Celebrated underground filmmaker Antero Alli is the focus of an evening highlighting his short films at “Loaded Visions,” a special program to be held on Wednesday, October 17, at 8pm at the La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, CA. Admission is $5-10 on a sliding scale.
Antero Alli will be at the event to introduce eight of his series of VideoPoems, short films which adapt classic and contemporary verse into cinematically experimental explosions of aural and visual imagination. Shot over the past decade and including two world premieres, the VideoPoems presented at “Loaded Visions” include two adaptations of Pablo Neruda (1992’s “Skin of Birch” and 1993’s “Book of Questions”), plus a 1992 filmed version of Alli’s own poem “Black Sea,” the 1996 “Bombs & Prayers” based on the writing of astrologer Rob Brezsny, a fiery 1998 filming of Sylvia Plath’s “Witch Burning,” a 1999 production from Tristan Tzara’s “Anti-Philosopher,” and two recently completed works: “Motion” based on the poem by Arthur Rimbaud and “Fears” based on a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.
“These videopoems are experimental shorts using poetry as an oblique narrative (rather than as recital) to tell stories or invoke spirits dwelling in the text itself,” says Alli, best known for his underground cult favorites “The Drivetime” (1995) and Tragos (2000), which was on Film Threat’s list of the Ten Best Unseen Films of 2000. “This collection represents my most personal and most hallucinatory work to date.”
“Loaded Visions” will also include a special screening of Alli’s 1998 “Lily in Limbo,” which was praised by Film Threat as being among the Ten Best Unseen Films of the 1990s. Starring the filmmaker’s real-life/reel-life collaborator Sylvi Alli, “Lily in Limbo” focuses on a bitter artist whose self-imposed isolation corrupts her senses into a state of delusion, where she loses herself in a series of bizarre dreams.
For more info, call 510-464-4640 or visit Antero Alli‘s Vertical Pool Productions .
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