Ken Paul Rosenthal
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Contact Information*:
San Francisco California USA |
Contact Type: Artist |
| web: http://www.kenpaulrosenthal.com | |
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Bio:
Ken Paul Rosenthal is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who makes film as a means of cultivating a more intimate experience with the world. Using hand-processing, bacterial manipulations, re-photography and multiple projection set-ups, Rosenthal’s films are poetic meditations on urban space, the natural world, and human gesture. He was born in New York City, and is currently based in San Francisco. He has a BA in Radio/TV/Film from Rowan State University, studied Fine Art Filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, earned an MA in Creative and Interdisciplinary Arts from San Francisco State University, where he is currently an MFA candidate in Cinema Production. Rosenthal curates programs of hand-processed film called Texture of the Gesture. He has taught as a Visiting Lecturer in the Center for Film and Media Studies at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore, and is currently teaching at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. His films are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. Filmography/Awards Info: FILMS Arcs of Texture – Digital Video, color, sound, 6 minutes, 2006 Flow – 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes, 2004 I My Bike – 16mm, color, sound, 5.5 minutes, 2001 Blackbirds – 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes, 1998 Near Windows – 16mm, color, silent, 12 minutes, 1997 Spring Flavor – 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes, 1996 1-PERSON SHOWS U-Theque, Canton, China, 2003 Adelaide Fringe Festival, Australia, 2002 Erwin Rado Theater, Melbourne, Australia, 2001 Blinding Light Cinema, Vancouver, Canada, 2000 Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, New York City, 1998 SELECTED GROUP SHOWS Intersection for the Arts, SF – Schematics from a Memory Grid, 2005 SF Arts Commission, San Francisco – A Trip Down Market Street, 2005 Exploratorium, San Francisco – Filmmakers Who Transgress Boundaries, 2003 Museu doChiado, Museum Contemporary Cinema, Lisbon – Intermittent, 2003 Guangzhou Fine Art College, Guangzhou, China, 2003 Art Museum, University of Houston – Collaborating With Moving Image, 2003 ICON Digital Salon, New York City – auto:IDENTITY, 2003 SF Camerawork, SF – Self/Projected: Moving Image As Self Portrait, 2003 Eyedrum, Atlanta – Cameraless Films, 2003 Artists Television Access, San Francisco – Penumbra, 2002 Image Movement Cinematheque, Taipei, China, 2001 Chinese Taipai Film Archive – Alchemy of Film; Chemical Collision, 2001 San Francisco Cinematheque – New Terrain; Recent Additions to Canyon Cinema, 2001 Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, New York – A Night of Films Handmade, 2000 Anthology Film Archives, NYC – What’s New in the Avant Garde, 1998 Other Cinema, San Francisco – New Experimental Works, 1998 MOMA, NYC – Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Film, 1997 The Lab, San Francisco – Projection Art Lab, 1997 Other Cinema, San Francisco – New Experimental Works, 1997 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco – Hand Crafting Mystery, 1996 Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, New York – A Night of Films Handmade, 1996 SELECTED FESTIVALS Images Contre Nature Festival Experimental Video, Marseilles, France, 2006 43rd Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2005 20th Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema, San Francisco, 2004 Intinerant Cinemascape Festival– National Touring Program, 2004 34th Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, 2003 19th Film Arts Festival of Independent Cinema, San Francisco, 2003 3rd Bicycle Film Festival, New York City, 2003 27th Cine Poem Festival, San Francisco, California, 2003 40th Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2002 29th Athens International Film and Video Festival, Athens, Ohio, 2002 3rd Sarah Lawrence Experimental Film & Video Festival, Bronxville, NY, 2002 Video Ex Festival, Zurich, Switzerland, 2002 14th Singapore International Film Festival, 2001 1st Telluride International Experimental Cinema Exposition, 2000 29th Rotterdam International Film Festival, 1999 6th Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival, 1999 Global 8 Day, Switzerland, 1999 1st Splice This! Film Festival, Toronto, Canada, 1998 2nd Super Super 8 Festival – International Touring Program, 1998 33rd Humboldt International Film Festival, 1997 AWARDS John Gutmann Award for Experimental Film – SFSU, 2006 Leo Diner Award for Innovative Filmmaking – SFSU, 2005 Kodak Award Cinematography/Rosebud Award – CSU Media Arts Fest, 2004 Mission Arts Foundation Residency – Arts Explosion, San Francisco, 2004 Film Arts Foundation Award – Humboldt International Film Festival, 2002 Honorable Mention – Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin, 2001 Audience Choice Award – Berkeley Bike Coalition Film Festival, 1997 Honorable Mention – Humboldt International Film Festival, 1997 Jury Award Experimental Process – Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1996 Sobel Memorial National Scholarship – San Francisco Art Institute, 1988 Community College Scholarship for Film – City College of San Francisco, 1987 All films available as 16mm prints from Canyon Cinema; 415-626-2255 VHS copies available through filmmaker; kenpaulrosenthal@hotmail.com This Contact appears in this database if Microcinema International has screened a film directed by the Contact, a film directed by the contact is featured in a DVD distributed by the Blackchair Collection Shop, or featured an organization or activity linked with the Contact. This database is used for commercial as well as informational, non-commercial purposes. It is a historical archive of Microcinema International's activities. Inclusion in this database and archive in no way implies a continuing formal relationship or affiliation with Microcinema International or the Blackchair Label nor an endorsement of its activities by the Contact. Contact details are not displayed in order to protect privacy. If you wish to contact this artist please see their website as listed above or write Microcinema International and we will be happy to forward your e-mail.
