronto

“Just before I began work on my book Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-Garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century, I discovered a trove of photographs depicting participants in a radical German movement, Freikörperkultur (free body culture), the early years of which constituted something of a prototype for the hippie movement that would emerge in California in the 1960s. Many of the photographs were strikingly well composed, unlike more recent images of practitioners of social nudity. But these formal rigours were responsible for only a small part of their charm. More important was this: there was something unbearably sweet about these images of groups of people who were convinced that they might alleviate modernity’s depredation of charity through exposing, completely and frankly, their vulnerable naked selves to one another. Though these social activities too soon ramified into more pernicious forms (including the body amplification taught by Hans Surén, who was admired by Adolf Hitler), Freikörperkultur did experience one brief, innocent, paradisiacal moment that reverberated through subsequent decades as an ideal. This moment was captured in these photographs. Reading texts produced by the advocates of social nudity, and especially Kehrt zur Natur zurück! Die wahre naturgemäße Heil- und Lebensweise. Wasser, Licht, Luft, Erde, Früchte und wirkliches Christentum had made me aware that early forms of Freikörperkultur were associated with a distinctive aesthetic, one that was reflected in their use of an exercise regimen the purpose of which was develop participant’s awareness of the deeply rhythmic character of fundamental coporeal energies. Similar aesthetic theories, I knew, had cosmological underpinnings, and the pagan character of the more important strains of Freikörperkultur connected these practices to such lofty metaphysical speculations. I decided to make a film that, I hoped, would reconnect these photographs to the cosmological yearnings I felt they harboured by creating a thoroughgoingly Pythagorean work. Like my previous film, whose title I borrowed from the extraordinary book I mentioned, this work is dedicated to Adolf Just.” - R. Bruce Elder

clintenns:

Beneath the Tower: Moving Images from Toronto
Selections by Clint Enns + Leslie Supnet
Friday, October 14 at 7:00PM
Schalten & Walten
Cologne, Germany

Beneath the Tower: Moving Images from Toronto is a small sampling of experimental works made in Hollywood North, by moving image artists who pursue their own personal visions. These works offer a glimpse into the formal and personal obsessions of those living in Toronto, Ontario.

Cosplay expert and visual artist Maya Ben David explores the wonderful world of vorarephilia, the erotic desire to be consumed by another creature, in We’ve Met Before while Jennifer Chan’s Austerity offers a glimpse into another form of consumption. The rich document themselves living it up while the world burns around them. In direct contrast to the selfie, There is a Woman Texting in Front of the Dark Horse by Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, Nina Könnemann, and Faraz Anoushahpour explores another form of contemporary documentation, namely, surveillance. Despite the playful and humorous nature of the work, the video reveals one of the natural tendencies of surveilling, the desire to document those who are different. Looking beyond difference towards ambiguity, Lee D'Angelo’s A Good Place to Hide creates an ideal garden in which sexual and gender fluidity can freely exist.

Some of the more formal experiments include Winston Hacking’s The Worst in You, a music video that is guaranteed to have you scratching your head and humming along at the same time; David Jones’ Temple Drone 3, an immersive audio/video experience that takes us on hypnotic journey to the centre of a VHS; and Christine Lucy Latimer’s Fraction Refrain (for Loeser, Evans & Snow), a visual poem exploring a pinball machine through a hand-made lens. The pinball machine is the prize possession of her partner Mark Loeser (an amazing Toronto-based filmmaker and an avid backgammon player) gifted to him by their friend, pinball wizard Justin Evans. Both Fraction Refrain and Dan Browne’s Poem are visual interpretations of Michael Snow’s 1957 poem simply titled Poem. While Poem uses super-impositions to formally collapse space, the space that Browne works with is his daily environment and includes an intimate portrait of his newly born son. In contrast, Phil Hoffman’s Aged is a tender portrait of his late father directly confronting topics surrounding aging and death. As poetically observed by Toronto experimental moving image icon Mike Hoolboom, Aged poses the question “how does the good son meet the end of his father?” He continues, “with golden light, and a pair of empty lawn chairs, a lone swan, long the animal familiar for this restless traveller, the body floats above the water but the head is buried beneath the surface, hunting for clues, for the mysteries of sex and death and family that are waiting there for anyone brave enough to endure them.”

