Film and Electronic Arts Program Presents

INTERCAT BARD '16

In 1969, Pola Chapelle founded and curated INTERCAT '69: The First International Cat Film Festival, a five-hour program of films about cats that screened at New York City's Elgin Theatre. INTERCAT had three more lives (in 1973, 1974, and 1976) and toured to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sydney and Winnipeg. This first edition of INTERCAT BARD features a selection of highlights from the original INTERCAT festivals, including works by Roberto Rossellini, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, Francois Truffaut, and an extraordinary instructional film titled Fluffy the Kitten.

 

Program introduced by Chapelle. All works presented on 16mm film. $2 suggested donation. All proceeds will go to support the adoption and care of local strays. All ages welcome. No dogs allowed.

 

ABOUT POLA CHAPELLE:

After an extensive nightclub and recording career that took her around the world, Pola Chapelle met and settled down with filmmaker Adolfas Mekas, who would later lead the Bard Film program. Chapelle became interested in films and filmmaking and made her first film in 1967 for Montreal’s Expo 67. Her oeuvre includes Fishes in Screaming Water (1967), Those Memory Years (1971) and the legendary catfilm How To Draw A Cat (1972). She also produced several of Mekas' films, including Windflowers (1967) and An Interview with the Ambassador to Lapland (1968), and co-directed Mekas' autobiographical travelogue Going Home (1972).

 

Although she would never knowingly abandon the fate of strays, Pola Chapelle is currently busy as CEO of Hallelujah Editions, a publishing company founded by her husband. She recently published her first book: Book 1 of The Adolfas Diaries, the daily journal of Adolfas Mekas' life during the wartime years in Lithuania and Germany, 1941 to 1946. Leon Botstein wrote about the Diaries: "...A riveting and humane account of the struggle and survival of one of the most colorful and brilliant filmmakers of his generation…Adolfas Mekas' account is a gift of remembrance to future generations."

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For more information, call 845-758-7253, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://www.bard.edu.

Time: 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center

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