Pleasure Dome and splice this! Present

Voices Unheard
In Person: Beth B from NYC
Saturday, June 19, 9:30 pm
@ Ted's Wrecking Yard
549 College St.

Beth B. will be present to screech and discuss her recent video VOICES UNHEARD (1997, 58 min., Hi-8 video). This investigative documentary explores juvenille sex offenders, specifically 13 to 18 year old, living in Middle America in the tough, intelligent way one expects a Beth B film to proceed. Those who have follwed her work, from the Super-8 punk days to her most recent productions in all realms of moving image art (be it avant garde, feature films, or museum/art gallery installations), have seen the development of a major artistic vision and voice engaging some of the more disturbing aspects of contemporary reality. Beth B emerged from the 70s New York underground art scene making Super 8 movies about ghoulish acts of espionage involving leather-clad special agents and their pseudo secret armies. The question of where these armies come from and the precise nature of their oppression has been the driving force behind B's extraordinary prolific career which has developed over the past two decades to include all realms of moving image art: photo installation, feature films, documentaries, and short experimental works.

Tonight's program returns to these highly charged early Super 8 and Hi-8 video works: Letters to Dad ('79) looks at the relation of power between Jim Jones and his followers; Belladonna ('89) draws texts from such loaded sources as Josef Mengele's trial testimony and Freud's work on sadomasochism; Out of Sight/Out of Mind ('95) continues the critique of one's relationship to power going beyond a simple reading of who has it and who doesn't. The program concludes with the Canadian premiere of Voices Unheard ('98), a riveting in-depth documentary about the incarceration of juvenile sex offenders. Interviews with the youths, their shrinks and straight taping of group therapy sessions exposes a deeply complex cycle of violence, as many of these youths are victims of abuse themselves. The question is posed: can early treatment prevent children from becoming adult offenders. Other works in the program include:

BELLADONA (1989, 12 min., Hi-8 video)
(Co-produced by painter and Beth's mother Ida Applebroog)
LETTERS TO MY DAD (Co-directed, 1979, 13min., Super-8)
OUT OF SITE/OUT OF MIND(1995, 6 min., Hi-8 video)

In Person: Peggy Ahwesh
Sunday, June 20, 7:00pm
@ Ted's Wrecking Yard
549 College St.
A co-presentation with splice this! Toronto's Annual Super 8 Film Festival June 18 to 21

New York film legend returns to Toronto to present a program of her most alluring Super 8 works. Peggy Awesh likes to have it both ways. Her films languish in the realm of the politically incorrect - from pornography to drug abuse to child sexuality- yet by playing under a set of broken rules she privileges us with a view of the incorrect from the inside out. In doing so Ahwesh teaches us not to be afraid but to recognize the things we fear about ourselves as complex manifestations of the human condition. The defiant child is a theme of several films in the prgram. Matina's Playhouse, a response to Pee Wee's Playhouse, focuses on the girl child, grappling with the fluidity of gender roles as she role-plays with her toys. Girl's beware, by eduactional film auteur Sid Davis, is a melodramatic scare film- a girl's advisory about the hazards of sexual activity. The Color of Love is a super 8 porn film that was found in the garbage slowly deteriorating and chemically decomposing. "The Color of Love is really about these abysses of obliterarted time. In it's riuned frames, sex and death meet face to face. The encounter is as tender as it is painful. A whole world of desire is created and destroyed. In less than ten minutes, it's all over" (Steve Shaviro).

Program:
Philosophy in the Bedroom, Pts1&2, (Super 8, 14 min)
The Color of Love(16mm blow up, 10 min.)
scenes from: The Fragments Project (Super 8, 10 min.)
Martina's Playhouse (Super 8, 20 min.)
The Scary Movie (16mm blow up, 9 min.)
From Romance to Ritual (Super 8, 20 min.)

Dragged out.....

Who could ever deny our daily acts of drag? Impersonation and cross dressing, essential to our activities in the banal (and the not-so-banal), to our lives as manifested in our relatively autonomous (career, professional, liesure, ethnic, linguistic, etc.) role-playing identities. Dragged out.... surveys the ravishingly rugged terrain of contemporary artists - drag or metadrag, if you will!- in video and in film.

Not only is transvestism addressed from transgendered perspectives as with the forever punning Wrik Mead in his Guise (Toronto) and Atif Siddiqis versified postcolonial Erotic/Exotic (Montreal), but also from the transsexual : Ivan E. Coyote's radical 'Family Portrait' Transmission (Vancouver) and Rita Kung's delicate La Difference (Lucerne). Bjoern Melhus continues his pointed exploration of androgeny and cloning in No Sunshine and Blue Moon (Berlin). You'll never forget Minnie St-Laurent's transgressive, melancholic homage to Tammy Wynette in Stand By Your Man (Toronto/Moncton). The program closes with Richard Fung and Tim Maskello's very special School Fag (Toronto), documenting an eloquent young queen-to-be......

Other artists represented include Charles Atlas, Pierre-Yves Clouin (Paris), Vaginal Creme Davis (L.A), Tom Kalin (NYC), Christoph Oertli (Zurich), Glennda Orgasm (L.A), et al. Most titles are Toronto or North American premieres. Program notes include original contributions from, among others, John Greyson, Arthur Kroker, Bruce LaBruce, and Tom Waugh. Darling, need I say, a show not to be missed!

Building Heaven, Remembering Earth:

Confessions of a Fallen Architect by Oliver Hockenhull
Friday, July 16
@ Cinecycle
129 Spadina Ave. (down the alley)

Pleasure Dome is pleased to present the Toronto premiere of Oliver Hockenhull's most recent film/video essay Building Heaven, Remebering Earth: Confessions of a Fallen Architect. An intensley visual study of architecture , Building Heaven acrues evidence on how design touches culture, in it's social and ideal forms. The work is decidedly transcultural in scope, situating itself through a nomadic and transhistorical approach in anticipated view of a future of subtle associative cultural references. Building is an expansive, real and imaginary journey, at times self-reflexive (and thus questioning) of its own panoptic complicity.

Building Heaven weaves an extrodinary narrative through visual letters of an incomplete alphabet inspired by thoughts on Brugel's Tower of Babel to the Pantheon in Rome to Schinkel's Berlin to Barcelona's Modernismo to Chicago's skyscrapers to the mind reading birds of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to the immaculate whores of Amsterdam to the other-worldly lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar to a cloud between Heaven and Earth to the erotic sun temple at Konark to the city of light known in ancient days as Kashi now as Varanasi to Palladio's "Rotunda" to Renzo Piano's "new Metropolis" to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's aestheitic to the significance (partial) of the Shiva-lingum to the structure of a zygote to the shape of water to how, yes, official Nazi architect Albert Speer finally died.

Open Screening Under the Stars!

Saturday, July 24, 9:30 pm
@ Cinecycle
129 Spadina Ave. (down the alley)

Pleasure Dome invites all film & videomakers, members and our audience to the annual Open Screening Under the Stars held in the courtyard behind Cinecycle. Open to anyone with a shred of celloid or tape kicking around this is your chance to put it up on the screening (for a maximum of 10 min.). Bring your latest work (finished or unfinished, found or stolen) to our outdoor screening (starts at nightfall around 9:30). We will screen any format (35mm, 16mm, super and regular 8mm, 3/4, 1/2 amd 8mm video) on a first come first shown basis. Participants free (please come early), audience by donation. If raining, the screening will be held inside at Cinecycle. Hot dogs and refreshments to be served at midnight.