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VAUDEVILLE AT THE MOVIE HOUSE:
THE BERKELEY VIDEO AND FILM FESTIVAL (“BVFF”)

From - The Alsop Review: Foley's Books By Jack Foley  - Friday, October 07, 2011

In 2010 Mel Vapour, co-director with Paul Blake of the city of Berkeley’s wonderful Berkeley Video and Film Festival, told Examiner reporter Jason-Louise Graham that “the BVFF blossomed out of my, and Paul Blake’s, persuasion that the 1979 Panasonic VHS camera was going to irreversibly and importantly change the course of filmmaking.” Vapour goes on in the 2011 twentieth-anniversary program, “We founded BVFF in 1991 as a venue for East Bay filmmakers and videographers and in the ensuing two decades the festival has grown into an international community, showcasing some of the world’s best cinema. Our goal has always been to present independent cinema in a mainstream venue—on the same screen where Hollywood presents its own cinematic offerings.”

The current bill at the Landmark Shattuck Cinema, 2230 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley includes Mysteries of Lisbon, The Mill & the Cross; Circumstance; Crazy, Stupid Love; Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame; My Afternoons with Marguerite; Mozart’s Sister; The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975; The Guard; The Lion King 3D—and the Berkeley Video Film Festival.

I recently saw, via Netflix, Les Plages d’ Agnès / The Beaches of Agnès, a retrospective film made by prominent Rive Gauche filmmaker Agnès Varda, niece of the once famous/notorious artist, Jean Varda—“Uncle Yanco”—whose Sausalito parties on his remodeled ferryboat became the stuff of legend.

Watching The Beaches of Agnès, I was struck by how much the film, made in 2008, reminded me of James Broughton’s Testament, made thirty-four years earlier: the presence of the beach, the ocean, the filmmaker’s attempt to assess an entire career, a life. Varda’s film was good—fine—but it tended towards the sentimental, it was a little long, a little repetitious: in short, it was nowhere nearly as good as Broughton’s little masterpiece. Yet it was certain that a lot more people would see Varda’s film than would ever see Broughton’s. In the world in which Broughton made his film, the filmmaker hopes to find, at best—in Milton’s phrase—“fit audience, though few.” To be sure, Broughton is—relatively—well known, but he isn’t as well known as Agnès Varda. And there is no publicity machine ready to take out a full page ad to tell you about his work. His are the kinds of films you have to look for.

The BVFF is a place where such films are sought out and presented with love and intelligence. Films that have left the “mainstream” behind and ventured out into the vast ocean in order to explore the boundless ecstasies of politics, chance and experimentation. Some of us remember the excitement of Ed Landberg’s Cinema/Guild Theaters in Berkeley—program notes by Pauline Kael. That was back in the 1960s. The Berkeley Video and Film Festival is what is happening now.

I attended the BVFF in order to receive as proxy the Grand Festival Award given to Nic Saunders for his wonderful new film, At Apollinaire’s Grave—about which I’ll write separately. Nic had given me some remarks to read. He said, among other things, “I was fortunate enough to attend the festival in 2009 when a film I made based on a poem by Michael McClure was screened and of all the festivals I attended with that film I found Berkeley to be the most supportive and encouraging of new filmmakers. There was never any doubt I’d submit any future film I was crazy enough to try and make and I’m honored and thrilled the festival decided to screen it and reward it so generously.” I read Nic’s remarks and accidentally substituted “twelfth festival” for “twentieth festival”: I was soon corrected about that. Mea culpa, Nic.

I enjoyed all the films I saw, though I wasn’t able to see everything. Among the highlights were these:

Some in memoriam tributes to various filmmakers including Richard Randell and Todd Godwin. Godwin’s commercials are marvels of invention, and their presentation here allowed them to make the transition from guilty pleasures to art.

The late Allen Willis’s S.F. Beat—a fascinating 1973 glimpse of Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti discussing Ann Charters’ then recent biography of Jack Kerouac while a young, gorgeous Michael McClure looks on. Ginsberg is charismatic and compelling as he defends his late friend’s intelligence.