Since myth can often transform into self-fulfilling prophecy, we assert that Toronto is not the centre of the Universe. As a friendly reminder, Leslie Supent and myself present works from beyond the CN tower with The Animated Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a re-make of Jeff Krulik’s cult classic shot in Maryland, Ohio and with Gary Wilson and the Austin Blind Dates, a video shot in Austin, Texas documenting performance artist Gary Wilson’s total onstage meltdown.

Working in a city that is home to the Festival of Festivals, the Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto experimental filmmakers are forced to wallow in a cinematic cesspool that inevitably informs their practice. These works respond by challenging the apparatus and by cleverly re-imagining it.

Program
Temple Drone 3, David Jones, 2016, 5 min.
Austerity, Jennifer Chan, 2015, 5 min.
We’ve Met Before, Maya Ben David, 2015, 5 min.
A Good Place to Hide, Lee D’Angelo, 2015, 1 min.
Animated Heavy Metal Parking Lot, Leslie Supnet, 2008, 2 min.
Gary Wilson and the Austin Blind Dates, Clint Enns and Paul D. Millar, 2015, 3 min.
The Worst in You, Winston Hacking, 2016, 3 min.
There is a Woman Texting in Front of the Dark Horse, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, Nina Könnemann, Faraz Anoushahpour, 2014, 7 min. (excerpt)
Fraction Refrain (for Loeser, Evans & Snow), Christine Lucy Latimer, 2014, 6 min.
Poem, Dan Browne, 2015, 4 min.

***Intermission***

Aged, Phil Hoffman, 2014, 45 min

Regional Support Network presents:
Eau de Cologne
Moving Images from Cologne, Germany

Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Doors: 7:30pm
Screening: 8pm
($5 or PWYC)
Cinecycle (129 Spadina Ave.)

Presented by Henning Frederik Malz

Program 1:
Rauschen und Brausen I - Daniel Burkhardt
First Person or Whatever - Robert Olawuyi 
Stick It - Stefan Ramirez Perez
Can’t Stop - Linda Franke
The Animal That Can Lie - David Jansen
Subroutin07 - Johannes Post & Julian Scherer
Saturn Return - Ale Bachlechner

Program 2:
How to Turn a Wooden Board into a Pressboard - Bastian Hoffmann
Subroutin01 - Johannes Post & Julian Schere
Camp Inc. ­ der Springer - Henning Frederik Malz
Could Real Today ­ - Linda Franke
Reign of Silence - Lukas Marxt
Desert Miracles - Miriam Gossing & Lina Sieckmann

Regional Support Network presents:
LONDON CALLING
Film and Video from London, England

Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Doors: 7:30pm
Screening: 8pm
($5 or PWYC)
Cinecycle (129 Spadina Ave.)

Curated by Martin Zeilinger

Deniz Johns and Karolina Raczynski - Walk No.1: ‘Fight, fight, fight back!’ (Student protests)
Deniz Johns and Karolina Raczynski - Walk No.4: 'One pound your souvenir flags, only a pound!’ (Jubilee celebrations)
Jamie Jenkinson - Corner
Jamie Jenkinson - Placemat
Jamie Jenkinson - Net storage
Jamie Jenkinson - Caledonian Road
Jamie Jenkinson - Dress Close Up
Simon Payne - +x 
Simon Payne - New Ratio
Simon Payne - Cut Out
John Smith - The Girl Chewing Gum
Neil Henderson - Candle
Zhu Xiaowen - Terminal Island
Jennifer Nightingale  - Rectangle Window, Arch Window
Jennifer Nightingale - Cornish Knitting Pattern series. Porthleven
Jennifer Nightingale - Knitting Pattern No. 1

Regional Support Network presents:
Frisco: Grit~Wit~Crit

Sunday, February 28, 2016
Doors: 7:30pm
Screening: 8pm
($5 or PWYC)
Videofag (187 Augusta Avenue)
(co-sponsored by Videofag and Other Cinema)

Curated by Craig Baldwin

Two programs of rare and diverse works from San Francisco/Oakland/Bay Area.

