Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor (France/Switzerland/U.S. 2022) 118 min. DCP. French with English subtitles.
In their thrilling new work of nonfiction exploration, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, best known for such aesthetically and ethnographically revelatory films as Leviathan and Caniba, burrow deeper than ever, using microscopic cameras and specially designed recording devices to survey the wondrous landscape of the human body. More transfixing than clinical, the film, shot in hospitals in and around Paris, eschews the normal narrative parameters for medical documentation in favor of a rigorously detached, expressionistic look at our tactile yet essentially unknowable flesh and viscera. With its unshakable images of biopsies, cesarean delivery, endoscopic procedures, and the little-seen crevices inside all of us, De Humani Corporis Fabrica both demystifies and celebrates life and death (Film at Lincoln Center notes).
“Extraordinary… digs deep into the human body and opens up landscapes as otherworldly—and harrowing—as any you’re likely to see. The result is a work of purest corporeal poetry… and a remarkably unvarnished, sympathetic portrait of doctors and nurses at work.” — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
One of the canonic titles of structural cinema, the starting point for Print Generation is a repetitive montage of sixty shots lasting one second, which was then scrupulously copied, again and again. “
“Abstractions as a result of filming mundane scenes are structured under a symmetrical order which eventually unfolds in reverse. What is inexpressible in the images is synchronized with the recording of waves in the sea. As they are successively copied, [these generations] produce a noisy soundtrack of oceanic origin. It is a detailed study of the acoustic properties of magnetic tape similar to the visual exploration of the qualities of the film grain in the film. While, in the first part of the film, the audience imagines hidden naturalist displays behind the celluloid surface, in the second part the audience’s perception swings between their capacity to sharpen their memory with regard to what they recognize ephemerally and their inclination to contemplate, in a simple and full-blown way, the beauty of emulsion in decay” (XCÈNTRIC, CCB notes).
PLAYING WITH
Deus Ex
Stan Brakhage (U.S. 1971) 33 min. 16MM. One of cinema’s most influential and prolific artists, Stan Brakhage’s output of over 350 films is loaded with countless visionary works. The Pittsburgh Documents (often called The Pittsburgh Trilogy) are a trio of masterworks that subjectively observe the realms of authority (police), death (morgue) and, in Deus Ex, illness (hospital).
“I nearly died several times in hospitals and additionally I’ve been very sick in hospitals a number of other times. And so with all this experience in hospitals it loomed in great terror for me. And here was the need to confront that terror, and then to try to understand in some overall sense what the hospital is in its own activities, separate from whatever use I might have of it. The [title’s] reference is to Deus Ex Machina, the machine of the gods. I leave the third word off this term quite deliberately because I’m not after the machine.” – Stan Brakhage
When this feature-length documentary was released in 1967 it won critical acclaim around the world and, simultaneously, received a television ban that was to last more than thirty years. In the winter of 1966, director Allan King took his crew to a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children in Toronto. The intention of Warrendale, an alternative to juvenile delinquent homes and psychiatric institutions, was to provide a “family,” an atmosphere of support in which children could feel safe communicating their feelings. The harsh reality however reveals an environment in which the boundaries of privacy, both psychic and physical, were eliminated in the name of treatment. Warrendale is an intense and profoundly moving documentary that will challenge viewers to rethink how our culture treats emotionally disturbed children (Harvard Film Archive notes). Print courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.
Leslie Thornton (U.S. 1985-) TRT approx 103 min. 16mm and digital.
In 1990, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum described “Leslie Thornton’s remarkable, mind-boggling experimental cycle of short films, worked on and released in episodes over a period of years [as] a postapocalyptic narrative about two children feeling their way through the refuse of late-20th-century consumer culture; the films employ a wide array of found footage as well as peculiar, unpredictable, and often funny performances from two found actors…. Highly idiosyncratic and deeply creepy, this series as a whole, which includes passages in both film and video, sometimes shown concurrently, represents the most exciting work of the 80s American avant-garde that I know, a saga that raises questions about everything while making everything seem very strange. Don’t miss this.” Thirty-one years later, the cycle had expanded and remained every current; in 2021, Saisha Grayson of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, wrote about Peggy and Fred in Kansas: “Thornton’s 11 minute ‘episode,’ one piece of the Peggy and Fred in Hell project that would unfurl across her career from 1983 to 2015, [is] a refreshing antithesis [abstract or minimalist works] – a feminist punk reset of experimental filmmaking’s aims and inclusions. This was about something—namely, life after apocalypse, something I’ve always been very interested in. It was also explicitly engaged with mass media—not trying to ignore it, but rather demanding we look at its power in shaping people and society. And it focused on a subject I’d never seen taken seriously in either Hollywood or art films—the experiences of children, amongst themselves, as they become themselves, and as they make sense of the world around them.” Selections to be screened: All Right you Guys, Jennifer Where are YOU, Peggy and Fred Prologue, Peggy and Fred in Kansas, Peggy and Fred and Pete, [Dung Smoke Enters the Palace], and Intro to the So-Called Duck Factory.
