FILM/VIDEOGRAPHY of Loren Sears

 

16mm EXPERIMENTAL FILM   1965-71


Haight-Ashbury Quartet
For history and art's sake I want to keep these four pieces before the public. They recount personal but widely shared experiences of the late '60s - from street and communal life of Haight-Ashbury to romance and family in deep country. Each is a documentary and a song of the times, people and places they record - so called, tribal home movies.


Be-In  - A Free Space Film
A credible re-creation of the event, as you might have experienced if you were there - the original, the great Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, January 14, 1967. Optically re-worked film and sound are energetically woven together in a tapestry of the day. 1967, 16mm, color/sound, 5.5min.
Included in the video display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH.


Tribal Home Movie #2
An intimate flipside of BE-IN, visits homes, parks and "offices" of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood - tearing out discrete images of daily life and composing them into montage episodes. This sequence of short poems, separated by black, follows the contour of one day in HA. Featured are the Grateful Dead at home, Oracle newspaper office, Diggers' Free Food in the Park, the Free Frame of Reference, and many friends. Like BE-IN, performed on the homemade optical printer. Too visually intricate for sound, this one’s all for your eyes. 1967, 16mm. color/silent, 6.5 min
Awards: Willard Van Dyke Award, Yale Film Festival; Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.  


Connie Joy
This is a love poem, pure and simple. I awoke the morning of our first romance, took up the camera and composed this film. I'm still astounded at how beautifully and precisely the instant was captured. Exposed in several layers, without editing of any sort - it came out of the camera this way! A rhythmic sound loop from Bob Dylan's "New Morning" offers aural embellishment. 1971, 16mm, color/sound, 3min.

 

Sevin Goes to School
Connie's son's first day of school, we awoke to a crisp September morning in a tipi overlooking a sheep ranch in Northern California. The multiple layers here are folded back on themselves so the beginning, middle and end of the story run concurrently. 1971, 16mm, color/silent, 3min.

 

 

EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO – Artist in Residence, the Experimental Project, KQED-TV 1967-68


Slip Back Into the Shining Sea - 12 min, 1967
Multi-layer B/W film/studio mix from prepared AB Roll film by Loren Sears, poetry/voice by Joanne Kyger, music/augmentation by Richard Felciano, exploring illusion and vision. Produced and directed by Loren Sears

 

Suzanne - 5 min. 1967
A dance poem. Optically reprinted film composited from video studio segments.

 

Sorcery - 29 min, 1968
An improvised theatrical piece in videospace. Live mix in studio using tape delay and camera debeaming. Camera motions were scripted and the "actors" were given the challenge of trying to devine their way out of entrapment in this electronic milieu. The viewer's neural system was the ultimate target of this experiment, rather than sensory or cognitive levels of consciousness. Sit back and let it work on you. 

 

Punch - 15 min, 1968
A taping of SF Mime Troupe politicized version of the classical Punch and Judy show.

 

News - 12 min, 1968
Chuck Wiley reads segments from the daily news wire, revealing the absurdity and innate insanity of what most often is taken as serious business.

 

Loops - 6min, 1968
High energy, 5-layer mix from film loops of animated shapes. Music is loop composition from a Bukla Box. Film, music, direction by Loren Sears.

 

 

                                   TRIBAL VISION NETWORK - Van based video studio 1972-74
 

Tribal Vision Network Journals -  7.5 Hours. 1972-1974
Several years of living and traveling in a van outfitted for video recording, editing and show. These are journals resulting from those travels. The aim was to tape cultural reinhabitation in communities along the West Coast, edit and show it back to them and other communities, acting as a poet/messenger reinforcing the process.

 

Day/Year - The Pacific Lake, Tribal Vision    25 min, 1973
An edited composition from Tribal Vision Journals, summer 1972 - from Bolinas, CA to Blain, WA. A poem edited around four story lines which climax near the end. It follows the cyclic pattern of a day, morning to evening, with birth and awakening as the outcome. It is about inventing new culture.

 

Native Medicine Series  -  7 Hours, 1972-74
Working with others, we recorded a number of Northern California Pomo, Concow, Midu and Shoshone story tellers, shamans & gamblers; and a journey to visit Huichol maraakames in Nayarit, Mexico. Acculturation and hybridization was the motive. These are the raw tapes from those encounters.

 

Native Medicine - 23 min, 1972
A compilation recorded and edited Fall, 1972, from meetings with the Old People of California and Nevada. Relating medicine to lifestyle, tradition to place; integration of living community prerequisite to health. Basic introduction to Indian medicine and the Native Medicine Series.

 

Brief Resume
Loren Sears has also: directed programs for KQED-TV, San Francisco; produced numerous community oriented public access programs; was a founder and production manager of KLSR-TV, a Fox affiliate in Eugene, OR - producing and directing numerous news, public interest programs and local commercials; produced a pilot for Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2000 called "Oregon Gazette;" and served three years on the on the OPB Community Advisory Board. He has taught filmmaking at San Francisco Art Institute and University of California SF Extension; video at Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA; has had one-man shows at Canyon Cinematheque, SF, Yale University, Philadelphia College of Art, and the Huntington Hartford Museum, NY. and has film in collections of the Whitney Museum New American Cinema and in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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