Events

  • Sweet Work: Sugar and Power

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    Once producing half of the nation's sugar, the Domino Sugar Refinery was a paragon of industrialism in South Williamsburg. Reprising a screening originally presented at Williamsburg’s UnionDocs in July 2014, this program presents a trio of films which examine labor history and issues of power, using this iconic factory as a lens. Domino Sugar—1989, filmed by Domino employee Kenny Malcom in 1989 and recently edited by Anthony Simon and Michael Vass, is “a time capsule of home video vignettes from 1989 filmed by a Domino Sugar employee that illuminates the diversity of the Domino workforce and the empowerment they felt at the time. Featured is a picket line in front of the Domino site, [and] a union meeting dispute between the Domino workers and the ILA Union organizers.” Animator Sarah Jane Lapp’s Sweetface (2000–2013) is a “personal essay film which uses sugar production as a point of departure to explore a variety of relational moments that involve soft power, gratitude and love. The film evolved from the filmmaker’s hand-production of about 1,000 sugar packets, the majority of which she gave as gifts to workers at the Domino Sugar Refinery during their twenty-month strike in the early 2000s.”

    Dates: 

    Friday, November 28, 2014 - 19:30

    Venue: 

    Artists' Television Access - San Francisco, United States
  • Isabelle Cornaro, Somnis Facere

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    Ricard Prize winner in 2010, the french artist Isabelle Cornaro confronts in her films a series of found objects to different patterns or gestures borrowed from the history of art, reinvesting in this way the problems raised by the notions of ornamental and readymades. Conceived by the artist as a space for dialogue between films and other cinematic objects produced outside the mainstream industry, the film program Somnis Facere draws the outlines of a utopian and immaterial exhibition. Isabelle Cornaro will introduce the screening.

    Dates: 

    Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 21:00 to Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 20:55

    Venue: 

    Centre Pompidou - Paris, France
  • VISIONS presents JP Sniadecki, Kimi Takesue & Douglas Moffat

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    VISIONS in collaboration with the Montréal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) presents "States of Limbo" a short film programme with works by JP Sniadecki, Kimi Takesue and Douglas Moffat. Sound artist, Douglas Moffat's White Space documents the hidden side of ever-present highway noise barriers across the island of Montreal and beyond. Kimi Takesue's SUSPENDED both documents and re-contextualizes the experience of suspended time among a cross-section of peopl

    Dates: 

    Friday, November 14, 2014 - 21:00 to Saturday, November 15, 2014 - 20:55

    Venue: 

    Pavillon Judith-Jasmin Annexe - Montréal, Canada
  • Paris, 1980s: Deconstructed Narratives and Late Formalisms

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    Microscope Gallery is very pleased to welcome back Paris-based curator and researcher Enrico Camporesi for a second survey of 16mm films selected from the Light Cone collection (Paris). The evening includes works by Jean-Pierre Bertrand, David Wharry, Unglee, Jakobois, and Téo Hernandez that have rarely, if ever, screened in the US.

    This program gathers five films from the early 1980s, and wishes to present an overview of a diverse variety of artistic practices of the time. Ideally the works presented in the program revolve around two main axes: narrative and form. At first the importance of 'structural' filmmaking can still be witnessed. The inquiry into the specific properties of film is developed both in an unconscious, indirect way (as in The Diamon'd by conceptual artist Jean-Pierre Bertrand) or else dismantled with sense of humor (as in the work of Jakobois). Narrative, in its deconstructed configuration, is at the core of the works by Unglee and David Wharry, the two of them openly playing with genre codes and tropes (science-fiction and mystery).

    Dates: 

    Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 19:30

    Venue: 

    MICROSCOPE GALLERY (previous) - New York, United States
  • Off the Screen: The Handcrafted Cinema of Richard Tuohy

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    As film processing labs worldwide shutter their doors and halt their activities, rumors abound of the end of celluloid filmmaking. Undaunted by apocalyptic visions of an all-digital media dystopia, Australian filmmaker Richard Tuohy—a prominent figure in the burgeoning international network of DIY-inspired “artist-run film labs”—is an infectiously optimistic master of the hand-made film. Using elaborately creative experimentation with laboratory processes and film mechanics, Tuohy’s works abound with such techniques as time-lapse photography, single-frame filmmaking, multiple exposure photography, extensive printing techniques, alternative chemical processes, direct cameraless filmmaking and more. This screening presents an exciting and inspiring array of these dazzling works, including the optical/audible rayogram work Flyscreen; the hand-colorized Korean streetscape Seoul Electric; Ginza Strip, a positive/negative/color/black-and-white “chromoflex” film; the flickering, strobing two-projector work Dot Matrix; the three-projector piece Horizontals and more. (Steve Polta/Richard Tuohy)

    Dates: 

    Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - 19:00 to Thursday, November 20, 2014 - 18:55

    Venue: 

    Exploratorium - San Francisco, United States
  • Hysterics and Mentalists: Two 3D Films by Zoe Beloff

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    What do psychologists, spiritualists, and filmmakers have in common? Each is in some way concerned with the making-visible of what is normally invisible, whether it be the hidden recesses of the unconscious, the voices of the dead, or the world of human passions as they manifest themselves on our faces and in our gestures. For over two decades, Zoe Beloff has been using cinematic technology as a probe into the collective fantasies of our visual culture, which are not so far removed from the 19th century as we sometimes think. Her work is a sustained exploration of the concept of “medium,” which is never simply a mechanical device but a point of juncture between past and future, here and elsewhere, the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead. The arcane devices she often employs—such as stereoscopic film, 78rpm phonographs, and slide projectors—are more than just quaint relics of a bygone era. They are conduits through which we, too, might commune with the past; they conjure up something of the wonder and the ritual that the earliest spectators of moving images might have felt. As an artist and a thinker, Beloff asks us to ponder what Freud and Coney Island share, what it means to “project” an image into the world, and why the French still refer to film screenings as séances.

    Artist In Person!

    Curated by Seth Watter

    Dates: 

    Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - 20:30

    Venue: 

    Cable Car Cinema & Cafe - Providence, United States
  • Andy Warhol’s Sexy Silent Films - Presented by Douglas Crimp

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    Presentation by Prof. Douglas Crimp, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester

    Screening of Andy Warhol films, projected on 16mm at silent speed (16 frames per second):
    - Haircut (No. 1) (1963, 24 min.)
    - Blow Job (1964, 35 min.)
    - Mario Banana #1 and #2 (1964, 4 min. each)
    - Jill and Freddy Dancing (1963, 4 min.)

    Dates: 

    Thursday, November 6, 2014 - 19:00 to Friday, November 7, 2014 - 18:55

    Venue: 

  • Fire+Light+Vision: New projections by James Harrar

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    James Harrar's experimental and highly personal film/video images will be viewed with a live musical rendering of soundtracks for each work. The musical concepts are created, directed and performed by Harrar, often with local musicians. The project places attention on exploring the moving image with live performance and when combined, attempts to reveal deeper levels of interpretation within Harrar’s visceral film poems. This presentation also celebrates the early beginnings of cinema, providing live music to support and elevate the silent movie experience.

    With the performance, the viewers will experience the spiritual states of mind through Harrar’s visual poetry, comparable to a moving painting.

    Dates: 

    Saturday, November 8, 2014 - 19:30

    Venue: 

    UnionDocs - New York, United States
  • Bozar Cinema: Jack Smith

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    A legendary American artist, filmmaker and actor described by Andy Warhol as the only person he would ever copy and by John Waters as “the only true underground filmmaker”.

    The films of Jack Smith (USA, 1932-1989), along with the artist’s complete body of work - including photographs, collages, drawings, slide shows, costumes, sculptures and props that were used in his performances - represent one of the most seminal and important oeuvres in twentieth century art. Born in Ohio and arriving in New York in 1953, Jack Smith transformed the detritus of post-war downtown New York into filmic tableaux vivants of exotic glamour and polysexual fantasy. Rejecting the conservative political climate of an America at war with Vietnam, the trends of Abstract Expressionism, the repression of queer expression and the abstention of the pornographic in high art, Jack Smith was one of the first proponents of the aesthetics which came to be known as 'camp' and 'trash', using no-budget means of production to create a visual cosmos heavily influenced by Hollywood kitsch and orientalism. An actor for Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs and Robert Wilson, Smith sought in his own filmmaking to create an aesthetic of delirium. Smith’s influence is obvious in the work of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Matthew Barney, Nan Goldin, John Waters, Derek Jarman, Guy Maddin and Ryan Trecartin.

    Dates: 

    Friday, November 7, 2014 - 19:00 to Saturday, November 8, 2014 - 18:55

    Venue: 

  • Intertidal by Alex MacKenzie + Hyas & Stenorinques by Jean Painlevé

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    First session in a series of useful labs in partnership with Le Lieu Unique on the porosities between the experimental image and the documentary: documentary cinema / experimental cinema - borders, influences. This first meeting is devoted to one of the common origins of experimental film and documentary cinema: the first science films from the early twentieth century.

    The moving image as an observation, and contemplation tool, of natural phenomena or environments, fragile, unknown and often invisible to the naked eye. A marine evening with the 16mm performance Intertidal by filmmaker Alex MacKenzie (Vancouver, Canada) and the projection in 16mm of the film Hyas & Stenorinques by Jean Painlevé.

    Dates: 

    Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - 20:00 to Wednesday, November 5, 2014 - 19:55

    Venue: 

    Le lieu unique - Nantes, France

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