Our Eyes, Spinning Like Propellers

"Light is the first visible animal of the invisible." -José Lezama Lima

A weekly international film series curated by Steve Elkins from 2013 - 2019 at Hibbleton Gallery, the Leo Fender Museum, and the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Each month featured an eclectic mix of films ranging from classics to underground cinema connected by a theme, director, or region, often from countries typically ignored by film historians such as Iran, Mongolia, Mali, Uruguay, Kazakhstan, Tunisia and El Salvador. Elkins introduced and moderated community discussion of each film. Whenever possible, directors of the films were present for Q&A. This gallery provides a retrospective of the films, people, publications, and art exhibitions inspired by the series which was named "Best Place To Watch Movies The Rest Of The World Has Forgotten" by OC Weekly in 2013.

FOR MORE INFO ON EACH FILM (AND STORIES FROM THE SERIES), CLICK ON A PHOTO, THEN THE CAPTION HEADER.

The film series on the cover of OC Weekly (2014), just above the giant pink bunny head while a dance party goes on next door and Bax Baxter rides his Vespa through the gallery. Steve Elkins on the film series: Mysteriously, very few people seem to notice an absolutely massive "Hobby Shop" prominently located on a busy street in downtown Fullerton. It is nearly a city-block long and only open one hour per month. The hour is never announced. But inside this curiosity cabinet of build-your-own-rockets and model cars half-buried under decades worth of dust, two elderly men arrive at the crack of dawn every morning to take calls from the Pentagon while they devise detailed plans to colonize the moon, use asteroids as space taxis, and build a 12-mile elevator from the moon's surface to the exterior of the lunar atmosphere. While this may sound like the premise for a Philip K. Dick novel (who once lived and wrote in Fullerton), these men are actually well qualified for these projects, since they were two of the chief engineers behind the Apollo program that brought mankind to the moon. Through this work, one of them, Pete Magoski, was able to buy a building across the back alley from the Hobby Shop which he has allowed to grow into the Magoski Arts Colony. When Jesse Latour asked me in 2013 to project films at the Colony for the monthly Fullerton Artwalk he founded, I enthusiastically agreed. But knowing the Artwalk tended to have a frenetic atmosphere, I asked if we could expand it to a more intimate weekly event in which cinema could become an excuse to bring the Colony and the outside community together to talk to each other, to slow down and discuss our personal labyrinths of associations branching out from the images and sounds we share. What interests me most about cinema is that it seems to serve as the modern substitute for the nomadic campfires of our ancestors: it is the flickering light which gathers us together in the dark to cultivate (or shatter) our collective mythologies, and our inner picture of what the world might actually be like. When I met Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi (whose film "Hausu" I presented in October 2013), he illustrated this beautifully by asking if I knew sign language for the word "movie." He waved his hands horizontally in front of his eyes, then slowed them down until the gesture revealed a flicker pattern as his fingers crossed each other. "The magic of cinema," he said, "is that we come together to share a flickering light. At a two hour movie, you spend one hour seeing what everyone else sees, and the other hour in darkness. Cinema, like poetry, is about what you bring to the nocturnal spaces between our shared images, which is your own. This is what you take with you out of the theater, and why you should ask for half your money back on the way out." The film series has exceeded all my expectations. I have watched people from all sectors of the Fullerton community (lawyers, punks, city planners, students, linguists, pastors, artists, cryptologists) come together each week for deep and engaging discussions that often last for hours after each film. Potentially lifelong friendships have emerged from this. It has shown me that people are willing to forego the comforts of home, video-on-demand, and commercial theaters even if it means sweating through the oven-like temperatures of the Colony in summer, or shivering in a cocoon of blankets during the winter, on whatever pilfered improvised furniture we could gather (torn-out car seats, forklifts, and even a vintage dentist's chair), covered in residue from the week's activities (sawdust, paint, unidentified substances), because there is something you can experience here that your couch, computer, or commercial movie theater cannot provide. It shows more than ever that people don’t actually want the latest vomit from the film industry, that factory designed to ensure you do not think, but become a product of their own thought. Jesse and the Magoskis have my deepest gratitude for making such an event possible.