HELLO
Please note that all Laughtears.com events are listed on the calendar on our website https://www.laughtears.com/ - the opening page.
This is the best source for the most updated information.
We welcome your participation. Thank you,
Gerry Fialka pfsuzy@aol.com 310-306-7330,
https://www.laughtears.com/ and http://www.venicewake.org/
Fialka bio: https://www.laughtears.com/bio.html
Lectures-Screenings https://laughtears.com/workshops_summary.html and https://laughtears.com/workshops6.html
++++++++++++
for immediate release,
contact: Gerry Fialka 310-306-7330 pfsuzy@aol.com laughtears.com
"Gerry Fialka is Los Angeles' preeminent underground film curator." - CinemaWithoutBorders.com
SUBVERSIVE CINEMA screens films at beyond baroque, 681 venice blvd, venice ca, 90291, 310-822-3006 http://www.beyondbaroque.org/ free admission
ON SELECT SUNDAYS in 2015 - Jan 18, March 1, May 10, July 5, Aug 30 and Nov 8
Experimental films to political activist cinema to lit, art, music flix to avant garde documentaries. With fiery discussion.
Call or email Gerry for specific titles. Just show up and we will get knee deep in the screening experience. Thank you,
Gerry Fialka pfsuzy@aol.com 310-306-7330,
Curator Gerry Fialka screens films as antennae of the race, broadcasting the hidden effects of what we have invented. From experimental films to political activist cinema to lit, art, music flix to avant garde documentaries, this series provokes new questions and features fiery discussions.
SUBVERSIVE CINEMA is inspired by two seminal books: Gene Youngblood's EXPANDED CINEMA and Amos Vogel's FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART. In FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: AMOS VOGEL & CINEMA 16 (2003 documentary directed by Paul Cronin), these thoughts were expressed by Scott MacDonald and Amos:
"Scott MacDonald: In Amos Vogel's Cinema 16 programming strategy, he was very conscious of Eisenstein; with the ideas of juxtaposing one kind of thing with another to create energy in the audience and maximum thought in viewers.
Amos Vogel: When I showed 5 or 6 films on the Cinema 16 program, they were always selected from the point of view how they would collide with each other in the minds of the audience. On one program there would always be an abstract film, a scientific film, an avant-garde film and a political documentary, because my intention at all times was to subvert audience expectations by showing such diverse and different films on one and the same program....
Many films shown at Cinema 16 and in my book "Film As A Subversive Art," show reality in ways that we have not previously anticipated. ... This is how I use the word "subversive" - anything that changes or undermines previous ways of thinking and feeling. Subversive art makes you look at things in a new and very different way. It disrupts. It destroys, and thereby builds up new realities and new truths."
"I have always been on the side of those who seek the truth, but I part ways with them when they think they have found it." - Luis Bunuel.
These thoughts inspire the spirit of curating films at SUBVERSIVE CINEMA. The public is invited to join us, free admission.
To screen your film at SUBVERSIVE CINEMA, contact Gerry Fialka.
THANK YOU.
Gerry Fialka
pfsuzy@aol.com
310-306-7330
Bio - https://www.laughtears.com/bio.html
https://www.laughtears.com/ and http://venicewake.org/
Gerry Fialka has been called "the multi-media Renaissance man” - LA Times, a "cultural revolutionary" - LA Weekly, and "Los Angeles' preeminent underground film curator" -CinemaWithoutBorders.com.
"Gerry Fialka is the Studs Terkel of Venice, California - nurturing active participation for common ground." - Michele Raven, Writer/Producer
"Fialka's vision is central to the identity of alternative Venice." - John O'Kane, author of Venice, CA: A City-State of Mind (which includes a whole chapter on Fialka) and editor/publisher of AMASS Magazine
"Fialka has been a mainstay of the Venice scene for over 30 years. He’s a filmmaker, a voracious event organizer who regularly hosts five multimedia events each month along with numerous special events he creates with filmmakers, authors, musicians and artists of all stripes. He has worked for the late Frank Zappa and is a musician in his own right playing guitar with the avant garde group Black Shoe Polish. He is a friend to the homeless and has more sides than a kaleidoscope. Throughout his various interests and passions runs the theme of community." - Tryg Hanson, Abbott Kinney 1st Fridays Online Magazine
"Gerry Fialka is one of the most giving impresarios that ever landed in Venice, California. He continues to fulfill Venice founder Abbott Kinney's dream of Chautauqua's influence on people. Fialka is the glue of the Venicessance. " - Jeffrey Solomon, Historian, Venicebeachwalkingtours.com
"Gerry Fialka couldn't come at a more propitious moment. One of Los Angeles' great celluloid underworld overlords, relentless cultural provocateur and filmmaker Fialka has been successfully bedeviling our popular consciousness since the late 20th century. A recognized artistic force since his early 1970s breakout as head shot-caller at the notorious Ann Arbor Film Co-op and renowned as the veteran curator of PXL THIS, Hollywood's second oldest film festival, any presentation of Fialka's work is guaranteed to rate as a mind-bending affair. ... It's a veritable stampede of visual strangeness, theoretical acrobatics and sociocultural redefinition, all delivered through the singular prism of Fialka's self-defined prime directive: 'exploration of the hidden psychic effects of human inventions.'" - Jonny Whiteside, LA Weekly
"Eminent McLuhanite, eccentric Joycean, and all-around experimental thinker, Gerry Fialka tirelessly excavates the future of art, media, and culture. His longstanding Marshall McLuhan-Finnegans Wake Reading Club in Venice is a throbbing epicenter of pulsating brainwaves and eccentric new ideas that will challenge your mind more than your weirdest university course ever could." - Peter Quadrino, Joyce scholar abuildingroam.com
"Gerry Fialka’s annual PXL THIS (the second oldest film festival in LA) is a reliably surprising and seductive round-up of recent work achieved with the PXL 2000 camera. This humble outdated “toy” continues to bring out the visionary child in filmmakers and viewers alike, and no one has kept the PXL flame burning longer or brighter than Gerry." - Michael Almereyda, director
+++++++++++++
SUBVERSIVE CINEMA ARCHIVES (we began this series at the talking stick, then moved to 212 pier,
and now we are at beyond baroque)
THURS, Sept 19: FUNK FILM NITE -
Jump back and kiss yourself with rare James Brown, Sly Stone and P-Funk
film clips. You'll be leaking all over da curb as we get knee deep in
the swamp muck of super heavy funk. Free your ass and your mind will
follow.
