Monday, February 14, 2011

PXL THIS 16 (2006)

PXL THIS film
festival - Established in 1991 and celebrating the Fisher-Price PXL 2000
toy video camera.
We are now accepting entries for PXL THIS 17:
deadline for entry Sept 22, 2007. It premieres in Venice CA at 7 Dudley
Cinema on Nov 17, 2007 visit

www.81x.com/7dudley/cinema

We now accept entries on DVD. Send one DVD copy to Gerry Fialka 2427 1/2
Glyndon Av, Venice CA 90291 and another copy to:

DOUG ING, 1522 Alewa Drive, Honolulu, HI 96817 douging@aol.com  808-371-6845 
Doug's preferred formats: 1) A quicktime movie miniDV codec burned to
either a CD ROM for those under 4 minutes or a DVD ROM for films under
20 minutes. (Note this isn't DVD but DVD ROM). 2) MiniDV tape- tapes
will be returned (do not send masters & send him return postage,
please). 3) DVD. Doug has started the Vidster festival: VIDSTER THIS -
contact him for more info.



PXL THIS
film festival director Gerry Fialka hoicks up PXL at the 45th
Ann Arbor Film Festival

aafilmfest.org
and conducts the ANN ARBOR FILM FEST PIONEERS
workshop.

Visit the workshops page.
 He'll be doing the interactive workshop
"PIXELVISION:Electronic Folk Art" on March 17, 2007 at 2pm at the Flint
Institute of Arts, who'll also being showing "The Best of PXL THIS" in
the FIA Fleckenstein Video Gallery from March 6 - April1, visit:

www.flintarts.org
 

PXL THIS 16, the 16th annual film festival featuring the Fisher
Price PXL 2000 toy video camera premiered Saturday, Nov 18, 2006
with 2 different shows 7 & 9pm at Sponto Gallery, 7 Dudley Ave,
Venice, 310-306-7330, free admission. The audience really
appreciated entries from all across the world. The Feb 15, 2007
VIDIOTS

www.vidiotsvideo.com
(they rent all past festivals
exclusively)screening takes place in Santa Monica at 8pm. PXL THIS
16 also screens in San Fran on May 12, 2007 at

othercinema.com
and in LA on May 24 at

echoparkfilmcenter.org
The * indicates that it will be on the tour as time permits.



PXL THIS 16 - Sponto Gallery,
Venice CA - Saturday, Nov 18, 2006   

7pm show:

1- KID KUKULELE - Denny Moynahan, 5 minutes*
2- ROUSHAM - Matt Honeyball, 5m*
3- ALIENS - Michael Almereyda, 13m*
4- GESTURES - L.M. Sabo, 2m*
5- A PRACTICAL MYSTIC - Gerry Fialka, 8m*
6- A STATE OFEXTREME UNWINDING - Will Erokan, 5m*
7- CONSCIOUSNESS OF MASS CONSTRUCTION - Theresa Hulme, 4m*
8- WON'T COME DOWN - Gabriel Van Jones, 4m *
9- WORDS - Hillary Kaye, 1m*
10- NEWSPAPER - Doug Ing, 5m*
11- IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES - Kelly Jones, 5m*
12- TOO BUSY - Glenn Abbott, 4m*
13- THE HOMECOMING - Gavin Maitland, 4m*
14- UFOLOGY - George Willis, 10m
 
9:00pm
show:

15- BURNT POPCORN 2 - Eli Elliott, 10m*
16- FORM CONSTANT - Will Erokan, 10m*
17- KLEZMER MUSIC - Ron Grun, 2m*
18- DARKNESS AS THE LIGHT - Hillary Kaye, 2m*
19- EMPATH - Robert Dobbs, 8m*
20- REMEMBER THE GOOD OLD DAYS - John Trubee, 2m *
21- SOMNIGRAPHIC TRACES OF THE OTHERWISE UNDOCUMENTED FRIEDKIN INSTITUTE FOR SLEEP DISORDER RESEARCH - Struan Ashby & Roy Parkhurst, 15m*
22-COLD STORAGE VS. TOKYO BOWL-Lisa Marr & Paolo Davanzo-TheHere&Now, 3m*
23-THE END OFCARLTON LUBOFF - Charles Chadwick, 20m
24- HOW TO MAKE A YOUTUBE VIDEO THAT IS NOT A YOUTUBE VIDEO - Gerry
Fialka, 7m youtube.com  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSN4aX-YIEQ#GU5U2spHI_4
25- CIRCUMFLEXUOUS - Paul Bacca, 5m*
 
"PXL THIS 16 represents Fialka’sdedication to showcasing unheard
voices and supporting a trulydemocratic art form" - HollyWillis, LA Weekly 11-16-06

PXL THIS 16 highlightsinclude: A chronology of thewar in Iraq is told inGESTURES, a provocative film by L. M. Sabo (press ready stills at http://members.cox.net/l.m.sabo/photos.html).

