I am going to be in downtown LA Saturday evening, maybe I can swing by this first.
The Rolling Stones on Film
The School of Cinematic Arts and
Visions and Voices: The USC Arts & Humanities Initiative present
THE ROLLING STONES ON FILM
Friday, February 6th – Saturday, February 7th, 2009
Norris Cinema Theatre/Frank Sinatra Hall
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
This two-day film festival will explore the many facets of the Rolling Stones’ involvements in cinema. Beginning with their appearance in one of the most celebrated of the early rock'n'roll documentaries, The T.A.M.I. Show (1964), the Stones became one of the most cinematic -- both highly visible and highly visual -- of sixties pop groups. That era, and in many ways the utopian vision of 60s popular culture, was conclusively terminated by the chaos of their attempt to match Woodstock in the free concert at Altamont, and the film about this, Gimme Shelter (1970), is widely recognized as a landmark in the history of both the documentary as a form and the rock'n'roll film.
Since then, the band has participated in many forms of cinema, and Martin Scorsese’s recent documentary, Shine a Light (2008) is only the latest instance of a cinematic tradition that includes The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (filmed, 1968; released 1996), the notorious and censored CS Blues (1972), Jean-Luc Godard’s essay on radical politics, Sympathy for the Devil (1968), Peter Whitehead's recently rediscovered documentary about “Swinging London,” Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (filmed 1968, released 2006), and Mick Jagger’s cult film, Performance (1970).
The festival will combine screenings illustrating this long and uniquely resonant history of music in film with a panel discussion focused on its cultural and social implications.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6TH, 2009
7:00PM – Performance (1970)
Directed by Donald Cammell & Nicholas Roeg, 105 minutes
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9:00PM – Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 100 minutes
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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7TH, 2009
1:00PM – Assorted Videos: The T.A.M.I. Show (1964), directed by Steve Binder, extract: 20 minutes; Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), directed by Kenneth Anger, 15 minutes; other material TBA.
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2:00PM – Gimme Shelter (1970)
Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 91 minutes
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4:00PM – Panel Discussion: The Rolling Stones on Film
Panelists will include Filmmaker Penelope Spheeris, USC Musicologists Joanna Demers and Josh Kun and Gimme Shelter Camera Operator Bill Yahraus. Moderated by Professor David James.
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5:30PM – Catered Reception in Queen’s Courtyard.
Featuring a live performance of Rolling Stones music by Calamity Magnet.
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7:00PM – Shine a Light (2008)
Directed by Martin Scorsese, 122 minutes
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ABOUT THE FILMS
Performance (1970), 105 minutes, Rated R
Directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
A grim and unsettling psychological account of a criminal who hides out in a bizarre house occupied by a peculiar rock star and his two female companions. The entire cast scores high marks, with Pallenberg especially compelling as a somewhat mysterious and attractive housemate to mincing Jagger. A cult favorite, with music by Oscar-winning composer Jack Nitzsche.
Print provided courtesy of Warner Bros. Classics.
Sympathy for the Devil (1968), 100 minutes, Unrated
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
A collage of the Rolling Stones rehearsing Sympathy For The Devil in the studio as they compose material for their forthcoming Beggar's Banquet album, combined with Godard's sequences and abstract fictional vignettes of revolutionary political activism. The film also features Black Power revolutionaries and a TV interview with one Eve Democracy about the relationship between culture and revolution. Also released as One Plus One.
Print provided courtesy of ABKCO Records and Cupid Productions.
The T.A.M.I. Show (1964), extract: 20 minutes
Directed by Steve Binder
In the early 1960s, "T.A.M.I." stood for "Teenage Awards Music International", a foundation devoted to providing music scholarships to teens. In support of this foundation, a concert was organized that would combine top British Invasion and American groups in one show. Filmed in 1964 in front of a packed house of 2,600 screaming fans at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, The T.A.M.I. Show is a record of one truly great concert hosted by Jan and Dean, featuring a mixture of groups and individuals and musical styles that pretty much summed up popular music of the era: American rock and roll (Chuck Berry); Motown (The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Marvin Gaye); California surf music (the Beach Boys); the British Invasion (The Rolling Stones); and the incandescent James Brown and His Famous Flames, in what many critics have asserted is hands-down one of the best performances of his career.
