LIST TWO: WORKSHOPS - LECTURES - SCREENINGS
Gerry Fialka 310-306-7330 pfsuzy@aol.com laughtears.com

Also visit: Fialka Workshop List One https://www.laughtears.com/workshops.html for BIO, writings and more info on Pixelvision, Documentary and Art workshops.

Fialka's Workshops List Two:

"Fialka's workshops are in depth communication of something extremely elusive - the history of the unimaginable - and his lively interpretation renders it useful." - William Farley, Award-winning filmmaker 

"Fialka's cool questions are right at the heart of all my work. By far the best interview I have ever been treated to." - Ondi Timoner, only two time Sundance Grand Jury winner. Fialka's MESS Interview Series https://www.laughtears.com/mess.html

"Gerry Fialka is a cultural revolutionary." - Michael Simmons, LA Weekly
 
"Gerry Fialka’s lecture on ‘The Art of Fakery in Experimental & Documentary Filmmaking’ passionately explores the art and science of media/ted truth in popular culture by way of the historical and contemporary, independent underground. With the evil brilliance of a mad scientist, the sly showmanship of a carnival barker, and the radical politics of a media ecologist, Gerry both disarms and re-stocks our psychic coffers with weapons for our culture’s war against the imagination.
"From the outset, Gerry’s presentation embodied the very substance of his thesis; that filmmakers are essentially fakirs, performing feats of endurance & magic through embracing contradictions. In deference to Goddard’s quote that, “All fiction films are documentaries of actors acting,” Fialka introduced his self-acknowledged 'playshop' by humbly stating, “A professor is someone who speaks to other people in their sleep.”  He then nimbly and skillfully skewered this 'ironic truism’ with his playful intelligence, acerbic wit, and frequent round robin quizzing of those in attendance.  
"Unfailingly optimistic in an age when truth in the media is increasingly less than self-evident, Gerry copiously cited constructive quotes from Marshall McLuhan to Picasso to John Cage to TS Elliot (amongst so many others). I particularly appreciated the pointed hilarity of his wordplay; "'Diaper' is 'repaid' backwards" as a precursor to his higher ethos that, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” Words to measure truth by, if ever." -KenPaul Rosenthal, Filmmaker & Instructor, Academy of Art University, City College of San Francisco

18- DREAM AWAKE - HOW JAMES JOYCE INVENTED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK - Paramedia-ecologist Gerry Fialka's challenging interactive workshop probes how Joyce's 1939 book/epic collage/meta-narrative film FINNEGANS WAKE (and Marshall McLuhan's Menippean Satirized translation of it) presaged experimental & political activist cinema. How did the WAKE influence Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, John Cage & Peter Greenaway? How & why does the WAKE tell the history of everything that ever happened and will happen? Why did Joyce hang out with Masons and reveal their secrets? Why did the British secret police study the WAKE? How did the WAKE invent MK-ULTRA, the CIA's mind control program? How does the WAKE write a detailed history of the future? How and why did Joyce anticipate the Facebook-Google-Wiki-Twitter-YouTube-Blogosphere swirl (social networking), TMZ, Girl Talk and whatever comes after the Internet? Harry Smith, who claimed Giordano Bruno invented cinema, stated that the function of film viewing is to put people to sleep - dreaming awake. With ultra-rare film clips. ReJoyce interconnecting Finneganese "funny funereels," "allnights newseryreel," "they leap looply, looply, as they link to light," "cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript," and "a ... riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed." Fun for all at Finnegans Wake. Premieres on Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009 at 7:30pm at Delancey Street Theater, 600 Embarcadero St, SF, 94107.  http://www.sfcinematheque.org/#/calendar/200910130/ 

19- THE REEL WRITERS' JOURNEYS - Film historian Fialka delves deeply into James Joyce and Marshall McLuhan's interconnections with cinema storytelling. He probes Christopher Vogler's The  Writer's Journey and its roots in Joseph Campbell. How do McLuhan's percepts of "effects precede causes," "sense-ratio-shifting," and "rearviewmirrorism" relate to screenwriting? Can we transcend William Goldman's axiom "Screenplays are structure"? Explore how video game writing may bypass screenwriting "truths" and get back to storytelling. Survey the screenwriter as auteur from Preston Sturges to the Coen Brothers, Lillian Hellman to Elaine May, Nunnally Johnson to Charlie Kaufman, Billy Wilder to Kurt Vonnegut, Francis Ford Coppola to Rod Serling, Ernst Lubitsch to Paul Schrader, Dorothy Parker to Terrance Malick, and trends like Dogma and Mumblecore. Why did D.W. Griffith carry around a Charles Dickens' book in his back pocket? What about the Robert McKee and Syd Field "systems"? Examine these two quotes: "Cinema is much too rich a medium to be left to storytellers"-Peter Greenaway and "I believe in beginnings, middles and ends, but not necessarily in that order"-Jean Luc Godard. Fialka covers Steinbeck, Thorton Wilder & Raymond Chandler's partnerships with Hitchcock, whose favorite joke was: Two goats are eating 35mm film, and one says to the other "The book was better."

