Tag Archives: Film

Let’s Get Working: Chicago Celebrates Studs Terkel

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Spring-2014-Arts-GuideIf you live in Chicago, you may already know about next week’s Let’s Get Working: Chicago Celebrates Studs Terkel. The festival, which runs from May 9-11, will feature screenings, concerts, talks, art installations, talks, performances, oral histories–all celebrating the incomparable Studs Terkel.* There has been a lot of attention surrounding  “Reinventing Radio – An Evening with Ira Glass” and the “Let’s Get Working” concert put on by The Hideout, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the Logan Center, and the Haymarket Brewery, but we have also compiled a list of other highlights in light of the sheer number of things going on (see below). You should check these out.

And, in case you need more reasons to come: MAPH preceptor Paul Durica is the Festival Program Coordinator and Mitch Marr (MAPH ’10), Harrison Sherrod (MAPH’13), Amanda Scotese (MAPH ’13), Ingrid Haftel (MAPH ’10) and Nick Fraccaro (MAPH ’10) are all working on this. Ohhhh, MAPH…

Some Highlights:

Friday, May 9: Continue reading →

From Spanish Celtic to Heavy Metal: Documentaries by MAPH Alum Biliana Grozdanova

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From MAPH ’11 alum Biliana Grozdanova, co-founder of El Jinete Films:

After living all over the world, from Australia’s east coast to America’s west coast and pretty much everywhere in between, the Grozdanova sisters found themselves on the premises of the University of Chicago campus about to embark on their most creative venture to date. In 2012, Biliana and Marina Grozdanova founded El Jinete Films – a documentary production company with a mission to create inspiring documentaries featuring music from all around the globe. Their first film, however, would be a tale about rock n’ roll from their very own streets of Chicago… Currently in production, “The Last Kamikazis of Heavy Metal” is a documentary about the Chicago-based band Hessler, with which the Grozdanova sisters have been on two national tours, filming their every move. A first cut of the film premiered this spring at the Bare Bones International Film and Music Festival and received the Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary. The final version of the film will be released in the national and international festival circuit in 2014.

Marina is a graduating senior in the college, majoring in International Studies. Biliana is a 2011 MAPH-er and wrote her thesis on rock n’ roll and the music documentary. This summer, the sisters return to Spain (their second home) to premiere their parallel project, “Ortigueira: Echoes at Land’s End,” a film about an international Celtic music festival on Galicia’s northern shores. Interestingly enough, what began as another crazy trip and film venture, the Ortigueira experience inspired Marina to write her B.A. thesis on this music festival, and it has been nominated for the Adlai Stevenson International Studies Thesis Prize.

In 1926, Scottish documentarian John Grierson coined the term “documentary” while studying at the University of Chicago… Who would have thought that this fact, along with the birth of Mick Jagger, 16mm film cameras, and two little girls in ex-communist Bulgaria, would lead to the epic apparition of El Jinete Films on the UChicago campus almost a century later? Indeed, the rock doc is a genre very much ALIVE and WELL, and the Grozdanova sisters plan to feed it for decades to come!

Check out the trailer for Kamikazes above, and be sure to look out for its premiere and the premiere of Ortigueira. Do you know of a MAPH alum doing exciting creative work? Let us know!

Alumna Sarah Best Reflects on Art, MAPH and Invites Everyone to Dance Films Kino

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Sarah Best Self Portrait

Dance Films Kino is a three-week project that I am presenting as an artist in residence at Hyde Park Art Center, March 4-25, 2012. Over three weeks, I will present 30 works of dance on film, as well as over a dozen live music, dance, and literary readings. All of the programs will be free to the public.

The seeds of this project were planted ten years ago, back when I was a MAPH student sitting in Yuri Tsivian’s intro to film class, learning about how filmmakers whose works were censored, or considered to be too experimental for mainstream distribution, showed films out of their own homes.

The films and performance I am presenting will be shown in an environment inspired by “kinos”, underground, avant-grade art clubs of the 1920s and 30s. I’m currently getting ready to paint the walls of my residency studio red, put out the caberet tables, and art deco objects I’ve sourced from Etsy. I’m creating artwork inspired by movement to hang on the walls of the space.

My first goal is to show movies in a place that feels like someone’s home, so that people are a little more willing to give something they’ve never seen before a try. My second goal is to bring all kinds of artists, writers, musicians, dance makers and filmmakers together to create a lot of different points of access into the work.