Playing with Chris Harris’ 28.IV.81 Bedouin Spark (U.S. 2009, 3 min. 16mm), which “approximates a small child’s fantasy world in the dark. In a series of close-ups, the nightlight is transformed into a meditative star-spangled sky. An improvisation, edited inside the camera and shot on a single reel. The stars swirl in silence.” (IFFR)
Directed by Chris Marker (France 1983) 100 min. DCP.
Marker, the cinemaʼs globetrotter essayist par excellence, traveled between Japan, Africa and Iceland to create his masterpiece portrait of late twentieth-century civilization. Juxtaposing sounds and images with astonishing fluidity, Marker dissolves the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, offering the viewer the extraordinary sensation of simultaneously spanning the globe and being enclosed within someoneʼs mind.
PLAYING WITH
The Cup and the Lip
Warren Sonbert (U.S. 1986) 20 min. 16MM.
An independent filmmaker and seminal figure with an astonishing, poetic, sometimes joyous and other times ominous aptitude for symphonic visual edits, Warren Sonbert died far too young – we can only imagine what more might have been. The Cup and the Lip is a montage of images from Sonbert’s travels across the United States and Europe; “one way to think of [the film] is as a kind of vortex, with its many intimations of public crisis closing in on a moment of private grief that momentarily pierces the normally invulnerable flow of Sonbert’s images (Max Goldberg, for the Pacific Film Archive).
“Sonbert’s art does not unlock secrets, but discovers new ways of preserving them. And yet this endless movement along the paths of evasion reflects and illuminates the movements of the heart in whose secret places it begins.” – James Stoller
Directed by Abigail Child, Ernie Gehr, Stan Brakhage (U.S.) TRT min. 16MM.
This dynamic shorts program features selections from some of the most seminal figures in the American Avant-Garde. We will screen Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation (Parts 1, 3 & 4); Ernie Gehr’s Untitled and Transparency, and Abigail Child’s Peripeteia 1 and Some Exterior Presence.
Directed by Robert Gardner (U.S. 1986) 35MM. 90 min.
Noted poetic documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner shaped his finest work so that it occupies the time between two sunrises, immersing the viewer in an intense aural and visual statement “about people being and also dying” (Gardner) and boldly challenging ethnographic cinema’s conventions by using neither voice-over commentary nor subtitles. Filmed in the holy Indian city of Benares, Forest of Bliss observes the daily activities punctuating the lives of the humans, marigolds, dogs and cows that populate the city, giving equal attention to the sacred Ganges river, upon whose shores children fly kites and men bathe and pray.
“Stan Brakhage has called Forest of Bliss ‘a series of wonderful metaphors’ and has pointed out that, were it a fiction film, it would buckle under symbolic overload… Gardner’s fine balance of reverence and roughness, manipulation and restraint, allows the small things of Benares to be seen for what they really are—things big enough to contain the world.” – Darrell Hartman, Artforum
Directed by William Greaves (U.S. 1969) 52 min. DCP.
William Greaves became a filmmaker in the 1950s, after growing infuriated by the stereotypical depictions of African Americans on television and Broadway. In his prolific and multidimensional career, Greaves produced over 200 documentary films and earned dozens of international film festival awards. In the Company of Men illustrates his decision to use film as an activist would — as a consciousness-raising tool. He brought a psycho-dramatist into an auto plant so that two conflicting sides within the workplace (each group had deeply held prejudices against the other) could improvise common interactions… “Greaves was not interested in simply presenting the issue of racial conflict within the workplace. Instead, he wanted to create a transformational encounter in order to enact change between the white foremen and the alienated African-American workers at the auto plant” (JJ Murphy).
PLAYING WITH
Flag Wars
Directed by Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras (U.S. 2003) 86 min.DCP.
