2005 AVANT-GARDE MASTERS GRANTS ANNOUNCED BY THE NFPF
Bruce Conner, Gregory Markopoulos, and Tom Palazzolo Films To Be Saved Through Grants Funded by The Film Foundation
Contact: Jeff Lambert (415-392-7291, lambert@filmpreservation.org)
San Francisco, CA (September 21, 2005)—Landmark films by Bruce Conner, Gregory Markopoulos, and Tom Palazzolo will be preserved through the 2005 Avant-Garde Masters Grants, a program created by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation to save the work of influential American experimental filmmakers. The $50,000 award will be split among three organizations—Anthology Film Archives, Chicago Filmmakers, and Temenos—and will fund the creation of new preservation masters and prints for eleven films.
Renowned artist Bruce Conner is credited with reinventing the collage film, manipulating and editing found footage in ways now widely emulated in music videos and advertising. Among the five Conner works slated for preservation are the legendary Report (1967), an emotionally-charged deconstruction of the media coverage of the Kennedy assassination, and Mea Culpa (1981), a music short commissioned by Brian Eno and David Byrne that has been unavailable for almost two decades. Anthology Film Archives will collaborate with the Pacific Film Archive and Conner himself on the project.
"Bruce Connor's films are the best experimental films of the twentieth century, in my opinion," said actor and filmmaker Dennis Hopper, "It's wonderful that they will be preserved by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation in conjunction with Anthology Film Archives of New York."
Chicago underground filmmaker Tom Palazzolo began his career making experimental documentary shorts such as Bride Stripped Bare (1967), an irreverent take on the unveiling of the five-story Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza. The funding will enable Chicago Filmmakers to collaborate with Palazzolo to save Bride and four other films from the late 1960s.
Visionary filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos (1928-1992) devoted his last twenty years to Eniaios, an eighty-hour mediation on Greek myth, portraiture, and landscape. The 2005 Avant-Garde Masters Grant will enable Temenos, the nonprofit organization devoted to Markopoulos' work, to create new preservation masters and prints of Cycle V of the epic.
The Avant-Garde Masters is the first grant program aimed specifically at preserving America's experimental film heritage. It enables archives to work directly with filmmakers to save works significant to the development of the avant-garde in America. The program is funded by The Film Foundation and managed by the NFPF. Each year's winners are selected by an expert panel drawn from the film community.
In previous years, the Avant-Garde Masters Grants have singled out for preservation works by Kenneth Anger, Hollis Frampton, Larry Gottheim, George and Mike Kuchar, and Jonas Mekas. New prints of three Larry Gottheim films, preserved by the New York Public Library's Donnell Media Center through this program, will premiere on October 2 at the New York Film Festival. A full list of films safeguarded through the program can be found on the NFPF Web site, www.filmpreservation.org, under the heading Preserved Films.
The National Film Preservation Foundation is the non-profit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. The NFPF has supported film preservation in 37 states and the District of Columbia and has helped save more than 800 films and collections. The NFPF is the charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress.
The Film Foundation is a nonprofit organization established in 1990 by Martin Scorsese and nine distinguished filmmakers— Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg. The foundation is dedicated to protecting and preserving motion picture history, and provides substantial annual support for preservation and restoration projects at the nations largest film archives.
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