My third goal is to invite people to help create the space by imagining what it would be like to be a part of an underground society, to feel nostalgia for a fictional place situated in the past. I think there is a collective desire to engage in this type of activity. I think it is part of the reason why bars inspired by speakeasies are so popular, and why people like to fantasize about travel, even in tough economic times.

More on how Sarah arrived at this point after the jump

Continue reading →

Meet an Alum: Jeremiah Glazer (2008)

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Jeremiah Glazer (MAPH 2008) lives in New York. He works at Etsy.com, the popular online marketplace, as Video Operations Coordinator

On a morning when MAPHers are submitting papers on “The Mirror Stage,” it might be hard for them to share all of Jeremiah Glazer’s (MAPH 2008) sentiments about his time in the program.

“I loved Core,” he told me by telephone last week, “I even loved Lacan.”

Jeremiah arrived at UChicago in the fall of 2007. He jokes that between graduation and the start of MAPH he went through every one of the motions that a recently-graduated liberal arts major can go through. After finishing at BU in 2005, he worked at a law firm, toyed with the idea of law school, decided he hated legal work, and applied instead to PhD programs, hoping to study Wittgenstein. Continue reading →

TYPEFACE screening this Friday

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MAPH and the 64th Street Print Shop are very pleased to announce that we’ll be holding a screening of the documentary film TYPEFACE this coming Friday (10/22) at 6:30 in Social Sciences 122.  Several 2004 MAPH alums collaborated in the making of TYPEFACE including producer and director Justine Nagan.  It was recently nominated for a regional Emmy for best documentary.  The film focuses on a museum and print shop in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, as a central location in the continuing evolution of printmaking, and it raises questions about the connection between past and future craft practices, the convergence of modern design and traditional technique.  You can read more about the film by checking out their website.  OR check out the official trailer here!

After the screening, several MAPH alums who took part in the making of the film will be available for a brief Q&A session.  Participants will include Justine Nagan, Associate Producer Starr Marcello, Director of Cinematography Tom Bailey, and researcher/photographer Brendan Kredell.  Do not miss this opportunity to learn more about the great work that other MAPH alums are doing (and to see a wonderful film as well)!

AND since you’re already heading to Hyde Park for the screening, why not grab a drink at social hour beforehand?  As you may recall, it starts at 4pm in Classics 110 and the drinks and snacks are free as always.  Come meet the exuberant 2011 class of MAPHers, share your infinite post-MAPH wisdom, and reconnect with each other!

RIOT ACTS!

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MAPH Alum Simon Strikeback just premiered a new documentary at the Reeling Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.  Here, Simon tells us about the project!

On November 11th, the full-length documentary RIOT ACTS: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance premiered at Reeling Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in Chicago.  The film was directed by local filmmaker Madsen Minax and produced by MAPH alum Simon Strikeback (’09), working together under the name Actor Slash Model.  The film was shown at the Landmark Theater to a crowd of 200 friends, family, and film affectionados.

RIOT ACTS is a transfabulous rockumentary representing the whole lives of transgender and gender variant musicians, through a first-hand perspective of the intersections between gender performance and stage performance. This feature-length documentary highlights issues crucial to interviewees such as songwriting, voice presentation, presenting a body/bodies on stage, audiences, venues, the idea of the spectacle, media representation, performing gender and theories about “drag,” and the personal as political. The film culminates with the notion that identities and bodies are undeniably political, and that the trans experience isn’t always one of tragedy, but one of creativity and joy.

The individuals and bands featured in the film are celebrated as talented, inspiring, sexy, critical and fully three-dimensional in a manner that purposefully counters mainstream (straight and gay) media that portray trans people as either isolated lonely victims, or psychopathic perpetrators.  The film is created from an insider’s view – as transpeople ourselves, Actor Slash Model seeks to capture trans and gender variant identities as fully and complexly as they are embodied and performed, both on and off the stage.

Strikeback and Minax are set to travel with the film over the next year, beginning with screenings at UMass – Amherst, Harvard, University of Maryland, and Creative Alliance Baltimore.  The duo is looking for more university screening events, submitting the film to national and international film festivals, and dreams of two free tickets to New Zealand for the OutTakes film festival next spring.

For more information: www.actorslashmodel.com