An Evening with Ken Jacobs - Tonight @ CINEFAMILY.

Ken Jacobs has called cinema “a form of thinking;” by his own measure, we must count Jacobs among the greatest thinkers of his generation.

Los Angeles Filmforum and The Cinefamily are thrilled to host a night of films and Q&A conversation with an artist whose diverse body of work, spanning six decades, contains many of experimental film’s most pioneering, provocative statements. A major figure whose works have been canonized in the permanent collections of MOMA and the Whitney, Jacobs has given us films, videos, performances and writings which have forever altered our concept of what cinema has been and can become. Alternately hilarious, hypnotic, confrontational and meditative, the films in this program testify to Jacobs’ lifelong commitments: progressive politics, the history and splendor of the moving image, and the search for new ideas/forms.

Tonight’s five selections, shown on 16mm, 35mm and digital, all showcase divergent approaches to found footage, drawing on such wide-ranging sources as Jacobs’ longstanding fascination with the birth of cinema, high-speed transfer operas based on his own previous films, and fascinating newscast outtakes projected exactly as Jacobs found them in a wastebin. Please come on down to the CINEFAMILY and welcome this legendary artist in person to discuss his work, and participate in a Q&A with another remarkable young filmmaker, Azazel Jacobs (Ken's son) director of Sundance hit Terri.

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REDCAT Announces 2011 Fall Season of Contemporary Performing, Media and Visual Art.

Mark Murphy unveils REDCAT's 2011 Fall Season, featuring a dynamic lineup of living legends and daring new voices in dance, theater, music, film/video, visual and multimedia work. These global and local innovators are encouraging exploration and discovery as well as confronting urgent issues facing our world. Dedicated to keeping its ticket prices low and gallery events free, REDCAT encourages visitors to come often and bring friends. Tickets for REDCAT's 2011 Fall Season are now on sale @ REDCAT

Adventurous Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and his company open the Sharon Disney Lund Dance Series performing more, more, more ... future (October 5–8), a collaboration with legendary Kinshasa-based guitarist Flamme Kapaya. Following soon after is rising-star New York choreographer Kyle Abraham performing The Radio Show (October 19–22) passionate reflection on communal identity, personal history, and—poignantly—the loss of communication, of voice.Later this fall, Los Angeles-based theater artist Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine takes to the stage with the world premiere of A Missionary Position (November 9–13), a searing satirical response to the rampant homophobia now gripping Uganda.

In addition to the fall events, REDCAT announces a special re-staging of the seminal Robert Wilson/Lucinda Childs' collaboration I WAS SITTING ON MY PATIO THIS GUY APPEARED I THOUGHT I WAS HALLUCINATING (January 26–February 5). Produced by Some Serious Business as part of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, Wilson teams up again with renowned choreographer Lucinda Childs to reinvent the work originally presented as a now legendary one-night preview in Los Angeles in 1977, and link it solidly with the art of our time.

Musical highlights this fall include the world premiere of a major new opus by creative music luminary Wadada Leo Smith commissioned and co-presented by Southwest Chamber Music (October 28–30) and a performance by Mike Keneally, former "stunt guitarist" and keyboard virtuoso in Frank Zappa's final touring band, featuring a 52-member orchestra (November 18). Early in the schedule REDCAT teams up with Angel City Jazz Festival to present jazz singer and composer Theo Bleckmann and Todd Sickafoose and Tiny Resistors (September 25) and a celebration of composer, reed and woodwind master Roscoe Mitchell (October 2) who will perform with his new trio.

Rounding out the season are Film/Video screenings featuring the work of visionaries including Chick Strand (September 26), Jules Engel (October 10), Werner Schroeter (October 14–15), among others; and Conversation events featuring Jack Halberstam, Wayne Koestenbaum and Maggie Nelson (October 16), Mark Z. Danielewski (October 31) and Darby English (November 3). In the gallery, Los Angeles-based artist Erlea Maneros Zabala re-photographs archival and journalistic images to disrupt the logic and order (September 16–November 6); followed by The Experimental Impulse, an exhibition co-organized by Thomas Lawson and Aram Moshayedi offering new insights into the understanding of developments in critical art practice in Los Angeles after 1965 (November 20–January 15) as part of Pacific Standard Time, an unprecedented collaboration, initiated through grants from the Getty Foundation, of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene.

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LYNDA BENGLIS - Now on View @ MOCA Grand.

LYNDA BENGLIS

now on view through October 10, 2011

This travelling exhibition spans the range of Lynda Benglis's career, including her early wax paintings, her brightly colored poured latex works, the Torsos and Knots series from the 1970s, and her recent experiments with plastics, cast glass, paper, and gold leaf. It features a number of rarely exhibited historic works, including Phantom (1971), a dramatic polyurethane installation consisting of five monumental sculptures that glow in the dark, and the installation Primary Structures (Paula's Props), first shown in 1975.

Alongside her sculptural output, Benglis created a radical body of work in video, photography, and media interventions that explore notions of power, gender relations, and role-playing. These works function in tandem with her sculpture to offer a pointed critique of sculptural machismo and suggest a fluid awareness of gender and artistic identity. They also contribute to an understanding of the artist's objects as simultaneously temporal and physically present, intuitive, and psychologically charged.

Lynda Benglis was originally organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Le Consortium, Dijon; The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and the New Museum, New York.

An Evening with Rob Zabrecky - @ The Steve Allen Theater 8.10.

Rob Zabrecky debuts a full-length, one-man variety show quite unlike any other. He will present highlights from his award-nominated Magic Castle act, song & dance, conversations with outmoded satellites, audience interaction, parapsychology, and more.

Zabrecky's multitude of creative lives have established him globally as a musician, magician, and actor, dating back to his early 90s days as front man for Silverlake art-popsters, Possum Dixon. MAGIC Magazine raved, “Zabrecky's magic could easily be the plot line of a Stephen King novel, if Stephen King wrote comedy.” An evening of cross-pollinated magic and reverie from one of LA’s most fascinating natives.

With Special Guests Imaginary Bear (featuring Tanya Haden & Sara Trussell) and Liberty Larsen and Shayne Eastin.

Wednesday, August 10 at 8p, $12

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Serge Gainsbourg's 'Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus' @ CINEFAMILY 8.5.

Super Rare 35mm Screening
Je t’aime moi non plus

Upon its release in England, it only played in a Soho porno theater; meanwhile, François Truffaut — one of the film’s few defenders back in ‘76 — announced “Don’t bother going to see my film, see Gainsbourg’s. That is a work of art.” Starring his wife Jane Birkin and Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro, Serge Gainsbourg’s directorial debut concept piece on the nature of love and sex goes far beyond the irony of its song-inspired title “Je t’aime…moi non plus” (it’s a call-and-response; Woman: “I love you”, Man: “Me neither.”) Whereas the original Gainsbourg-Birkin song is full of breathy, orgasmic wordplay, Je t’aime… the film is breathtakingly wordless at times, as Birkin’s boyish, sexually desperate snack bar owner and Dallesandro’s brutish gay garbage truck driver(!) navigate one of the most rocky and blackly humorous relationships in all of French cinema. It’s intellectually explicit, beautifully offensive, full of summer, trash and ass — an absolute must-see.

Dir. Serge Gainsbourg, 1976, 35mm, 89 min.

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