Shot over a four-year period, Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras’ Flag Wars is a poignant and very personal look at a community in Columbus, Ohio undergoing gentrification. What happens when gay white homebuyers move into a working-class black neighborhood? As the new residents restore the beautiful but run-down homes, black homeowners must fight to hold onto their community and heritage. The inevitable clashes expose prejudice and self-interest on both sides, as well as the common dream to have a home to call your own. Winner of the Jury Award at the South by Southwest Film Festival, Flag Wars is a candid, unvarnished portrait of privilege, poverty and local politics taking place across America.
Directed by Hollis Frampton, Owen Land and Colleen Fitzgibbon (U.S. ) TRT approx 120 min.16MM.
The 1970s was a fertile decade for the American avant-garde, a period in which Hollis Frampton’s remarkable films defined one strand of the mode often labeled Structural Film; in which Owen Land (né George Landow)’s “original genius,” precocity and humor made him singular in a field already abundant with idiosyncratic artists; and in which Colleen (aka Colen) Fitzgibbon, who studied with Land, came to be considered as part of a second wave of structural filmmakers that was deeply rooted in the high formalist aspirations of the avant-garde. Films to be screened: Poetic Justice (1972, Frampton, 32 min.); Fm/Trcs (1974, Fitzgibbon, 11 min.); Owen Land’s What’s Wrong with this Picture (1972), A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian, World Liberation Front (1974), No Sir, Orison (1975), Wide Angle Saxon (1975), On the Marriage Broker Joke (1979) .
Films by Peggy Ahwesh, Scott Stark and Harun Farocki (U.S. & Germany) Approximately 93 min. 16MM & Digital.
This program features Color of Love (Ahwesh, 1994, 10 min.) and Noema (Stark, 1998, 11 min.). In Ahwesh’s provocative short, an apparently found pornographic film is subjected to coloring, optical printing and general fragmentation, as the source material threatens to virtually collapse under the beautiful violence of her filmic treatment. What emerges is a portrait at once nostalgic and horrible: the degraded image, locked in symbiotic relation with an image of degradation. Noema’s title derives from philosopher Husserl’s term for “the meaning of an object that is formed in the domain of consciousness.” Stark mines pornographic videos for the unerotic moments between moments, when the actors are engaging in an awkward change of position or when the camera pans meaningfully away from the urgent mechanisms of sex up to a cheap painting on the wall or the distant embers of a crackling fire. A piercing musical score loops endlessly throughout, and the repetitive and curious iterations of movement become furtive searches for meaning within their own blandness. Harun Farocki’s essay film As You See (1986, 71 min.) is an “action-filled feature [that] reflects upon girls in porn magazines to whom names are ascribed and about the nameless dead in mass graves, upon machines that are so ugly that coverings have to be used to protect the workers’ eyes, upon engines that are too beautiful to be hidden under the hoods of cars, upon labor techniques that either cling to the notion of the hand and the brain working together or want to do away with it.”
Directed by James Benning (U.S. 2020) 84 min. DCP.
In a succession of static shots, James Benning explores the buildings and terrain of the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches. A series of views of nature filmed in the surrounding park and woods transitions into images of floors, seating areas and other details of a public building not meant for show. In both parts, an uncanny feeling dominates: the geometries of nature, the dark green and brown tones, the rushing of the highway in the background on the one hand and the humming of halogen lamps, the sound of steps in an otherwise seemingly empty school on the other – it all seems to be hiding a secret. The camera’s gaze is almost always restricted; it rarely penetrates very far into the image. It discovers shabby corners, observing scenarios more reminiscent of a mystery novel than the campus of an art institution. More so than in the majority of James Benning’s longer works of recent years, a narrative lies concealed within the images; every shot creates an urge to move forward, a tension, almost as if the landscapes and interiors were the scenes of a crime (Berlinale).
PLAYING WITH
Last Things
Directed by Deborah Stratman (U.S. 2023) 50 min. 35MM.
Last Things looks at evolution and extinction from the perspective of the rocks and minerals that came before humanity and will outlast us. With scientists and thinkers like Lynn Margulis and Marcia Bjørnerud as guides and quoting from the proto-Sci-fi texts of J.H. Rosny, Deborah Stratman offers a stunning array of images, from microscopic forms to vast landscapes, and seeks a picture of evolution without humans at the center.
“Stratman’s haunting, iridescent work of science-nonfiction actively decenters the human perspective, narrating the history and the speculative future of the universe with rocks as its protagonists.” – Devika Girish, Film Comment
Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor (France/Switzerland/U.S. 2022) 118 min. DCP. French with English subtitles.
