[FAC] Remember First Friday Films at the Met? It's back!

Thu May 28 13:41:20 EDT 2009

First Friday Films 2009
June 5, July 3, August 7, September 4, 2009  - Fresno Met Museum, 9pm.  More info at fresnomet.org
First Friday Films is an annual free series of events exploring science concepts by showcasing short films and videos and presenting them in an out of doors evening setting.  It's a unique atmosphere unlike any other experience in Fresno! 
This year's events will take place in the Fresno Metropolitan Museum's courtyard area with the films projected onto the Museum's south wall.  
This summer's theme is "Childhood". Each month's program will present characteristics of youth (imagination, collecting, play, and youthfulness) ranging from nostalgic to critical, humorous to thought-provoking.

Details on June's films:

Zea, Andre and Jean-Jacques Leduc, Canada, 1981, 5 minutes Tight close-ups show a slowly revolving, glistening, lightly textured surface. Water drips. Bubbles coalesce. An orchestra plays. What is the mysterious surface? Suddenly, it bursts! --IMDB

Forming Game, Malcolm Sutherland, Canada, 2008, 6 minutes
Instructions: Open box. Unfold board. To begin play, place any shape on the board and interact with it with your hands. A series of forms will unfold. They may seem familiar or suggest a hidden order. Try to influence the shapes, or sit back and let them arise naturally. Do not be concerned with winning. Forming Game is played for creative fun. 

The result of several months of interplay between animation filmmaker Malcolm Sutherland and composer and musician Luigi Allemano, Forming Game is an engaging dance of shape and sound. Includes musical cadenza by Ravi Shankar. --NFB

The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg, Paul Driessen, Canada, 2000, 9 minutes A playful and poignant animated short about a boy with an overactive imagination, The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg presents two worlds - reality and fantasy. 

Paul Driessen's multi-layered split-screen approach revels in the shifting boundaries between these two realms. In this cautionary tale, the young protagonist, bored with his lot, imagines a diabolic and dangerous life of adventure. But when our would-be hero, accustomed to eluding mobsters and monsters in his daydreams, finally finds himself facing a real-life drama - in the shape of an iceberg - he can't believe his eyes! Suddenly, the mundane life that he always wanted to escape is what he wishes to recapture. --NFB

Et Cetera, Jan Svankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1966, 8 minutes A small, animated figure learns how to use a whip, a pair of wings and a house. --IMDB

Alice, Jan Svankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1988, 84 minutes A surrealist fantasy film, it retells Lewis Carroll's first 'Alice' book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in Švankmajer's unique style. The film combines live action with stop motion animation. --IMDB

This adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland mixes animation and live action to create a dreamlike world, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's simply a kid's film. Young Alice (Kristyna Kohoutová, spoken by Camilla Power) watches a stuffed and mounted rabbit come to life in her playroom and follows it through a magical drawer into a strange world that resembles a 19th-century toy store come to life, with a few specimens from a natural history museum thrown in. Czech animator Jan Svankmajer retains the familiar story elements but tweaks them with bizarre imagery brought to herky-jerky life with his spasmodic style of stop-motion animation. The caterpillar becomes a sock puppet with dentures, while other crazy creatures materialize as creepy skull-headed beings that bleed sawdust. Throughout the tale Svankmajer returns to punctuating close-ups of Alice's lips telling the story, just to remind us that this is a tale told. In the best surrealist tradition Svankmajer uses familiar objects in unfamiliar ways, giving a fantasy quality to the banal (and the not so banal) while tipping the dream logic to the edge of nightmare. While the imagery remains more unsettling than genuinely disturbing, younger children will certainly be happier with Disney's brightly colored animated classic Alice in Wonderland. Older children and adults will better appreciate Svankmajer's sly visual wit and unusual animation style. --Sean Axmaker 

John M. English
Manager, Marketing and Communications
Fresno Metropolitan Museum
1555 Van Ness Avenue
Fresno, CA 93721
(559) 441-1444 ext. 227
(559) 441-8607 fax
johne at fresnomet.org <mailto:johne at fresnomet.org> 
www.fresnomet.org <http://www.fresnomet.org/> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://fresnoarts.info/pipermail/fac-list_fresnoarts.info/attachments/20090528/f88ccdd1/attachment.html>