WORKSHOPS by Gerry Fialka - 310-306-7330, pfsuzy@aol.com

GERRY FIALKA, media ecologist, film curator, writer & lecturer, has conducted interactive workshops from UCLA to MIT, from the Ann Arbor Film Festival to Culver City High School. Fialka gave two major lectures at The 2001 North America James Joyce Conference at UC Berkeley. His public interview series MESS (Media Ecology Super Sessions), with the likes of Mike Kelley, Alexis Smith, Abraham Polonsky, Mary Woronov, Paul Krassner, Norman Klein, Chris Kraus, P. Adams Sitney, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Kristine McKenna among many others, began in 1997 and continues to grow. His MARSHALL McLUHAN-FINNEGANS WAKE Reading Club (www.jesgrew.org/wake/) has explored media and literature at the Venice Public Library since 1995. His PXL THIS film festival (www.indiespace.com/pxlthis) celebrates its 15th year in 2005. Film Threat's Chris Gore deemed PXL THIS one of the ten best video festivals. Fialka's DOCUMENTAL series at Midnight Special, the oldest political bookstore in the world, ran for 8 years, and was praised as "L.A.'s pre-eminent documentary and experimental film showcase...the holy grail"-LA WEEKLY. In RES magazine, Holly Willis declared Gerry Fialka the "Los Angeles-based independent media hero." In the Independent Film & Video Monthly, Willis proclaimed Fialka an "exemplary devotee of cinema. Thanks to Fialka's penchant for the weird and wild, L.A. gets to see material we wouldn't otherwise." The LA TIMES calls Fialka "the multi-media Renaissance man." His 7 DUDLEY CINEMA series (www.81x.com/7dudley/cinema) continues the tradition of DOCUMENTAL at Sponto Gallery in Venice, where the beats used to read poetry (Venice West Cafe). Fialka has worked for Frank Zappa (for nearly ten years as an archivist), George Carlin and Filmex. He has interviewed the likes of Carla Bley, Horace Silver, Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, George Clinton, Paul Plimley, Oscar Brown Jr, Ben Watson, Craig Baldwin among others for AMASS magazine, LA Jazz Scene, Jazz News, Bird, Flipside, and PACIFICA's KPFK radio.

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NEW FIALKA WORKSHOPS:

1- WHO'S JAMMIN THE JAMMERS ? - Media ecologist Gerry Fialka (Bio-http://www.venicewake.org/About/About_Gerry.html) presents an interactive workshop and screening of films by subversive artists and pranksters who inflict brand damage to expose corporate manipulation of America's mediascape. Fialka probes Marshall McLuhan's Laws of Media in correlation with revolutionary artists (including Craig Baldwin, Barbie Liberation Organization, Rev. Billy - Church of Stop Shopping, Billboard Liberation Front, and Bob Dobbs) providing new critical perspectives with surprise, humor and the thrill of transgression. Join this agitprop examination of the motives and consequences of the jammer's collaboration with the jammee. When Sputnik went up fifty years ago, McLuhan upgraded the global village to the global theater, and we all became actors. Visit: www.venicewake.org

“A put-on is not necessarily a put-down. I liken what I do sometimes to a life game, as an adventure in absurdity, an adult fairytale in which I engage people emotionally and intellectually. The audience gets involved and has to decide for itself what’s going on and what’s to be learned from the experience. Everybody is a participant." - Alan Abel

JAM Z JAMMERZ: SEE, REAPPEAR & BREATHE (14 minutes, 2008) - As agitprop archaeologists, Mark X Farina & Gerry Fialka's provocative video probes how the 50's music/comedy icons John Cage (noise as music, side effects in silence), Korla Pandit (the Hammond Organ as drum, fake identity), Lenny Bruce (speech as jazz, grievance), Ernie Kovacs (visual effects as Surrealism, Menippean tactic of the "fourth wall") and Lord Buckley (narrative as living organism, elevation not put-down) laid the groundwork for contemporary culture jammers. They reinvented Beckett's "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," and Steve Allen's "Behind every joke there's a grievance."

