This WORLD is UNREAL like a SNAKE in a ROPE
A collage of sights and sounds from the eternal never-ending collage that is INDIA. A trip through the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu featuring Hindu trance ceremonies, free jazz nagaswaram improvisations, impossibly loud cities, processions, devotion, blessings, color, abstractions, detail, music and more. India is impossible to know: it is too vast, too rich and too much of a dream, it is impossibly old and impossibly new. Offered here is one perspective, one dream, subjective and flawed, hanging by a thread, captured live and in the moment and in the midst. One journey revealed in the order it happened. Not quite ethnography. Not quite documentary. A film by Robert Millis.

Screenings/performances:

October 6–Flywheel
with special live taping of the Chris Manz show!
43 Main Street
EASTHAMPTON

October 7–Spectacle
with Weirdo Records DJ set!
17 Edinboro Street 3rd floor
Chinatown
BOSTON, MA

October 8–Albany Sonic Arts/Upstate Arts Guild (UAG)
247 Lark St
ALBANY, NY

October 9– Casa del Popolo
4873 Boulevard St. Laurent
MONTREAL, CANADA

October 10th–Teranga
with Six Heads and Gastric Female Reflex
159 Augusta Ave
TORONTO, ON

October 12–Now That’s Class
With Scarcity of Tanks
11213 Detroit Ave.
CLEVLAND, OH

October 13–Pittsburgh Filmmakers
477 Melwood Ave
PITTSBURGH, PA

October 14–Space 1026
1026 Arch Street
PHILADELPHIA, PA

October 23–Issue Project Room
232 3rd street
BROOKLYN, NY

October 23rd
special transcontinental CGT experience at
Portable Shrines Escalator Fest
Seattle, WA

October 24th
SCREENING at WFMU RECORD FAIR
Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts Of Isan, plus maybe a few extras…
merch, records, movies about crazy drunken thai festival, what could be better?

Short trailer for This WORLD is UNREAL like a SNAKE in a ROPE

FIRST WORDS
The Birth of Sound Cinema, 1895 - 1929

Thursday, September 23, 2010
7:30 PM Victrola Favorites, with Robert Millis & Jeffery Taylor
8:00 PM Film screening (16mm, 90 min.)

Northwest Film Forum
1515 12th Avenue, Seattle, WA
Between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill SEATTLE

Contrary to popular myth, there were sound movies long before Al Jolson played The Jazz Singer in 1927. This program explores that forgotten history, with rare short films ranging from Thomas Edison’s early experiments 115 years ago to the triumph of the talkies, and all points in between. You’ll see — and hear — music, cartoons, newsreels, and more.

In addition to our film program, Seattle musicians and archeo-sonographers Robert Millis and Jeffrey Taylor will delight us with a pre-show program of rare 78rpm records from the period, played on antique hand-wound phonographs similar to those used in the earliest sound movie processes.

These acoustic phonographs will also be used to (loosely) recreate the experience of an 1897 “sound film” screening by Pennsylvania showman, Lyman H. Howe.

An introductory talk and a complimentary booklet of program notes will provide historical context, information about the films, and pointers to additional reading and info.

Other Highlights of the Film Program Include:
The oldest surviving sound film…from 1895
A French variety act…from 1900
Children’s musical theater by Thomas Edison…from 1913
Some of the very first jazz music ever filmed…in 1923
Sing along to the original Bouncing Ball…in 1925
A Vitaphone technical demonstration film…in 1926
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chats about his belief in ghosts…in 1927
Duke Ellington in a film made by the director of a Surrealist classic…in 1929
And even more!

The Sprocket Society
…has been celebrating the history of mechanical cinema, its arts and sciences with film screenings since 2007. Some notable prior events have included Georges Méliès: Impossible Voyager featuring special effects epics from 1902-1912, the Secret Sunday Matinee series which recreated the weekend matinees of yore (complete with movie serials), last year’s Halloween Spook Show Spectacular, and co-presenting this past spring the series Visual Music, Sensory Cinema 1920s-1970s with the Northwest Film Forum.