Bill Daniel Presents Sonic Orphans

Film tramp Bill Daniel is back in the van and on tour with a new program of recently unearthed 16mm footage.

The details for the Richmond Virginia show are as follows…
Thursday August 12th 7pm at Gallery 5.
Also featuring Bill’s “Texas Punk Pioneers” photos, as well as works by El Kamino and Brad Bacon.
Music by DJ Marty Violence.
$5 at the door. One night only.
More info at billdaniel.net, gallery5arts.org, and bornuglymag.com

Here is more info on the show…

SONIC ORPHANS is a compilation reel of lost and found clips projected on 16mm; some silent, some that rock. They are all rare and strange celluloid gems, many have been seen by almost no one and have never seen the light of youtube. Most of this footage is truly orphaned film— abandoned, lost, found, and now presented raw without editing. The presentation includes a discussion of “orphan films” as they are called by archivists, and at some venues on tour, a one-night photo exhibit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_film

Featuring: The Beatles/Avengers/Huns/Boy Problems/Sonic Youth/Tennessee Ernie Ford/Butthole Surfers/Johnny Cash

Here is an unlikely collection of film that exists in an impossibly strange space between entertainment— (music films); and the stupefying bewilderment of Useless Cinema— (which is what I call the clips of silent outtakes, un-contextualized news, lab mistakes, abandoned student films…)

There is a flavor of goofy nostalgia to much of the footage, but the images are also haunting— rock and roll ghosts, still singing, pogoing, sneaking hits on cigarettes, making direct eye contact from 20, 40 years ago.

Each of the films has it’s own story, like if a stray dog at the pound could tell you how he got there. Part of the evening’s presentation is a telling of some of these stories, and a discussion on the relationship between underground music and film cultures.

***1965, Beatles in San Francisco— raw silent news footage I rescued from a closing film lab (eerie silent mop-top photo op, teenagers convulsing with Beatlemania, etc.)

***1977, Silent performance footage of the Avengers and lost takes from a student drama staring Penelope Houston, shot by poet/punk portraitist Pamela Mosher.
www.pamelamosher.com

***1980, Two legendary punk/new wave Austin bands The Huns and Boy Problems filmed live at Rauls Club. Evidence of the fertile crossover between the Film dept at UT and the music scene at Raul’s club.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raul%27s_%28night_club%29

***A couple of 100-footers of mine—Butthole Surfersperformance I shot while touring with them in ’87 (footage confiscated by the club for on-stage nudity, then inexplicably returned to me months later) and an outdoor Sonic Youth concert shot downtown Houston in ’86.

***Plus a haunting early Johnny Cash kinoscope, and several other bizarre and unseen curios.

That’s part of the thesis of this show is to present the kind of intimate cinema experience that is based on being there. None of this material is available on video or the internet. One of my motivations is a reaction against the kind of ‘remote viewing’ that has become our primary way of viewing motion picture— on little computers, alone, while multi-tasking…This show is a communal, participatory experience… feeling the responses of the people sitting near you… the smell of dust burning on the projector bulb, like caveman story time around the fire.

At selected shows I’ll be putting up a one-night photo exhibit—photos I shot in the Austin scene ’80-’84 (www.texaspunkpioneers.com), plus some random things from my current 35mm still photo practice (tri-x-noise.com). And at some venues the program will be a double feature including Who is Bozo Texino?