20- REALLY THE BLUE LIGHT - Combining art, music, science, literature and avant garde film, Art Historian/Agitprop Artist Fialka interconnects Wilhelm Reich, Tesla, Derek Jarman, Leni Riefenstahl and more. Fialka illuminates the blue light lyrical patterns in songs by Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry and a certain avant-ga rde composer, who questioned language. Delve deep into interrelations from Picasso's Blue Period to St. Elmo's Fire (Melville & Poe) to Walter Mosley's Blue Light book to William Irwin Thompson percepts to James Turrell's Sojourn, which is a glowing blue rectangle of projected light that hovers in dark space teasing the viewer into the "permanence" of its immateriality. The life source color is blue, thusly art, science and nature converge into synesthesia. Tesla regarded heightened creativity as radiating blue light. Reich said all living creatures radiate blue. Kandinsky insisted that blue represented the transcendent infinite.
 
21- GOT P.E.P. ? ( Poetry, Experimental Film and Performance Art) - Aphoristic thinker Fialka mercurially plays with the meta-language of James Joyce and Marshal McLuhan, who anticipated French poststructuralist theory. Fialka's sharp wit provokes the interconnections of the Symbolists, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Examine the rascality retrieval of Edgar Allen Poe to Man (Cine-poem) Ray to Curtis Harrington, who transformed Poe into cinema. These artforms expand the notion of reality that includes both the external world and imagination. How is the interior dialogue the essence of the human condition? How do these three forms cross-over and combine the form vs content issues? Review Vaudeville, Dada and Bauhaus roots in P.E.P., and the developments of Jack Smith, Alan Kaprow, John Cage, Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley, who articulated "You can get with it if you want to."

22- SLEEPIN' THRU SEX, DEATH & TECHNOLOGY - Poet/politician Fialka embraces the Zeitgeist of McLuhan's "Everything is sex, death and technology" via Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Gid eon, Frank R. Leavis, Sergei Eisenstein, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and James Joyce's mediamystical social engineering. What is the Emerson-Thoreau Transcendentalist connection? "Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just Insomnia, and agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep." -Henry Miller. "Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it" - Ralph Waldo Emerson. "We are confronted our whole lives by threshold and transitional states - the passage from night to day, waking to sleeping, joy to sorrow, presence to absence, life to death." - Bill Viola. Bunuel said about his film The Exterminating Angel: "Its images, like those of a dream, do not reflect reality but create it."

23- THE MACHINE AS ART - FROM ARCHETYPE TO CLICHE - Fialka's inter active workshop probes our interrelations with technology, art, music and literature. By flipping McLuhan's From Cliche to Archetype, he sheds new light on Calder, Man Ray, Giacometti, Jean Tinguely, video games, robotics and Sol LeWitt's proposition that "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art." Examine the resonating intervals and inventory the hidden effects of machines as extensions of our human senses. How and why do we anthropomorphize the idea of cyborgian culture?  "Upon this faith in Art as the organic heart quality of the scientific frame of things, I base a belief that we must look to the artist, of all brains, to grasp the significance to society of this thing we call the Machine." - Frank Lloyd Wright. "Poetry is nothing but a machine made of words." - William Carlos Williams. "Art is dead -long live Tatlin's new machine art." - John Heartfield & George Grosz."What does it allow us to ignore?" - Jacques Ellul. Includes screening of: I AM NOT A ROBOT - Mark X Farina & Gerry Fialka's 14 minute film probes the percept of technology "being alive" by evoking early Russian film and Constructivism. Cultural icons from James Joyce to Robby the Robot to Marilyn Monroe are your humanoid guides through new art technologies. Can machines surpass humans in the creative process? How are robotics restructuring patterns of social interdependence in Art, Science and Nature? Cine-poets Farina & Fialka reframe our collective compliance in anthropomorphizing media as art forms. In the spirit of McLuhan's mosaic writing, this collage film propagates mythic thinking, in the Jungian sense, where people mime cues from technology used by millions. By flipping the art museum video installation experience into media yoga, one can download morphic resonance into the nervous system as a Zen experiment. What is the future of art and artificial intelligence? See the likeness & difference in Anticipatory Mindfulness and Android Meme. Summon the impossible by examining what Derrida calls "the absence of presence."  "The future of the future is the present." - McLuhan. "I wouldn't be seen dead with a living work of art." - Museum curator.

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