For items older than twelve months, please visit our archive.
Scholarships and Grants
CU Well Represented at Robert Flaherty Film Seminar
Joaquin Villalobos, former student
June 25, 2006 -- Creative Demolition was the theme of the 2006 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Held from June 17-24, the 2006 Seminar brought together 150 filmmakers, critics, historians, curators and students to discuss the art of the moving image. Participating media makers included Zoe Beloff, Vittorio De Seta, Jacqueline Goss, and Sharon Lockhart.
Patti Bruck, Lecturer, and Friend
Among this year's participants were a number of current and former Film Studies students and faculty. Joaquin Villalobos, BFA 2005, received a Student Fellowship to attend the Seminar. Student Ashley Swendson participated as an intern, and engineered the audio recordings of all of the discussions. Former student and Flaherty Fellow Scott Nyerges was also in attendance. Instructor J. Gluckstern attended on a Professional Fellowship. Film Studies Instructor Patti Bruck is President of the Flaherty Film Seminar.
Three students selected for Sundance summer internship
July 1, 2006 -- CU film students Ken Amarit, America Palacios and Matt Talarico were accepted for the 2006 summer internship program of the Filmmakers Lab at the Sundance Institute in Utah. The Filmmakers Lab is a three-week workshop that offers directors hands-on experience rehearsing, shooting, and editing scenes from their screenplays on videotape under the mentorship of accomplished directors, editors, cinematographers, and actors. Past Lab projects include Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Boys Don't Cry, and Me and You and Everyone We Know.
Award Winners
Clay Pruitt and Andrew Ratzlaff at Starz First Look Student Film Festival
April 28, 2006 -- Two CU film students had their films shown at the 2006 Starz First Look Student Film Festival in Denver in April 2006. Clay Pruitt's documentary The Coming of Winter was produced in Patti Bruck's Art of Independent Filmmaking class, and Andrew Ratzlaff's documentary Photographer was produced in Russ Wiltse's FILM 3600 class.
David Marek's Snow Petals at festivals
March 25, 2006 -- David Marek's (BFA 2004) FILM 4500 project Snow Petals was shown at the March 2006 Durango Independent Film Festival and the March 2006 East Lansing Film Festival. The 30-minute experimental narrative uses a split screen and simultaneously moves forward and backward in time to tell a love story between a 62-year-old man with Alzheimer's and a young woman who assists him in his garden. The film took home first prize in the student film division at the 2004 Crested Butte Reel Festival.
Daniel Brother's Wings wins at SIFF and ISFFH
February 20, 2006 -- Daniel Brother's (BFA 2005) narrative film Wings won the award for Best Student Short at the Sacramento International Film Festival. The film also won the award for best Children Drama at the November 2005 International Student Film Festival Hollywood, and wasan official selection in the Student Film category at the 2006 Boulder International Film Festival. Wings was Daniel's FILM 4500 project.
Alumni in the News
Matt Stone and Trey Parker's South Park wins Peabody
April 5, 2006 -- The Comedy Central animated series South Park, created by former CU film students Matt Stone and Trey Parker, has been honored with a prestigious George Foster Peabody Award in the 65th Annual Peabody Awards competition. The Peabody committee described South Park as "Comedy Central's notoriously rude, undeniably fearless lampoon of all that is self-important and hypocritical in American life, regardless of race, creed, color or celebrity status."
Faculty Achievements
Rocky Mountain Twilight reveals an intense faith in first-person cinema
October 18, 2007 -- One of the most respected American cities for experimental film and video is Boulder, Colorado. Fueled by the vision and dedication of Stan Brakhage, the giant of avant-garde cinema who taught generations of film students at the University of Colorado, the Boulder scene has thrived for several decades. Weekend salons and the legendary program “First Person Cinema” (founded by Brakhage and Bruce Conner and run since the late 1960s by Don Yannacito) are regular forums for the exhibition and discussion of experimental film, not only for students but also for Boulder residents and visitors to the city. Widely respected educators and visiting artists at CU-Boulder have trained and influenced many talented students over the years.
This program celebrates a cross-section of recent film and video work produced within the Boulder community. Brakhage is represented by important short films from his late career. Among current faculty at CU-Boulder, the series includes: Phil Solomon, one of the most innovative experimental filmmakers working today; Dan Boord and Luis Valdovino, critically-revered and influential video artists investigating cultural narratives; and Stacey Steers, one of today’s most respected hand animators. Also included are some of the best of recent CU students: Andrew Busti, Victor Jendras, Thomas Helman, Casey Koehler, Mary Beth Reed, and Robert Schaller. Amidst the disparate styles of these media artists, ROCKY MOUNTAIN TWILIGHT reveals an intense faith in first-person cinema as a medium for metaphoric and poetic expression.
