BroSide (aka The Brother Side of the Wake) Reactions
We have received these reactions from The Brother Side of the Wake test screenings in California, Michigan and New York.
We welcome your thoughts, and please consider booking this performance film.
Thanks,
Gerry Fialka
*** I recently had two 15-year-old students in a class at Echo Park Film Center. They told me they found out about the film center when they came to seeThe Brother Side of the Wake and that it was the BEST FILM THEY HAD EVER SEEN. So way to go on capturing the imaginations of the new generation! - Lisa Marr, one of the directors of Echo Park Film Center
***A painful experience in which I felt a rebirth, And the world was seen anew. - Nicole Macdonald
*** Fialka's film, The Brother Side of the Wake, challenges the paradigm of faux humanitarianism. It becomes a meta-meditation on the nature of documentary practice. With each step out into the big bad world, the potpourri of human beings Fialka meets and questions on Venice Beach, we look into our own binary contradictions. It made me laugh, gasp, and think deeply. - Lynne Sachs
***Appreciated your interactive methods with the audience, engaging them in the presentation. Became immersed with the characters you met and chatted with in Venice. Felt the anarchic, free spirited character of the place. - Cary Abrams
***Thanks! The screening was so much fun and made me feel so optimistic for days afterward. - Joan Piekny
*** I don't think I've ever been so completely in the head of a filmmaker while watching his film. The Brother Side of the Wake is a feverish dream, wacky, original and deliciously unexpected. Life gave the irrepressible Gerry Fialka lemons, and he gave us a discursive and fresh performance and film. - Mark Street
***We LOVED it! The film and experience were just what we were hoping for, lots of fun, lots of neurons firing, and lots of Venice Beach. - Suzanne Lipkin & Richard Exelbert
***Pure lemony joy. Marcel Duchamp would be proud. He'd probably make a cameo if he could. - Sean Kenny
***Broside is amazing. What a masterpiece. The way the filmmakers wove the narrative and experimental together is pure art. I liked the relationship that the interview questions had with the abstract images. As far as the questions they asked, my general answer is that this film proves that it is the "now" moment where everything exist and the other side of the wind is the mirror by which we see our own mortality. However just as the journey is the "now" moment, the destination is a play thing we learn as children but really not necessary. The most important reason people exist is to serve the afflicted and comfort those in pain through the talents we are born with such as art and teaching. Each in our own way as the sun sets reminding us it is a journey. - Stuart Fordyce
*** I think BroSide is a Herculean effort. It is uncompromisingly executed. - MariBeth Dougherty
*** BroSide reminded me of another way to spell the word "Brother," that is "BrothHer." The "Her Side" evokes Oja Kodar in The Other Side of the Wind. BroSide also recalls the gleeful destruction of film, once earlier portrayed by Harpo Marx - Larry Zabawski
*** Most of the time art never lives up to the promise of what PR says it’s about, or what other reviewers say about it. But that’s just me. - Gary Guttman
and more:
"It let me think on my own."
"Enthralling"
"recalls the etymology of the word "whimsy" which came from "to let the eyes wander," and "to flutter."
"I love BroSide. It took me places (the other side?). I would have titled it: Birth of a Universe or If Life Gives You Lemons, Make Experimental Film"
"Too hippy for me"
"Meta-Mystical Mash-up of Len Lye and Chronicle of a Summer"
"It's a nature film ... the new nature."
"I could feel the materiality. It evoked both the Dada and Fluxus art movements."
"This is why I left LA"
AND here is reactions to the preview trailer https:/ /www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBj0UdpFEWo :
Richard Modiano, poet and former Executive Director of Beyond Baroque Foundation, declared: "Terrific BroSide trailer. Chris Burden redux, by which I mean that while watching a late night movie on TV in the 1970s one of the commercials was by Chris Burden, not publicizing any product, but making a statement about art that was totally avant-garde. I thought I was dreaming, but sure enough it was real, and BroSide brings it up to date."
