My Body is A Lightning Rod

Mike Plante RT: 05:00

Barry goes to a competition. Human form vs film.

Sound Speed

Alex Cunningham RT: 04:40

Every time you watch this film, it may very well appear to move faster.

Come Wishes Be Horses

Rebecca Meyers RT: 08:00

COME WISHES BE HORSES weaves audio from a birdwatching walk with images inspired by W.H. Auden’s sentiment that it seems “only proper that words/Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.”

Wherever You Go, There You Are

Jesse Mclean RT: 12:00

In this experimental travelogue, efforts to sound human and look natural go awry. The scenery is provided through photo-chromed vintage postcards, displaying not only scenic North American landscapes but also the rise of infrastructure and industry. Aspiring to look more realistic by adding color to a black and white image, the postcards (already a vulnerable method of correspondence caught between private and public) are instead documents of the fantastic. The road trip is narrated by an automated correspondent (all dialogue is taken from spam emails) who is both seductive and mercurial, his entreaties becoming increasingly foreboding and obtuse, in a relentless effort to capture our attentions.

Soft Body Goal

Jaako Pallasvuo RT: 03:37

Body without bone Sloppy and improper Body seepage Naked sewer rats Hairless aristocratic cats Slime The body of the future, fluid and flexible and folding into itself body negotiations 3D software as a lab for new subjectivities/monstrosities. I dub all the voices. unfortunately, the mischievous flubber seems to have a mind of its own.

Batrachian’s Ballad

Leonor Teles RT: 10:00

“Simultaneously strange and familiar, distant and near, disquieting and seductive, outsider and cosmopolitan, gypsies are shrouded in an aura of ambiguity. They cannot be said to be invisible, as they hardly go unnoticed.” (Daniel Seabra Lopes) Like the gypsies, the frogs, made of china, don’t go unnoticed to a careful observer. “Batrachian’s Ballad” comes about in a context of ambiguity. A film that immerses itself in the reality of Portuguese everyday life, as a form of fabling about a xenophobic behaviour.

Lie Back & Enjoy It

JoAnn Elam, 1982

RT: 8 minutes

JoAnn Elam’s Lie Back & Enjoy It is an absorbing eight-minute dialectical film about the politics of representation. More specifically, it examines the politics of filmic representation of women under patriarchy…The film is endowed with remarkable structural and rhetorical lucidity…Everyone who watches movies with women in them ought to see it. (Claudia Gorbman)

Removed

Naomi Uman, 1966

RT: 6 minutes

Using a piece of found European porn from the 1970s, nail polish and bleach, this film creates a new pornography, one in which the woman exists only as a hole, an empty, animated space.

Mujer de Milfuegos

Chick Strand, 1976

RT: 15 minutes

A kind of heretic fantasy film. An expressionistic, surrealistic portrait of a Latin American woman. Not a personal portrait so much as an evocation of the consciousness of women in rural parts of such countries as Spain, Greece and Mexico; women who wear black from the age 15 and spend their entire lives giving birth, preparing food and tending to household and farm responsibilities. Mujer de Milfuegos depicts in poetic, almost abstract terms, their daily repetitive tasks as a form of obsessive ritual.

My Name is Oona

Gunvor Nelson, 1969

RT: 10 minutes

My Name is Oona captures in haunting, intensely lyrical images fragments of the coming to consciousness of a child girl. A series of extremely brief flashes of her moving through night-lit space or woods in sensuous negative, separated by rapid fades into blackness, burst upon us like a fairy-tale princess, with a late sun only partially outlining her and the animal in silvery filigree against the encroaching darkness; one of the most perfect recent examples of poetic cinema. Throughout the entire film, the girl, compulsively and as if in awe, repeats her name, until it becomes a magic incantation of self-realization. (Amos Vogel)

Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron)

Cauleen Smith, 1992

RT: 10 minutes

Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) is less a depiction of “reality” than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabricates a personal history of her emergence as an artist from white-male dominated American history (and American film history). (Scott MacDonald)

Cauleen Smith’s rapid-fire Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) likewise concerns the multiplication of personae. With dueling narrators, scrolling text, and collaged photographs, Smith blends autobiography with fantasy, fashioning a character based on the artist who nonetheless seems to exist across centuries, from the Middle Passage to surf-punk California. Even though the film is repeated twice in its entirety, the experience still overwhelms—there’s so much to see, to hear, to unravel, to feel—raising questions which animate the entire screening: When charting your course through a totalizing matrix of oppressive representation, what should you pay attention to? How do you craft your own identity when systems like Hollywood, urban planning, or the art world attempt to define you on their own terms—not yours? And if you’re forced to live a double life, why not use that shifting selfhood as a tactic? (program notes for “Why Couldn’t She Have Two Lives?”, Light Industry, August, 2015)

Regal

Karissa Hahn RT: 02:00

from: film (theater) to > youtube (home) > to film (theater) // torrented/pirated (digital) images as found footage // printed from a household printer onto 16mm clear film // // Such as the loading dial, REGAL aims to circulate and find its way back to the screen. Take this proxy and see that the ghost has become tangible. //

The Invisible Ax

Anna Kipervaser RT: 03:45

He knew that the woods are full of forest demons who graze deer and hares like cattle, that the Chuhaistyr – who rends wood nymphs from limb to limb – roams about, inviting passers-by to join him in dance, and that the sound of the ax lives in the forest. He also knew about the Rusalky who emerge from the rivers on clear days to sing songs, to invent tales and prayers, and about the drowned men who dry their pale bodies on river boulders after sunset.

Pattern Language

Peter Burr RT: 10:00

‘Pattern Language’ is a term coined by architect Christopher Alexander to quantify the aliveness of certain human ambitions through an index of structural patterns. Some advocates of this design approach claim that ordinary people can use it to successfully solve very large, complex design problems. In this piece, Alexander’s design theories are applied towards the construction of a generative video game labyrinth resulting in a rhythmic animation made of rippling, skipping, and strobing arrays of light. The whole environment is infused with a procedural vitality brought forth through cellular automata and crowd simulation algorithms.

Division Movement to Vungtau

Benjamin Crotty + Bertrand Dezoteux RT: 04:00

Four pieces of fruit find themselves in a tropical theatre of war.

Ponchartrain

Adam Sekuler RT: 04:08

Ghostly apparitions are seen walking the banks of the Bayou. Caught in a cyclonic tidal force, these specters are seized by the chemical and physical interaction between the emulsion, the body and the seawater.

Dislocation Blues

Sky Hopinka RT: 17:00

An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.

Carolee, Barbara, & Gunvor

Lynne Sachs RT: 08:00

From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.

Optimism

Deborah Stratman RT: 14:00

Draw down the sun, boil up the gold. The impulse to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find precious metal in alluvial gravel are part of a long history of desire and extraction in the northern Canadian landscape. Cancan dancers, curlers, smelters, ex city officials and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a Yukon town portrait.

Dragons and Seraphim

Sasha Waters Freyer RT: 14:00

Ancient flowers and animal desire. The past rises up – a mirage, but I can’t bury it deep enough. Fever season of magic, madness: adolescence. It’s their turn now, our willing sacrifice. “dragons & seraphim” fuses original film footage of three generations of family shot on a handcranked Bolex camera, with 16mm nature films and the home movies of strangers that optically reprinted frame by frame. Sound design by Stephen Vitiello; poem “Childless” by Michael Morse.

A Path Seems Like A Place

Sylvia Herbold RT:19:20

Archival images of women and nature are intercut with recent footage of my sisters. This mixture is simultaneously intimate and unfamiliar. A Path Seems like a Place plays with the line between performance and documentary.