If you want to summon some ghosts, sip on witches’ brew and watch a satanic smorgasbord of documentary, experimental and narrative shorts, head to Glob for Cinema Contra tonight . Film programmer Anthony Buchanan promises that the ghost of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey will host this unique mix…
Denver artist Lauri Lynnxe Murphy has been trying to break her addiction to petroleum products, but they keep popping up: in her photos, in her paintings and in her large-scale sculptures, too. “When you realize how many things trace back to petroleum,” she says, “you’re thinking, ‘It’s like Alfred Hitchcock’s…
Mary DeForest loves Jane Austen. The 68-year-old academic has read each of the author’s novels over 100 times. “I went to her tomb at Winchester Cathedral and burst into tears,” she says. “I couldn’t believe she was dead.” DeForest has spent much of her academic career defending Austen’s legacy. “Austen…
Scouring flea markets, thrift stores and film archives, filmmaker Kelly Sears rescues bits and pieces of forgotten movies and reanimates old footage to explore new ideas. But unlike many found-footage filmmakers whose works are an exercise in nostalgia, Sears reinvents histories to reflect on the current crises facing our society…
Many basements, attics, closets and garages harbor dusty boxes of Super 8 films, VHS tapes or even mini-DVs. These old home movies show long-forgotten birthday parties, trips to the amusement park, babies cuddled by now deceased grandparents, all flickering moments in time captured but rarely screened. The Center For Home…
By the 1980s, feminist art pioneer Judy Chicago had secured a seat at the table of art history with her landmark installation, The Dinner Party. The triangular table, 48 feet on each side, was decorated with place-settings for 39 women from myth and history and celebrated another 999. The project…
Interstate 70 roars through Globeville, and with an October 31 deadline for public comment, discussion over its expansion is roaring as well. Houses on either side may be torn down as part of the project, and murals under the viaduct at 46th Avenue and Lincoln — paid for by the…
Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, whose art often deals with environmental themes, has been on a mission to purge herself of oil-based materials. But boycotting oil is next to impossible. Next May, Murphy plans to leave her massive Five Points studio behind and embark on a cross-country journey in a tiny home…
When Julia Joun’s not up to her elbows in rose petals, exotic herbs, jams, Ball jars and dehydrator trays, fulfilling her role as a “preserving maniac,” she’s digging through catalogs of films and sniffing out the Boulder/Denver culinary scene in order to program the Flatirons Food Film Festival, five nights…
In the debate over gun safety, regulation and ownership, people keep firing off their partisan politics without giving the conversation a whole lot of thought. The LIDA Project wants to change that, says Tommy Sheridan, director of the troupe’s latest production, Happiness in Warm Gun, a six-part series of abstract…
“Once upon a time,” “heroes,” “villains” and “happily ever after” aren’t good enough for Shana Cordon, the Boulder-based solo performer and writer of Dancing With Demons: A Fractured Fairytale, a play about a writer held hostage, a demon gone wild and a narrative structure that vanishes. Cordon, who has been…
Even with hundreds of rock documentaries covering everything from concerts to artists on tour, few have managed to crystalize the creative process as well as 20,000 Days on Earth. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s fantastical depiction of Nick Cave’s 20,000 days explodes the rules of traditional documentary filmmaking. They have…
When it comes to the immigration debate, all too often people get swept up in political generalities and forget the people, says Kristy King, programmer for the Emily Griffith Film Festival, which runs Friday, October 10 through Sunday, October 12 at the SIE FilmCenter. “We really tried to focus on…
Karen Yasinsky is not afraid to test her audience’s patience. Often, she animates slight variations of one shot and leaves the viewer with that single image for minutes on end. Her films are quiet, and in their stillness and subtlety, they are a violent rupture from the speed, aggression and…
Cultural critics have been debating the virtues and perils of youth-obsessed literature all summer long. In the New York Times, A.O. Scott lamented “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.” Slate’s Ruth Graham wrote the screed “Against YA,” bashing older fans of young-adult fiction. Both say they fear that the…
With a background in painting, Karen Yasinsky wanted to make movies without crews. So she set up an animation stand at her Baltimore studio and started shooting short films with puppets and archival materials. “It made sense to make my own actors,” she says. Her solitary process spawned an anti-narrative…
Some say October is the month when the veil between the dead and the living vanishes. For movie lovers, this is no rare thing: We’re used to the shadows of the past flickering before our eyes and yesterday’s voices flooding our ears. And not just in horror films; after all,…
In 1969, activists at the First National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference wrote the manifesto “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” which called on artists to “produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to our revolutionary culture.” By 1974, David Avalos felt the call of the movement…
When viewers walk into the Black Book Gallery this month, they’ll enter a space where all of the lights have been shut off except for the stark, backlit, magical imagery of husband-and-wife duo Hari Panicker and Deepti Nair. “Our paper-cut lightbox art pieces are intricate hand-cut paper sculptures and dioramas…
Regional theater companies have been mining the tragic history of the Ludlow Massacre this year to mark the hundredth anniversary of the epic battle in the Colorado coal wars. For Ludlow, 1914, avant-garde performance troupe the LIDA Project joins with Colorado Springs’s Theatreworks to bring a unique mix of performance,…
“I saw so many great films coming from Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Brazil and Chile that go to Cannes or that go to Sundance and are winning awards. That’s when I realized there’s something going on. There’s a Latin American film renaissance,” says Sie FilmCenter programmer Ernie Quiroz, who three years…
You might think the world of experimental film is actually filled with experiments. But the genre’s series of tropes are often beaten to death by one generation after another. Stan Brakhage’s hand-painted films, Bruce Conner’s found footage remixes and Kenneth Anger’s surrealist narratives have influenced generations of filmmakers, some of…