PXL THIS goes international once again with the UK entry ROUSHAM by Matt Honeyball (press ready stills at http://www.welcometohell.co.uk/rousham/), who utilizes Pixelvision's dream-like gaze to explore the edifices and dark corners of one of England's most striking countryside domiciles.

Culture Jammer John Trubee makes the subtleties obvious
in REMEMBER THE GOOD OLD DAYS.
Will Erokan's A STATE OF EXTREME UNWINDING utilizes the more grainy noise of audio cassette Pixelvision to create a rockin' rhythmic
experiment.
Ron Grun's touching KLEZMER MUSIC celebrates Jewish soul music.
Glen Abbott's TOO BUSY deconstructs the axiom "what comes around, goes around and around and around."
PXL pioneer Doug Ing contributes THE NEWSPAPER as read and written.
Gerry Fialka's A PRACTICAL MYSTIC studies the effects of Korla Pandit's visionary music on teenagers.
From New Zealand, Struan Ashby & Roy Parkhurst's SOMNIGRAPHIC TRACES OF THE OTHERWISE UNDOCUMENTED FRIEDKIN INSTITUTE FOR SLEEP DISORDER RESEARCH delves deep into the neuro-psychological dream research of Dr. Vorlicek's Somnigraph.
Lisa Marr & Paolo Davanzo-The Here & Now's COLD STORAGE VS. TOKYO BOWL survey the mysterious delights of modern day velocipede clubs in downtown LA.
EMPATH by Robert Dobbs  illuminates the cosmic  para-awareness of the flight
bulb. 

Hillary Kaye's DARKNESS AS THE LIGHT impacts the viewer with political poetry and painted  imagery. Agitprop Pixelator
Eli Elliott's BURNT POPCORN  2 sabotages the PXL THIS  fest with the newest kids video camera and gut-wrenching hilarity. 

Theresa Hulme's CONSCIOUSNESS OF MASS CONSTRUCTION invites a pulsation of soul-transformation. 
From Nova Scotia, Canada, Gavin Maitland's THE HOMECOMING reflects on a young woman returning to her childhood home and the strange relationship with her younger brother. 
Denny Moynahan, the Ernie Kovacs of PXL, remote controls his baby daughter in the funny interactive gem KID KUKULELE.
Paul Bacca's CIRCUMFLEXUOUS takes on bike antics.
Michael Almereyda's ALIENS is a portrait of two brothers playing a video game while talking about their favorite movies.

"PXL THIS is something that has to be seen and experienced at least once in a lifetime."
-Santa Monica Mirror

"All the PXL THIS videos reflect festival organizer Gerry Fialka's commitment to the freedom produced by making art without financial constraints. PXL THIS is a welcome highlight in the Los Angeles media scene celebrating the rich lexicon available in a tool which might initially seem rather limiting."
- Holly Willis, LA Weekly.

"PXL is the ultimate people's video."
- J. Hoberman, Premiere Magazine 
  
PXL THIS 16 reviews and articles:
http://www.fylmz.com/editorial/article_43.html

"Gerry Fialka's PXL THIS festival snaps, crackles and pops off the screen with the funky, user-friendly energy of real first-person cinema. Goofy, gorgeous, and altogether groovy, his provocative program of pieces produced with the Fisher-Price PXL 2000 toy video camera is not only downright entertaining, but more, its blipping and buzzing black 'n' white picture-bits coalesce into a veritable inspiration to all those who cherish the playful, spontaneous gestures and low-cost of electronic folk art."
-CraigBaldwin.

Established in 1991,Clap Off The Glass Productions supports independent video-making by sponsoring the annual PXL THIS Festival, which is the oldest of its kind in the world. Even with no corporate sponsors, no color brochures, no big shot movie director board members, no ticketmaster access, PXL THIS has been featured on PBS, IFC and NPR, and most recently screened at MIT. PXL THIS spans many genres: documentary, poetry, drama, art, music, political activism, cinema povera, comedy and the avant-garde. The unique Fisher-Price toy camcorder PXL 2000, which records sound and image directly onto audio cassettes, continues to empower artists. This failed toy was only made in the US from 1987 to 1989. The magical PXL 2000 restores a certain humanity to the overpowering technology of video. The irresistible irony of the PXL is that the camera's ease-of-use and affordability, which entirely democratizes movie-making, has inspired the creation of some of the most visionary, avant and luminous film of our time.