In their thrilling new work of nonfiction exploration, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, best known for such aesthetically and ethnographically revelatory films as Leviathan and Caniba, burrow deeper than ever, using microscopic cameras and specially designed recording devices to survey the wondrous landscape of the human body. More transfixing than clinical, the film, shot in hospitals in and around Paris, eschews the normal narrative parameters for medical documentation in favor of a rigorously detached, expressionistic look at our tactile yet essentially unknowable flesh and viscera. With its unshakable images of biopsies, cesarean delivery, endoscopic procedures, and the little-seen crevices inside all of us, De Humani Corporis Fabrica both demystifies and celebrates life and death (Film at Lincoln Center notes).
“Extraordinary… digs deep into the human body and opens up landscapes as otherworldly—and harrowing—as any you’re likely to see. The result is a work of purest corporeal poetry… and a remarkably unvarnished, sympathetic portrait of doctors and nurses at work.” — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
One of the canonic titles of structural cinema, the starting point for Print Generation is a repetitive montage of sixty shots lasting one second, which was then scrupulously copied, again and again. “
“Abstractions as a result of filming mundane scenes are structured under a symmetrical order which eventually unfolds in reverse. What is inexpressible in the images is synchronized with the recording of waves in the sea. As they are successively copied, [these generations] produce a noisy soundtrack of oceanic origin. It is a detailed study of the acoustic properties of magnetic tape similar to the visual exploration of the qualities of the film grain in the film. While, in the first part of the film, the audience imagines hidden naturalist displays behind the celluloid surface, in the second part the audience’s perception swings between their capacity to sharpen their memory with regard to what they recognize ephemerally and their inclination to contemplate, in a simple and full-blown way, the beauty of emulsion in decay” (XCÈNTRIC, CCB notes).
PLAYING WITH
Deus Ex
Stan Brakhage (U.S. 1971) 33 min. 16MM. One of cinema’s most influential and prolific artists, Stan Brakhage’s output of over 350 films is loaded with countless visionary works. The Pittsburgh Documents (often called The Pittsburgh Trilogy) are a trio of masterworks that subjectively observe the realms of authority (police), death (morgue) and, in Deus Ex, illness (hospital).
“I nearly died several times in hospitals and additionally I’ve been very sick in hospitals a number of other times. And so with all this experience in hospitals it loomed in great terror for me. And here was the need to confront that terror, and then to try to understand in some overall sense what the hospital is in its own activities, separate from whatever use I might have of it. The [title’s] reference is to Deus Ex Machina, the machine of the gods. I leave the third word off this term quite deliberately because I’m not after the machine.” – Stan Brakhage
When this feature-length documentary was released in 1967 it won critical acclaim around the world and, simultaneously, received a television ban that was to last more than thirty years. In the winter of 1966, director Allan King took his crew to a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children in Toronto. The intention of Warrendale, an alternative to juvenile delinquent homes and psychiatric institutions, was to provide a “family,” an atmosphere of support in which children could feel safe communicating their feelings. The harsh reality however reveals an environment in which the boundaries of privacy, both psychic and physical, were eliminated in the name of treatment. Warrendale is an intense and profoundly moving documentary that will challenge viewers to rethink how our culture treats emotionally disturbed children (Harvard Film Archive notes). Print courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.
Leslie Thornton (U.S. 1985-) TRT approx 103 min. 16mm and digital.
In 1990, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum described “Leslie Thornton’s remarkable, mind-boggling experimental cycle of short films, worked on and released in episodes over a period of years [as] a postapocalyptic narrative about two children feeling their way through the refuse of late-20th-century consumer culture; the films employ a wide array of found footage as well as peculiar, unpredictable, and often funny performances from two found actors…. Highly idiosyncratic and deeply creepy, this series as a whole, which includes passages in both film and video, sometimes shown concurrently, represents the most exciting work of the 80s American avant-garde that I know, a saga that raises questions about everything while making everything seem very strange. Don’t miss this.” Thirty-one years later, the cycle had expanded and remained every current; in 2021, Saisha Grayson of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, wrote about Peggy and Fred in Kansas: “Thornton’s 11 minute ‘episode,’ one piece of the Peggy and Fred in Hell project that would unfurl across her career from 1983 to 2015, [is] a refreshing antithesis [abstract or minimalist works] – a feminist punk reset of experimental filmmaking’s aims and inclusions. This was about something—namely, life after apocalypse, something I’ve always been very interested in. It was also explicitly engaged with mass media—not trying to ignore it, but rather demanding we look at its power in shaping people and society. And it focused on a subject I’d never seen taken seriously in either Hollywood or art films—the experiences of children, amongst themselves, as they become themselves, and as they make sense of the world around them.” Selections to be screened: All Right you Guys, Jennifer Where are YOU, Peggy and Fred Prologue, Peggy and Fred in Kansas, Peggy and Fred and Pete, [Dung Smoke Enters the Palace], and Intro to the So-Called Duck Factory.
