In a career that spans six decades and over 100 films, UCLA alumnus David Lebrun has crafted a multidisciplinary film practice encompassing animation, documentary and experimental techniques to explore different ways of seeing and being in the world. A founding member of the multimedia light show collective Single Wing Turquoise Bird, Lebrun helped create the visual language of the psychedelic era while leaning on his background in philosophy and anthropology to understand and visualize how other cultures, ancient and modern, have used available technologies to represent their own aesthetic and spiritual systems. From the hippie counterculture of the 1960s to Tibetan and Mayan mythologies, Lebrun seeks cinematic forms that draw out the radical specificity of his subjects while simultaneously revealing their interconnectedness across time and place. Beyond documentary, his films can be powerful, transformative meditations on human expression and experience, in and of themselves. The Archive is honored to host Lebrun in person at the Billy Wilder Theater for a weekend of screenings that includes the premiere of the Academy Film Archive’s new restoration of Sanctus (1966) and a special selection of works from Lebrun’s latest museum installation project Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past, which employs innovative digital animation techniques to explore the evolution of fundamental artistic forms and symbols from the Paleolithic through the late Middle Ages.

Admission is free, available at: cinema.ucla.edu/

In a career that spans six decades and over 100 films, UCLA alumnus David Lebrun has crafted a multidisciplinary film practice encompassing animation, documentary and experimental techniques to explore different ways of seeing and being in the world. A founding member of the multimedia light show collective Single Wing Turquoise Bird, Lebrun helped create the visual language of the psychedelic era while leaning on his background in philosophy and anthropology to understand and visualize how other cultures, ancient and modern, have used available technologies to represent their own aesthetic and spiritual systems. From the hippie counterculture of the 1960s to Tibetan and Mayan mythologies, Lebrun seeks cinematic forms that draw out the radical specificity of his subjects while simultaneously revealing their interconnectedness across time and place. Beyond documentary, his films can be powerful, transformative meditations on human expression and experience, in and of themselves. The Archive is honored to host Lebrun in person at the Billy Wilder Theater for a weekend of screenings that includes the premiere of the Academy Film Archive’s new restoration of Sanctus (1966) and a special selection of works from Lebrun’s latest museum installation project Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past, which employs innovative digital animation techniques to explore the evolution of fundamental artistic forms and symbols from the Paleolithic through the late Middle Ages.

Admission is free, available at: cinema.ucla.edu/

Comparisons between humans and animals are foundational to the experimental branches of medicine and psychology. Yet converting the bafflingly complex bodies and behaviors of nonhuman animals into scientific models is not a straightforward process. From testing apparatuses to spreadsheets of findings, from textbooks on animal handling to published journal articles, such a transformation requires an intricate system of interlocking media. Film has been an essential, yet largely overlooked, element within this process. Often treated as purely transparent scientific recordings, the films produced out of animal research are in fact deeply formalist works that tested what film could capture through the image of an animal—variously proposing that they could visualize pure thought, the processes of history and culture, and the influence of the environment on an organism. In this capacity, scientific filmmakers often advanced their own theories of media and their relationship to living organisms, theories which overlapped with and influenced figures like Marshall McLuhan.

Tickets: $10 General | $5 Students/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at link.dice.fm or at the door