Thurs, Oct 24: ART FILMS -
Rare film clips on Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop and
Performance art. "The artist is the person who invents the means to
bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by
technological innovation." - McLuhan. "The creative act is not performed
by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the
external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications
and thus adds his contribution to the creative act" - Duchamp
Thurs Nov 21: EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION FILMS
we ran at 212 PIER for a few years...
2010 archive: Friday, July 23, 7-10pm: Happiness Is A Warm Projector - In a rare public appearance visionary curator Bryan Konefsky screens a selection of un-dependent films from the first five years of his Albuquerque-based festival, Experiments in Cinema. This program includes experimental documentaries, essay films, avant garde music videos, and film poems from Russia, Germany, Japan, Canada, Panama, Spain, China, South Korea, and Texas.
_________
2011 arcives-
Friday, July 29, 2011 at 7:30pm
DANNY PLOTNICK FILMS - WARTS & ALL (1986-2001, 104m) at 7pm. Danny Plotnick (in person) roared into the underground film world in the 1980s. Fueled by his love of punk & alternative culture and infected with righteous DIY spirit, he started making films that captured a similarly snarly attitude. His films were pegged as bawdy, bad-mouthed and beautiful, straddling the line between high-brow and low-brow art. It's no surprise that his work has screened at such high falutin' places like MOMA in NYC to lowlife haunts like the Golden Shower Film Festival, San Antonio, TX and mortuaries in Baltimore to the Independent Film Channel. A veritable film school in an evening. Plotnick's eleven shorts include PIPSQUEAK FOLLIES (kids gone wild), DUMBASS FROM DUNDAS (teen angst), SWINGERS' SERENADE (suburban sexual malaise), FLIP ABOUT FLIP (Ode to Flip Wilson) and more. "Plotnick's films are funny and very important." -NY Underground Film Fest.
Sept 30, 2011 -THE KINGDOM OF SURVIVAL (2011, 92 minutes) Producer Alex Hebert and Director M. A. Littler's (both in person) interdisciplinary documentary explores modern skepticism in America, challenges the status quo and uncovers provocative links between survivalist philosophy, ecumenical spirituality, radical political theory, and outlaw culture. The audience is invited into a thoughtful conversation with the likes of Prof. Noam Chomsky, Dr. Mark Mirabello, Ramsey Kanaan, and the riveting final interview with beloved author, Joe Bageant. These unique thought leaders cast a rare shadow of doubt over our most blindly accepted American traditions. By framing this journey in a cross-country travelogue, maverick writer and director M.A. Littler connects art, religion, academia, alternative media, utopianism, anarchism, globalized capitalism and radical fringe philosophy in an elegant American tapestry. The transformative visual execution of the cinematography acts as a lingering contextual reminder of the events that shaped the featured philosophies. By remaining observantly agnostic to the subjects, the film is able to honestly investigate the physical and psychological practices of diverse individuals in a conflict-ridden and confused post-modern world. In a time of brainwashing corporate and political propaganda, The Kingdom of Survival reunites us with the life-changing spirit of the outlaw highway. “We have to go within, man. We have to go within and find something that brings joy to our souls.” -Will “The Bull” Taylor. M.A. Littler is a maverick writer and filmmaker. Littler's films have been described as a strange cocktail of European auteur cinema, intellectualism and Rock 'n' Roll paired with an idiosyncratic sense of melancholy. Littler's films and writing merge the intellectual and the primitive and display an unhidden affinity for outsiders of all kinds. When asked about this, Littler says: "I'm interested in people who dance to their own beat, prototypes who fix their radio with a blow torch.
---------------------------------------------