2023 Program
Light Matter is Curated by James Hansen
Program Seven (Part One): Un-Framing
Sunday Nov. 7th, 1:00 PM, Nevins Theater
Analytical Frame Study II
Paul Sharits, USA, 1976, 30 minutes
16mm
A set of short pure color studies, usually exploring one dominant hue. Most of these works were studies for longer projects. The last four "migraine" studies are rhythmically based around the five-cycle-per-second oscillation pulse of the typical fortification illusions preceding a migraine attack; this onset period, with its visually dynamic effects, is reported to be a quite vibrant and enjoyable state. 1. Modular Blue 2. Green Matrix 3. White Field 4. Orange Field 5. Pink Modulation A 6. Pink Modulation B 7. Temporal Frame A 8. Migraine Onset A 9. Migraine Onset B 10. Migraine Onset C 11. Migraine Onset D. (After titles, focus should be shifted to sharpen the edges of the screen).
Edges: Mirrors
Simon Payne, United Kigdom, 2018, 5 minutes
North American Premiere
Edges: 'Mirror' is one of a series of digital videos in which the edges of the frame are essential and the whole screen is animated in its entirety. This piece involved repeatedly re-videoing from a flat screen, the mirror-like qualities of which become increasingly apparent.
Diane (wrapped in plastic)
Joanna Byrne, United Kigdom, 2022, 4 minutes
North American Premiere
A super 8 hauntology. Reimagining a series of one-way conversations with the permanently off-camera Diane, foraged in fragments from the screen of a cathode ray TV - onto an expired Ektachrome 160 super 8 sound cartridge (best before 1990). The film was home-processed, then wrapped in plastic and buried in the woods in 2011 - excavated in 2021. ‘Diane…’ is a collaboration between the original source material, myself, the body of the film, and the earth it was buried in. The soundtrack was recorded directly onto the magnetic strip of the film, firstly through the camera whilst in-cartridge, secondly using a super 8 motorised editor after excavation- adding to the fragmentation and abstraction of the soundtrack into a multi-layered sonic collage (No additional digital editing has taken place). The film can be screened in its original form on a sound super 8mm projector, or as a digital video.
Trágame nube
Esperanza Collado, Spain, 2023, 13 minutes
Shot with Bruno Delgado Ramo and Paula Guerrero, ’Trágame, nube (el cuerpo establece el ritmo)’ revolves around some of the most persistent preoccupations about cinematic perception Spanish experimental filmmaker José Val del Omar (1904-1982) expressed in his writings and works. It consists in two twin films with an exact equal, complementary structure divided into three parts that explore an ‘other cinema’ that takes place during the intervals between frames. The first section of the film is a play tag shot at the Alhambra palace in Granada, an emblematic location charged with meaning in Val del Omar’s oeuvre and other experimental landmarks as Marie Menken’s 1961 ‘Arabesque for Kenneth Anger’. The second and central part is devoted to a selection of Val del Omar’s original documents held at the library of the MNCARS in Madrid, composed mostly of notes, project drawings, sketches, letters, written material for lectures and press clippings. This part is an attempt to penetrate the author’s writings and activate them in playful and plastic ways. The third section is a choreographed intervention in and around the film apparatus, where the syntax of cinema becomes sculpture and performance. The title ‘Trágame, nube’ is taken from a script Val del Omar wrote in the early forties for a documentary about gliding and its schools in Spain. It also refers to the press clippings unexpectedly found when delving into his documents, and became the basis of a series of collages that complement and expand the films.
Recycling
Caique Poi, Brazil, 2018, 2 minutes
Dozens of files from computers recycle bin such as images, texts files, installers and files of all kinds undergo a forced transformation. All this digital garbage, through the subversion of software, is transformed into abstract sounds, images and videos, simulating a kind of recycling in the virtual environment. This process, which takes advantage of the software dysfunctions, forces the machine to generate random results. And with certain autonomy, the machine resignifies the data arbitrarily.
I Would’ve Been Happy
Jordan Wong, USA, 2023, 9 minutes
New York Premiere
"I Would've Been Happy" attempts to map a fraught relationship through the use of intricately coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric. The aesthetics of architectural language are used to reconstruct memories of my family's domestic spaces in the hope to uncover logic or reason to a broken home.
Jews Harp or: Harpaud
Sam Taffel, USA, 2023, 7 minutes
North American Premiere
“If I held you any closer, I’d be on the other side of you” – Groucho Marx An examination of identity as seen through the lens of the Marx Brothers and Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty.” Appropriating sounds, images and theories from The Marx Brothers, Wayne Koestenbaum, Elaine May, and Artaud, “Jews Harp or: Harpaud” reflects on the nature of Vaudeville as a shared art form and cultural practice. The hand of the artist is revealed using analog video and editing processes to re-capture and manipulate film. Gesturing towards performance as a form of survival, the effect of mirroring becomes a means of finding wholeness.
Sin título
Ignacio Tamarit, Argentina, 2022, 2 minutes
North American Premiere
Taking on the theme of Health, this short film chooses some of the most compelling archival images from the Archivo de la Radio Televisión Argentina (RTA), with a visual and emotional impact, while adding voices and some personal footage, achieving a piece that, without exposing a message or story in a traditional way generates a strong contradictory and mobilizing feeling.
Hand Tinting
Joyce Wieland, Canada, 1967, 8 minutes
16mm
"...is the apt title of another short film made from outcuts from a Job Corps documentary which features hand tinted sections. The film is full of small movements and actions, gestures begun and never completed. Repeated images, sometimes in color, sometimes not. A beautifully realized type of chamber-music film whose sum-total feeling is ritualistic." Robert Cowan, Take One
It’s time to patch up my own soul
Oakley Mertes, USA, 2023, 3 minutes
North American Premiere
My goal with this film was to show some of the biggest issues that I've seen as a bi trans man in the LGBTQ+ community, specifically on the topic of dating cis men. The idea of conventional attraction/beauty standards revolving around cis gay men being muscular has impacted me for a long time-- I won't ever have their body type, especially when beauty standards of gay men have never included people who look visibly trans. I chose to make this film silent because of my own personal experiences of being assaulted (trans men have higher rates of domestic violence, sexual assault, etc. in their relationships) and feeling like I needed to stay silent/keep it to myself after it happened. This film is ultimately about my view of abuse and assault and how those memories became part of my identity.
WE DON'T TALK LIKE WE USED TO
Joshua Solondz, USA, 2023, 36 minutes
We Don't Talk Like We Used To continues Joshua Gen Solondz's loose series of addled diary films with a film that is part travelogue, part affective almanac, and part cinematic noise show. With stops in Hong Kong, New Hampshire, Japan, and Brooklyn, the film alloys obscured faces, oozing onscreen text, throbbing abstractions, solarized superimpositions, and the occasional dad joke into a vertiginous mosaic of encounters and eruptions that also reflects somberly on issues of aging and exile, love and artmaking, lust and wanderlust.