"Oh my god, I love it. It’s the perfect preview because I am not exactly sure what will come next, but sure as hell, I wanna see it. Also, this is SO INFORMATIVELY complex and intricate. My mind is a buzz. When will the finished version be out?" - Evan Meaney
"The BroSide trailer reminds me of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, Glenn O'Brien's TV Party, Lydia Lunch, Paul McCarthy, and Chris Burden. - filmmaker, author, philosopher Francisco Ricardo
the Laughtears.com demake of the prequel for 2001. Probe why Kubrick declared: "To convolute McLuhan, in 2001, the message is the medium."
The Brother Side of the Wake (aka BroSide) BroSide is a new experimental documentary about the people of Venice, California. It probes the question that Orson Welles explores in The Other Side of the Wind: "Is the journey more important than the destination?" By evoking the comedies of The Little Rascals, BroSide conjures the playful and psychic effects of direct cinema, abstract animation, and films within films.
As directed by Gerry Fialka, BroSide is a "living organism" that involves audiences in the call-and-response ritual, much like a communal, out-loud reading of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. BroSide empowers the audience to have fun, and inspires new questions. BroSide was made in various formats including 16mm, Super 8mm, Pixelvision, digital video, cell phones and hand-painted celluloid. The imaginative soundtrack merges binaural beats, and Vaporwave into jazz-funk-blues-classical music-scapes. Bruno Kohfield-Galeano's stroboscopic cinematography and hypnotic editing propels the viewer onto an immersive magic carpet ride.
You see what you look for.
Featuring the people of the Venice Boardwalk, Treeman, Jen the Hooper, DeDe Audet, Solomon Snakeman, Joe the Limo Driver, Suzy Williams, Brad Kay, Alita Arose, Dave Healey and Jeff Michalski.
+++++
PLEASE ask about the workshop on LIVE CINEMA from Gerry Fialka, and read the essay https://laughtears.com/liveCinema.htmlThe Fuse Family Four Films by Laughtears.com conjures neologisms like homeless hagiographical ethnofiction. These new genres of performative cinema evoke ethnofiction reality, ethnographic docufiction and having fun with all media. The "quadtandra" of The Brother Side of the Wake, The Mother Side of the Wake, The Sister Side of the Wake, and The Father Side of the Wake evoke the aedificium (from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco), which has 4 towers at 4 cardinal points. This fourness continues
http://laughtears.com/iwantmyRIA.htmlFuse Family For Four (aka FF44) - "I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue on the side-lines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the somnambulists." - Marshall McLuhan
ANd heArz sum of the unedited quotes:
*** "Regarding The Brother Side of the Wake, I really had NO idea what to expect. For me there was this awesome inversion in which what I thought I would come away with was really only the curtain behind which I found something far more psychological and compelling. The piece offered us the chance to peek into your mind by way of the people who inspire and provoke you, the potpourri of human beings you happen to meet on the streets of Venice Beach. Through your questions to them you give us the chance to know you in an ever deeper and more evocative way. In this way, your film becomes a meta-meditation on the nature of documentary practice. You challenge the paradigm of faux humanitarianism, of selflessness and ask us to question the muse that pushes us into the field beyond and within. With each step out into the big bad world, we must also look into our own binary set of contradictions, accept the Apollonian and Dionysus in us, face our bundle of internal contradictions. Thanks for making me laugh, gasp and think so deeply." - Lynne Sachs
"The trailer reminds one not only of Chris Burden (sans rifle) but brings me to the 1980's in my downtown NYC days, captured in good form on the Yang side by Glenn O'Brien's TV Party series (seen only in NYC local cable), as as we said, Lydia Lunch, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Vivienne Dick, Pat Place, or on the Yin side by Jim Jarmusch's Permanent Vacation, or between both Yin and Yang, Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, among others. Here in California, no question: Paul McCarthy all the way." - Francisco J. Ricardo