SELECTED FILMS AND LANTERN PERFORMANCES
A Pictorial Story of Hiawatha (2014)
A partial reconstruction of Katharine and Charles Bowden’s illustrated lecture (1904-08). Featuring original lantern slides from Valparaiso University, 35mm restorations from Chicago Film Archives, and musical accompaniment, based on music composed by Frederick R. Burton for the Hiawatha pageant performed in Desbarats, Ontario by the Garden River Ojibway community from 1900 to 1904.
The Night Sky ( 2013)
A modern lantern presentation of the wonders of the universe.
“On Wednesday, when George Lucas decided to locate his movie museum on the lakefront, a band of scholars up the coast at Northwestern University concluded a film conference on what came before the story industry Lucas salutes…The academics did not analyze “Star Wars” but they did applaud “The Night Sky,” a multimedia performance designed by U. of C. grad student Artemis Willis. Nineteenth-century astronomical lantern slides from the Adler Planetarium, not CGI, re-created the cosmos.”
—Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun Times
Da Feast! (22min., 2009)
A short film celebrating a day in the life of the Giglio, an 85-foot obelisk, on its 100th anniversary in the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Released with an original soundtrack album by Joe Magnarelli. Cover illustration by Michael Kupperman.
Distribution: Documentary Educational Resources
“In some ways, “Da Feast!” is remarkably mundane, but I think that is partially if not entirely the point: the familiar, mundane doings of a fair/carnival are culture too, and for a 22-minute production, it is very successful at portraying the color of such events. It is a slice of real life that Americans take all too casually, when the street fair deserves as much attention and analysis as any procession in Japan, Bali, or India. Exactly because it dwells on the familiar and does so in a highly visual and sensory way, it makes an important contribution where, quite frankly, most people would probably assume that there is nothing to contribute at all.”
—Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database
Smoke & Mirrors: A Geisha Story (63 min., 2005)
A first-person documentary about my unusual friendship with Kiharu Nakamura, an 88-year-old former Tokyo geisha living in New York, with cinematography by Albert Maysles and an original score by Ron Carter. Poster by Michael Kupperman.
“This is a quirky, quite fascinating, personal documentary about the friendship between the New York-based filmmaker and Kiharu Nakamura, an 88-year-old Japanese woman residing in Jackson Heights, Queens, but obsessed with her long-ago life as a geisha in pre-World War II Japan. Nakamura remains an imposing figure: as painted up and dolled up as half a century ago, and as cool, shrewd, and narcissistic as Marlene Dietrich. Also, she’s an enigma. Did she really meet, in her work, Chaplin, Babe Ruth, and Jean Cocteau? And ‘geisha respect customer, customer respect geisha’ is all she’ll say to the inevitable sex question.”
—Gerald Peary, The Boston Phoenix