Artists' Television Access

Boyland \ Emma’s Dilemma

Friday, April 10, 2015, 8:00 pm, $7-$10

boylandBoyland (Gabe Rubin, 2015)

Boyland tells the story of the young muse from the perspective of James (played by musician James Coarse), as he is photographed by Meyer (played by poet Kevin Killian), and haunted by demonic and daemonic spirits (CA Conrad and Quinn Miller). The film pivots around the poem “The Love that Dare Not Speak It’s Name,” by Oscar Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, about the happy boy and the sad boy; one who can speak his love, and one who cannot. Co-directed by Felix Bernstein with music by The Teddy Bears, Gabe Rubin and Cammisa Buerhaus. “The boy is perfect. Gabe Rubin is a sensitive and talented filmmaker. Boyland is a film with lovely photography and, again, the boy is perfect.” – James Bidgood (director of Pink Narcissus)

 

Artist’s Note:

The battle between youthful neverlands and tyrannical maturity serve as an allegory for the ways in which we give up ambiguous desires for the rigid structures of society. As a male identified person in a female body, I’m drawn to the trope of the lover who intensely desires another’s perfect body and expresses this through the melancholic poetics of unrequited love. 
However, Boyland is not made to sulk but to colorize pain, sorrow, and anguish in vibrant fantasy in the tradition of Mike Kuchar and Christina Rossetti; Henry Darger and Lewis Carroll. —GR

Gabe Rubin and Felix Bernstein have collaborated on music, performance art, and video. The ambiguous duo fronts the band Tender Cousins, directed and starred in Red Krayola’s opera Victorine at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and produced the films Boyland and Unchained Melody. They also sang Jellicile Cats on repeat for nearly four hours at GaussPDF. http://www.gausspdf.com/post/78457058131/gpdf103-felix-bernstein-felix-and-gabe-sing.

emma 2Emma’s Dilemma
(Henry Hills, 2011) Henry Hills’ Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. Probing into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’ cinematic inventions literally turn the screen upside down and inside out. In this epic journey into the picaresque, we follow Emma Bee Bernstein, our intrepid protagonist, from her pre-teen innocence to her late teen-attitude, as she learns about the downtown art scene firsthand. In the process, Hills re-imagines the art of video in a style that achieves the density, complexity, and visual richness of his greatest films.

“Filmmaker Henry Hills put his focus otherwise on young Emma Bee Bernstein, twelve when she started conducting interviews and conversations with the adult artists and writers in her family’s circle.  Her bratty younger brother appears now and again to try to steal the show, but Hills treats his eponymous vedette the way Louis Malle treated ten-year-old Catherine Demongeot in his 1960 film of Queneau’s Zazie dans le Metro—like a new wave starlet, passionate, phony, gawky, alluringly beautiful, playful, and pissed in turns…. You can see Emma in the movie, not wanting to be just the talking head her role assigns her, and happily her director allows her the freedom of the screen where she can relax and be totally present, as EdieSedgwick was so lusciously present in Ciao Manhattan, or, earlier, in Inner and Outer Space.  Perhaps the warmest and most intimate of Hills’ films, Emma’s Dilemma is one of those documents that just spins like a top. You hate to see it come to a close.”—Kevin Killi

Info: http://jacket2.org/commentary/emmas-dilemma

Henry Hills is a filmmaker based in New York and Prague. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library (Donnell Media Center and Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library), the Archives du Film Experimental d’Avignon, the Arsenal in Berlin, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Rocky Mountain Film Center, SUNY Buffalo, Bard College, Wayne State University, and the Miami-Dade Public Library. He has been a member of the faculty in film at the Pratt Institute and the San Francisco Art Institute and has been Professor at the film academy FAMU in Prague since 2005.


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