For the past eight years the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's film department has hosted Experimental Tuesday -- a program that features films and "cinematic alternatives" that examine the content of media as well as the form of media.
What began in February 2000 with Andrew Noren's "Lighted Field" has since expanded, with the help of the film department's Carl Bogner, who also coordinates and directs the Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival and the Woodland Pattern Experimental Film/Video Series.
Over the years UWM has welcomed L.A. filmmaker / photographer Sharon Lockhart, who introduced her 2005 film "Pine Flat;" stereoscopic artist Vladimir, whose hand-made View Masters -- Vladmasters -- make use of toys, neglected household objects and odd ephemera to tell 28-picture tales of train chases, missing steam shovels, disastrous dinner parties and overly adventurous cockroaches; as well as independent filmmakers Peter Hutton and Julie Murray.
This April, Experimental Tuesday hosts two more visiting artists.
On April 3, UWM showcases "Zoopraxia: The Films of Karl Kels," a German experimental filmmaker who has sometimes taken the controlled environment of zoos as the site for his cinematic exploration. On April 15, Craig Baldwin is in town for a sneak preview of "Mock Up On Mu," a radically hybridized mash-up of spy, sci-fi, Western, and horror genres.
"Having Baldwin and Kels as guests at the series fulfills the ongoing mission to bring international experimental filmmakers to Milwaukee," says Sarah Buccheri, the film department's assistant programmer.
Bogner has this to say about the two experimental filmmakers:
Karl Kels
Using carefully chosen camera angles and 35mm black and white film stock, he accrues his material slowly over periods of years. A great subtlety of nuance forms in the apparent endurance of the captive animals as it is mirrored within the shape of the film itself. As the elephant patiently waits, so, too, does the filmmaker. The result is a strikingly unsentimental observation of considerable emotional depth. In other films he has used numerical based editing strategies, which elicit the most surprising sensuality over the duration of the pieces.
Kels will present his new film, shot in the TriBeCa area of downtown Manhattan, in an in-person presentation.
Craig Baldwin
"Mock Up on Mu" musters the creative audacity-make that recklessness-to take up within its absurdly impossible collage-narrative agency the profoundly serious issue of Technological Ethics, namely, the militarization of space.
(Mostly) based on historical fact-the occult sex rituals of three seminal figures in post-War California (JPL founder Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard and Marjorie Cameron), the incorrigible Baldwin promiscuously mixes his own desert-shot live-action footage with both fiction and non-fiction archival material to weave a dense tale of mind-control, subterranean intrigue, and scientific speculation out of the three thematic threads of aerospace, alternative religion, and Beat subculture ... and in pulp-serial form to boot!
There will be assorted short works prior to the screening and Q&A to follow.
OnMilwaukee.com staff writer Julie Lawrence grew up in Wauwatosa and has lived her whole life in the Milwaukee area.
As any “word nerd” can attest, you never know when inspiration will strike, so from a very early age Julie has rarely been seen sans pen and little notebook. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee it seemed only natural that she major in journalism. When OnMilwaukee.com offered her an avenue to combine her writing and the city she knows and loves in late 2004, she knew it was meant to be. Around the office, she answers to a plethora of nicknames, including “Lar,” (short for “Larry,” which is short for “Lawrence”) as well as the mysteriously-sourced “Bill Murray.”
