Rooftop Films Southern Tour:
ROOFTOP SHOTS


Monday, February 2, 8pm:
The Hideout
617 Congress Ave.
Austin, TX 78701
(512) H-I-D-E-O-U-T thehideout.org
$5.50 (general) / $4.50 (students)
Co-Sponsored by CinemaTexas
Friday, February 6, 8pm
The Axiom
2524 McKinney
Houston, TX 77003-3630
(713) 522-8443
infernalbridegroom.com
$5 general admission
Hosted and sponsored by Microcinema International


Shorts so sharp they're shots.
Perhaps because the Rooftop Films Summer Series takes place on a rooftop high above New York City, our shows often seem to take on an air of danger. The films often wind up being dark, foreboding; even the animated caveman comedies and surreal music videos deal with desperation, oppression, and death. Many of these films will make you laugh, it's true, but they're black comedies, their humor based on technological, physical and emotional alienation. Maybe we're just being maudlin, reading into things too much as we hang on in the chill of winter. This is why we came south: to bring you laughs directed at the fissures in society.

This program is fraught—like the rest of life, we suppose—with both dark and light. The attempt to un-alienate Americans from their food; the slimy underbelly of seemingly innocuous Disney films; the tortured anxieties of Condoleeza Rice. It may be difficult, but you have to see this show. It's haunting, it's funny, it's tragic poetic and important.

As we try to define short films as a genre unto themselves in the world of motion pictures, as we attempt to categorize films not by their duration but by their impact, we find that the "shorts so sharp they're shots" hurt when they hit you. The reality of these surreal films; the sidesplitting humor of these tragedies; the raw, raging emotions in these quiet, still films—these movies will shock and amaze. Shots are fired, from dank underground TV studios in Chicago, from the wasteland of Iraq, and from the shape-shifting rooftops of Brooklyn. Shots are fired, and you turn to look right at them.

THE FILMS

Security Anthem Kent Lambert (3:30)
A series people, holdovers of the mid-80's mall culture, tell a disjointed tale in which everything from knives to carrots takes on an aura of threat. Lambert's (Condensed Movie #1, 7/11/03) clever, abrupt editing weaves an anthem of anxiety and destruction.

Interactive Jim Munroe (6:00)
nomediakings.org
Two guys go about their daily lives with each other while immersed in a computer role-playing game they store in their minds. The breezy way the game-master repeats, with precision, complex scenarios represents the strange cultural phenomena in which technophiles become immersed in both the game and the medium. The subtle writing and excellent performances also suggest a romance between the two men, despite the heterosexual "save-the-girl" narrative of the game.

Pin ("Yeah Yeah Yeahs" music video) Tunde Adebimpe (2:00)
misterminus@hotmail.com
An intense, colorful stop-motion animation where the lead singer of the band is frighteningly pinned like bug. Music in the vein of Blonde Redhead and Challenge of the Future; video by a member of TV On The Radio (Rooftop music 6/20/03) and the star of the indie-film Jump Tomorrow.

Call of the Wild Julia Sarcone-Roach (8:00)
www.jsarconeroach.com
A hallucinogenic menagerie of flying cats and line-dancing bats populate the brilliantly colorful imagination of this RISD animator. Sarcone-Roach creates a Dr. Seussian zoo hopped up on goofballs going about their business and making prank calls, too.

AC130 Gunship Anonymous (5:00)
According to the US Air Force, the AC-130 Gunship, a war plane known as Spectre, "uses video cameras, infrared and radar sensors to find and track targets on the ground and distinguish them from friendly forces." In this anonymous video posted to the web, it's the pilots themselves who seem to have trouble distinguishing between a mosque and a military target.

Re: The Operation Paul Chan (15:00, Excerpt)
A fascinating collection of imagined letters, memoirs and to-do-lists representing the startling innermost thoughts of current U.S. Government officials. Each cabinet member is introduced with a robotic, computer-animated portrait in which they sport cuts, bruises and deformations, as though what we are about to see and hear comes from a deep cavern of the soul which acknowledges its own battered debasement. Haunting voice-overs, eerie surveillance footage and snapshots of desecrated landscapes and off-kilter muscle-flexing poseurs, all hint at psychological strains a band of plundering pirates might feel, where sexual repressions, petty jealousies and power grabs result in mass slaughter and destruction.

The Freak (6:00) Aristomenis Tsirbas
menithings.com
In a land where blind conformity is the law, a brightly garbed freak brings hope for all things fantastic and atypical.

INTERMISSION

The Fellowship of the Ring of Free Trade LordRings@riseup.net (6:00)
Tolkien always denied that his books were about the rise of European fascism. Peter Jackson mostly dodged the issue. But in this eye-opening and hilarious film the political allegory is unmistakable.

Untitled (3 Disney Films) Eileen Maxson (4:00)
Houston-based video artist Eileen Maxson recasts Disney films with B-movie dialogue, hilariously questioning the perceptions of women in these children's "classics." Cinderella's got a bad rap. The Tramp settles into the ugly realities of married life. Sleeping Beauty is coerced down a dark path.

Life or Liberty (Trailer) Konrad Aderer (7:00)
lifeorliberty.org
A documentary about Middle Eastern-American citizens being detained and deported after 9/11.

The Soup Peddler Lisa Kaselak (26:20)
The slow food movement moves on a bike in Austin, where David Ansel delivers gallons of hand-made soup to subscribers, otherwise known as "soupies." Ansel believes that Americans are especially alienated from the food, and that his all natural, tenderly-concocted recipes allow people to eat well with a conscience. He proves that livable, connected neighborhoods can support human-scale, environmentally-responsible micro-businesses such as his. Too bad he doesn't deliver to NY.

Heavy (5:10) Kell McGregor
Last spring, you may have read, an experienced rock-climber became trapped when his right arm was pinned down by a fallen boulder. In excruciating pain, he waited two days, hoping for help. On the third day, out of water and food, the climber knew his only chance at survival was to sever his arm. Using a pocketknife, he sawed through his numbed elbow, then walked several miles to a road, where he was rescued. In this animated film, a pre-lingual caveman cries out for the invention of the pocketknife. This is a funny film.

TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 1 hour 42 minutes



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