Black Maria Film Festival: The Legacy of the Short Film
November 18–22, 2006

The Black Maria Film Festival was named after the American birthplace of the motion picture—Thomas Edison’s West Orange, NJ, laboratory—a revolving photographic studio called the Black Maria because it resembled a police paddy wagon. Over the last twenty-five years, founding director John Columbus has overseen this alternative festival, which embraces the diversity and passion of the cinematic short form. It provides many directors with their earliest exhibition opportunities and discovers avant-garde and idiosyncratic talents. The festival also provides an important, one-of-a-kind distribution outlet for short films, traveling each year to over seventy sites and reaching audiences in the farthest corners of the USA and Europe. Through the years the festival has championed cinema that resides on the margins of popular culture and in the center of artists’ imaginations. All films presented by Columbus and the filmmakers, and from the USA, unless otherwise noted.

Organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film; with John Columbus, Director, Black Maria Film Festival. Special thanks to Alvin Larkins, Associate Director, Kerrie Young, Program Associate, and Megan Kern, Office Manager, Black Maria Film Festival.

Program 1
Three American directors discovered in the festival’s first years: Tony Buba, Peter Rose, and Barbara Hammer.
Mill Hunk Herald. 1980. Tony Buba. A musical trip inside a Steel
Valley workers' magazine.
Braddock Food Bank. 1985. Buba. A moral dilemma about making a film or giving to charity.
Fade Out. 1998. Buba. The ripple effect of arbitrary decisions: a new highway, a local town, the length of a film.
Secondary Currents. 1982. Peter Rose. A mind-boggling performance about image and language.
The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough. 1998. Rose. A young man's epic journey.
Sanctus. 1990. Barbara Hammer. An absorbing composition using 1950s X-ray films made by doctor and film director James Sibley Watson. Silent.
Program 96 min.
Saturday, November 18, 6:30. T2

Program 2
Recent work by five prolific filmmakers.
Viscera. 2005. Leighton Pierce. The emotional resonance of absence and its effect on perception, memory, and imagination.
The Future Is behind You. 2005. Abigail Child. A haunting interpretation of a Jewish family's home movies in pre-Nazi Germany.
Phantom Limb. 2006. Jay Rosenblatt. The filmmaker's family, personal loss, and the stages of grieving.
Ideas of Order in Cinque Terre. 2005. Ken Kobland. A meditation on an extraordinary string of Italian cliff towns on the Mediterranean coast.
A Time to Die. 2005. Joe Gibbons. Video diarist Gibbons examines the pecking order within the natural world while mapping his own values and fears.
Program 98 min.
Saturday, November 18, 8:30. T2

Program 3
Personal and multicultural non-fiction stories get to the heart of the matter.
Glass Jaw. 1991. Michael O’Reilly. The director grippingly visualizes his own health trauma in this Pixelvision film.
Delivery Man. 1982. Emily Hubley. A girl's dreams/memories about her doctor, her mother who survived surgery, and her father, who didn't.
Ame Noire—Black Soul. 2002. Canada. Martine Chartrand. Haitian-Quebecois animator Martine Chartrand goes into the heart of Black culture via a whirlwind of defining moments in Black History.
Vision Test. 2002. Wes Kim. A routine eye exam turns into an examination of bias.
Famous Irish Americans. 2003. Roger Beebe. A witty, revelatory account of the hidden Irish ancestry of famous American citizens.
Lot 63, Grave C. 2005. Sam Green. A re-examination of the tragic events caught on camera by the Maysles Brothers at the 1970 Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter concert.
Pleasures of Urban Decay. 1999. Samuel Ball. Cartoonist Ben Katchor peers behind New York City's facades.
The Memory Box. 2005. Jane Steuerwald. A magical look at family memories, intercutting a mother's lilting operatic melodies and family footage.

Program 80 min.
Sunday, November 19, 1:00. T2

Program 4: Animation and Special Effects 1

Animated films have found a home at the Festival, which continues to cover
the full spectrum of the field.
When the Day Breaks. 1999. Canada. Wendy Tilby, Amanda Forbis. A happy pig discovers harsher realities. Winner of the best short film Palm d'Or at the fifty-second Cannes Film Festival.
S.P.I.C. The Storyboard of My Life. 2004. Robert Castillo. The director narrates stories while illustrating scenes using storyboards. Excerpt.
Ryan. 2005. Canada. Chris Landreth. This Academy Award nominee is an intriguing synthesis of documentary and photorealist animation in tribute to Canadian animator Ryan Larkin.
Strange Invaders. 2001. Cordell Barker. A couple's quiet, comfortable life is disrupted by the arrival of a strange child.
Goodnight Norma, Goodnight Milton. 1988. John Schnall. A married couple gets ready for bed.
OuterSpace. 1999. Austria/Canada. Peter Tscherkassky. The meeting point between the
materiality of film and its history as an aesthetic form.
Copy Shop. 2001. Belgium. Virgil Widrich. A copy shop employee duplicates himself, and his doppelgangers spin out of control.
Fast Film. 2003. Belgium. Widrich. An homage to motion pictures, hand-made by folding 65,000 print- outs of film frames into three-dimensional objects.
Program 70 min.
Sunday, November 19, 3:00. T2

Program 5: Animation and Special Effects 2
River Lethe. 1985. Amy Kravitz. Abstract movement and imagery.
Master of Ceremonies. 1987. Chris Sullivan. A reluctant transformation into the spirit world, drawn on black paper with silver pencil.
What Happened. 1991. Richard Kizu-Blair. Sculptor Elizabeth King creates a femal homunculus.
The Janitor. 1993. Vanessa Schwartz. A reinterpretation of the events of the bible, as told by God's janitor.
Capillary Action. 1997. Australia. Paul Winkler. An ode to the translucency of water.
Moschops. 2000. Jim Trainor. A prehistoric mammal- like reptile bleeds to death in a mud puddle.
Tender Bodies. 2003. James Duesing. Strange, genetically altered characters hunt and are hunted in this computer animation that uses the logic of video games.
The Penguins and the Mice. 2001. Tim Szetela. A hand-animated fable about high-flying penguins and industrious mice.
Elements of Light. 2004. Richard Reeves. A handmade film in which the photographic emulsion is a tactile element of he piece. The surface is scratched, dyed, and manipulated to create a rich textural pastiche of color and line.
Linear Dreams. 1997. Reeves. A magnums opus with a handmade soundtrack and visuals composed of two words, "line," as in drawing, and "ear," as in hearing.
I Am Not Van Gogh. 2005. David Russo. A tour de force of cinematic acrobatics, with pixilated photography and playful inventive effects.
Nibbles. 2003. Christopher Hinton. Academy Award–nominated director Christopher Hinton debunks the joys of family travel, fishing trips, and fast food.
Program 83 min.
Sunday, November 19, 5:00. T2

Program 6: Animation 3
MediaScope 2006: An Evening with Suzan Pitt
Monday, November 20, 6:30. T2

Program 7
Experimental investigations of cinema, history, and memory. 
Art of Memory. 1987. Woody Vasulka. Unspoiled desert landscape juxtaposed with the horrors of three wars engineered there.
Decodings. 1988. Michael Wallin. A search for identity through a collection of 1940s/50s found footage.
Spiral. 1987. Emily Breer. An introspective collage.
A Knowledge They Cannot Lose. 1989. Nina Fonoroff. On the death of the director's father.
The Imagined, the Longed-for, the Conquered, and the Sublime. 1995. Roddy Bogawa. An experimental film about the wonders of existence.
A.W.O.L. 2004. Robert Banks. A man gets a haircut from a bevy of beauties.
Here. 2006. Fred Worden. Frenetically intercut footage from Sir Laurence Olivier and George Méliès films, minus dialogue-driven plots.
Program 96 min.
Monday, November 20, 8:30. T2

Program 8
A selection of groundbreaking narrative shorts.
Night Cries a Rural Tragedy. 1990. Australia. Tracey Moffatt. The classic, tragic story of a middle-aged Aboriginal daughter and her aging white mother.
Bedhead. 1991. Robert Rodriguez. The director's popular debut film is about a young girl's revenge on her pest of a brother.
Seven Hours to Burn. 1999. Shanti Thakur. A personal documentary tracing two wars that produce two émigrés, the filmmaker's parents.
Ghost Trip. 2000. Bill Morrison. A mystical road trip to New Orleans in a Cadillac hearse.
Burn. 2002. Reynold Reynolds. Unspoken secrets create a force that sears the fabric of everyday interaction.
Electrocute Your Stars. 2005. Mary Losier. A delightful, campy portrait of director George Kuchar.
Program 77 min.
Wednesday, November 22, 5:00. T2

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