Basement Films does things a little differently.
"We exhibit a lot of films in a mobile, makeshift manner," said Keif Henley, group member and owner of the Guild Cinema. "We don't make films in a traditional sense. We've done things in parking lots. We've done a show inside a used car lot. We've done outdoor shows in playgrounds. And we did one by the railroad tracks outside, which was a real favorite."
Basement Films, with its headquarters in the basement of the Harwood Art Center at 1114 Seventh St., has a lot of vintage projection equipment and an archive of thousands of old films. They hold workshops at schools and art spaces when they're not projecting in random spots around town.
"We have a graveyard," Henley said. "We have a growing junkyard that's good for parts. We archive small-gage film and video, and we have a lot of older motion-media equipment like film projectors, portable film projectors, microfiche any kind of light projection we tend to collect. We have a library of over 7,000 16mm films."
He said artists sometimes rent their equipment if they want to experiment.
"We're a support system for individuals attempting to experiment with the media in an underrepresented way," he said. "They could do found films - orphan films that have been discarded or thrown away. You make somebody else's film your film by re-editing it. You can do an installation type of ambiance - you can basically use somebody else's film. We really like to encourage people to fuck around with film and video in an unusual way."
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Group member Brian Gillespie, also the director of the Southwest Film Center, said they have fun recycling and reusing footage.
"We have decades worth of educational films and just weird, old ephemeral films, industrial instructional movies, and rather than play them in movie theaters or in classrooms, we play them in weird places like alleyways, art spaces," Gillespie said. "We did a show on flight where we projected stuff under a big tree."
He said the group likes to focus on film as a physical thing.
"Film is so physical, as compared with anything digital," he said. "You can actually mess with the surface of it. Most of us we recontextualize things. We'll bleach it, scratch it, bake it. It'll warp if you heat it up, and there's different things you can do to get the emulsion to curl and bubble up in weird ways. "
Basement Films hosts "AV Show 3" today through Sunday at the Southwest Film Center.
It is a visual-audio performance reminiscent of silent films, with sevens bands - North America, Fertile Crescent, Casper Pony, Yoda's House, Father of the Flood, A Barnhouse and Reba Hasko.
"Sarah (Wentzel-Fisher) and I thought it would be cool to do this kind of reinterpretation of silent-era live music to silent film, so the whole concept is to kind of reimagine how a movie used to be played silent," Gillespie said.
AV Show 3
Thursday-Saturday: 7 p.m.
Sunday: 3 p.m.
Southwest Film Center
SUB, Room 1003
$5
