AVATAR PLUSH TOYS

Alan Berliner will present an evening of some of his rarely seen experimental short films, installation projects, collages, and a selection of other mixed-media specimens gathered from his extraordinary archive of images, sounds, and miscellaneous multi-media.

Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet’s Alzheimer’sby Alan Berliner
USA 2010, 19 minutes
For the past several years, Alan Berliner has been chronicling the final years of his friend, cousin, and former mentor, Edwin Honig – distinguished poet, translator, critic, and teacher – into the depths of Alzheimer’s disease. Honig, who is 91 years old, founded the Creative Writing Program at Brown University, where he taught for 26 years. He’s written dozens of critically acclaimed books and poems that have been published all over the world. His seminal translations of Federico Garcia Lorca, Calderon de la Barca, and Fernando Pessoa awakened English speaking readers to the work of these literary giants, and he’s received honorary “knighthoods” from both the King of Spain and the President of Portugal. Unfortunately he remembers none of it. This suite of six short films reveals a poet and wordsmith who, although he has lost his memory, his relationship to the past, and his command of language, still retains his sense of rhythm, rhyme and sublime musicality. And through it all, his dignity.

Playing With Fire by Alan Berliner
USA, work-in-progress
The early stages of a work in progress exploring the boundaries of montage and repetition, using imagery with unstable (and combustible) historical and metaphorical implications.

Exquisite Corpse by Alan Berliner
USA, 2009
A collage made from fragments of newspaper obituaries collected over a 25 year period.

Playing God by Alan Berliner
USA, 2008
“Part game of chance, part cinematic toy, part biblical commentary, Playing God,” says Berliner, “mines the opening chapters of Genesis (the story of the seven days of creation) to reveal a universe of significance, meaning, and contemporary relevance hidden inside the text.” Reassembling the language of Genesis into a wide range of poetically evocative phrases juxtaposed with an eclectic landscape of video imagery—from the beauty of nature to historical and contemporary political and social environments—Playing God is a reflection on the role that human beings have played as God’s proxy, with better and worse consequences.

City Edition by Alan Berliner
USA, 1980, 9 minutes
Alan Berliner’s unremitting attempts to bring order to his world drive him to juxtapose the most divergent images and sounds in his experimental short films. His creative logic is enticing and stimulating. In the black-and-white film City Edition, the images of The New York Times are the starting point for a journey through wars, a state funeral, baseball, political demonstrations, parades, a marathon, a blaze, a flood, factories, and a man discarding his newspaper. Berliner edits and manipulates his base material, in this case from old newsreels and feature films, until time, place and meaning loose their common references and tumble about each other in a new context, over an equally associative sound layer.

Late City Edition by Alan Berliner
USA, 1990, 12 minutes
“The newspaper page… you have loud and noisy headlines, auditory headlines… you have a mosaic space made up of unconnected items from every part of the world at once. The total discontinuity, the total lack of storyline… is as sophisticated as Picasso….” -Marshall McLuhan

Everywhere At Once by Alan Berliner
USA, 1985, 10 minutes
“…a musical montage, a synchronized symphony composed from an infinity of elements at hand…a journey in images at the speed of sound.”
“Virtuoso Editing” –INDEPENDENT FOCUS, WNET/Thirteen
Alan Berliner’s uncanny ability to combine experimental cinema, artistic purpose, and popular appeal in compelling film essays has made him one of America’s most acclaimed independent filmmakers. The New York Times has described Berliner’s work as “powerful, compelling and bittersweet… full of juicy conflict and contradiction, innovative in their cinematic technique, unpredictable in their structures… Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life.”
A recipient of Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Jerome Foundation Fellowships, Berliner has received multiple grants from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA and in 1998, won his third career Emmy Award (he has also received six nominations) from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In 2006, the International Documentary Association honored Berliner with an International Trailblazer Award for “creativity, innovation, originality and breakthrough in documentary filmmaking.” Retrospectives of his films have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and numerous film festivals and museums around the world. His most recent film, Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s was shown at the New York Film Festival in 2010.

357/365 - T-8 days and counting

Scud: The Disposable Assassin (published from 1994 to 1998, and 2008) is a humorous, hyperkinetic science fiction comic by Rob Schrab about a world in which one can buy weapons out of vending machines, the most popular of which are intelligent robots that kill a specified target and then self-destruct.

The protagonist of the series is Scud, an average Heart Breaker Series 1373 model assassin. On his first mission, he is sent to kill Jeff, a rampaging female mutant with mousetraps for hands, an electrical plug for a head, and a squid for a belt.

During his first mission, Scud glances in a mirror and sees the warning label on his back explaining how he will self-destruct upon completion of his mission. Realizing that he doesn't want to die, Scud mortally wounds Jeff, shooting off her arms and legs, then takes her to a hospital placing her on life support ensuring their mutual survival.

Scud: TDA's main plot follows Scud's career as a freelance mercenary and assassin, working to pay off Jeff's medical bills.