Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 7:30pm
Christmas on Earth + Flaming Ears
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn
Presented by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner
Christmas on Earth, Barbara Rubin, 16mm double projection, 1963, 29 mins
Flaming Ears, Angela Hans Scheirl, Ursula Pürrer, and Dietmar Schipek, 16mm, 1991, 84 mins
After spending 3+ years constructing a socio-sexual portrait (aka professional amateur art porn) into a feature-length video titled Community Action Center, we are pleased to present an evening of womyn-identified arty "porn." Community Action Center, to be released in September at Taxter & Spengemann, was heavily inspired by gay male sex-romance-liberation films of the 60’s and 70’s like those by Joe Gage, Jack Smith, Fred Halsted, Kenneth Anger, and James Bidgood. These films are complex representations of both fantasy and reality, exposing the implicitly politicized body. We see them as radically beautiful and thought-provoking works in spite of—or moreover because of—their explicit sexual content.
Tonight we’re screening two pieces that we identify as important queer/feminist socio-sexual portraits, largely ignored in greater art/film history perhaps due to that fact: Christmas on Earth (aka Cocks and Cunts) by Barbara Rubin and Flaming Ears by A. Hans Scheirl, Ursula Pürrer, and Dietmar Schipek. Rubin’s double projection has been called “the ultimate study on the celebratory and erotic nature of free-love." She made the film when she was 17 and later in life, wished it destroyed; luckily it wasn’t. Flaming Ears, a pop sci-fi lesbian fantasy feature set in the year 2700, follows the tangled lives of three women. Shot on Super-8 then blown-up to 16mm, it’s been described as "original for its playful disruption of narrative conventions, its witty approach to film genre, and its visual splendor," “an anti-romantic plea for love in its many forms."
As our comrade Thomas Beard so succinctly put it, “Cool. Cocks and cunts and Austrian lesbian Super-8 scifi for June 22. Calendar marked.” - AKB & ALS
Tickets - $7, available at door.