Stom Sogo | Shuo Wen Hsiao | Hangjun Lee

Film artist Hangjun Lee treats us to a collection of Asian experimental short films from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, all shown on 16mm film.

As part of the 13th Festival Film Dokumenter

The Abraham Ravett Retrospective program is an effort to reflect on the significance of the aesthetics of cinema – the complexity of visual journeys that can be interpreted from so many events and moments, especially from a personal perspective – that leads us to collectively discover something more plural. Although experimental cinema is no longer a new discourse in documentary, Ravett’s works may introduce new challenges to our audience in Yogyakarta.

The filmic discourse is not limited to the simple notion that photography can evoke memories of the past or nostalgia. The combination of mediums used by Ravett translates major events as well as represents his personal journeys – his identity formed around immigrant Jewish lives and the myriad connections through the passage of historical time. The explorations are transcendental and are not limited to the particular re-narrations of Nazi atrocities.

The films by Los Angeles artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher (US, 1942) are largely about film itself, whether in its material form and technical procedures or as an institution, such as the tropes of films made in the commercial film industry. Fisher started making film in the late 1960s, when the dominant schools of visual art were minimalism and conceptualism. Some of his films were included in “Information,” the landmark exhibition of conceptual art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, and received further recognition at the Independent Avant-Garde Film Festival, London, in 1973. In 2005-2006 a retrospective was presented at Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. From the beginning Fisher made his films as a filmmaker, but the range of his films, touching visual art on one side and on the other the commercial film industry, above all Hollywood, has complicated the reception of his work within avant-garde film criticism. Since the late 1990s Fisher has been active mainly as a visual artist, producing paintings and other works, many of which, like his films, bring into view unexamined assumptions about their medium.