The Short Films of Rufus Butler Seder

In the early 1980’s, filmmakers Rufus Butler Seder, Dennis Piana, Susannah Labov, Cheryl Hirshman, Flip Johnson and Ed Callahan formed The Boston Black and White Movie Company, a collective that directed, processed and printed their own short 16mm movies and showed them around town with live musical accompaniment by George Cordeiro, Basil Bova and other Berklee College of Music musicians.
This is a 40 minute compilation of Rufus’ international award-winning short films from that time. Inspired by the films of George Melies, Norman McClaren and the teachings of Serbian film theoretician Slavko Vorkapich, these shorts, ranging in length from 1 to 15 minutes, combine in-camera mattes, hand-cranking, stop motion, and up to eleven multiple superimpositions at one time.
Reviewing the 1980 Ann Arbor Film Festival, Owen Gleiberman wrote:
“This year gave us not just a Grand Prize winner but a bona fide festival star: Rufus B. Seder, whose four remarkable films-City Slickers, Star Crazy, The Laughing Cop and Miami… earned him the proverbial big bucks. The 7:00 audience caught the best of the four, the sleek, haunting City Slickers, while the other three were spread over the rest of the evening, giving anyone who sat it out the pleasure of observing Seder’s stylistic development and his subtle but hardly negligible thematic consistency.”