Keenan by Kurt Hemmer and Tom Knoff, a wonderful, joyous, illuminating portrait of the great photographer—once Michael McClure’s student—Larry Keenan. The film covers Keenan’s life and career, including the recent Parkinson’s Disease which has afflicted him but scarcely slowed him down. Because Keenan was present at so much of what has happened in this area—he took the famous Michael McClure-Bob Dylan-Allen Ginsberg photo in which McClure and Ginsberg are looking at Dylan while Dylan looks straight at the camera—the film is also a portrait of an entire era. Speaking of one particular photograph of artist Bruce Conner, McClure remarks, “It wasn’t the car, it wasn’t Bruce—it was everything that was there in that moment.” Keenan is able to find exactly the angle, exactly the moment in which whatever is happening fully announces itself: there it is, caught in an experience which, Keenan assures us, “is a physical thing with me.” Afterwards, I congratulated Keenan, who attended, on becoming a movie star.

After an intermission, At Apollinaire’s Grave. Utilizing three poems written by Allen Ginsberg when he was living at the Beat Hotel in Paris (“Át Apollinaire's Grave," "Message," "Europe! Europe!")Nic Saunders’ film lifted us into another space entirely: symbolic, richly allusive, compelling. Philip Bulcock’s performance and reading of the verse were superb—and Aden Cardy-Brown as Apollinaire’s ghost was a marvelous presence. His image graced the beautiful cover of the festival’s program.

The amazing Esse di Salome followed At Apollinaire’s Grave. A seductive woman sits, squirms, smiles, makes the most amazing sounds—mostly, I think, in Italian. Made by Sonia Bergamasco, the film is described as “a work for sound theatre. The project stems from a desire to explore the possible directions that vocal research can undertake thanks to new technology.” Indeed, it does.

That was followed by David Finkelstein’s equally amazing Marvelous Discourse. Two men, one of them the filmmaker, talk on endlessly, hilariously, while a somewhat androgynous “sorceress” moves around, dances, mugs. The often astonishing dialogue was improvised by the actors and has the effect of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry on steroids. BVFF’s program comments, “The text for the video is…a spectacular example of language unfolding from an intuitive physicality,” which seems, like the video, simultaneously puzzling and heroically accurate.

Friday evening ended with Bagels, Borscht and Brotherhood by Marc N. Weiss, Barbara Kopple and Laurence Storch—video footage of Allen Ginsberg on the beach at the time of the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. Ginsberg couldn’t sing but does anyway, to great effect, especially when the bathing-suited audience joins in at the end. The archival preservation and editing of this film was by Ed and Bette Sharpe—with the inspiration of BVFF’s Mel Vapour, who urged Ed to select the Ginsberg footage and bring it to life for the BVFF 2011.

On Sunday I saw, first, Andrew Young’s moving Change in the Wind, a documentary about the unlikely relationship between Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell (white) and Dr. Benjamin Mays, African-American president of the all-black Morehouse College in Atlanta. Mitchell died in 1949—ten years after the release of the triumphant film version of her novel. Young’s film reveals that she had privately struck a deal with Mays to anonymously underwrite scholarships to Morehouse students. The film examines how that might have come to pass—“Margaret Mitchell was a work in progress”—and provides a wonderful portrait of Dr. Mays. His poem, “Only a Minute,” is quoted:

I have only just a minute,
Only sixty seconds in it,
Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it,
But it’s up to me to use it,
Give account if I abuse it,
Answer for it if I lose it,
Just a tiny little minute,
But eternity is in it!

In the evening I saw Edward Frenkel and Reine Graves’ Rites of Love and Math and Cecil Hirvi’s Machinima: Cinema, Stories and Poetry from the Virtual World. Rites of Love and Math combines the ambiance of a Noh play with the sound of Western opera—especially that of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde since the film centers on a kind of liebestod, though it is only the man who dies. The death of the man—“The Mathematician”—is based on the death of the famous author Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide by seppuku, and Rites of Love and Math contains several references to Yukoku (Patriotism, released in English as The Rite of Love and Death), a film Mishima wrote, directed and appeared in. Edward Frenkel, a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, talked about the film as an allegory in which the beautiful woman on whose body The Mathematician tattoos the mysterious “formula” of love is equivalent to Truth, long sought by the mathematician. Rites of Love and Math is complex, strange, paranoiac (there are “bad guys” who are after The Mathematician’s formula: one thinks of the academic’s need to publish first!), multiethnic, and a definite assertion that mathematicians have sex lives too! It attempts to raise cinema to the realm of the ritualistic and perhaps suggests that mathematical formulae are rituals too.

The last film I saw was an example of “machinima”: “the use of real-time 3D computer graphics rendering engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, video games are used to generate the computer animation. Machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, are often fan laborers, by virtue of their re-use of copyrighted materials” (Wikipedia). I knew nothing of this art and found Cecil Hirvi’s explanations and examples fascinating.

