Five Films by Fred Camper

Friday, October 6 at 7:00 PM — Film Studies Center (Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts) — 915 E 60th Street
Tickets: Free Admission

FIVE FILMS BY FRED CAMPER
1967 – 1969

Filmmaker In person! Introduction and discussion with Fred Camper

Fred Camper’s incisive film reviews ran in the Chicago Reader from 1986 through 2010, but long before he was a celebrated critic he was a young cineaste absorbing ideas and images he glimpsed while programming 16mm screenings at the MIT Film Society. Soon he turned to making films himself. Armed with a few rolls of Ektachrome and the crudest technical equipment, Camper turned his Cambridge rooming house into an expansive cinematic constellation, finding infinite reward in a patch of peeling paint in the bathroom or the leaves outside his window. Drawing equally from Stan Brakhage and Howard Hawks, Gregory Markopolous and Douglas Sirk, Camper’s films are omnivorous explorations of the everyday. Camper’s five 16mm shorts represent a unique synthesis of his seemingly disparate influences, often locating an aesthetic epiphany in a forgotten work of Hollywood cinema and extrapolating a rigorous and suggestive way of seeing that can be applied to non-narrative ends. (KW)

All films preserved by Chicago Film Society. Dan Potter and Bathroom preserved with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Welcome to Come and A Sense of the Past preserved through the NFPF’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant Program and the Film Foundation; funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

• Joan Goes to Misery (1967) – 8 min – 16mm
• A Sense of the Past (1967) – 4 min –  16mm
• Dan Potter (1968) – 39 min – 16mm
• Welcome to Come (1968) –  3 min – 16mm
• Bathroom (1969) – 25 min – 16mm 

Total Runtime: 85 min