Film Love: Big Screen 2: Return to Reason! | Historic Psychedelia, Animation, and Avant-Garde films

Name: Film Love: Big Screen 2: Return to Reason! | Historic Psychedelia, Animation, and Avant-Garde films
Genre: Experimental
Released: 2026-05-14
Duration: 1 h 45 min

The Big Screen, Film Love’s 2025 program of dazzling artists’ films in 35mm, sold out the Plaza Theatre. This May 14, Film Love founder Andy Ditzler and scholar of handmade cinema Gregory Zinman present Big Screen 2: Return to Reason! – another evening of spectacular visions made manifest on the Plaza’s glorious big screen. While much of cinema’s avant-garde is associated with “small-gauge” formats – 8mm and 16mm film, videocassettes, and phone cameras – there is a lesser known history of artists using 35mm and 70mm film and even IMAX. This will be an extremely rare opportunity to see these historic and contemporary large-format visions presented at full cinematic scale. This screening is unique to The Plaza Theatre and will be presented only once. To source these films, the curators have scoured archives in the U.S., the Czech Republic, Poland, Canada, France, and New Zealand. Several will be projected in 35mm film prints and even in widescreen Cinemascope, alongside new 4k digital restorations of classic films. Highlights include: - Historic films from the 1930s to the 1970s by masters of animation: Len Lye’s joyous Rainbow Dance, Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart’s Begone Dull Care (hand-drawn to the rhythms of Oscar Peterson’s lightning-fast jazz piano), and the memorable, camera-less post-psychedelia of Poland’s Julian Antonisz - Contemporary works made with scientific cameras, or by applying substances directly to 70mm filmstrips or burying film negatives underground, show how artists have extended avant-garde techniques into the present - Peter Tscherkassky’s virtuosic widescreen film Dream Work (For Man Ray) is paired with its 1923 inspiration, Return to Reason by the key 20th-century Dada artist Man Ray - A new digital restoration of Broadway By Light, William Klein’s ecstatic study of the neon universe of 1950s Times Square – a work which Orson Welles called “the first film I’ve seen in which color was absolutely necessary” Curated and hosted by Andy Ditzler and Gregory Zinman PROGRAM: - Rainbow Dance (Len Lye, 1936, 3 min) - Adebar (Peter Kubelka, 1957, 2 min) projected in 35mm - Broadway by Light (William Klein, 1958, 12 minutes) new 4k digital restoration - A Hard-Core Engaged Film. Non-Camera (Ostry Film zaangażowany) (Julian Antonisz, 1979, 8 min) - Athyrium filix-femina (Kelly Egan, 2016, 5 min) projected in 35mm - Chevelle (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2012, 8 min) - Hra bublinek (Bubbles Game) (Karel Dodal and Irena Dodalová, 1936, 2 min) - Impressions of the Upper Atmosphere: double screen version positive/negative (José Antonio Sistiaga, 1989, 7 min) - I ♥ Neutrinos: You Cant See Them but They are Everywhere (Jennifer West , 2011, 1 min) - Le retour à la raison (Return to Reason) (Man Ray, 1923, 2 min) new 4k digital restoration - sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2014, 2 min) - Dream Work (for Man Ray) (Peter Tscherkassky, 2001, 11 min) projected in 35mm Cinemascope - 1734 (Joel Schlemowitz, 1997, 2 min) projected in 35mm - Begone Dull Care (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, 1949, 7 min) BIG SCREEN 2: RETURN TO REASON is a Film Love event. The Film Love series provides access to great but rarely seen films, especially important works unavailable on consumer video. Programs are curated and introduced by Andy Ditzler, and feature lively discussion. Through public screenings and events, Film Love preserves the communal viewing experience, provides space for the discussion of film as art, and explores diverse forms of moving image projection and viewing. Facebook group: Film Love Atlanta THE CURATORS Gregory Zinman is an associate professor in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, among other publications. He is the curator of Off The Wall @ 725 Ponce, a public screening program in Atlanta. He has also programmed film and media art at the Film-makers’ Co-op, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Berkeley Museum of Art, Asia Society New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and several venues in Atlanta. He recently served as a technical consultant for Ad Astra (James Gray, 20th Century Fox, 2019), and is currently an archival producer for Universe in a Grain of Sand, Mark Levinson’s documentary about the future of art and computing for IBM. He is the author of Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (University of California Press, 2020) and co-editor, with John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips, of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik (The MIT Press, 2019). He recently received an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for his next book, Public Scenes. Since 2003 Andy Ditzler has curated and hosted Film Love, a widely acclaimed screening series of over 150 programs dedicated to the history of the moving image. He co-founded the artistic collective John Q, recipient of the Artadia Award and other honors. Ditzler was trained in Music Performance at Indiana University and later completed a doctoral dissertation on moving image curation at Emory University. His musical practice varies widely from orchestra performance to musical theater, contemporary classical and improvisation to Sacred Harp singing. He has released two full-length albums of his own music (Songs From Yes and No and Since the Music Began) with a third LP to follow in 2026.ExperimentalPT1H45MNot Rated2026-05-14

Len Lye

Peter Kubelka

William Klein

Julian Antonisza

Kelly Egan

Kevin Jerome Everson

Karel Doda

Irena Dodalova

José Antonio Sistiaga

Jennifer West

Man Ray

Tomonari Nishikawa