Connect the Dots

Los Angeles boasts an incredible history of visual music film art, from the groundbreaking work of Oskar Fischinger, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1936, to the dazzling visual experiments starting in the 1940s by the Whitney Brothers. Much of this extraordinary work was showcased in MOCA's Visual Music show three years ago, but this week's Filmforum presentation updates the genre with a program of short abstract videos from all over the world curated by MAD, a Madrid-based organization. The group's traveling festival is titled Punto y Raya, or the Dot and the Line, and selected projects are described as "no figuration, no narrative: just dot-lines moving on a plane." Not surprisingly, several featured projects hail from Los Angeles, including Chris Casady's Puddle Jumper, a dynamic piece visualizing pinball dings, whooshy atmospheric noise and the pops, clangs and drum flourishes that all add up to a fast-paced visual triumph. Mecanismo, by CalArts grad Joaquin (Kino) Gil, was made by looping images and sounds; the glitchy soundscape becomes a kinetic examination of black and white lines, planes and cubes in motion, moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional space in very pleasing permutations. The 65-minute show features 13 shorts, each one exploring the possibilities of lines, dots, sound and motion, and overall, the program is a terrific overview of a burgeoning genre of film art. (Image: from Asperity, by Tom Jobbins.)
the details:
December 2, 2008, 8:00 p.m.
Silent Movie Theater
611 N Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles