DREAM AWAKE - HOW JAMES JOYCE INVENTED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK

Poet John Sinclair just shared details of a filmfestival scheduled in his home of Ann Arbor later this year, featuring a lecture that sounds like the perfect sand-wedge, between Bobby Campbell's fantastic artwork and recent mind-cleansing MCLUHAN/JOYCE postings:

Friday, March 26 at 5pm: ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL LECTURE -

at Ann Arbor Library, 343 South 5th Av, AA, MI 48104, 734-302-7774, free admission http://www.aafilmfest.org/

DREAM AWAKE - HOW JAMES JOYCE INVENTED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK - Paramedia-ecologist Gerry Fialka's challenging interactive workshop probes how Joyce's 1939 book/epic collage/meta-narrative film FINNEGANS WAKE (and Marshall McLuhan's Menippean Satirized translation of it) presaged experimental & political activist cinema. How did the WAKE influence Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, John Cage & Peter Greenaway? How & why does the WAKE tell the history of everything that ever happened and will happen? Why did Joyce hang out with Masons and reveal their secrets? Why did the British secret police study the WAKE? How did the WAKE invent MK-ULTRA, the CIA's mind control program? How does the WAKE write a detailed history of the future? How and why did Joyce anticipate the Facebook-Google-Wiki-Twitter-YouTube-Blogosphere swirl (social networking), TMZ, Girl Talk and whatever comes after the Internet? Harry Smith, who claimed Giordano Bruno invented cinema, stated that the function of film viewing is to put people to sleep - dreaming awake. ReJoyce interconnecting Finneganese "funny funereels," "allnights newseryreel," "they leap looply, looply, as they link to light," "cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript," and "a ... riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed." Fun for all at Finnegans Wake. "Gerry Fialka's 'Dream Awake' is a great, entertaining, eye-opening, mind-widening, and provocative event. It amply demonstrated for me Marshall McLuhan's assertion that Finnegans Wake is 'a memory theater for the entire contents of human consciousness and unconsciousness.' Highly recommended." - John Bishop, seminal James Joyce scholar, author of "The Book of the Dark," and author of the intro to the current in-print edition of Finnegans Wake.

F FOR FAKE

Wikipedia: "F for Fake (French: Vérités et Mensonges) is the last major film completed by Orson Welles. Initially released in 1974, it focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger; de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art. Far from serving as a traditional documentary on Elmyr de Hory, the film also incorporates Welles's companion Oja Kodar, notorious "hoax-biographer" Clifford Irving, and Orson Welles himself, in an autobiographical role."

Passages from Finnegans Wake (1965)

"A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce's polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion - 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances - she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel's nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.

With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut."

Movie embedded from ubu.com
Torrent available from Greylodge
Soundtrack available from WFMU