MADE BELIEF: Utopia in Four Movements
September 22, 2010
7 pm Screening and Live Performance
Los Angeles Times Media Center
Hillside Campus
Art Center College of Design
1700 Lida St.
Pasadena, CA 91107
FREE TO THE PUBLIC
SEATING IS LIMITED;
YOU MUST EMAIL TO RESERVE A SEAT:
mdpinfo [at] artcenter.edu
PARKING ON SITE
Sam Green
Director
Dave Cerf
Composer and Musician
CO-PRESENTED WITH ART CENTER'S BROADCAST CINEMA PROGRAM
This performance of Utopia in Four Movements expands the MADE UP project's interest in utopias, dystopias, and the fantastic.
From the Director:
Throughout human history, people have had giddy dreams and fantastic notions about what the future would bring. Today the future has become more of a threat than a promise—a knot of intractable problems looming menacingly on the horizon. With a powerful sense of poetry, Utopia in Four Movements uses the collective experience of cinema to explore the battered state of the utopian impulse at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
In this "live documentary," filmmaker Sam Green cues images and narrates in person while musician Dave Cerf performs the soundtrack. From the establishment of a man-made language designed to end war and cultural conflict and the undying optimism of an American exile in Cuba, to the current economic boom in China and the desire to give the remains in mass graves a dignified burial, Green and Cerf sift through the history of the utopian impulse with audiences and search for insights about the way to build a vision of the future based on humankind's noblest impulses.
Sam Green is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker. His feature The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His other award-winning documentaries include lot 63, grave c, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, N-Judah 5:30, and Pie Fight '69. His work has won awards and been featured in many festivals, among them Sundance, the London Film Festival, and Locarno, where he won the Critics Choice Award. Green has received grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Creative Capital Foundations, and the NEA.
Sam got his masters degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. He currently teaches at the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute.
samgreen.to/
Dave Cerf is a filmmaker, musician, sound artist, and software designer. His earliest memory is when his parents replaced his crib with a mainframe computer. After graduating California Institute of the Arts, he moved to the Bay Area and began collaborating with other musicians, filmmakers, and media artists. He composed music for Scott Kennedy's film OT: and Sam Green's The Weather Underground, and performed live musical and sound accompaniment over the films of Jennifer Reeves, Pat O'Neill, and Melinda Stone, including her 2003 California Tour of abandoned drive-in movie theaters.
Dave also tours both in the U.S. and internationally with Threnody Ensemble, a band co-founded with longtime friend Erik Hoversten. Other projects include Picture of the Day (a 365 long-exposure video-photo calendar), dramatizations distributed via radio and voice mail, and Shirley and Spinoza Internet radio (with sound designer Fausto Ciceres).
Dave is currently a user interface designer at Apple, Inc., and is rapidly becoming the only person he knows without a cell phone.
image:performance footage, Utopia in Four Movements