Their reappearance offers new questions:
- Did the electric environment kill or save humanity?
- Did television renew the art museum?
- Why did James Joyce make TV the hidden ground in his 1939 book FINNEGANS WAKE?
- Can the banality of satellite-speed-up cause epiphanies?
- What have we forgotten about social amnesia?
- Who is jamming the jammers?

Rechanneling George Melies and Marcel Duchamp, JAM Z JAMMERS reinvigorates and mirrors how these visionaries elevated self-irony to uncover the ambiguity and complexity of ecstasy and numbness. "The audience is the employer." - Marshall McLuhan. "I find TV very educational. Every time someone turns on a set I go in the other room and read a book." - Groucho Marx. "When you are laughing, you're learning." - Robert Dobbs. "Satire is tragedy plus time" - Lenny Bruce.

MARK X FARINA is a Los Angeles based painter, filmmaker and biker, whose work has appeared in group shows with David Hockney and Ed Rushca. He received his BFA from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, and now heads the Video Department at Otis College of Art and Design in LA. He is a practitioner of POP, Pro Punk, Neo Goo, and Reverse Engineering in Mixed Media Visual Arts.

GERRY FIALKA, artist, film curator, writer, lecturer, and paramedia ecologist has conducted interactive workshops from UCLA to MIT, from the Ann Arbor Film Festival to Culver City High School. Fialka gave two major lectures at The 2001 North America James Joyce Conference at UC Berkeley. The public interview series MESS (Media Ecology Soul Sessions) has featured Fialka in engaging conversations with the likes of Mike Kelley, Alexis Smith, Abraham Polonsky, Mary Woronov, Paul Krassner, Ann Magnuson, Heather Woodbury, Norman Klein, Chris Kraus, P. Adams Sitney, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Kristine McKenna, Ann Magnuson, John Sinclair, Grace Lee Boggs, and Firesign Theatre's Phil Proctor. Fialka's interviews have been published in books by Mike Kelley and Sylvere Lotringer. 

"I have participated in Gerry Fialka's interactive workshops at the Ann Arbor Film Festivals in 2006 and 2007. He is willing to enter in new discussions even if they go against his current views. Fialka's multilayered delivery of ideas encourages the search for new questions and new paradigms that extend beyond. He is well-informed, off-beat and articulate - one of the most fascinating people I've met at the AAFF." - Keith Jeffries, Ascalon Films

"I am very impressed by Gerry Fialka's energy in bringing together groups of people to think about ideas. That is very much in the McLuhan spirit to create and foster interdisciplinary, living, educational projects in which people can talk about ideas. He creates forums that bring together a plurality of critical perspectives into one multivalent conversation. " - Janine Marchessault, author of MARSHAL McLUHAN: COSMIC MEDIA. 

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2- FOUND FOOTAGE - Scavenger artist Gerry Fialka asks new questions about found art. This interactive workshop delves into Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, Emile de Antonio, and Dusan Makavejev. Do reconstructions and deconstructions create counter histories? Dumpster diving filmmakers (like past AAFF participants: Bruce Conner, Craig Baldwin, Jesse Lerner & more) recycle refuse to elevate the bastard medium of assemblage with aesthetic coherence. How and why does the hybrid film's metaphoric weight surpass its status as a visual document? Have all the films in the world been made and it's just a question of re-editing them?

3- FAKE DOCS - Media archaeologist Gerry Fialka explores the popularity of the mockumentary. Are they lying to tell the truth? Discussing Alexandra Juhasz & Jessie Lerner's book F IS FOR PHONY: Fake Documentray And Truth's Undoing, Fialka probes the fiction/documentary divide, the ethics of reality-based manipulation, and whether documentaries derive from form or reception. From Bunuel's Land Without Bread to Welles's F is For Fake to Reiner's Spinal Tap to Craig Baldwin's faux faux Tribulation 99, fakes dismantle understandings of identity, history, authenticity and authority.

 

4- GRASSROOTS 9/11 FILMMAKERS - Self taught filmmakers & political activists are asking the questions that corporate media avoids. Their compelling investigative research is reaching millions via the Internet, community & at-home screenings. Filmmaker/political activist Gerry Fialka probes the phenomenon of ZEITGEIST and screens exclusive interviews with the independent filmmakers of LOOSE CHANGE, 9/11 MYSTERIES and more. This interactive discussion explores the motives and consequences of bottom-up filmmaking movements, revolutionary change, copyright free ("open sources") and movie-watching's subliminal effects.

