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Films by artist Bruce Checefsky will be shown Wednesday at the McDonough Museum of Art.
Checefsky is a filmmaker, photographer and writer whose independent films have been shown around the world. Looking to films that were lost, destroyed or conceived but never made, Checefsky recreates and reimagines abstract and avant-garde shorts.
He focuses on pre-1920s and post-1935s films, with special interest in those made by Jewish filmmakers that were destroyed during World War II.
The screening will include some of Checefsky's most recent films, inspired by works from the 1940s and 1960s. These include a remake of Maya Deren's lost film, "Witch's Cradle," a collaboration between Deren and Marcel Duchamp, and Andy Warhol's confiscated film from 1963 titled "Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love."
According to the artist, "My short films require extensive, almost obsessive research to uncover the facts and materials surrounding the original lost film. I carefully unravel a filmmaker's life story. I am especially interested in their social and political, and economic conditions under which the lost film was originally made. Several of my films were made in the country of their origin to influence the cultural and contextual grain, which plays a decisive role in the film's ability to move beyond a stick-figure view of history."
Other films in the program include poet Salmon Monny De Boully's "Doctor Hypnison," which was filmed but never published; "Ulysses, Part 1," inspired by a film poem published in December 1924 by Czech artists Karel Tiege and Jaroslave Seifert; "Bela," made by Hungarian Dada artist and avant-garde filmmaker Gyorgy Gero in the 1920s; "A Woman And Circles," based on a script by the avant-garde poet Jan Brzekowski that was published in Polish and French magazines in the 1930s; and "Pharmacy," an experimental film made in 1930 by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson.
"Lost and Unmade: The Films of Bruce Checefsky" starts at 5:30 p.m., and the screening is made possible in part by state tax dollars allocated to the Ohio Arts Council. Admission is free.
If you go…
WHAT: "Lost and Unmade: The Films of Bruce Checefsky"
WHEN: 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.
WHERE: McDonough Museum of Art, 525 Wick Ave., Youngstown.
HOW MUCH: Admission is free. For more information, go to ysu.edu/mcdonough-museum or call 330-941-1400.
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