Playing with Chris Harris’ 28.IV.81 Bedouin Spark (U.S. 2009, 3 min. 16mm), which “approximates a small child’s fantasy world in the dark. In a series of close-ups, the nightlight is transformed into a meditative star-spangled sky. An improvisation, edited inside the camera and shot on a single reel. The stars swirl in silence.” (IFFR)
Directed by Chris Marker (France 1983) 100 min. DCP.
Marker, the cinemaʼs globetrotter essayist par excellence, traveled between Japan, Africa and Iceland to create his masterpiece portrait of late twentieth-century civilization. Juxtaposing sounds and images with astonishing fluidity, Marker dissolves the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, offering the viewer the extraordinary sensation of simultaneously spanning the globe and being enclosed within someoneʼs mind.
PLAYING WITH
The Cup and the Lip
Warren Sonbert (U.S. 1986) 20 min. 16MM.
An independent filmmaker and seminal figure with an astonishing, poetic, sometimes joyous and other times ominous aptitude for symphonic visual edits, Warren Sonbert died far too young – we can only imagine what more might have been. The Cup and the Lip is a montage of images from Sonbert’s travels across the United States and Europe; “one way to think of [the film] is as a kind of vortex, with its many intimations of public crisis closing in on a moment of private grief that momentarily pierces the normally invulnerable flow of Sonbert’s images (Max Goldberg, for the Pacific Film Archive).
“Sonbert’s art does not unlock secrets, but discovers new ways of preserving them. And yet this endless movement along the paths of evasion reflects and illuminates the movements of the heart in whose secret places it begins.” – James Stoller
Directed by Abigail Child, Ernie Gehr, Stan Brakhage (U.S.) TRT min. 16MM.
This dynamic shorts program features selections from some of the most seminal figures in the American Avant-Garde. We will screen Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation (Parts 1, 3 & 4); Ernie Gehr’s Untitled and Transparency, and Abigail Child’s Peripeteia 1 and Some Exterior Presence.
Directed by Robert Gardner (U.S. 1986) 35MM. 90 min.
Noted poetic documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner shaped his finest work so that it occupies the time between two sunrises, immersing the viewer in an intense aural and visual statement “about people being and also dying” (Gardner) and boldly challenging ethnographic cinema’s conventions by using neither voice-over commentary nor subtitles. Filmed in the holy Indian city of Benares, Forest of Bliss observes the daily activities punctuating the lives of the humans, marigolds, dogs and cows that populate the city, giving equal attention to the sacred Ganges river, upon whose shores children fly kites and men bathe and pray.
“Stan Brakhage has called Forest of Bliss ‘a series of wonderful metaphors’ and has pointed out that, were it a fiction film, it would buckle under symbolic overload… Gardner’s fine balance of reverence and roughness, manipulation and restraint, allows the small things of Benares to be seen for what they really are—things big enough to contain the world.” – Darrell Hartman, Artforum
Directed by William Greaves (U.S. 1969) 52 min. DCP.
William Greaves became a filmmaker in the 1950s, after growing infuriated by the stereotypical depictions of African Americans on television and Broadway. In his prolific and multidimensional career, Greaves produced over 200 documentary films and earned dozens of international film festival awards. In the Company of Men illustrates his decision to use film as an activist would — as a consciousness-raising tool. He brought a psycho-dramatist into an auto plant so that two conflicting sides within the workplace (each group had deeply held prejudices against the other) could improvise common interactions… “Greaves was not interested in simply presenting the issue of racial conflict within the workplace. Instead, he wanted to create a transformational encounter in order to enact change between the white foremen and the alienated African-American workers at the auto plant” (JJ Murphy).
PLAYING WITH
Flag Wars
Directed by Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras (U.S. 2003) 86 min.DCP.
