Events

  • Ben Russell: The Garden of Earthly Delights

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    Programme:

    Introductions and Q&A featuring filmmaker Ben Russell in person.

    - Let us persevere in what we have resolved before we forget (2013, 20 min., Super-16mm on video)
    “We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy?” – Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot”
    “John Frum prophesied the occurrence of a cataclysm in which Tanna would become flat, the volcanic mountains would fall and fill the river-beds to form fertile plains, and Tanna would be joined to the neighbouring islands of Eromanga and Aneityum to form a new island. Then John Frum would reveal himself, bringing in a reign of bliss, the natives would get back their youth and there would be no sickness; there would be no need to care for gardens, trees or pigs. The Whites would go; John Frum would set up schools to replace mission schools, and would pay chiefs and teachers.” – Peter Worsley, “The Trumpet Shall Sound: a study of cargo cults in Melanesia”

    Dates: 

    Thursday, April 16, 2015 - 20:00 to Friday, April 17, 2015 - 19:55

    Venue: 

    Hubbell Auditorium - Rochester, United States
  • Photography? An Enigma

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    The ability of photography to make visible the imperceptible has fascinated and nourished a collective unconscious inclined to assign her with a set of supernatural attributes. Taking up the foundations of an ontology based on ageless beliefs to images and their conversation with the invisible powers, cinema has drawn from the register of spirit photography the elements of a formal grammar in which the phenomenon of appearance and disappearance on the screen are the markers of its magical nature. Like Georges Méliès in the role of a photographer making a portrait of a young woman by only using his psychic powers (The Spiritualistic Photographer, 1903), the American artist Rebecca Baron (based in Los Angeles) offers with Détour de Force (2014) an disturbing portrait of Ted Serios, an atypical figure in American popular culture of the 1960s who was able to expose the surfaces of Polaroid film by his thought. If Méliès has exalted through its optical traps the magical aspect of the photographic image, Rebecca Baron explores the mainstream media coverage of Ted Serios and his mental pictures (thoughtography) in which both became the subjects a morbid attraction where the use of imagination is denied. The demystification of photography denounced by Détour de Force seems to find in an industrial film produced by the American Chemical Society his negative reflection.

    Dates: 

    Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - 19:00 to Thursday, April 16, 2015 - 18:55

    Venue: 

    Centre Pompidou - Paris, Francia
  • Espace Croisé: Stuart Pound

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    Stuart Pound's films are the subject of a first solo exhibition at Espace Croisé. His recent works are made from DVD images appropriations of well-known Hollywood films found in charity shops in London. The three videos Chase (2012), Shooting and Run Loops (2013), designed from science fiction movies or action movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger turn vertical what was initially horizontal. They compile image strips and intensify their pace by creating a new visual score close to abstraction. The soundtrack is split with the moving image and creates an intense reverb effect.

    Dates: 

    Thursday, March 19, 2015 (All day) to Saturday, July 11, 2015 (All day)

    Venue: 

    Espace Croisé - Roubaix, France
  • Photography? A Story

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    Emblematic film of the modernity in the cinema history, La Jetée (1963) by Chris Marker has influenced the unconscious of a cinephilia by its revolutionary structure borrowed from the photomontage. Created from still images on which the comment of an off-camera narrator adds its own story, the film draws the outline of a utopian space in which the temporalities of photography and narrative are intermingled through the phenomenon of cinema projection. In his search of childhood buried memories, the Brazilian artist Pablo Pijnappel (born in Paris in 1979) revives in his work Fontenay-aux-Roses (2010) the founding principles of an experience based on memory and poetry that was inaugurated by Chris Marker. By borrowing a selection of 80 still images made in Paris by other, Fontenay-aux-Roses deploys the intriguing beauty of a chronicle nourished by the nostalgia of memories and the desire of a fiction without beginning or end. On the projected images that appear successively on the screen by following the predetermined order by the carousel of a slide projector, the voice of a narrator physically present in the movie theater, delivers one after the other the pieces of a puzzle that each viewer is led to reconstruct.

    Dates: 

    Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - 19:00 to Thursday, April 9, 2015 - 18:55

    Venue: 

    Centre Pompidou - Paris, Francia
  • Were the Eye Not Sunlike

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    Were the Eye Not Sunlike
    Curated by Third Object - an exhibition in two parts

    Digitally: ACRE TV, acretv.org (April 1 - May 31)
    Physically: Fernwey Gallery (April 3 - April 26)
    Opening Reception: Fernwey Gallery, April 3, 2015, 6-9pm

    Inspired by the long dark winters of Chicago, this exhibition focuses on the Sun at a time when it is missed the most, moments before springtime. As an object that is both illuminating and unseeable, the experience of the Sun is dominated by metaphor and myth. Were the Eye Not Sunlike channels the mythologization of the Sun and our relationship to its immeasurable power. 

