Renowned experimental artist, Robert Irwin, explores human perception in a world that has expanded the presence of technology. Irwin’s unorthodox style led to a long career and life, including periods as a gambler and a cherished teacher. Through his art, Irwin questions consumerism, technology, and human nature. The film spans Irwin’s early work experimenting with biofeedback, to his immersive minimalist masterpiece in Marfa, Texas, which is a radical ode to the evanescent elements of light and space. – Anita Raswant

Introduction by Artist and Fabricator Jeff Jamieson

Director: Jennifer Lane

Executive Producer: Carolyn Pfeiffer, Nancy P. Sanders, David Koh, Nicole DiMiceli.

Producer: David Hollander, Jennifer Lane, Joseph Cashiola, Arne Glimcher.

Cinematographer: David Hollander, Joan Churchill, Alan Barker, Joseph Cashiola, Layton Blaylock, Rick Siegel, Jennifer Lane, Rosa Barba.

World Premiere.

Neuro Osmosis, a new film by American filmmaker David Fenster, explores the visual relationship between the current paintings of artist Nick Terry, and the electron microscopy imagery created several decades ago by his late father, renowned Neuropathologist, Dr. Robert D. Terry. How art, science, zen philosophy, and familial relations can influence our daily lives, work and pursuits, are addressed in this personal film.

Conversation led by Tim Johnson with David Fenster and Nick Terry following screening

Ian Lewis: Real, Happy, Alive, Free (25 min.)

Lea Bouanich: HEME (22 min.)

Joseph Cashiola: 10 MIN. OF WATER (25 min.)

Nicholas Francis: IT GETS WORSE (5 min.)

As a sci-fi obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario back in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home-studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realised far before its time.

Three decades on, the musician – now Glenn Copeland – began to receive emails from people across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered. Courtesy of a rare-record collector in Japan, a reissue of Keyboard Fantasies and subsequent plays by Four Tet, Caribou and more, the music had finally found its audience two generations down the line.

Keyboard Fantasies sees the Glenn Copeland commit his life and music to screen for the first time - an intimate coming of age story spinning pain and the suffering of prejudice into rhythm, hope and joy.

Half aural-visual history, half DIY tour-video, the film provides a vehicle for our newly appointed queer elder to connect with youth across the globe. A timely lullaby to soothe those souls struggling to make sense of the world.

A chronicle of the elusive Black American art star David Hammons whose category-defying career radically seeks to fuse the dominant culture and his own into a new one for the 21st century.

The Melt Goes On Forever chronicles the singular career of the elusive African-American art star David Hammons from Watts rebellion era ’60s L.A. to global art world prominence today. Hammons’ category-defying practice – rooted in a deep critique of American society and the elite art world – is in the words of one art critic “an invitation to confront the fissures between races” as the artist seeks to go beyond the dominant culture and his own to a new one for the 21st century.

Featuring eminent artists, curators and critics, a rich trove of archival footage, animation, and an evocative soundscape, The Melt is a record of the work of an artist who constantly defies the establishment and remains subversive at every turn.

A film by Barbara McCullough on ritual and art.  Features interviews with David Hammons, Houston Conwill, Kinshasha Conwill, Kenneth Severin, K. Curtis Lyle, Kamau Daa’ood, Betye Saar, and Senga Nengudi.  Also includes film of Senga Nengudi’s 1978 performance, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, a collaboration with David Hammons and Maren Hassinger.

Introduction by Thomas Beard, founder and director of Light Industry in Brooklyn.

Laserdisc was a home video format launched in Japan in 1981. By the mid-1990s the format was phased out in favor of DVD, and later Blu-Ray.  We will celebrate this obsolete format by playing some of the rarest, and strangest Laserdiscs ever released.  Expect a relaxing and immersive tour through the world of Laserdiscs (and maybe a little VHS) in the lounge-like atmosphere of the Adobe Room at The Lumberyard.

