Super-8 Summer

Colorado's own TIE, The International Experimental Cinema Exposition, exists to illuminate what curator and founder Christopher May calls the truest form of cinema: the experimental.

On May 23, TIE brings the old guard of the avant-garde to a one-night-only screening in the Tears McFarlane Mansion in Cheesman Park. Super-8 Summer is a twenty-minute show featuring three silent Super-8 short films: NYC Flower Film and Bellagio Roll, by Sandra Gibson, and Light Lick: Only Sunshine, by Saul Levine. "As a curator, I don't like to use the words 'short program,' just as an experimental filmmaker doesn't like to use the [words] 'short film,'" May says. "The term is too limiting of a word to build a program upon. TIE has had a brilliant, groundbreaking 4.5-hour-long program before, yet never a program of this length.... The 4.5-hour program included a piece from Saul Levine as well.... Must be something about Saul that makes our programming so unconventional."

Levine, who's been called this country's foremost avant-garde filmmaker, describes his twelve-minute piece as "an ecstatic flicker film inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice...a mid-summer day dream."

Doors open around 10 p.m. on Wednesday, May 23, at the McFarlane Mansion, 1290 Williams Street. Admission is $10 in advance (call 1-800-595-4849), or $20 at the door. The show will start after a brief social. For more information, go to http://experimentalcinema.org.