    Beginning on April 1, a three-part video program will unfold on the artist-made live streaming platform ACRE TV. The program begins with Sunrise and its thematic associations of stillness, repetition, ritual, crispness and intimacy. Reflecting the course of the earth-bound day, the following program, High Noon, tracks the warmth and optical energy of a bright, full sky. Sunset, the final chapter, evokes impending darkness, melancholy, loss and reflection. The ACRE TV program includes work by sixty-two artists from around the world and will run for two months. 

    Dates: 

    Wednesday, April 1, 2015 (All day) to Sunday, May 31, 2015 (All day)

    Venue: 

    Fernwey Gallery - Chicago, United States
  • Unconscious Archives #17: Derek Holzer/Hangjun Lee & Chulki Hong/Ewa Justka/Rose Kallal

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    Cracked electronics, distorted luminosities and photochemical aberrations are brought into being across four intensely unique and electrify acts. Derek Holzer unleashes opti-sonic graphic scores utilising his homemade Tonewheels technology. Hangjun Lee and Chulki Hong present a brutal expanded cinema set with 16mm film projections, optical sound and turntables. Ewa Justka performs optoelectric noise with pulsing hacked light. And Rose Kallal presents immersive 16mm film projections with live modular synthesis soundscapes.

    Dates: 

    Friday, May 22, 2015 - 20:00 to Saturday, May 23, 2015 - 19:55

    Venue: 

    Apiary Studios - London, United Kingdom
  • Photography? An Artifice!

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    If the end of the 1960s was marked by the American underground, it was also a particularly fecund period in the development of conceptual cinematic proposals made by artists and filmmakers who were sharing a special interest to the consubstantial components of the film. This approach, which some film historians have defined as structuralist, has drawn the outlines of a new ontology of the film based on the rejection of his illusionist nature and motivated by the deconstruction of its own means of production. Paradoxically or not, this reflexive tendency of cinema has made its dependence – firstly historical and technological - to the photography one of the central elements in the affirmation of its autonomy. By appropriating production stills photography, the American artist Morgan Fisher has displaced, in Production Stills (1970), the documentary function of these still pictures by exhibiting them successively in the front of his 16mm camera and making them both object and subject of his film. This principle of succession finds an extension in Gary Beydler’s Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974) in which the Californian artist explores the relationship between stillness and moving pictures through the scrolling phenomenon. If the films of Fisher and Beydler make from the exposure of their production process by using photography one of the theoretical clue of their reading, Wavelength (1967) by the Canadian Michael Snow achieves, through the masterful and minimalist operation of a continuous zoom movement toward a photograph hung on the wall of a studio, a new ontology of the film in which the photography would appear as a simple off-center element.

    Dates: 

    Wednesday, April 1, 2015 - 19:00 to Thursday, April 2, 2015 - 18:55

    Venue: 

    Centre Pompidou - Paris, Francia
  • 25 FPS Festival

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    25 FPS Festival promotes independent and non-commercial films which innovatively explore the possibilities of cinematic language, narration and the medium itself, cross film types and genres and broaden the notion of film as art. It promotes expressive original concepts, progresses in terms of theme, idea and aesthetics, as well as works that perpetuate the tradition of avant-garde and experimental film. Main festival's sections are Competition program, Jury's Choice, Expanded Cinema, Reflexes, Kino 23.

    Dates: 

    Thursday, September 24, 2015 (All day)
    Friday, September 25, 2015 (All day)
    Saturday, September 26, 2015 (All day)
    Sunday, September 27, 2015 (All day)
    Monday, September 28, 2015 (All day)
  • Courtisane Festival 2015

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    Just two days more until the beginning of the 2015 Courtisane Festival (April 1-5, Ghent, Belgium). Now in its fourteenth year, the festival keeps a solid programme as ever with their 'Artists in focus' section, dedicated to Thom Andersen and Pedro Costa. Each filmmaker will be the protagonist of a series of different events including screenings of their work, masterclasses and carte blanches. 

    The festival will also present a selection of over 50 films from the L.A. Rebellion movement, including works by Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Larry Clark and Billy Woodberry. The Selection strand will feature films and videos by Basma Alsharif, Mary Helena Clark, Beatrice Gibson, Ernie Gehr, Morgan Fisher, Ute Aurand and Luke Fowler, among many others. 

    Dates: 

    Wednesday, April 1, 2015 (All day)
    Thursday, April 2, 2015 (All day)
    Friday, April 3, 2015 (All day)
    Saturday, April 4, 2015 (All day)
    Sunday, April 5, 2015 (All day)

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