White Light Cinema Presents
Tuesday, October 27 - 8:00pm
At The Nightingale
(1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
PREMIUM & MIRACE: TWO FILMS BY ED RUSCHA
Jim
Ganzer in MIRACLE. Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
One of the acknowledged masters of mid and late-twentieth century art, Ed Ruscha
has created a powerful body of work that skewers the popular culture and marketing
of the time through simple, and now iconic, renderings of signage, gas stations,
consumer items, Hollywood imagery, and other modern detritus.
Unlike Andy Warhol's works of similar subjects, Ruscha rejects the New York
grit for a Los Angeles sheen - much of the power of his paintings comes from
the ironic gloss that he gives to his images. As Warhol did in NY, Ruscha has
become something of a counterpoint West Coast celebrity and is admired by and
hangs out with Dennis Hopper, Mick Jagger, and others. He, like many of his
art world contemporaries in the 1950s-70s, also explored filmmaking.
Ruscha's efforts were short-lived - he only made two films as compared to the
several hundred Warhol made. But they are idiosyncratic and fascinating evocations
of the time and carry-through many of the themes Ruscha developed in his painting.
White Light Cinema is pleased to present this extremely rare screening of Ed
Ruscha's two films, PREMIUM and MIRACLE.
PROGRAM:
Premium
1971, 24 mins., 16mm
Featuring artist Larry Bell, model Léon Bing, designer Rudi Gernreich,
and musician/comedian Tommy Smothers
Based on the Mason Williams short story "How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment
from Crackers"
"The
immediate source of PREMIUM was a photo-novel, CRACKERS, that Ruscha made in
1969, itself deriving from a story, 'How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment from
Crackers,' written by Mason Williams...
A man played by the artist Larry Bell buys a shopping cart full of tomatoes,
lettuce, and other salad foods and five one-gallon cans of dressing. Driving
to a skid row flophouse, he rents a $2 room from the desk clerk, played by the
designer Rudi Gernreich. In the rat-infested room, he pulls back the covers
of the bed and on it very carefully prepares a huge salad, a sculptural composition
of greens that flower out symmetrically from its center and then replaces the
bed cover." (David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde)
We won't spoil the rest.
Miracle
1975, 28 mins., 16mm
"Features artist Jim Ganzer and actress Michelle Phillips in a tale about
a strange day in the life of an auto mechanic." (Harvard Film Archive)
These films are Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
Admission: $7.00-10.00 sliding scale.