Projected from a DVD.
Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), 15 minutes
Directed by Kenneth Anger
In 1967, the footage for Anger's Lucifer Rising was allegedly stolen by Anger's "Lucifer", Bobby Beausoleil, who was later convicted for his participation in the Manson murders (Beausoleil denies stealing the footage to this day). Anger went into a deep depression and publicly renounced filmmaking via a full-page "In Memoriam" in The Village Voice. He later moved to London and met up with Mick Jagger and the Stones. By this time, Anger had begun editing two other versions of what was to be Lucifer Rising, although by the final edit it had taken on a very different form, which led to the incarnation of Invocation, a mind-bending collage of sonic terror and subversion and fast paced ritual ambiance which found the union of the circle and the swastika, a swirling power source of solar energy. Mick Jagger contributed a suitably eerie soundtrack with a newly acquired synthesizer.
16mm print provided courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
Gimme Shelter (1970), 91 minutes, Rated PG
Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
Called “the greatest rock film ever made,” this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour. When 300,000 members of the Love Generation collided with a few dozen Hell’s Angels at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway, direct cinema pioneers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin immortalized on film the bloody slash that transformed a decade’s dreams into disillusionment.
Print provided courtesy of The Criterion Collection and Janus Films.
Shine a Light (2008), 122 minutes, Rated PG-13
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese and the world’s greatest rock n’ roll band unite to show the world the Rolling Stones as they’ve never been seen before. Filmed at the famed Beacon Theatre in New York City in the fall of 2006, Scorsese assembled an ace team of cinematographers to capture the raw energy of the legendary band.
Print provided courtesy of Paramount Classics.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Joanna Demers is an assistant professor of musicology in the USC Thornton School of Music, where she teaches and researches concert, popular and experimental music since 1945. She is the author of Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity. Her next monograph, Listening Electronically: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Josh Kun is an Associate Professor of communication and journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. His research focuses on the arts and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on popular music, the cultures of globalization, the US-Mexico border, and Jewish-American musical history. He is director of The Popular Music Project (
www.usc.edu/pmp) at Annenberg's The Norman Lear Center and co-editor of the book series Refiguring American Music for Duke University Press. A former Arts Writers Fellow with The Sundance Institute and a former fellow of the Ucross Foundation and The Mesa Refuge, he is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press). He is co-author of And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past As Told By The Records We've Loved and Lost (Crown, 2008), and wrote the introduction to the re-publication of Papa, Play For Me (Wesleyan University Press), the autobiography of musical comedian Mickey Katz. As a critic and journalist, Kun is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Los Angeles Magazine. He serves on the boards of Dublab, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Latin American Cinemateca, and on the editorial boards of American Quarterly, the International Journal of Communications, and The Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Penelope Spheeris has often been referred to as a rock‘n’roll anthropologist. She has an MFA in Theater Arts from UCLA, and worked as a film editor and a cinematographer before forming her own company in 1974. ROCK ‘N REEL was the first Los Angeles production company specializing in music videos. She produced, directed, and edited videos for major bands through the Seventies and Eighties, concluding her music video work with the Grammy nominated, “Bohemian Rhapsody” video for Wayne’s World. Spheeris’ feature film debut was the 1979 documentary on the Los Angeles punk scene, The Decline of Western Civilization, which was received with stunning and unanimous critical praise. The LAPD shut down Hollywood Boulevard and Chief of Police Daryl Gates wrote a letter demanding the film not be shown again in L.A. Still fascinated with the subject of punk rock, she wrote and directed Suburbia, her first narrative film, in 1983. It is a disturbing and somewhat prophetic story of rebellious, homeless kids squatting in abandoned houses, trying to make new families, and protecting one another. The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years was released in 1988, again to spectacular critical acclaim. It is a caustically hilarious look at the LA heavy metal scene. Commentaries from Ozzy Osbourne, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, Alice Cooper, Lemmy of Motorhead, Poison, etc. accentuate then totally unknown metal bands who perform the music. In 1992, Spheeris directed her seventh feature and her first studio film, Wayne’s World, at Paramount Pictures. Her other credits include The Boys Next Door, Dudes, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Little Rascals, Black Sheep, Senseless, and The Kid & I. The Decline of Western Civilization: Part III was filmed in 1997, focusing more on social issues rather than music. Most of the subjects are crusty gutterpunks, proud products of a society truly in decline.
