Filmmaker: Eric Patrick
Film: Ritual Etchings: The Experimental Shorts of Eric Patrick
September 4-13, 2007
About the filmmaker:
Eric Patrick has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Texas Filmmakers’ Production Fund of the Austin Film Sociey, and The Rooftop Film Fund among others. His films have screened extensively throughout Europe, Australia, Asia and the Americas, and have won numerous awards both domestically and internationally, including awards at The Black Maria Film Festival, The Humboldt International Film Festival, Semana de Cine Experimental de Madrid, South by Southwest Film Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, U.S.A. Film Festival, Big Muddy Film Festival, and Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona. He is currently working on a film titled Retrocognition, and is on leave from his position as an Assistant Professor in the Radio/TV/Film program at Northwestern University.
About the films:
Experimental director and producer Eric Patrick will be showing a collection of short films that spans a decade of his highly acclaimed work, including his 2007 Delta International Film and Video Festival award-winning Startle Pattern. The collection entitled Ritual Etchings: The Experimental Shorts of Eric Patrick represents not only ten years of Patrick’s work, but also a sort of general method that he uses in his work. “The films are a cohesive collection of a certain approach to filmmaking for me,” he says. “I was interested in finding innovative techniques to illustrate the concepts that I was dealing with.”
Those concepts include a variety of issues such as the hectic pace of modern life explored through time lapse photography in Ablution, or the “changes in consciousness that happen during driving long distances,” explored through cinematic collage in Stark Film. Patrick’s focus on low-tech, traditional, film-based techniques to explore these ideas results in films filled with eerily beautiful visuals that evoke a surreal, otherworldly feel which is complemented by the absence of a traditional narrative throughout Patrick’s films. “One shouldn’t look for all the trappings of traditional narrative,” he says of his film, adding that, “Approaching films in this way also allows me to leave secret passageways and trap doors in the narrative so that viewers can come up with their own individual interpretation.”
Opening Short:
Sandstorm
Directed by Yeon Choi (Animation)
In an imaginary land that lacks of water and flesh, two skeleton figures find a pair of eyes in the sand. Their selfish minds start a fight over the eyes, and the fight leads to a bitter end.
Tour Dates & Locations:
|