Charles and Ray Eames are best known for their ground breaking contributions to architecture, furniture design (the Eames® Chair), industrial design and manufacturing and the photographic arts. The subjects of their films range from tops to trains; from sea creatures to the simple explanation of advanced mathematical and scientific concepts. Complimentary milk and cereal will be served and all ages are welcome.

Join us in the Hotel Paisano's Rock Hudson Suite as we celebrate our tenth anniversary!
Cocktail Party sponsored by Hotel Paisano & Tito’s vodka

G-rated movie, suitable for all ages!

Laserdisc was a home video format launched in Japan in 1981. By the mid-1990s the format was phased out in favor of DVD, and later Blu-Ray.  We will celebrate this obsolete format by playing some of the rarest, and strangest Laserdiscs ever released.  Expect a relaxing and immersive tour through the world of Laserdiscs (and maybe a little VHS) in the lounge-like atmosphere of the Adobe Room at The Lumberyard.

An immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, guided by naturalist and environmentalist Zoe Lucas who has lived over 40 years on this remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. Shot on 16mm and created using a scope of innovative eco-friendly filmmaking techniques, this feature-length experimental documentary is a playful and reverent collaboration with the natural world. Zoe leads us among wild horses, seals and bugs, through peaks, valleys, roots, sands, weathers, seasons and stars. The intangible is evoked with hidden sounds and vanishing light. Much like a field book, the film tracks its protagonist's labor to collect, clean and document marine litter that persistently washes up on the island shores.

Eileen Myles: Writer, Director
David Fenster: Producer, Cinematographer, Editor

A road trip through the majestic, rough-hewn landscape between Marfa and Alpine with poet Eileen Myles as your guide. Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s spoken score of Robert Frank’s 1958 classic Pull My Daisy, and Louis Malle’s 1981 talk drama My Dinner With Andre, Myles discusses daily life and political realities with their childhood puppets, Oscar, Bedilia, Montgomery, Casper, and Crocky.

Participants were given access to super 8mm cameras, film, and post production services that enabled them each to create a new film.

Film provided by Kodak.

Also featured, the trailer for a local filmmaker Travis Walker’s newest project Quiero Ser Niño Otra Vez (I want to be a kid again).

10 minutes. Digital and 8mm. 2019 

A Life In Film: Carolyn Pfeiffer
Marfa resident Carolyn Pfeiffer will talk about her illustrious career in the film business, from working in Rome with Fellini and Visconti, to founding Island Alive and Alive Films and producing many films - working alongside some of the greatest filmmakers of our time. 

Carolyn has selected The Leopard because she worked on the film and she will discuss that and more preceding the film.

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The Leopard

Luchino Visconti / Italy, 1963 - 185 min.

Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is an epic on the grandest possible scale. The film recreates, with nostalgia, drama, and opulence, the tumultuous years of Italy's Risorgimento—when the aristocracy lost its grip and the middle classes rose and formed a unified, democratic Italy. Burt Lancaster stars as the aging prince watching his culture and fortune wane in the face of a new generation, represented by his upstart nephew (Alain Delon) and his beautiful fiancée (Claudia Cardinale). Awarded the Palme d’Or at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, The Leopard translates Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel, and the history it recounts, into a truly cinematic masterpiece.

By Yuri Ancarani / Italy, France, Switzerland, 2016 - 69 min.

Italian visual artist Yuri Ancarani’s exquisite documentary enters the surreal world of wealthy Qatari sheikhs with a passion for amateur falconry. The opulence of this Middle Eastern gas state is on full display as the men race SUVs up and down sand dunes, fly their prized falcons around on private jets, and take their pet cheetahs out for desert spins in their souped-up Ferraris. The result is a film jaw-dropping not only for its displays of wealth, but for the pure cinematic beauty that won Ancarani the Filmmaker of the Present award at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival.

With Thomas Beard, from Light Industry.

