Blog

       Kodachrome 40 has been the film of choice for Super 8 filmmakers for forty years. In May Kodak announced it would stop making the film.  Artists around the world were devastated.   Mike Missiaen invites you to celebrate the life and mourn the passing of this irreplacable film stock.  Ten of his super 8 films will be shown.  The films will be accompanied by LPs for a delicious analog experience. 

       Kent Howie, internationally reknowned artist and man-about-town, says Missiaen’s films are “lyrically stunning and poetically brilliant, like a passing cloud from a slow-moving train.” Come see for yourself.

             Northern Minnesota’s Bearded Child Film Festival will be taking the nation by storm this Fall with a selection of experimental, low-budget, and extremely bizarre short films. For the past five years, the festival has thrived within the obscurity of Grand Rapids, Minnesota– a mill town of under 8000 people located 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis. In order to develop a niche within the crowded world of festivals, the Bearded Child specifically seeks out work that is often “too weird” or too “lo-fi” for many festivals. The festival has encouraged filmmakers to push the boundaries of corporate film culture, while entertaining local crowds of pseudo-lumberjacks and old women in the process– a curious venture to be sure. According to Dan Anderson, festival founder, the festival was a near wash back in 2002– in large part due to an area fiddle contest taking place that same weekend.
              “I’m not sure if anyone really understands the festival up here, but at least they seem to appreciate it,” says Anderson. “People are so polite here, that it’s actually kind of hard to tell…”
              “It’s really about giving them the option more than anything else. Plus, there are very few festivals out there that show anything really crazy– we try to tap as far into the fringe as possible.”
                After five years of obscurity, the Bearded Child Film Festival will spend the next three months criss-crossing the nation with a selection of “All Star” films from the past five years. While the tour will hit major cities such as San Francisco, Montreal, and New York, their main focus is on smaller towns and rural areas. “Cultural missionary work!” says Anderson. The tour will hits such sites as Kirksville, Missouri and Harrison, Arkansas, along with several stops in the Deep South. The tour will kick off at the Burning Man Festival in late August, and will continue well into the Christmas holidays. To assist in travel expenses, Anderson will be selling wild rice roadside out of a 1978 Chevy van during off days. “Even Brakhage needed to work for a living!” he says.
              Attendees should expect a mix of experimental films, oddball comedies, and the bizarre. Many of the films have never been shown outside of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. “Craziness is our number one priority. After that, it better really rock our socks!”
             

Bearded Child Film Festival Tour
Grand Rapids, Minnesota
www.beardedchild.com

» More images

A Vladmaster performance is a simultaneous ViewMaster experience. Everyone in the audience is given a ViewMaster viewer and a set of Vladmaster disks. A soundtrack of narration, music, sound effects, and ding noises to cue the change from image to image then leads the audience through the story. The glorious ker-thunk of many of ViewMaster viewers turning simultaneously fills the air. Euphoria ensues.

Vladmasters are unique ViewMaster disks photographed, designed, and hand-assembled by Vladimir, an artist hailing from Portland, Oregon. Her beautifully packaged Vladmasters feature 3D macro photography of detailed dioramas built out of everything from HO scale model railroad men to dead cockroaches to Currier & Ives prints.

Three different Vladmaster stories will be performed. They are Lucifugia Thigmotaxis, about the misadventures of a cockroach named Stanley who dares to journey across an apartment; The Public Life of Jeremiah Barnes, about finding 86 idled and abandoned earth-moving vehicles in the forest and then trying to discover who put them there and why; and Actaeon at Home, a loose take on the Actaeon myth transferred to a turn-of-the-century man seemingly attacked by his own decor.

Lucifugia Thigmotaxis and The Public Life of Jeremiah Barnes both have pre-recorded soundtracks, while Actaeon at Home Vladmaster will feature a live soundtrack performed by The Apt Ensemble. The Apt Ensemble is a trio from Portland consisting of Peter Broderick, Nathan Crockett, and Branic Howard. They play strange and delightful music on an assortment of instruments including toy piano, tuba, musical saw, melodica, pump organ, and train whistle. The Apt Ensemble will also perform a wonderful set of music unaccompanied by tiny photographs and clicking noises.

Vladmaster performances have been featured at the Olympia Film Festival, the Northwest Film & Video Festival, and, for two years running, Vladimir has been crowned the World Champion of Experimental Film at the Portland Documentary and Experimental (PDX) Film Festival Invitationals. They have also been featured in Res Magazine.