Filmforum is community partner for two screenings of works by David Lebrun at UCLA that also fit in our series Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film.
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.
Special thanks: David Lebrun; Rosey Guthrie; the Academy Film Archive; Cindy Keefer, Center for Visual Music.
Program notes by Paul Malcolm and David Lebrun.
SCREENING
Tanka
U.S., 1976, DCP (from 16mm), color, 9 min. Director: David Lebrun
Tanka means, literally, “a thing rolled up.” Photographed from Tibetan scroll paintings of the 16th to 19th centuries, Tanka is a cyclical vision of ancient gods and demons, an animated journey through the image world of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that won the Bronze Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and other international awards.
Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision
U.S., 2004, 35mm, color, 60 min. Director: David Lebrun
An exploration of the intersection of science and art that itself embodies a visionary fusion of art and documentary, Proteus centers on the fascinating life and career of 19th century German naturalist Ernst Haeckel and his obsession with radiolarians, a species of microscopic marine protozoa. Illustrating the infinite variety of their intricate skeletal structures, challenged Haeckel to reconcile his personal contradictions, as an artist and a scientist, as well as the larger contradictions of his age between the material and the spiritual worlds. David Lebrun delivers heady doses of philosophy, history, aesthetics, religion and evolutionary biology made all the more potent by his dazzling presentation of Haeckel’s scientific drawings.
Admission is free. No advance reservations. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office.
via cinema.ucla.edu