Experimental Landscapes I: Landscape and the Body at Work and Play

By on

Rating: 

No votes yet

Filmforum presents the first in a series of screenings devoted to experimental cinema and landscape, with a program that explores the connection between labor, leisure, landscape, and the moving image. For as long as artists have taken the landscape as an object worthy of their scrutiny, the human body has served them as its measure and its foil. Whether at work or at play, whether above or below, it is the body from which we view the landscapes we inhabit, just as we survey the landscape—as if by instinct—for signs of the bodies that inhabit it, give it form, depth, and meaning. With its particular ability to render things in motion, experimental cinema has long seized upon this interrelation between landscape and the body in order to capture what is most essential to them both. Few filmmakers working today have grasped this connection with as much depth and subtlety as Sharon Lockhart. And Lockhart’s films, in turn, assume even greater relief when juxtaposed with the work of older artists like Phill Niblock, or with that of such contemporaries as Francis Alÿs. If Niblock’s 1973 film Trabajando Dos (Mexico) centers on the raw mechanics of manual labor—all the while insisting on the primordial unity between laborers and the land they work—Alÿs’s video, REEL-UNREEL, from 2011, casts child’s play as a politics of improvisation, one capable of expressing optimism in even the bleakest of landscapes. Lockhart’s films, meanwhile, meld these two impulses into an ethnographic fascination with the landscapes of labor and leisure alike. In works as disparate as NŌ (2003) and Pódworka (2009), landscape emerges as an elaborate stage on which human bodies choreograph their everyday lives. 

Programmed by Greg Cohen.

Sharon Lockhart in person!  

Programme:
- Trabajando Dos (Mexico) (Phill Niblock, 1973/4, 16mm to digital video, 24 min.)
With composition for cello (“FeedCorn Ear”) by Phill Niblock, featuring cellist Andre DeForce

Trabajando Dos counts among the earliest works from Niblock’s monumental twenty-year series, The Movement of People Working. Here, a rhythmic succession tightly framed shots capture the bodies of Mexican peasants in their rural surroundings. The use of very long lenses, meanwhile, serves to scrutinize the dynamics of their manual labor—performed by mostly pre-industrial means—while resolutely anchoring the workers in the landscape.

"Unlike an anthropological study, Niblock’s films abstract themselves down to the level of motion, focusing on the qualities of repetitive movement, ‘the texture of rhythm and form of body motion within the frame.’” — Pleasure Dome (pdome.org)

- Reel-Unreel (Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi, 2011, single-channel video projection, 20 min.)
Commissioned by dOCUMENTA(13) and filmed in the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, REEL-UNREEL depicts a group of jubilant children rolling and chasing two metal film reels through the desolate cityscape. As one reel pays out an immense length of celluloid, the other reel, far behind, simultaneously takes the tattered train of film back up. In the process, we bear witness to the profound historical link between war, play, landscape, and the cinema itself.

“[T]he whole city of Kabul is transformed into an improvised movie set, and the gesture of playing into the three-dimensional projection of a film, which gets covered in dust and detritus, bearing with it, in the material impression on the film, the multiple memory of a community suspended between disintegration and reconstruction, memory and forgetting, past and future, drama and play.” (Domus)

- NO (Sharon Lockhart, 2003, 16mm, color/sound, 34 min.)
“Filmed in a continuous take with a fixed-angle camera, NO captures Masa and Yoko Ito, a Japanese farming couple, systematically mulching a plot of land. For over half an hour, they arrange tidy piles of straw and then disperse them over a field with minimalist, almost sculptural precision. […] Lockhart described her process in the following way: ‘I organized NO around the optics of seeing . . . I had the farmers make piles of hay in the reverse perspective of the camera, following the camera’s field of vision. . . . After working from background to foreground to make the piles, the farmers come in and slowly spread the hay over just that portion of the field revealed by the camera, from foreground to background, as if they are covering a canvas.” As the figures move through horizontal fields of color in a choreographed fashion, Lockhart’s film appears almost as a living landscape painting.” (Art Institute of Chicago)

- Pódworka (Sharon Lockhart, 2009, 16mm to HD video, 31 min.)
Pódworka “takes as its subject matter the courtyards of Lodz, Poland, and the children that inhabit them. A ubiquitous architectural element of the city, Lodz’s courtyards are the playgrounds of the children that live in the surrounding apartment buildings. Separated from the streets, they provide a sanctuary from the traffic and commotion of the city. Yet far from the overdetermined playgrounds of America, the courtyards are still very much urban environments. In six different courtyards throughout the city of Lodz, we see parking lots, storage units, and metal armatures become jungle gyms, sandboxes, and soccer fields in the children’s world. A series of fleeting interludes within city life, Pódworka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of the resourcefulness of childhood.” (www.lockhartstudio.com)

“This is both minimalist filmmaking and social documentary. Lockhart’s scenarios can be seen as embodiments of space and time—the basic abstract dimensions of the film medium—but she is also engaging in oblique social commentary. As always, her work is concerned with how people inhabit places, and therefore how they inhabit their own lives.” — Mark Prince, Flash Art

Venue: 

Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian - Los Angeles, United States

Dates: 

Sunday, October 18, 2015 - 19:30

Category: 

Dates: 

Sunday, October 18, 2015 - 19:30
  • 6712 Hollywood Blvd.
    90028   Los Angeles, California
    United States
    34° 6' 5.1048" N, 118° 20' 11.742" W