I was sorry to have missed Hot Velcro Action, The Last Mambo, Space Land and Time—Underground Adventures with Ant Farm, and many others. What I have described here are only a few of the wonders of the BVFF—and it will be back next year. Hosannas to the 1979 Panasonic VHS camera.

Mel Vapour insists, rightly, that his vaudeville presentations “are films that really express the important search for identity in these contemporary times of unprecedented political social and economic changes – they represent the voice of many who are silenced and also dare to criticize the authorities that would otherwise become dictatorships.” They are also, one might add, not infrequently a lot of fun.

Photo by Koichiro Yamauchi.

About the Author- Jack Foley is an innovative, widely-published poet and critic who, with his wife, Adelle, performs his work frequently in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 1988, Foley has hosted a poetry radio show on Berkeley station KPFA. His column, “Foley’s Books,” has appeared for many years in the online magazine, The Alsop Review. On June 5, 2010 Foley received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and June 5, 2010 was proclaimed “Jack Foley Day” in Berkeley.

Glendale AZ's Ed Sharpe  Recipient of 
BVFF 2011 Pioneer in Television Award

By Bette Sharpe - Glendale Daily Planet /  This appeared also at 
Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation www.smecc.org
October 2, 2012

Photo by Bette Sharpe / CouryGraph Productions

Ed Sharpe, Media Archivist from the SMECC Media Preservation Laboratory located at the Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation in Glendale Arizona Holding the BVFF 2011 Grand Festival Pioneer in Television Award.

BERKELEY VIDEO & FILM FESTIVAL
 2011 PROGRAM

Friday, September 30

6:30pm - Filmmakers Awards Presentation - Invitation only

7:30pm - Tribute Screenings - In Memoriam 2011

'Marione ( The Dolls )' - Richard Randell - Animation - 4:00

'Commercials Spots of Todd Godwin' - Todd Godwin - Commercials spots - 7:00

'Full Blossom Clips' – Roberts Blossoms - 7:00

'Allen Willis Clips' – Allen Willis - 7:00

8:00pm - 'S.F. Beat' – Allen Willis - Arts -10:00

8:15pm – 'KEENAN' – Kurt Hemmer/Tom Knoff/Harper College - Arts - 40:00 – Premiere - Q &A to follow

9:15pm – 'At Appolinaire’s Grave' – Nic Saunders - Arts - 25:00 – U.S. Premiere

9:45pm – 'Esse di Salome' – Sonia Bergamasco - Arts - Italia - 10:00

10:00 – 'My First Science Fiction Movie' – Neil Ira Needleman - Experimental - 4:00

10:15 – 'Marvelous Discourse' – David Finkelstein – Experimental - 21:00

10:40 - 'Bagels, Borscht and Brotherhood-Allen Ginsberg' - Marc N. Weiss, Barbara Kopple,  Laurence Storch, Ed and Bette Sharpe - 1992 Republican Convention - Miami - Premiere of recently discovered video

Saturday, October 1

1:00pm – 'Four Cubic Feet of Space' – Tony Gault – Documentary - 8:30

1:30pm - 'Enforcing the Silence' – Tony Nguyen – Documentary - 59:00
Unlocking a thirty year old mystery surrounding the first Vietnamese American to be reportedly assassinated on U.S. soil, this doc explores how the Vietnam War continued in America.

2:30pm – 'August Moon, Safe Light' – Rose Khor – Experimental – 10:00

2:45pm – 'Second to None: Inspiring Stories of Extraordinary Women' – Randy Rice – Documentary 86:00 Q&A to follow

4:30pm – 'Noho Hewa -The Wrongful Occupation of Hawaii' – Anne Keala Kelly - Documentary - 82:00

Student Films

6:00pm - 'Jimbo' - Daniel Maggio – Student Filmmaker - 6:00

6:10pm - Selections from the USC School of Cinematic Arts - Student Filmmakers - 35:00

6:45pm – 'Nuts for Pizza' – David Andrade – Animation – 2:00

6:50pm – 'The Last Mambo' – Rita Hargrave – Trailer – 7:00

7:00pm – 'Dearly Departed' – Ilo Orleans – Short Feature - 10:15

7:15pm – 'Un Ville de I’Avenir' – Chip Lord – Experimental - 12:00

7:30pm – 'Space Land and Time – Underground Adventures with Ant Farm' - Laura Harrison, Elizabeth Federici - Documentary - 77:30 - Q & A to follow