Microcinema Interview/Article:
April 2003, Interviewed by Joel S. Bachar 1) What drives your art? My films are entirely unscripted. The notion of a finished film is a glass carrot to me, that is, the goal of completion is transparent. Either I collect images because I find them beautiful or I’ll randomly generate a concept like a seed or point of departure. Fashioning ideas into a film is like running damage control; producing and resolving a series of aesthetic problems manifests the film. It’s not so much content that drives form, but process that breeds content. In short, I find the film in the footage. It’s a practice of deep listening with my eyes. 2) Explain your collaborative relationship to the medium. I have a profound attraction to indeterminate photochemical and organic-based manipulations, and the unpredictable, textural detritus such processes reveal. These strategies transform my regard for film as a recording medium to that of a collaborator that short-circuits my own intentions and trumpets chance. Burying film in the earth, soaking it in cooked wild berries, or composting it in seaweed are a means of collaborating with the environment on a more macroscopic level. Such gestures are beyond affecting pretty colors. Repeated visits to a particular geographic region can sensitize me to life below the landscape as a corollary to what happens beneath the surface of the film. For instance, after months of observing how wave patterns reflect the ocean floor, my experience is transformed from picture-taking to a meditation on light, and an inquiry into cosmic forces; How can that universal consciousness be explored on the film plane? The relationship is sympathetic and cyclical; soil is to emulsion is to flesh. The universe is wielding me as an instrument of its own creative life force. 3) What inspired the content and visual style of ‘I My Bike’. The bicycle imagery was gathered by gaffer-taping a camera to my helmet and shooting from within San Francisco's monthly Critical Mass rides at a rate of 1 frame every 2 seconds. On the first of the 5 rides I filmed, my batteries accidentally ran so low, that the camera's shutter stayed open long enough for the car and street lamps to 'paint' the film with laser-like streaks of light. With no intention whatsoever of developing a narrative, I assembled my imagery from a purely visual standpoint, so that the pictures grew increasingly frenetic over time. At the time, bicycling was my exclusive mode of transportation, and I spent a lot of time in therapy addressing my fear of road rage and obsessive fantasies of violent death while cycling. Four years later, I returned to the footage and combined the bicycle imagery with scenes of vintage Market Street, circa 1905 San Francisco by rear-projecting them through hand-made, cardboard mattes onto drafting vellum. One projection had a matte with a circle cut out before it, while the other had the cut out circle before it. Simultaneously re-photographing both sets of images produced a crystal ball effect in which the past and present intersect. A couple of years later, I transcribed recordings of my therapy sessions into a poetic narration that addressed the conflict between urban space and the body. 4) Who would you want to see your films at a special screening if you had the choice of anyone, living or dead, and why? Stan Brakhage. I first experienced Stan in person with his magnum opus, ‘Dog Star Man’ at the San Francisco Cinematheque back in 1987. The film and he were quite indistinguishable from one another. ‘Barking Stars’, both were passionate, profound, and radiant. I had newly arrived in town as a brief detour before seeking a career in Hollywood. Intrigued by a flier advertising the show, I attended and to be quite honest, witnessed the color of my soul onscreen. From the very first frame, I felt his images were giving shape and texture to the experience of being alive in my body. The pulse of the ineffable was irrevocably made tactile to me. It occurred to me that I was essentially a plant with legs in terms of my relationship to light. I turned 180 degrees, and never moved to LA. His vision inspired me to make film as a means to become more intimate with the world—to see and engage it as both mirror and window. His films have facilitated an awareness that I do not simply exist in the world, but that I am of it. |
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