Some thirty years ago, the artist Peggy Ahwesh began to cultivate a fascination with the films of Doris Wishman, the prolific director behind grindhouse gems like Nude on the Moon (1961), Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), and Let Me Die a Woman (1977).

Light Industry’s Thomas Beard presents two films side by side, a feature by Wishman and a short by Ahwesh.

A limited number of Ahwesh's zine publication on Wishman, just reprinted by LightIndustry will be available for purchase at the screening.

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Bad Girls Go to Hell

By Doris Wishman / USA, 1965 - 71 min.

Possessed with sex, they know no shame!

"My favorite Wishman films are the 'roughies' from the mid-'60s, which combine titillating striptease (black lace panties dropping provocatively to the floor) with rough sex play and a brutally dystopic view of relations between the sexes. In Wishman's masterful Bad Girls Go to Hell, a sad and misunderstood housewife is a fugitive fleeing a stream of violent men (and one well-meaning lesbian)."

- Peggy Ahwesh

The Color of Love

By Peggy Ahwesh, 1994, 16mm, 10 mins

"The last word in ready-mades, Peggy Ahwesh's The Color of Love...is a slightly slo-mo, optical reprint of an obviously ill-treated '70s porn movie in which the chemical rot that's already eaten away the edges of the image threaten to censor it entirely...An ur-text for Ahwesh's work, The Color of Love is an almost Rose Hobart for the '90s."

- Amy Taubin

This year we have unearthed some surprising vintage films about flora and fauna that will delight children of all ages! 

Complimentary cereal and milk will be served.

Screenings with Lynne Sachs in attendance.

Investigation of a Flame

By Lynne Sachs / Color and B&W, 2001. 45 min.

On May 17, 1968, three Catholic priests, a nurse, an artist and four others walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. Their poetic act of civil disobedience helped galvanize an increasingly disillusioned American public against the Vietnam War. Investigation of a Flame is an intimate look at this Sixties protest within our current times, when foes of Middle East peace, abortion, and technology resort to violence to access the public imagination.

Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor

by Lynne Sachs / Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital, 8 minutes, 2018

From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.

By Adam R. Levine and Peter Bo Rappmund / USA, 2018 - 68min.

COMMUNION LOS ANGELES, An equinoctial journey along the 110 freeway of Los Angeles traces California’s oldest freeway, the 110, as it courses from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, defining and dividing the communities it is designed to serve. Viewing the 35-miles of blacktop as both infrastructure and public architecture, this equinoctial journey highlights dichotomies of mobility, technology and urban space.

By Nikolaus Geyrhalter / Austria, 2018 - 112 min

In concentric circles starting from the driveable border of the Brenner, a mountain pass through the Alps, which forms the border between Italy and Austria, this film measures the surroundings that were the scene of a shift in inner-European policy. Geyrhalter describes the space using the precise long takes he became known for on films like Homo Sapiens. In extended talks with police officers, locals, hikers, farmers, innkeepers, and toll collectors, a full diversity of voices express their individual political attitudes on a topic that affects Europe.

By Shohei SHIBATA

Japan, 2014, 50 minutes

Dashi is a distillation of the natural resources of Japan, the essence of its very nature. In the philosophy of Japanese cuisine, Dashi is not fabricated or concocted but “drawn out” from the very stuff of nature. The essential ingredients from which it is drawn are gathered from the waters that surround Japan’s islands, but Dashi is also nurtured in the forest, where forest dwellers have for centuries developed the delicate craft of cultivating choice shiitake mushrooms from the humid trees.

Cinemarfa's opening circle of visionary seekers will gather at The Well to celebrate the inspiring opportunity of being in creative community. Come experience the heartbeat of the drum, crystal bowl vibrations, warm cello resonance, intuitive vocals, and guided sonic release. Honoring the blooming Beltane mid-point of Spring and nearly new moon in Taurus; part ritual, part exorcism, part prayer. Prepare to feel lighter.