Bill Yahraus was a camera operator for Gimme Shelter. He graduated from The Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he began his filmmaking career in San Francisco as a member of the documentary unit at KQED. He then teamed up with filmmakers Michael Anderson, Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau to make documentaries collectively (The Jail, Song for Dead Warriors, Robert Wall: Ex-FBI Agent). In Los Angeles, he formed Focal Point Films with Christine Burrill and David Davis, where he made the award-winning Homeboys, about the Cuatro Flats gang. A career in feature film editing followed, with an extensive list of credits on such films as Pass the Ammo, Heartland, Country, The Long Walk Home and Silent Tongue. Currently, he is producing documentaries in collaboration with his wife Robin Rosenthal (Travels with Tarzan: A Circus Season and On the Muscle: Portrait of a Thoroughbred Racing Stable). Since 1999 he has taught film production at the University of Southern California.
ABOUT CALAMITY MAGNET
Los Angeles-based Calamity Magnet melds the world of indie-pop with girl group harmonies of the sixties, adding a hint of country flavor and the occasional peek at a Beatles influence. The brainchild of Texas-born songwriter/musician Sara Radle, Calamity Magnet picks where her critically acclaimed solo records left off. For a band that started playing together in October 2007, Calamity Magnet already have a lot under their belts. They headed into the studio in January '08 to work with Grammy Award-winning engineer Dennis Moody, and created their first group of recordings together. Three months later, they released that collection of six songs in the form of a self-titles EP (now available through iTunes, as well as their MySpace page.
To learn more about the band, visit
http://www.CalamityMagnet.comABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
David James is a Professor in the Critical Studies department at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. James is an authority in Asian and avant-garde cinema and has expanded and enriched the cultural scene in Los Angeles, curated countless film programs, worked on museum exhibitions, produced his own film work and published extensively in the arts and popular press, including his latest book The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. James’ awards include an NEH Fellowship for College Teachers, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research. He is the editor of To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, as well as The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, and has served on the editorial boards of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Now Time, and Art Week.
Alessandro Francesco Ago is the Special Events Coordinator for the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he completed his B.A. and M.A. degrees in critical studies (’00, ’05). He has taught "Filmmaking, Italian Style" and "Transnational Nightmares", two critical studies/production hybrids for the SCA summer program. Ago coordinates many of the SCA/Visions & Voices film festivals, including Napoli! The System, the Camorra and the Pizza, John Wayne: Actor, Star, Icon, Trojan, and the ongoing Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD series, in addition to the SCA Alumni Screening Series and many other special events. To learn more about upcoming events at the USC School of Cinematic Arts that are free and open to the public, visit:
http://cinema.usc.edu/eventsABOUT CHECK-IN & RESERVATIONS
All screenings and events are free of charge and are open to the public. The theater will be OVERBOOKED to ensure capacity and all RSVP lists will be honored on a first-come, first-serve basis, with no reserved seating. Please bring a photo ID or print out of your reservation confirmations, which will automatically be sent to your e-mail account upon successfully making RSVPs through this website.
ABOUT PARKING
The USC School of Cinematic Arts is located at 900 W. 34th St., Los Angeles, CA 90007. Parking passes may be purchased for $8.00 at USC Entrance Gate #5, located at the intersection of W. Jefferson Blvd. & McClintock Avenue. We recommend parking in outdoor Lot M or V, or Parking Structure D, at the far end of 34th Street. Please note that Parking Structure D cannot accommodate tall vehicles such as SUVs. Metered street parking is also available along W. Jefferson Boulevard.
For a map of the USC campus (Norris Cinema Theatre, NCT, is N.10 in blue), please access the following website:
http://www.usc.edu/assets/maps/upc_map.pdfFor more information about upcoming programming and events offered by Visions and Voices: The USC Arts & Humanities Initiative, please visit their website.
Contact Information:
Alessandro Ago
213.740.2330
[email protected] Event URL:
http://cinema.usc.edu/RollingStones
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"The Rolling Stones on Film" At USC Feb 6/7 (Read 770 times)
