Movies: Walker film series to examine 'Place and Time'

"Place and Time" is the theme of Walker Art Center's 2009 experimental film series "Expanding the Frame," beginning Thursday and running through February.

Place? The program includes features and documentaries from Los Angeles to Liverpool, China to Mexico. Time? The films span 1930s avant-garde efforts by West Coast assemblage artist Bruce Connor to a dystopian near future where Third World mind-laborers rent their brains in Alex Rivera's edgy speculative thriller "Sleep Dealer."

A sidebar program includes a series of films by iconoclastic English director Derek Jarman. The dual themes offer a framework holding together a program of forward-thinking world filmmakers as diverse as you'd find at any film festival.

Highlights include:

"Sound and Light: Projector Performances." Bruce McClure's 60-minute journey to the outer limits of sensory stimulation employs guitar pedals, film loops and 16-mm projectors. This trippy, abstract multimedia extravaganza challenges viewers' expectations with asynchronous sound, deliberately degraded film stock and unexpected planes of focus. (7:30 p.m. Thu., Walker Cinema, free.)

"The Exiles." Kent Mackenzie's 1961 dramatic documentary is a portrait of urbanized American Indians living in L.A.'s low-income Bunker Hill neighborhood. Luminously photographed in velvet-soft black and white 35mm, the film opens with famous still portraits of warrior chiefs, braided women and painted children by frontier photographer Edward Curtis. Cutting from tepees to multi-story apartment buildings, the action shifts to postwar Los Angeles, a ghost city now, with trolley cars, hot rods and cool cats bopping to fresh jazz. Mackenzie followed a dozen city-dwelling Indian men and women through a typical Beat Generation night of clubbing, flirting, drinking and brawling. In its day, "The Exiles" was shunned by distributors. Now, with its edgy Cassavetes-style realism and its eye for the rites and rituals of big-city nightlife, the film may fill you with despair or mesmerize you with its polished, stunning imagery, but it unquestionably will move you. (7:30 p.m. next Friday and Jan. 17-18, plus 2 p.m. Jan. 17-18.)

"Of Time and the City." Terence Davies' 2008 tribute to the Liverpool of his 1950s youth shows no trendy irony. The city, shown in lyrically edited documentary footage, was an ugly old thing, and Davies, growing up unhappy and repressed in the days before the Beatles liberated British libidos, remembers it as a painful place to live. And yet youth is never entirely terrible; Davies' icily critical recollections are tinged with nostalgia. "Of Time and the City" ends with lush, high-definition footage of strange, modernist buildings that have replaced old landmarks, and even if you don't know the city, the sense of rueful disorientation is powerful. (7:30 p.m. Jan. 23-24.)

Other notable films include the Chinese economic-boom drama "24 City," starring Joan Chen, 7:30 p.m. Jan. 30-31; Jarman's "Caravaggio," featuring a young Tilda Swinton, 7:30 Feb. 21, and the futurist Mexican thriller "Sleep Dealer," 7:30 Feb. 27. For complete details, visit www.walkerart.org.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186