 

5- YOUTUBE: DEMOCRATIZING FILMMAKING - Media Ecologist Gerry Fialka traces the history of low-tech creativity from Super 8mm & Pixelvision to cellphone videos, ipods, new media to come, and the latest global cultural phenomenon, YouTube. Online social networking sites are rapidly making accessible everything from experimental film to war atrocities, from rare music performances to influential political clips, and from user-generated content to censored shows. Explore the hidden effects of this vital tool as an active means of  democratizing self expression 24/7. Fialka will probe McLuhan's "rearviewmirrorism" (when new media looks backwards for content and meaning) and how we experience the multilayered blending of high & low cultures.

6- DOCUMENTARY DILEMAS - Film Curator Gerry Fialka leads an interactive workshop on the documentary film and its recent rise of popularity. Examining pioneers like Flaherty, Vertov, Wiseman, Pennebaker, Michael Moore, Herzog and Chris Marker, this review will incite new questions about Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality." Probing the philosophies of documentarians, fresh insights will arise concerning stagings and reenactments, and the different viewpoints on degrees of involvement with the subjects. Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera). What is endemic to this genre and why? Is Perception reality?

Review questions facing documentarians and their quest for ecstatic truth, emotional truth, intellectual truth and physical truth. How do they deal with personal bias, morals, and ethics in rewriting memory? If the filmmakers are faced with a life-or-death situation with the subject, should they put down the camera and attempt to save the life? What is the story, and then, what is the "real" story? Fialka offers diverse evaluations of how we perceive the world via documentaries, and challenging perspectives on Herzog's Grizzly Man, Morris' Fog of War, Eric Steel's The Bridge, the early hybrid masterpiece by Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle Of Algiers, and the faux faux doc Tribulation 99 by Craig Baldwin.

"The most important thing a documentary director does is to say 'Stop shooting'" -Peter Davis. "The best fiction is more true than any kind of journalism." -Faulkner. "In order to make fiction, you have to begin with documentary, and in order to make documentary, you start with fiction." -Godard. "We are led to believe a lie, When we see not through the eye." - William Blake.

1. PIXELVISION & McLUHAN - The Toy That Won't Go Away - Gerry Fialka, Director of the PXL THIS festival in Los Angeles, hosts an interactive discussion on the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 toy video camera and its relations to the percepts of author and artist Marshall McLuhan. James Wickstead invented the plastic camcorder and Fisher-Price produced it from 1987 to 1989. Most uniquely, it records picture and sound directly onto audio cassettes, which creates its grainy look. Another distinguishing feature is its "in-focus" capability from zero to infinity. The "in your face" attitude restores a certain human vitality to the overpowering sensory overload that bombards us daily. It illustrates Marshall McLuhan's percept that television is tactile - you can practically touch the dots, all 2,000 of them (as opposed to the 150,000 you normally see on TV). Orson Welles said that a movie studio is "the biggest electric train set a kid ever had." On the other end of the spectrum, the PXL-2000 video camera is the cheesiest failed toy ever -- a train crashes in the playpen. Yet, in the hands of visionary video-makers, it has become an essential tool of cutting-edge creativity. www.indiespace.com/pxlthis

2. CULTURE JAMMING & McLUHAN - Media ecologist Gerry Fialka will present an interactive workshop and screening of films by subversive artists and pranksters who inflict brand damage to expose corporate manipulation of America's mediascape. Fialka will probe McLuhan's Laws of Media in correlation with these revolutionary artists (including Craig Baldwin, Barbie Liberation Organization, Rev. Billy - Church of Stop Shopping, Billboard Liberation Front, Bob Dobbs and more) providing new critical perspectives with surprise, humor and the thrill of transgression. Visit: www.jesgrew.org/wake/

3. THE ARTIST & McLUHAN - Info-archaeologist Gerry Fialka probes the depths of Robert Cavell's 2002 book McLUHAN IN SPACE:A CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY, Mike Kelley's 2002 book FOUL PERFECTION and the Robert Dobbs’ essay/interview ENTERTAINMENT SUCKS. McLuhan’s theme of art as anti-environment is the context for exploring the impact of Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, John Cage, Henry Darger, William Pope.L, Bruce Conner, Joseph Beuys, Karl Appel and more. "We must all become creative artists in order to cope with even the banalities of daily life."- Marshall McLuhan.

