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David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past (2018-2024)

  • Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA, 90024 United States (map)

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.

Total running time: 67 min.

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

45 Handaxes, Lower to Middle Paleolithic (600,000 to 40,000 BP)

U.S., 2020, DCP, color, 7 min. Director: David Lebrun.

137 Coins, Greece via Rome to Gaul (4th to 1st C. BCE)

U.S., 2020, DCP, color, 7 min. Director: David Lebrun.

Cycladic and Anatolian Figurines (3300–2000 BCE)

U.S., 2021, DCP, color, 7 min. Director: David Lebrun.

91 Spouted Vessels, Iran (3200 BCE–224 CE)

U.S., 2021, DCP, color, 9 min. Director: David Lebrun.

65 Churches and Cathedrals / Early Romanesque to Late Gothic/France (1050-1500 CE)

U.S., 2021, DCP, color, 18 min. Director: David Lebrun.

American Gods Triptych (2000 BCE–1521 CE)

U.S., 2024, DCP, color, 10 min. Director: David Lebrun.

The Hoysalesvara Temple / Karnataka, India (circa 1250 CE)

U.S., 2012, DCP, color, 9 min. Director: David Lebrun.

 

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.


David Lebrun’s latest project is a large-scale, multi-year work in progress to create a transformative encounter between the present and the past through an immersive experience with change itself. Beginning with high-resolution images of artifacts, art objects and architectural details from different eras and photographed at various sites around the world, including museums, churches and temples, Lebrun animates the changes in their forms across millennia. The results are an awe-inspiring tour of human ingenuity, imagination, belief and craft as it expressed itself from the Paleolithic period through the Middle Ages, and from Mesoamerica to Europe, the Middle East and Indian Asia. 

Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum

Tickets:

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.

More Info

via cinema.ucla.edu

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David Lebrun: Proteus

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