Shot over a four-year period, Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras’ Flag Wars is a poignant and very personal look at a community in Columbus, Ohio undergoing gentrification. What happens when gay white homebuyers move into a working-class black neighborhood? As the new residents restore the beautiful but run-down homes, black homeowners must fight to hold onto their community and heritage. The inevitable clashes expose prejudice and self-interest on both sides, as well as the common dream to have a home to call your own. Winner of the Jury Award at the South by Southwest Film Festival, Flag Wars is a candid, unvarnished portrait of privilege, poverty and local politics taking place across America.
Directed by Hollis Frampton, Owen Land and Colleen Fitzgibbon (U.S. ) TRT approx 120 min.16MM.
The 1970s was a fertile decade for the American avant-garde, a period in which Hollis Frampton’s remarkable films defined one strand of the mode often labeled Structural Film; in which Owen Land (né George Landow)’s “original genius,” precocity and humor made him singular in a field already abundant with idiosyncratic artists; and in which Colleen (aka Colen) Fitzgibbon, who studied with Land, came to be considered as part of a second wave of structural filmmakers that was deeply rooted in the high formalist aspirations of the avant-garde. Films to be screened: Poetic Justice (1972, Frampton, 32 min.); Fm/Trcs (1974, Fitzgibbon, 11 min.); Owen Land’s What’s Wrong with this Picture (1972), A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian, World Liberation Front (1974), No Sir, Orison (1975), Wide Angle Saxon (1975), On the Marriage Broker Joke (1979) .
Films by Peggy Ahwesh, Scott Stark and Harun Farocki (U.S. & Germany) Approximately 93 min. 16MM & Digital.
This program features Color of Love (Ahwesh, 1994, 10 min.) and Noema (Stark, 1998, 11 min.). In Ahwesh’s provocative short, an apparently found pornographic film is subjected to coloring, optical printing and general fragmentation, as the source material threatens to virtually collapse under the beautiful violence of her filmic treatment. What emerges is a portrait at once nostalgic and horrible: the degraded image, locked in symbiotic relation with an image of degradation. Noema’s title derives from philosopher Husserl’s term for “the meaning of an object that is formed in the domain of consciousness.” Stark mines pornographic videos for the unerotic moments between moments, when the actors are engaging in an awkward change of position or when the camera pans meaningfully away from the urgent mechanisms of sex up to a cheap painting on the wall or the distant embers of a crackling fire. A piercing musical score loops endlessly throughout, and the repetitive and curious iterations of movement become furtive searches for meaning within their own blandness. Harun Farocki’s essay film As You See (1986, 71 min.) is an “action-filled feature [that] reflects upon girls in porn magazines to whom names are ascribed and about the nameless dead in mass graves, upon machines that are so ugly that coverings have to be used to protect the workers’ eyes, upon engines that are too beautiful to be hidden under the hoods of cars, upon labor techniques that either cling to the notion of the hand and the brain working together or want to do away with it.”
Directed by James Benning (U.S. 2020) 84 min. DCP.
In a succession of static shots, James Benning explores the buildings and terrain of the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches. A series of views of nature filmed in the surrounding park and woods transitions into images of floors, seating areas and other details of a public building not meant for show. In both parts, an uncanny feeling dominates: the geometries of nature, the dark green and brown tones, the rushing of the highway in the background on the one hand and the humming of halogen lamps, the sound of steps in an otherwise seemingly empty school on the other – it all seems to be hiding a secret. The camera’s gaze is almost always restricted; it rarely penetrates very far into the image. It discovers shabby corners, observing scenarios more reminiscent of a mystery novel than the campus of an art institution. More so than in the majority of James Benning’s longer works of recent years, a narrative lies concealed within the images; every shot creates an urge to move forward, a tension, almost as if the landscapes and interiors were the scenes of a crime (Berlinale).
PLAYING WITH
Last Things
Directed by Deborah Stratman (U.S. 2023) 50 min. 35MM.
Last Things looks at evolution and extinction from the perspective of the rocks and minerals that came before humanity and will outlast us. With scientists and thinkers like Lynn Margulis and Marcia Bjørnerud as guides and quoting from the proto-Sci-fi texts of J.H. Rosny, Deborah Stratman offers a stunning array of images, from microscopic forms to vast landscapes, and seeks a picture of evolution without humans at the center.
“Stratman’s haunting, iridescent work of science-nonfiction actively decenters the human perspective, narrating the history and the speculative future of the universe with rocks as its protagonists.” – Devika Girish, Film Comment