4. McLUHAN AS MUSIC - Music outsider Gerry Fialka examines McLuhan’s probe: “Song is slowed-down speech. The reason cultures have different musical tastes is ultimately connected to language difference” by surveying the anti-hits of The Shaggs, Igor Stravinsky’s Harvard lectures (attempting to prove that music is an expression of itself and nothing more), Korla Pandit’s “Universal Language of Music” idea, The Mothers Of Invention’s employment of Sprechstimme, Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic philosophy, John Oswald's Plunderphonics, and air molecule sculptures by Captain Beefheart, George Russell and Sun Ra. “Music is the Mother art”-Frank Lloyd Wright. “The best music does not want to be recorded” –Tom Waits.

5) MEDIA & McLUHAN - Gerry Fialka presents an interactive workshop to examine the effects  of what humans invent. After a brief survey of McLuhan's background in literature from Poe to Joyce, Fialka will detail the importance of probing the "hidden effects or environments" created by media. By examining what's going on (pattern recognition) one can attain views of the big picture (comprehensive awareness). McLuhan hoicked up this mindfulness as a path to cope with media's hidden effects. He devised the Tetrad, four questions one can apply to media:

1) What does it enhance or intensify?
2) What does it render obsolete or replace?
3) What does it bring back that was previously obsolesced?
4) What does it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it flip into?

McLuhan defined "media" and "technology" as anything humans invent from clothing to computers, from language to philosophy, from toothpicks to cell phones. These are some of the topics we will do Tetrads on as a group. Also, Fialka will review McLuhan's famous observation "The medium is the message/massage," his first book THE MECHANICAL BRIDE which covers his reasons to study advertising, and how media are extensions of human sensoriums.
 

7) FACT & FICTION: IS PERCEPTION REALITY? - Film Curator Gerry Fialka will lead an interactive workshop on the documentary film and its recent rise of popularity. Examining pioneers like Flaherty, Vertov, Wiseman, Pennebaker, Michael Moore and Chris Marker, this review will incite new questions about Grierson's definition of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality." Probing the philosophies of documentarians, fresh insights will arise concerning stagings and reenactments, and the different viewpoints on degrees of involvement with the subjects. Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera). What is endemic to this genre and why? "The most important thing a documentary director does is to say 'Stop shooting'" -Peter Davis. "The best fiction is more true than any kind of journalism." -Faulkner. "In order to make fiction, you have to begin with documentary, and in order to make documentary, you start with fiction." -Godard. "We are led to believe a lie When we see with not through the eye." - William Blake.

http://www.jesgrew.org/wake/

8) MOTIVES & CONSEQUENCES OF EXPERIMENTAL FILM - Reality Performance Artist Gerry Fialka will lead an interactive workshop on how deviation from the norm results in progress. Reviewing the effects of avant-garde experiments in filmmaking on the creators and the audience, participants will uncover the hidden environments of moving image art. Marshall McLuhan's theme of art (in this case, experimental film) as anti-environment is the context for exploring the impact of pioneers like Marcel Duchamp, Luis Bunuel, Maya Deren, Bruce Conner, and more. Consider these questions:

*Is experimental film just another form of storytelling or something completely different? "Cinema is much too rich a medium to be left to storytellers" -Peter Greenaway. "I am not a storyteller, I work with emotions"- Robert Altman.

*Why is experimental filmmaking usually a solo effort rather than a group collaboration?

*Ala Marcel Duchamp, how can one make an experimental film that is not an experimental film?

*How and why do experimental filmmakers combine self expression and self surrender to expand cinema language?

*Is the crux of the experimental film biscuit to see beyond seeing itself?

*How did James Joyce re-invent a genre-mashing strain of experimental filmmaking and disquise it as a book, FINNEGANS WAKE in 1939?

*How can we apply these McLuhan's probes to experimental filmmaking?: "There's no such thing as a good or bad film, it is a good or bad viewing experience." "Understanding is not having a point of view."

