Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.
Each Friday night in June, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art will host its annual Rooftop Cinema series in the sculpture garden atop the museum. This open-air event will pay tribute to smaller films — some old and some new — that don’t normally get shown in Madison theaters. Series organizer, James Kreul (an Isthmus freelancer), says that his goal is “to pick titles that fell through the cracks” at festival, campus and commercial screenings. “The lineup gets more challenging as the series progresses,” says Kreul.
Rooftop Cinema opens June 1, with No Maps on My Taps, George Nierenberg’s newly remastered 1979 documentary. This hour-long love letter to tap dance showcases the lives of three vibrant, aging dancers (Bunny Briggs, Chuck Green and Harold “Sandman” Sims), who are called together to perform with and compete with each other at a Lionel Hampton concert. And, man, is that competition a joy to watch. The film will be preceded by Elemental, a short nature/dance film made by local artists Elizabeth Wadium and Aaron Granat that premiered at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival.
Collage is the theme of the night on June 8, with six short pieces all pasted together from images culled from historical photographs to classic movies to YouTube clips. The centerpiece of the evening is Kate Lain’s She Collage, a tribute to artist Terry Braunstein that unfolds as one of Braunstein’s collages comes to life on film.
The main event on June 15 is William Greaves’ 1968 pathbreaking docu-sorta-mentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. Fact and fiction blur together in this question mark of a movie that leaves audiences baffled at what, if anything, is real life in this documentary about the filming of the exact same documentary. Who is filming whom? Was the final form of this movie elaborately plotted, or was it salvaged in the editing room? The film will be shown alongside Yippie!, a short doc about the 1960s radical group the Youth International Party. These will complement MMoCA’s exhibit Far Out: The Art of the 1960s and the Madison Reunion.
June 22 offers another look back on the decade that popularized the phrase “Don’t look back.” The Canyon Cinema 50 Tour is a retrospective of experimental short films distributed by San Francisco Canyon Cinema. Bizarre images and eerie sound effects intertwine in these arty-est of art films.
The series closes on June 29 with an experimental film from a little closer to home. INAATE/SE [it shines a certain way. To a certain place./it flies. Falls./] is a reimagining of an Ojibway story/prophesy set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It is a little bit narrative, a little bit documentary and a lotta bit experimental — three adjectives that seem to describe the mix to be found in this year’s Rooftop Cinema series.
The films roll at nightfall, usually around 9:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased in the museum lobby at 227 State St. Admission is free for MMoCA members, $7 for non-members. All of the screenings run less than 90 minutes.