Los Angeles Filmforum presents The Festival of (In)appropriation #8

Curators Jaimie Baron and Greg Cohen in person!

Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, détournement, or recycled cinema, the incorporation of already existing media into new artworks is a practice that generates novel juxtapositions and new meanings and ideas, often in ways entirely unrelated to the intentions of the original makers. Such new works are, in other words, “inappropriate.” This act of (in)appropriation may even produce revelations about the relationship between past and present, here and there, intention and subversion, artist and critic, not to mention the "producer" and "consumer" of visual culture itself. Fortunately for our purposes, the past decade has witnessed the emergence of a wealth of new audiovisual elements available for appropriation into new works. In addition to official state and commercial archives, resources like vernacular collections, home movie repositories, and digital archives now also provide fascinating material to repurpose in ways that lend it new meaning and resonance.

Barbara Meter is a pivotal figure in Dutch experimental cinema. In the 70's she was the driving force behind the Electric Cinema in Amsterdam, where numerous British and American filmmakers screened their work alongside their Dutch colleagues. Meter has a long filmography including experimental films, documentaries and fiction. She describes her experimental films as "lyrical structuralist". Curated by Karel Doing, the programme includes four films in which Meter combines documentary aspects with a more formal approach. Her latest film Up to the Sky and Much Much More will be screened in the UK for the first time. She will be present during the screening and participate in a short Q&A afterwards.  

Programme:

DIM Cinema opens its 2016 season with Ghanaian-born British artist-filmmaker John Akomfrah’s epic film about the African diaspora to postwar Britain. Conceived as a gallery piece based on Homer’s Odyssey, this retelling of Telemachus’s search for his lost father, Odysseus, grew into a feature-length cinematic work structured as a song cycle, with each musical chapter named after one of the nine muses.  Mixing archival footage with original scenes shot in Alaska, and scripted from sound clips of established works of the (mainly) Western canon, the film summons up “a mood, rather than a story, that reflects on the immigrant experience and the violence of displacement with a majestic grace" (Jason Solomons, The Observer). “Striking ... Extends, complicates, and enriches the definition of documentary. Though lofty, The Nine Muses is never grandiose, taking as its subject the primal notion of what constitutes home” (Melissa Anderson, Artforum).