January 24: House
Join us for Movie Night at the OACC!
This month we will be screening House (ハウス Hausu) by Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi. The film follows a schoolgirl nicknamed Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) as she and her six classmates travel to her ailing aunt’s country home. There they are confronted by numerous unexplainable events as the girls, one by one, disappear. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis described House as a “haunted-house freakout.” Critic Chuck Stephens called the film, “Japanese pop culture at its most delightfully unhinged extreme,” expanding that to:
[A] midnight movie about nubility and dismemberment marketed to a matinee audience of adolescents and “office ladies,” a predigital maelstrom of cinekinetic visual ingenuity produced during one of the most tepid seasons in late twentieth-century Japanese filmmaking, a modern masterpiece of le cinéma du WTF?!, originally released on the bottom half of a double bill with a treacly teen-idol romance called Pure Hearts in Mud and sporting a tagline that exhorted viewers to witness “How Seven Beauties Were Eaten!”
The film will be introduced by artist Anthony Discenza. Discenza was born in New Jersey in 1967 and currently resides in Oakland, CA. He received his undergraduate degree in at Wesleyan University in 1990 and an MFA at the California College of the Arts in 2000. Over the past decade, Discenza’s work has focused on the ubiquitous presence of mainstream media in contemporary life. Working in a range media including text, audio, print, video, and outdoor signage, Discenza extracts and subverts material taken from commercial film, television, and the Internet, introducing disruptions and collisions into the otherwise uninterrupted flow of information surrounding us. In addition to his solo work, since 1994 Discenza has been one-half of the collaborative entity HalfLifers, along with longtime friend and fellow artist Torsten Z. Burns. HalfLifers fuses humor with a low-fi, improvisational approach to engage narratives of control and crisis embedded in technological culture. Discenza’s solo and collaborative works have been presented at numerous national and international venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Center, and the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne. He has screened work in The New York Video Festival, CinemaTexas, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Thaw Festival of Film, Video and Digital Media, Stuttgart Filmwinter, and the Impakt Festival in Utrecht. Discenza currently works as a Senior Lecturer at the California College of the Arts. He is represented by Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and the Video Databank of Chicago.
House
1977
88 minutes
7pm Tuesday
January 24, 2012
$5 suggested donation, no one is turned away due to lack of funds.
Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 Ninth Street, Suite 290 (btwn. Franklin and Webster Street)
Oakland, CA 94607
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Movie Night at the OACC is sponsored by the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. For more information about the OACC, please visit www.oacc.cc.
Movie Night at the OACC is a monthly screening night organized by Jackie Im.