Program 1:
Bryan Boyce - N.E.W.A.T.A (3-D)
James Sansing -  Forsaken (16mm)
Greta Snider - Urine Man
Wago Kreider - Between Two Deaths
Gibbs Chapman - Turbine: Russian Scissors (16mm)
Jeremy Rourke - Walk Long Upon Inside Your Land
Ken Paul Rosenthal - In Light In
James Hong - Condor: A Film From California
Jeanne Finley/John Muse - Manhole #452
 
Program 2:
 Bryan Boyce - Other Basement (3-D)
Anne McGuire - Joe DiMaggio #1
Thad Povey - St. Louise (16mm)
Kerry Laitala - Nine Lives Measured in Mercury (3-D)
Tommy Becker - Song for Koko
Bryan Boyce - Walt Disney’s ‘Taxi Driver’
Soda_Jerk - Astroblack: We Are the Robots
Sam Green - lot 63, grave c
Sylvia Schedelbauer - Sounding Glass

Regional Support Network presents:
Stéphane Oystryk’s FM Youth

Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Doors: 7:30pm
Screening: 8:00pm
($5 or PWYC)
Videofag (187 Augusta Avenue)
(co-sponsored by Videofag)

Regional Support Network presents:
The Windows Collective

Sunday, November 29, 2015
Doors: 7:30pm
Screening: 8pm
($5 or PWYC)
Videofag (187 Augusta Avenue)
(co-sponsored by Videofag)

Curated by film scientist Roger D. Wilson (in person).  

A 45 minute program of films and videos providing a glimpse into the Windows Collective, an Ottawa based collective formed in 2008 with the intent to create original, accessible and unconventional art events using super 8mm, 16mm and 35mm film as the medium.

Program:
Against the Grain - Roger D. Wilson
Excerpt: Osore-Zan, Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself - Dave Johnson
Marrakesh Secret Garden - Bridget Farr
Change Over - Paul Gordon
Bones - Pixie Cram
Baked Goods for Norman - Roger D. Wilson
Summer Evening at the Drive-In - Bridget Farr
Excerpt 2 & 3: Nothing to Hyde - Dave Johnson
Skate Loop - Paul Gordon
Joan - Pixie Cram

Regional Support Network presents:
Frenkel Defects III
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Doors: 6:30pm
Screening: 7pm
($5 or PWYC)
Videofag (187 Augusta Avenue)
(co-sponsored by Videofag and Process Reversal)

Curated by Kevin Rice and Mariya Nikiforova.

Program 1:
Volga - Schleusenroth
Lichun Tseng - Flow
Guillaume Mazloum - Fractions 

Program 2:
Esther Urlus - Konrad & Kurfurst
Eric Stewart - WAKE
DISTRUKTUR - In the Traveler’s Heart
Andrés Denegri - Aula Magna
Dražen Zanchi - Split Film 100110

Regional Support Network presents:
Basement Media Festival
Monday, July 13, 8pm
Videofag (187 Augusta Avenue)
(co-sponsored by Videofag)

Organized by LJ Frezza (in person) and Nicholas Tamburo.

Program:
Yates – The Bags,
Jarrett Hayman – Me, Dancing
John Wilson – How To Remain Single
Amelia Johannes – Family Crockery (Whiteness)
Eric Stewart – Wake
Paul Turano – Toward the Flame
Jared Hutchinson – The Infinity Scroll, pt. II
Hannah Piper Burns - Outer Darkness
Henning Frederik Malz – Rest in Me
Felipe Steinberg – Tudo Referente a Frio: Rua César Bierrenbach, 181, Campinas

Regional Support Network presents:
A Thousand Things to Frame: Films by Portuguese Filmmakers
Monday, June 15, 8pm
Videofag (187 Augusta Avenue)
(co-sponsored by Videofag)

Curated by Pedro Ferreira (in person)

Program:
Mónica Baptista - Aso
Pedro Maia - Sleepless
Pedro Ferreira - Little Portugal
Ricardo Leite - IO
Rita Macedo - Implausible Things #1
Paulo Abreu - Asleep
Pedro Ferreira - Fragments #5
Pedro Maia - Plants in my Head
Mónica Baptista - Diary