9:15pm – 'Boys of Bonneville-Racing on a Ribbon of Salt' – John Greene, Curt Wallin, Jennifer Jordan Documentary - 81:00

10:40pm – 'Hot Velcro Action' – Mike Cantor – Experimental – 6:05

Sunday, October 2

1:00pm - East Bay Media Center's Summer Teen Media Camp -30:00

1:30pm  – 'Evil Robot' – Zack Scott - 6:30

1:45pm - 'Roman Restaurant Rhythms' – Michael Herzfeld - Ethnographic - 38:00

2:30pm – 'Change in the Wind' – Andrew Young - 101:00

4:30pm – 'Brunswick, Quiet Conflict' – Andrew Stern - 60:00 Q & A to follow

5:45pm – Selections from the USC School of Cinematic Arts - Student Filmmakers - 30:00

6:15pm – 'Polka Face' - Andrea Young – 45:00

7:05pm – 'Rites of Love and Math' – Edward Frenkel, Reine Graves - 27:00 –Q & A to follow

8:00pm –'Machinima: Cinema, Stories and Poetry from the Virtual World' -Cecil Hirvi - 35:00
See some of the best examples of writing for this dynamic, new medium and discuss its merits and drawbacks with the avatars that make them! Hosted by virtual world Machinima pioneer Cecil Hirvi.

9:00pm – 'Ashley/Amber' – Rebecca R. Rojer - 23:00

Berkeley Video and Film Festival 2011 Bestows Pioneer in Television Awards

Pressbox (Press Release) - A newly designated award this year at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival is the Grand Festival Pioneer in Television Award, for distinguished service in the medium of TV.

Berkeley, CA, September 29, 2011 -- A newly designated award this year at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival is the Grand Festival Pioneer in Television Award, for distinguished service in the medium of TV.

This year Andrew Stern, professor Emeritus, and founder of the UC Berkeley School of Broadcast Journalism, is receiving one of the Pioneer in Television awards and BVFF is screening his 1964 classic broadcast video, Brunswick, Quiet Conflict.

Marc N. Weiss, Barbara Kopple, Laurence Storch, and Ed Sharpe will receive the Pioneer in Television Award for their early work in reel to reel video, capturing the Miami Republican Convention in 1972; with a whimsical short document of Allen Ginsberg, providing an extemporaneous song poem, Bagels, Borscht, and Brotherhood, aptly restored and preserved by engineer and broadcast journalist Ed Sharpe of Glendale, Arizona.

Chip Lord, one of the founders of ANT FARM a radical media consortium from the S.F. bay area in the 1960's and 1970's famous for their Cadillac Ranch in Texas and the S. F. Media Burn, receives a Pioneer in Television Award, for his dedication and production of avante garde media, in the last half of the 20th century. BVFF will be screening his short homage to Jean Luc Godard, Un Ville de I'Avenir.

Founded by award winning independent filmmakers who were involved with the "independent underground cinema revolution" in the early and mid-1960's, THE BERKELEY VIDEO + FILM FESTIVAL was created in 1991 to provide a venue for independent film makers and videographers creating works that challenge and confront our notions of "Electronic Cinema."

The EAST BAY MEDIA CENTER, (EMBC), located in Downtown Berkeley's Arts District, was founded by Mel Vapour and Paul Kealoha Blake. Out of the EBMC the BVFF was born... This is the 20th event...Mel reminiscences, "With the support of George Manupelli (director of Ann Arbor Film Festival), who had met Vapour at the Ann Arbor film festival in the late 60’s, BVFF would become a festival of international acclaim showing unusual, off-beat as well as mainstream documentaries and short film. More importantly, the BVFF grew quickly in popularity because of its willingness to promote highly experimental as well as politically conscious film that would always include the development of highly advanced technical refinement and skill."

Every BVFF as a fantastic event but this year is extra-special due to the 20 year birthday!

BVFF will be screening over 50 remarkable new films and videos by Independent Producers. Their films range from documentaries, shorts, student films, ethnographic, animation, machinima and art films. Screenings will start Friday evening at 7:30pm, and continue Saturday and Sunday at 1:00pm through the evening. Held September 30, October 1 & 2, 2011 at the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas - 2230 Shattuck Avenue - Downtown Berkeley. You may purchase tickets there

Here are a brief description of just a few of the great movies to be seen... go to the BVFF website for a complete program. This link will navigate you to the program schedule: http://www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org/BVFF%202011%20Selections.html