Venice California Film & Photography by Gerry Fialka https://laughtears.com/

Venice California Film & Photography by Gerry Fialka https://laughtears.com/

The Laughtears.com family celebrates Venice Film and Photography every year. Usually the last two Saturdays of January, we screen cinema, show photos of our community and host discussion. In 2022, the events were covered in local papers

The Argonaut https://argonautnews.com/celebrating-filmmakers-and-photographers/

and

The Venice BeachHead has lots: https://thevenicebeachhead.com/

and https://twitter.com/venicebeachhead?lang=en and http://www.freevenice.org/

We welcome your input & suggestions. Thank You, Gerry Fialka

rsvp pfsuzy@aol.com for Zoom discussion links (they are live and not taped)

Saturday, Jan 22, 2022–19th Annual VENICE FILM FEST https://www.facebook.com/ events/448174040202516

Saturday, Jan 29, 2022–12th annual POETRY OF VENICE PHOTOGRAPHY

https://www.facebook.com/ events/1063183207585805

We do media archaeology. Film archivist and experimentalist John Cannizzaro

has shown rare, 1930’s newsreel footage of monkeys, goats and outrageous people on Venice Beach in past VFF, and this year is discussing the Leland Auslender 60’s footage he recently restored, which will be part of the new film The Mother Side of the Wake.
Venice Beach circa 1960s Photographed by Leland Auslender Venice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jIRb-01ibI&feature=youtu.be
Venice Beach in the Sixties — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1Y6GYvQ56w

Anti-Nuke March https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OobMlgTXLnY

Early Venice Beach https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIDkErMdvNI

HERE’s lots more to view anytime:

Filmmakers Name, followed by their youtube channel name or other links,

then tune to their channels, go to “videos” there and explore…

Tim Corvin — Cloud5146

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOb36KaDLe49oHoKhh3cHUw

and https://vimeo.com/captaincloudproductions

The Peter Demian Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEXyy4vkbow

https://pfsuzy.medium.com/peter-demian-l-o-v-e-legend-of-venice-eternal-by-gerry-fialka-65735371f900

MJ — Venice History Tapes

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPdPf4rTEvaWGjVPOC5SXjQ/videos?view_as=subscriber

John Cannizzaro — johnnysmoke3

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChHhF4Cqo5wOjw4UYyVv7tg

Early Venice Beach CA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIDkErMdvNI

Bruno Kohfield-Galeano — Bruno Kohfield-Galeano -

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCptx0w_tEccmWFVmCm4bbzg

MOSIDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKhUyVgvt8Y

Richard Kerr — his Venice film Cruel Rhythm http://www.richard-kerr.ca/new-page-1

and ck his McLuhan film http://www.richard-kerr.ca/mcluhan

Mark Stevens Shepherd — worldnewswow

https://www.youtube.com/user/worldnewswow/videos

Street Life clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02s62DV8o40

Mark Steven Shepherd’s “Venice of America” (just trailer) https://vimeo.com/467168001

https://www.instagram.com/markstevenshepherd/

Z Weyand & B Meade — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygv_QVw4TCI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-4h-fhfRpM

OTHER CLIPS:

Sonny Zorro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVtJvisQDX0

Venice Ralph Trailer (by Gerry Fialka & Eli Elliott) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msnvtmTl2WQ

Fialka & Bruno Kohfield-Galeano’s The Brother Side of the Wake Redux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBj0UdpFEWo&t=4s

and MoSide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OakQ2sPXs2c
& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM342xK58tM

Solomon Turner in Utopia by Farina, Fialka, Turner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqAK_DMzZOc&t=15s

Charlie Chaplin Kid Auto Race https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j2K3A1S5ak

More info on SPONTO GALLERY
http://laughtears.com/ItCameFromVenice2014.html
http://laughtears.com/sponto_lives.html

+++++++++++++

12th annual POETRY OF VENICE PHOTOGRAPHY

https://www.facebook.com/ events/1063183207585805

Margaret Molloy https://www.margaretmolloyphotography.com/

Dave Healey https://davidhealeyphotography.com/ and https://mydadtakespictures-blog.tumblr.com/

Ned Sloane’s Venice history photos at http://nedsloane.smugmug.com/

SEE PHOTOS by Todd, Bruce, Dave and Gerry = https://poetryofvenice.shutterfly.com/pictures
Click on “Pictures and Video” at https://poetryofvenice.shutterfly.com/

Paramedia ecologist Gerry Fialka hosts a Zoom panel discussion of award-winning Venice photographers, who explore landscapes of the human psyche and push pictorial representation beyond! Examine the trance-inducing transforming power of cameras in our community by way of fiery discussion.

Program notes: POETRY OF VENICE PHOTOGRAPHY Laughtears.com

As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding which cannot be separated from other means of visual expression. It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s originality. It is a way of life.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson http://truecenterpublishing.com/photopsy/decisive_moment.htm

“Sculpture as place” — Carl Andre, who also said in 1968: “The photograph is a lie. I’m afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides, and I think this is dreadful, this is anti- art because art is a direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.”

In McLuhan’s Understanding Media, the chapter entitled Photography: The Brothel Without Walls, McLuhan writes: Awareness of the transforming power of the photo is often embodied in popular stories like the one about the admiring friend who said, “My, that’s a fine child you have there!” Mother: “Oh, that’s nothing. You should see his photograph.”

In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes writes, “By attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive … ; but by shifting this reality to the past (‘this-has-been’), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.” He goes on to argue that every photograph, “whether or not the subject is already dead,” suggests death, since by capturing a specific moment, that moment and the person who experienced it immediately become a part of the past, something that will never exist again. Once someone is photographed, that photograph, and everything it captures, ceases to exist as it is, and becomes instead a verification that it has existed. “The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.” Barthes: “In photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric.” Simply, Boyhood (the Richard Linklater film) ratifies this boy’s existence, an existence that has passed through time and formed according to the moments that he lived. — Philip Conklin

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: “The real photographer has a great social responsibility. He has to work with these given technical means which cannot be accomplished by any other method. This work is the exact reproduction of everyday facts, without distortion or adulteration. This means that he must work for sharpness and accuracy. The standard of value in photography must be measured, not merely by photographic esthetics, but the human-social intensity of the optical representation.”

Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing….So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful…The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. — Susan Sontag

To speak of the image is often to speak of an object with a set of specific boundaries. It is to elevate image to the level of a category. Underlying this approach is the search for the visible. Frozen, the image becomes concrete. The visible can be named. What then happens to motion and to the passage of time? Are the configurations on the screen, the patterns of light and dark, the flowing presence and absence of people and objects, an image? Can this plurality and heterogeneity be reduced to the singular? Should it be? The concrete image can then become like a word or like a text. — Ron Burnett

To understand the medium of the photograph is quite impossible, then, without grasping its relations to other media, both old and new. For media, as extensions of our physical and nervous systems, constitute a world of biochemical interactions that must ever seek new equilibrium as new extensions occur. In America, people can tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices. The photo and visual worlds are secure areas of anesthesia. — McLuhan http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/426/readings/thephoto.htm

More info: pfsuzy@aol.com Laughtears.com