*Legendary Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett, who won first prize at the 1964 Ann Arbor Film Festival with "21-87," described his first film VERY NICE, VERY NICE (1961): "It's not just an interesting experiment...it moves people. It's not arty. It is in between - neither underground nor conventional." Stanley Kubrick described it as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen." Lipsett combined elements of narrative, documentary, experimental collage and visual essay to create a new hybrid. Embracing comprehensive awareness, what elements define experimental? What is beyond experimental?

9) DOCUMENTARY DILEMMAS - Film Curator Gerry Fialka probes many questions facing documentarians and their quest for ecstatic truth, emotional truth and physical truth. How do they deal with personal bias, morals, ethics in rewriting memory? If a documentarian is faced with a life-or-death situation with the subject, should he put down the camera and attempt to save the life? What is the story, and then, what is the "real" story? Fialka offers diverse evaluations of how we perceive the world via documentaries, and challenging perspectives on Herzog's Grizzly Man, Morris' Fog of War, Eric Steel's The Bridge, the early hybrid masterpiece by Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle Of Algiers, and the faux faux doc Tribultion 99 by Craig Baldwin.

"I am very impressed by Gerry Fialka's energy in bringing together groups of people to think about ideas. That is very much in the McLuhan spirit to create and foster interdisiplinary, living, educational projects in which people can talk about ideas. He creates forums that bring together a plurality of critical perspectives into one multivalent conversation. " - Janine Marchessault, author of MARSHAL McLUHAN: COSMIC MEDIA.

"Gerry Fialka's MESS series is a unique opportunity to meet special artists in a unique, intimate and revealing setting. His intelligence and dedication to research leads to a stimulating and highly interactive interview that is both entertaining and amazingly enlightening." - Phil "Firesign Theatre" Proctor

COMMENTS:

"High praise for Fialka's interactive McLuhan workshop which stimulated my high school students' critical thinking skills and gave them analytical tools to evaluate media." -Steve Pollman, Culver City High School, English teacher, Jan. 2005.

"Gerry Fialka is a brilliant and impassioned lecturer. Weaving together theories of art, Marshall McLuhan and Pixelvision, he held the class spellbound." -Dr. Holli Levitsky, LMU

"Fialka's lecture on Pixelvision and McLuhan was great. He engaged with the students and interacted with them a great deal during his talk - no small feat considering that there are 110 students in the class and it takes place at 5 o'clock at night, a time when many of them are tired and hungry. His talk succeeded in generating interesting class discussion. The students found the material and ideas that he presented to be exciting and inspiring." -Ben Benjamin, University of California, San Diego

"Gerry's preparation for 'Culture Jamming and McLuhan' was obviously extensive and well considered. Gerry's oral commentary in my class was articulate, insightful, humorous and timely. Gerry's presentation flowed nicely, and he kept my students in rapt attention for the duration of the three-hour course - no mean feat." -Todd Belt, CSU, Long Beach

"With humor and skill, Fialka helped my students and myself understand how 'media' can inform, entertain, manipulate and control. He took the questioning and learning process to a deeper level, to which my students responded with enthusiasm." -Michael Grodsky, The Art Institute Of Los Angeles

"Insider secrets every filmmaker should know: Gerry Fialka is yet another exemplary devotee of cinema. For several years, Fialka has curated PXL THIS. Thanks to Fialka's penchant for the weird and wild, L.A. gets to see material we wouldn't otherwise. -Holly Willis, THE INDEPENDENT FILM & VIDEO MONTHLY, April 2000

"Gerry Fialka is very special; sincere, well prepared and ready to take risks - I learned things about my self! My kind of interviewer." -Martin Perlich, author "The Art of the Interview"

"Gerry Fialka's workshop 'McLuhan As Music' was a lively and informative dialogue with our group of composers, performers and media enthusiasts - it was a packed three hours with live music, extremely clear explication of complex concepts, and interactive problem solving that ushered us into the mysteries of Marshall McLuhan's ideas as applied to music. We at ACF/LA look forward to an ongoing relationship with Gerry; he's our kind of thinker." - Richard Zvonar, Director of Music Technology programs, American Composers Forum of Los Angeles