* Photos available upon request
| WHO: | Monica Gazzo |
| WHAT: | Tending Echo Park and other shorts |
| WHEN: | Thursday, November 2nd, 2006, 8:00 pm |
| WHERE: | Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles |
| HOW MUCH: | $5.00 donation |
TENDING ECHO PARK and other shorts is an evening of short films by Los Angeles artist Monica Gazzo, who will present her work for the first time at Echo Park Film Center, in Echo Park.
For more information visit www.echoparkfilmcenter.org
Echo Park Film Center is proud to present the film and video work of Monica Gazzo. A graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), Monica was born in Argentina and raised in Italy and has been a Los Angeles resident since 1981. Her film, video and performance work has been exhibited in the US and internationally.
About her work in film Gazzo says: "My films explore the relationship between personal narrative (autobiography / memory) and larger historical references (theory / history). As an experimental filmmaker my attempt is to create thought-provoking works that lead to new ways of thinking about the language of film. My film grammar combines visual poetry with emotional states, collage with familiar landscapes, while recreating a space for the mind that speaks with intimacy of contemporary societal issues."
Tending Echo Park is an experimental diary film about life in Echo Park. Daily artifacts, people and literary reminiscences from the 1900's are juxtaposed with images of the city in a rich sound / image collage. The film moves into many places, but is mostly a stylistic essay on cinematic écriture feminine. It reinvents a film grammar based on gender and race. The autobiographical material of daily life is expressed through semiotic strategies and psychoanalytical symbolism, documenting murals as we can no longer see them and creating "family album" images with neighbors and family members, while commenting on larger issues, such as violence and war in society: the personal is political. The combination of color and black and white footage creates a rhythmic textured bridge between past and present time, memory and personal space. Gertrude Stein's reading of her The Making of the Americans alternates intermittently with La Barbara's extended vocalizations and Gazzo's voice quoting excerpts from A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf, writings on the cinema by Antonin Artaud (in Spanish) and her own diaries.
Joan La Barbara is an avant-garde vocalist and composer whose work has been presented internationally. Her song Urban Tropics is the main sound structure in Tending Echo Park. La Barbara's work explores the spectral possibilities of the human voice as a multifaceted instrument in solo and ensemble music, art performance, mixed media works and with electronics. As a pioneer in extended vocal techniques, La Barbara expands the timbral vocabulary for the voice with multiphonics (the simultaneous singing of two or more pitches), inhaled singing (glottal clicks and circular breathing) and more traditional techniques.
Founder in the early '80's of Metropolis Space, a performance and film space in the Los Angeles Downtown Artists' District, Monica Gazzo produced and presented the work of numerous filmmakers and visual artists, including Rachel Rosenthal, Barbara Smith, May Sun, Betzy Bromberg, Beth Block and many others. In the '90's she nurtured the work of experimental filmmakers in the series A Tongue of Her Own, a celebration of women in film in the past 100 years, including the work of director Chantal Akerman. Also, in Film Under the Stars, in collaboration with NewTown Pasadena, at Farnsworth Park Amphitheater, Altadena, which included work by the influential Los Angeles artist Pat O'Neil. Since 1994 and for 10 years Monica maintained a studio at Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro.
Echo Park Film Center is a volunteer-run, non-profit media arts organization committed to providing equal and affordable access to film and video education resources for all members of the Los Angeles diverse and vibrant community. It offers film and video classes, a microcinema with screenings almost every night of the week, film equipment rental and unique services, such as telecine of home movies and an extensive film and book lending library. It's located at 1200 N. Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026, just north of Sunset Blvd. There's ample parking free of charge on Alvarado and the surrounding streets.
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