Films featured in past PXL THIS festivals are archived and available for viewing at the Academy Film Archive in Hollywood. For viewing appointments and information, please call (310) 247-3016 x 387, or visit the archive's web site at www.oscars.org/filmarchive.
"In past years, PXL THIS gave us some fascinating work...definitely an out-there experience. In the last few years, PXL videos have made it to such hallowed domains as the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, and the London Film Festival, where they have been admired for their characteristic spontaneity, highly personal perspective, visual uninhibitedness and raw, grainy truths."
 - Mary Beth Crain, LA Weekly.

"PXL THIS is worthy of praise...spellbinding. The shifting bricks of light and dark that form the Fisher-Price PXL 2000's picture lend themselves well to personal essays, creating an invigorating mesh of ambiguity and intimacy in every frame." - Paul Malcolm, LA Weekly.
"Since the start of the 21st century, I've attended the annual screenings of the PXL THIS toy camera festival at San Francisco's OTHER CINEMA. I have discovered several patterns of Pixelators that are similar to the pioneering video artists of the 60's. One, they reclaim film as a one-person project. Contrary to the popular belief that filmmaking must be collaborative, the solo vision is dominant and documented here. Two, in PXL-land, personal and deeply individualistic issues - frequently in the form of confessionals - are dominant. Pixelvision forms a quiet sub-genre within the larger category of the 'personal essay' film, an intimate art-world of privacy, whose entries frequently resemble message-in-a-bottle intimacies. These patterns show that expanding the vocabulary of moving image art is still possible - and, indeed, is growing." 
-Steve Polta, San Francisco Cinematheque curator.

According to filmmaker Bryan Konefsky: "Pixelvision is the haiku of cinema: the minimum of means delivering the maximum of meaning. The PXL 2000 toy camera's limited image-quality forces moviemakers to focus on essentials, and thereby to produce a richly connotative cinematic experience. In fact, PXL may be the best instantiation of Stan Brakhage's luminous quote: 'The true meaning of cinema can be found between the frames.'"

In spirit, the PXL-2000 toy camera resembles the cheap throwaway still camera, known as the Holga. Writing in ESQUIRE, Joshua Liberson called the Holga: "The world's most unserious serious camera...the Holga takes strangely beautiful, dreamlike pictures. Its two-part interlocking design allows light to bleed through constantly from the sides, making it almost impossible to take a boring picture, regardless of the subject matter."


"Most exciting art movements have been reactions against technical sophistication. Many have gone 'backwards' to find honesty and truth, the essence of things." - Guy Maddin

Film programmers and curators - please be aware that many different PXL THIS programs (90 to 120 minutes each) are available for exhibition by contacting Gerry Fialka, phone 310-306-7330 or pfsuzy@aol.com
Programs include BEST OF PXL THIS, PXL THIS 10, 11, 12, 13 (on DVD, read praise from The LA TIMES and SF WEEKLY in the Blackboard interview with Fialka on the Articles page), 14, 15, 16, etc. In the past, they have screened successfully in San Fran at www.OtherCinema.com, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Echo Park Film Center www.echoparkfilmcenter.org, New York-rbmc.net, Vancouver-blindinglight.com, Irvine,CA, Austin,TX, Albq., NM, Jacksonville, FL, Seattle, Eugene and Portland,OR. These are truly dynamic shows of low-tech video folk art that can draw big crowds

The DVD entitled THE ART OF PIXELVISION came from www.precious-realm.com

PXL THIS was  declared one of the ten BEST VIDEO FILM FESTIVALS by CHRIS GORE in his book "The Ultimate Film  Festival Survival Guide."

Gerry Fialka offers various workshops on Pixelvision and more.

SUBMISSIONS
COTG is now accepting entries for PXL THIS. For more information,
please send a self-addressed stamped envelope or call Gerry Fialka,
2427 1/2 Glyndon Ave, Venice, CA 90291, #310-306-7330.  The rules
for entry are the same every year. Submissions must be shot with the
PXL 2000 camera (but not exclusively), and entered on DVD and/or VHS
videotape at SP (2 hour) speed. Do not send originals; no returns.
All categories accepted, Deadline for entry is always Sept 22.
Mail to: PXL, 2427 1/2 Glyndon Ave., Venice, CA 90291, 310-306-7330.
Please include a synopsis and THREE first-class postage stamps with
each entry. 


Email PXL THIS at pfsuzy@aol.com or elienation@hotmail.com Continue to feel free to write or call.
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