—Paul Roth, Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington
The Rocky Mountain Twilight program will also be screening at Anthology Film Archives in New York in March 2007, the Pacific Film Archives and CalArts in the fall of 2007, along with other possible venues in Europe, South America, and more.
Ernesto Acevedo-Munoz wins Eaton Award
June 1, 2007 -- Professor Ernesto Acevedo-Munoz is the winner of one of the 2007 Leslie & Woody Eaton Awards for Excellence in Research, given by the CU Center for the Humanities and the Arts, for his book Bunuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (University of California Press, 2003). Professor Acevedo-Munoz's new book, Pedro Almodovar, has just been published in London by the British Film Institute.
Jerry Aronson's Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg in the New York Times
October 3, 2007 -- (From the New York Times:) Jerry Aronson has augmented his crisp, straightforward 1993 documentary portrait of the poet Allen Ginsberg with six hours of extra material for this double-disc release, which now makes it a scholarly resource as well as a remarkably clearheaded study of a singularly complex individual.
Mr. Aronson’s film follows Ginsberg from his middle-class upbringing in New Jersey through the media explosion that was the Beat movement, his role in the flowering youth movement of the 1960s and his last years as a devoted Buddhist and political activist. Those interviewed range from close friends and family members to artists whose relationship to Ginsberg was more remote (Beck, Bono and Johnny Depp), while the footage Mr. Aronson has gathered includes lengthy excerpts from Ginsberg’s 1998 memorial tribute at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Ginsberg and Bob Dylan visiting Jack Kerouac’s grave, a 1965 reading with Neal Cassady at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and sequences from Jonas Mekas’s touching record of Ginsberg’s wake, “Scenes From Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit.” (New Yorker Video, $34.95, not rated)
Jerry Aronson wins BIFF Education Award
March 13, 2007 -- Senior Instructor Jerry Aronson won the Boulder International Film Festival's "Commitment to Education" award for 2007.
Jerry Aronson wins BFA Teaching Award
April 30, 2006 -- Senior Instructor Jerry Aronson has been selected to receive a Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award for 2005-2006. He was honored at the BFA Awards Recognition Ceremony and Reception in April 2006. Jerry Aronson's photo joins those of previous award winners in the Norlin Library, including Film Studies faculty Melinda Barlow and Jim Palmer.
Melinda Barlow receives CHA fellowship for "Powers of Wonder"
March 10, 2006 -- Professor Melinda Barlow has received a Center for the Humanities and the Arts Fellowship to participate in their "Powers of Wonder" seminar for the 2005-06 academic year.
Patti Bruck discusses Black Maria on NPR
March 13, 2006 -- Intructor Patti Bruck appeared in a March 2006 National Public Radio program discussing the Black Maria Short Film Festival and this festival's national significance. CU's First Person Cinema program featured this festival and its creator on March 13. The program can be heard at the NPR website.
Suranjan Ganguly publishes article on Gopalakrishnan
November 1, 2005 -- Professor Suranjan Ganguly's essay "Dealing Death, Saving Lives: Forms of Otherness in Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Shadow Kill" has been published in the fall/winter 2005 issue of Asian Cinema. The 2002 film by one of the leading lights of the New Indian Cinema concerns a hangman in 1940s India.
Phil Solomon artist-in-resident at Cal Arts, Reviewed in NYT
November 18, 2005 -- Professor Phil Solomon was artist-in-resident at Cal Arts from November 15-18, 2005. In conjunction with the honor, he presented solo evenings of his films at The Red Cat at the Walt Disney Hall, at Cal Arts, and at UCLA. The shows received a glowing review in The New York Times entitled "An Artist Who Inspires a New Way of Seeing."
"Like much of the work gathered under the rubric of avant-garde cinema, the films of Phil Solomon deserve a larger audience than even the enthusiastic crowd that welcomed them at Redcat (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) on Nov. 14 in downtown Los Angeles. Etched in black and vivid color and infused with melancholy, Mr. Solomon's stunningly beautiful films have an emotional power that might well attract more viewers, if not for the maddening divisions that find a few rarefied films classified (read: ghettoized) as art, while the vast majority are relegated to the commercial trough."
Click here for the full review.
Phil Solomon signs contract for installation at Corcoran Gallery
April 15, 2006 -- Professor Phil Solomon has signed a contract to complete a six-channel digital video installation in 5.1 surround at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (two blocks from the White House) entitled American Falls
Stacy Steers' Phantom Canyon shows at Sundance, wins at Black Maria
March 14, 2007 -- Stacy Steers animated film Phantom Canyon screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. It also won a Jury's Choice award at the Black Maria Film Festival for 2007.
Stacy Steers' Phantom Canyon shown at MoMA
April 2, 2006 -- Stacy Steers new animated film Phantom Canyon premiered in New York City on April 1 and 2, 2006 as part of the New Directors New Films Festival at the Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.