Lost and Unmade: The Films of Bruce Checefsky – CANCELED
This event has been canceled.
The John J. McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown State University’s center of contemporary art, is excited to announce Lost and Unmade: the films of Bruce Checefsky. This screening of some of Checefsky’s most popular works will be held on Wednesday, March 20 beginning at 5:30 pm in the McDonough Auditorium. Entry to the screening is free and open to the public.
Checefsky is a filmmaker, photographer, and writer whose independent films have been shown around the world. Looking to films that were lost, destroyed, or conceived but never made, Checefsky recreates and reimagines abstract and avant-garde shorts. He focuses on pre-1920s and post-1935s films, with special interest in those made by Jewish filmmakers that were destroyed during the Second World War. The screening will include some of Checefsky’s most recent films from the 1940s and 1960s. These include a remake of Maya Deren’s lost film, Witch’s Cradle, a collaboration between Deren and Marcel Duchamp, and Andy Warhol’s confiscated film from 1963 titled Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love.
“My short films require extensive, almost obsessive research to uncover the facts and materials surrounding the original lost film. I carefully unravel a filmmaker’s life story,” Checefsky said. “I am especially interested in their social and political, and economic conditions under which the lost film was originally made. Several of my films were made in the country of their origin, to influence the cultural and contextual grain, which plays a decisive role in the film’s ability to move beyond a stick-figure view of history.”
Along with Witch’s Cradle and Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love, there will be five additional films in the screening.
Salmon Monny De Boully’s Doctor Hypnison was filmed but never published. de Boully was a poet, publisher, and a member of the Serbian Surrealist movement. His film is a visual mélange of images and filming techniques that produces a mesmerizing and hypnotic effect.
Ulysses, Part 1 is inspired by a film poem published in December 1924 by Czech artists Karel Tiege and Jaroslave Seifert. It examines the ideal of Poetism; – the art of being alive and living.
Béla, by Hungarian Dada artist and avant-garde filmmaker György Gerő was created in the 1920s. The original scene-by-scene film script consists of four pages currently housed in the Budapest City Archives.
A Woman And Circles was based on a script by the avant-garde poet Jan Brzękowski that was published in Polish and French magazines from the 1930s. The film script was an illustration of Brzękowski’s theory of abstract film.
Pharmacy is an experimental film made in 1930 by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. Departing from the traditional way of making photograms, they began by placing objects on translucent paper and photographed them from below using positive film. The unique artistic expression of the film was a play of lights with soft, dancing shadows, obtained by the movement of lamps over a trick table, and effects resulting from the juxtaposition of the negative and positive film.
This screening is made possible in part by state tax dollars allocated by the Ohio Legislature to the Ohio Arts Council (OAC). The OAC is a state agency that funds and supports quality arts experiences to strengthen Ohio communities culturally, educationally, and economically.
Youngstown State University does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, disability, age, religion or veteran/military status in its programs or activities. Please visit the Digital Accessibility Home Page for contact information for persons designated to handle questions about this policy.
More information is available by calling the McDonough Museum at 330-941-1400.
