BIFF OFFSCREEN: DE PROFUNDIS

Screening Thursday, October 15 at 12PM + 3PM + 6PM at Burchfield Penney Art Center.

DE PROFUNDIS

Lawrence Brose (Dir), 65 minutes, USA, Special Offscreen/Onscreen Presentation

DE PROFUNDIS is a three part, hand-processed experimental film based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter DE PROFUNDIS. Incorporating home movies from the 1920's and early gay male erotica, along with images from Radical Faerie gatherings, queer pagan rituals, drag performances and images of confinement, this film sets up a haunting investigation of queerness, masculinity, history and sexuality. These images are buttressed against a soundtrack composed of Wilde's aphorisms, a voice and piano setting of Wilde's prison letter, and multi-tracked interviews with a diverse group of contemporary gay men.

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." - Oscar Wilde

"Taking its cue from Oscar Wilde, DE PROFUNDIS holds up a mirror to gay sexuality and plumbs the tensions reflected there. Brose makes film itself into the protagonist of his exploration. With images and sounds constantly decaying and shifting and contaminating each other, film becomes a metaphor of the transforming self that Wilde prized for corrupting a sense of sexual normalcy. DE PROFUNDIS embraces Wildesque deviance and cautions that the desire for normalization prevalent among contemporary gays threatens to contain it. Serenity in sophistication is a triumph - like the deviance of DE PROFUNDIS, which, achieved in an age too terrified to be deviant, lies in the film's unflinching honesty and terrifying beauty." - John Palattella

Music by Frederic Rzewski with additional sound compositions by Douglas Cohen.

This free offscreen/onscreen film event will only screen for one day during the fest – don't miss it!

Exhibition copy and 16mm film scans courtesy of The Film-Makers' Cooperative.

Many thanks to CEPA Gallery, The Film-Makers' Cooperative, Lightcone and Burchfield Penney Art Center.

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About the artist:

Lawrence Brose was a Buffalo, NY-based experimental filmmaker, photographer, and arts administrator. His films have been exhibited at international festivals, museums, art galleries, and cinematheques in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. Brose held the position of Executive Director of CEPA Gallery in Buffalo from 1999 to 2009.

In 1989 he began work on FILM for MUSIC for FILM, an ambitious series of collaborations with contemporary composers exploring the relationship between the moving image and music. (Among his collaborators on the project were John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Conlon Nancarrow, Yvar Mikhashoff, and Frederic Rzewski.) His 1997 film DE PROFUNDIS, a 65-minute hand-processed work based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter with an original score by Rzewski, has been screened at more than sixty venues and festivals worldwide. In an artist’s statement, Brose described his work as “cinepoems which build on the vertical layering of experiences rather than a more linear structure familiar to the narrative form.”

An unidentified observer later provided this explanation of the artist’s aesthetic: “Lawrence Brose is working in a well-established tradition of image appropriation, drawing specifically on images of masculinity in home movies, old films, Gay erotica and documentaries. Brose collects found still images, which he then processes and re-processes to find more depth in the picture, producing complex layers of imagery that are highly conceptual and offer a poignant commentary on normative conventions of gender and sexuality.”

Brose’s prints are part of several private collections and have been exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now Buffalo AKG Art Museum), CEPA Gallery, Big Orbit Gallery, Studio Hart Gallery, and El Museo Francisco Oller y Diego Rivera in Buffalo, NY; Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, Ireland; Jack Tilton Gallery, New York City; and Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred University. His work has also been exhibited at Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York, and is included in their collection. He has been invited to place his films and career-related documents on deposit at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York as part of their permanent collection.

For more information on Lawrence Brose, visit lawrencebrose.com.