Amy Halpern’s FALLING LESSONS (1992) with guest author Laura Paul

Across a career that spanned over 50 years as both an experimental filmmaker, commercial cinematographer, and technician, the late Los Angeles-based filmmaker Amy Halpern (1953-2022) practiced her craft with a level of rigor, versatility, and care that made her a beloved and deeply influential figure to generations of makers, workers, and viewers of film. Among the ingenious landscape and nature studies, formal experiments, and unclassifiable provocations that make up her prodigious filmography, 1992’s FALLING LESSONS stands as the sole feature-length expression of her art. A fugue of vertical pans, beguiling close-ups, and narrative fragments, dotted with legendary figures from Shirley Clarke to Julie Dash and bound together with an exquisite musique concrète soundtrack, FALLING LESSONS doubles as a group portrait of her Los Angeles creative community and a vivid record of the psychic atmosphere of a city shaken by police violence and roiled by civil unrest. A work of rage and grace, seduction and refusal, it’s a film that only Amy Halpern could have made.

For this screening, Block Cinema welcomes poet Laura Paul, author of the recently published Film Elegy (PRROBLEM Press), a book-length poem exploring her time working as Halpern’s apprentice. Paul will introduce FALLING LESSONS, preceded by Halpern’s Southern California landscape study, VERGE for my sisters (2022, 5 min), and will offer reflections on the work and selections from her poem in a discussion following the screening.

FILMS SCREENED:

VERGE for my sisters (2022, 5 min, 16mm courtesy of Canyon Cinema)

FALLING LESSONS (1992, 64 min, 16mm courtesy of Canyon Cinema)

This event is part of a city-wide celebration of Halpern’s films, presented in partnership with Pilsen’s Inga Bookshop, which will host Paul for a screening and reading of Halpern’s short 16mm films on Saturday, February 22; and with experimental film programmer and Tone Glow publisher Joshua Minsoo Kim, who will host a two-part program of Halpern films at Elastic Arts on Sunday, February 23.

About the speaker:

Laura Paul is a writer and artist who has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Comics Journal, and other outlets. Her work has been exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts, Other Places Art Fair, L.A. Zine Fest, and West Hollywood Book Fair. She earned her B.A. in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named a Mary Gates Scholar in the Arts and Humanities, and her M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA, where she received the Gilbert Cates Fellowship for Artistic and Academic Merit. Her book, Film Elegy, was released in October 2024 from PRROBLEM Press. To find out more, visit LauraPaulWriter.com.

Host or Publisher The Block Museum of Art