Futures II
- Mike Crane
- Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
- Independent Creative Production Grant
Futures II is the sequel to Mike Crane’s most recent film, Futures, which documents Amos Vogel’s former movie house. Prior to working at Penn, Vogel founded Cinema 16, a New York based film society considered by many as the origin of the American avant-garde. (Still from Futures (2020), variable resolution, sound, color, 20 min)
Futures II is a short fiction film based on the research of a former Annenberg School faculty member, Amos Vogel. The film’s setting is the Annenberg Cinematheque, which was founded by Vogel in 1973. As a professor of visual communications at Penn for almost twenty years, Vogel pioneered a unique method for teaching the technological, ideological and political subtext of the hundreds of films that he screened for his students. Futures II will adapt this method in a staged lecture that will be performed by an actor in the newly renovated Annenberg Center Montgomery Theater, formerly the Annenberg Cinematheque. The resulting film will retrace the legacy of the American avant-garde to examine the social and material conditions of artistic production today.