Altered States Film Screening

USC Cinema

POP SECRET:
THE FILMS OF MICHAEL ROBINSON

Friday, March 28, 2008
7:00 PM
USC School of Cinematic Arts
Lucas Instructional Building
Room 108

Free and open to the public

www.poisonberries.net
Still from "All Through The Night" (2008)

Description:

Though experimental film has a long tradition of reworking the detritus of pop culture, few have so explicitly engaged its hallucinogenic possibilities and intoxicating lies as Michael Robinson. Retrieving material from the late 80s and early 90s, Robinson turns Guns 'N Roses, the World's Fair, and Full House inside out, revealing their sinister charms and startling sincerity with a dazzling array of celluloid and digital mutations. Robinson explains: "I'm less interested in creating discord than in arranging the distances between things to let them harmonize in new and convincing ways, allowing for emotionally manipulative experiences that concurrently point to their own contrivance." In his films we experience what Michael Sicinski calls "the hangover of postmodernism": bruised and broken from yesterday's crash, still reeling from its promise.

Voted "Most Promising Filmmaker" at last year's Ann Arbor Film Festival, Robinson signals a new generational force, and a singularly important voice, in contemporary avant-garde cinema. His work has shown at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the New York Film Festival, the Times BFI London Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and numerous other international venues. Michael Robinson will present and introduce a selection of his recent films as part of the USC Critical Studies Graduate Student Conference.

Screening list:

you don't bring me flowers (2005, 8:00, 16mm)
Viewed at its seams, a collection of National Geographic landscapes from the 1960s and 70's conjures an obsolete romanticism currently peddled to propagate entitlement and individualism from sea to shining sea; the slideshow deforms into a bright white distress signal.

The General Returns From One Place To Another (2006, 11:00, digital video)
Learning to love again, with fear at its side, the film draws balance between the romantic and the horrid, shaping a concurrently skeptical and indulgent experience of the beautiful. A Frank O'Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.

And We All Shine On (2006, 7:00, 16mm)
An ill wind is transitting through the lonely night, spreading myth and deception along its murky path. Conjuring a vision of a post-apocalyptic paradise, this unworldly broadcast reveals its hidden demons via layered landscapes and karaoke, singing the dangers of the mediated spirit.

Light Is Waiting (2007, 11:00, digital video)
A very special episode of television's Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.

All Through The Night (2007, 4:00, digital video)
A charred visitation with an icy language of control; there is no room for love.

Victory Over the Sun (2007, 12:30, digital video)
Dormant sites of past World's Fairs breed an eruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom and the power and glory; nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain.