7 DUDLEY CINEMA at THE TALKING STICK, 1411 Lincoln Blvd, Venice CA 90291, 310-450-6052, free admission, 6-10pm For updates visit: http://www.myspace.com/sevendudleycinema, info 310-306-7330 MON, June 15. REJOYCE: McLUHAN AS MOVING IMAGE ART - 6-10pm - Celebrate James Joyce's Bloomsday with live performances and ultra rare film clips of Joyce and Marshall McLuhan, whose translation of FINNEGANS WAKE reveals the cloned ESP of global theater probing. venicewake.org
MON, July 20. POCKET FULL OF SOUL: PFOS 45 ('09, 45min) at 8:30pm - This comprehensive documentary explores the mythos surrounding the harmonica and the unique relationships forged between the instrument and its players. Filmmaker Marc Lempert (in person) delivers an unvarnished and exciting look at the harmonica's rich subculture, it's versatility across music genres, and its subsequent ubiquity. Get up close&personal with the famous, infamous, and totally unknown players as a universal tale of passion, creativity, and musical celebration unfolds. Featuring interviews with John Popper (of Blue Traveler), James Cotton, Magic Dick (of J. Geils Band), Robert Klein, Peter Madcat Ruth, Lee Oskar (of WAR) and man y more. Narrated by Huey Lewis. Plus: ROLLINGMAN ('00, 12m) at 8pm - Mike Sakamoto combines harsh black and white images to portray the dead-end existence of a man living alone in a shabby house."Besides being funny and even a little touching, Rollingman offers a vision of "a way out" that transforms the human condition without attempting to transcend it."-Bill Krohn, Senses ofCinema. Preshow 6pm with live music and rare blues films.
MON, Aug 17. FORGOTTEN TENOR (‘94, 136m) at 7:30pm- Abraham Ravett's experimental documentary pays tribute to bebop saxophonist WARDELL GRAY, who was a contemporary of Count Basie and Charlie Parker. Ravett is interested in why some figures are inscribed in history and others are not, but he is primarily concerned with the process of investigating a person's life--the attempt to construct a vision of a figure from incomplete and fragmentary documents. Wardell Gray's story is pieced together from both willing and reluctant witnesses, film snippets, personal letters, home movies and photographs, and a number of in credible recordings. The inevitable gap between a life lived and a life remembered is suggested by Ravett's use of animation and recreations. Whether trying to connect with a potential interviewee by phone, examining a photograph, or explaining the economics of avant-garde productions, Ravett reveals the storie s behind oral histories. His portrait not only provides a face to the sound, it evokes a sense of what it is like to be a black musician in postwar America. With Clark Terry, Art Farmer, Teddy Edwards. 6pm- rare Jimmy Smith & Jaki Byrd films.
MON, Sept 21. RiP ('08, 90m) Created over a period of six years, RiP features the collaborative work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this, the world’s first20open-source documentary, about copyright and Remix Culture. Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of intellectual property in the Information Age, mixing up the mediascape and shattering the wall between users and producers. Gaylor’s doc features artists like mash-up master and Illegal Art exponent Girl Talk, who blends samples of existing music into new songs. Engaging interviews with additional creators, lawmakers, companies, and consumers are interspersed with animation, collage, and archival footage in this righteous rave-up. 6pm- Girl Talk Imitators Dance Contest & Experimental Music.
MON, Oct 19. BLACK PANTHER FILMS - 8pm - Rare films on the powerful movement which had provocative rhetoric, militant posture and cultural & political flourishes that permanently altered the contours of American Identity. With the Ten-Point program “What We Want, What We Believe,” they called for "Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace", and captured in uncompromising language the collective economic and political grievances articulated by black radical and many black liberals since the 1930s. 6pm-rare James Brown, Sly Stone and P-Funk films.
MON, Nov 16. LYNNE SACHS & MARK STREET'S GARDEN OF VERSES. 6-10pm. From archival snips of an educational film on the weather to cine-poems in full blossom, New York film "avant-gardeners" Sachs & Street cultivate an evening of cinematic seeds and mordant vines. Short films reap audio-visual crops from the fertile soil of the filmmakers' florid imaginations. In this mulch of visual ruminations on nature's topsy-turvy shakeup of our lives, they ponder a city child's tentative excavation of the urban forest,winter wheat, and the great American deluge of the 21st Century.
MON, Dec 21. MOVING IMAGE ART - 7:30pm. Probing survey of cinema from pioneer Melies and experimentalist Vertov to maverick Welles and preservationist Henri Langlois. 6pm: rare Motown film of The Temptations.
MON, Jan 18. SPONTO FILM FEST - 6-10pm. Celebrate films and videos of the otherwordly happenings at the legendary Venice Art Gallery- SPONTO GALLERY &Venice History. From the infamous Dumpster Diving Fashion Show to the Fool's Fest (with Ginger Smith and Kahlil Sabbagh) to Jazz Funk Fest to Summer Solstice shows, experience the essence of Spontofication Rituals in art, music, poetry and the freedom of creativity.