Experimental filmmaker Michael Robinson in person!

The Dryden Theatre
Monday, April 14th
8pm | $5

Video games, television shows, pop songs and magazines - these are the raw ingredients with which Michael Robinson makes his own brand of independent cinema. Where else can you find in one film the music of Guns’N'Roses, the writings of Ayn Rand spoken in a chant, and the voice of Skeletor soundtracking the sites of past World’s Fairs?

The film and video work of Michael Robinson consists of equal parts landscape cinematography and pop culture mashup, and it is through the interaction between these two seemingly disparate modes of filmmaking that his work becomes transcendent. Milking out every drop of saccharine bliss from pop songs, Michael sweetens the normally doom-ridden theme of humanity’s failure to achieve heaven on Earth in Victory Over the Sun (2007). And We All Shine On (2006) is interested in the harmonies and discordances brought out by positioning and repositioning the natural world around the virtual, while you don’t bring me flowers (2005) investigates our fascination with pictorial tourism through a slideshow of National Geographic two-page landscape spreads. 2007’s Light is Waiting uses a heavily manipulated, very special episode of Full House as fodder to launch in to an examination of our media’s colonialist tendencies toward the exotic Other.

Other films to be screened include The General Returns From One Place to Another (2006), Tidal (2002), Chiquita and the Soft Escape (2003), and his most recent video, All Through the Night (2008).

Hosted by Doug McLaren and Jason Middleton
Co-sponsored by University of Rochester’s Department of English, and Film & Media Studies