Transfigurations: A Weekend with David Lebrun - Sanctus and Other Shorts by David Lebrun

In a career that spans six decades and over 100 films, UCLA alumnus David Lebrun has crafted a multidisciplinary film practice encompassing animation, documentary and experimental techniques to explore different ways of seeing and being in the world. A founding member of the multimedia light show collective Single Wing Turquoise Bird, Lebrun helped create the visual language of the psychedelic era while leaning on his background in philosophy and anthropology to understand and visualize how other cultures, ancient and modern, have used available technologies to represent their own aesthetic and spiritual systems. From the hippie counterculture of the 1960s to Tibetan and Mayan mythologies, Lebrun seeks cinematic forms that draw out the radical specificity of his subjects while simultaneously revealing their interconnectedness across time and place. Beyond documentary, his films can be powerful, transformative meditations on human expression and experience, in and of themselves. The Archive is honored to host Lebrun in person at the Billy Wilder Theater for a weekend of screenings that includes the premiere of the Academy Film Archive’s new restoration of Sanctus (1966) and a special selection of works from Lebrun’s latest museum installation project Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past, which employs innovative digital animation techniques to explore the evolution of fundamental artistic forms and symbols from the Paleolithic through the late Middle Ages.

Sanctus

U.S., 1966

Restoration premiere

Sanctus intercuts three Mexican rituals of parallel structure: the Catholic Mass, the bullfight and the sacred hallucinogenic mushroom ceremony of the Mazatec people. The Archive is thrilled to present this stunning new restoration overseen by Mark Toscano at the Academy Film Archive.

DCP, color, 20 min. Director: David Lebrun. Courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

Single Wing Turquoise Bird Light Show Film

U.S., 1970  

This film document of a light show performance by Peter Mays, Jeffrey Perkins, Michael Scroggins, Jon Greene, Larry Janss and Rol Murrow includes film footage by David Lebrun, Pat O’Neill and John Stehura — all made on UCLA printers and computers.

16mm, color, 5 min. Director: David Lebrun. Print courtesy of the Center for Visual Music.

Metamorphosis

U.S., 1968-2010

An animated dance of human-made forms from the Lower Paleolithic to the present, Metamorphosis was created in 16mm in 1968 for the Single Wing Turquoise Bird light show collective and digitally recreated and expanded between 2002-2010.

DCP, color, 14 min. Director: David Lebrun.

The Hog Farm Movie

U.S., 1970

The Hog Farm Movie opens with a shot of a towheaded kid snuggled, asleep in bed. What follows unfolds like a dream recorded while it was lived. David Lebrun’s time capsule of the counterculture captures a moment in 1968 when residents of the famed California hippie commune set off on a cross-country bus caravan to share their anarchic gospel. From their industrious preparations to their psychedelic performances on the road, the film abounds with the joyful, purposeful mayhem essential to the work of trying to “figure out a whole other way of doing it.”

DCP (from 16mm), color, 38 min. Director: David Lebrun.