Sunday June 12-14, 2020, Online Los Angeles Filmforum and Northwest Film Forum present The Festival of (In)appropriation #10
Discussion ** Co-curators Jaimie Baron, Lauren Berliner, and Greg Cohen will be joined by Adam Hyman of LA Filmforum to host a Zoom Q&A with filmmakers Jennifer Proctor, Penny Lane, Phoebe Tooke, and composer Wayne Grim on June 13 at 5pm PDT. We will send all registrants a link to join the Zoom that day! A recording of the conversation will accompany remaining screenings. ** https://nwfilmforum.org/films/festival-of-inappropriation-10-encore-online/
BLACK LIVES MATTER. In recognition of the importance of the current moment, NWFF is donating ALL PROCEEDS from our June film screenings to organizations that empower the Black community, including Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County, Rainier Valley Community Clinic, Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network, and other organizations to be announced. Learn more about this initiative here or donate directly to NWFF: https://nwfilmforum.org/news/black-lives-matter-freedom-fund-trans-women-solidarity/
Collage or compilation. Found footage film or recycled cinema. Remix or détournement. Whatever one might call it, the practice of incorporating preexistent media into new artworks engenders novel juxtapositions, new ideas, and latent connotations… often entirely unrelated to the intentions of the original makers. In that regard, such works are truly “inappropriate.” Indeed, the act of (in)appropriation can reveal unimagined relationships between past and present, here and there, intention and subversion, artist and critic, and perhaps even compel us to reexamine what it means to be the "producer" or "consumer" of visual culture itself.
Fortunately for our purposes, the past decades have witnessed the emergence of countless new kinds of audiovisual material available for artistic (in)appropriation. In addition to official state and commercial archives, resources like vernacular collections, home movie repositories, and digital archives now provide the artist with a wealth of fascinating matter to reprocess, repurpose, and endow with new meaning and resonance.
Founded in 2009 and curated by Jaimie Baron, Greg Cohen, and Lauren Berliner, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a yearly showcase of contemporary, short-form, audiovisual works that appropriate existing film, video, or other media and redeploy them in “inappropriate” and inventive ways. This year marks the culmination of the Festival’s first decade, with a program that ranges from militant political documentary, uncanny TV supercuts, and raucous re-mix juggernauts, to quasi-DIY orphan film animations, haunting YouTube mash-ups oozing with existential teen angst, and a brooding digital experiment performed upon a single, black-and-white, still photograph.
Watch this conversation about Festival of (In)appropriation #8 between Curator Greg Cohen and film scholar Constance Penley at UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center (10/27/2016): https://vimeo.com/191083847
Read this review of Festival of (In)appropriation #7 (2015) in Artillery magazine: http://artillerymag.com/festival-inappropriation-7/
Check out this interview by Laura Wissot with curators Jaimie Baron and Greg Cohen in Filmmaker magazine: http://filmmakermagazine.com/84086-the-festival-of-inappropriation-6-at-los-angeles-filmforum/ - .Uv6Qlf0dq89
• • HOW TO WATCH • • Purchase a ticket through Brown Paper Tickets at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4607385 Registrants will get an email receipt from Brown Paper Tickets containing a link and password for viewing, under “Ticket Details”. (Don’t see it? Check your spam filter.) The password will expire at midnight PDT on June 14. If you encounter any issues logging in, please contact [email protected] for a quick follow-up. Tickets: Sliding scale at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4607385 For more event information: www.lafilmforum.org, or 323-377-7238 Visit the Festival of (In)appropriation at https://festivalofinappropriation.com/
Screening:- Identity Parade by Gerard Freixes Ribera (Spain, digital video, b/w, sound, 2017, 04:18) A private conversation between a couple at a costume ball gets increasingly bizarre as the two characters reveal their true faces to each other, again and again. Delving into the archive to forage for found footage, Ribera deploys the tools of digital manipulation to warp the time and space of film history. Identity Parade, in turn, asks us to imagine the many masks we wear and how they shape our most intimate interactions. (Lauren Berliner/Greg Cohen)
- Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can’t Fix by Jennifer Proctor (USA, digital video, color, sound, 2017, 09:15) In films, as in life, the bathtub is often considered a private space for women – a place not only to groom, but to relax, to think, to grieve, to be alone, to find sanctuary. For Hollywood, though, it’s also a place of naked vulnerability, where women narratively placed in harm’s way have no escape. Using appropriated movies, this experimental found footage work deconstructs the representations of women in this domestic space as historically framed in popular film. (Jennifer Proctor)
- Acting Erratically by Tuff Guts, Hazel Katz, Daniel Goodman (USA, HD video, color, sound, 2018, 15:08) “Acting erratically” is a term typically used by law enforcement when they believe they are encountering someone experiencing mental distress. This short film explores the connections between freedom of movement and state sanctioned violence in the lives of NYC-based women and gender-non-conforming people of color by critically engaging with the archive and using found footage as metaphorical architecture. A narrative of resistance is explored through the first person by Mecca, who re-appropriates the idea of Acting Erratically as a powerful and performative response to systemic oppression and police violence. This film was made collaboratively with members of Picture The Homeless and Black Youth Project 100 (NYC Chapter). (Tuff Guts, et. al.)
- Normal Appearances by Penny Lane (USA, HD video, color, sound, 2018, 05:00) In Normal Appearances, Penny Lane’s nearly-silent recut of the reality TV show The Bachelor, we see a series of different women perform the same gestures in succession, thereby exposing not only the scripted nature of all of the movements in the show, but also the ways in which femininity itself, as narrowly defined by popular culture, is a set of performed elements that – once isolated and repeated – reveal its arbitrary nature. Even when the emotion appears to be real, the way in which the women brush away their tears indicates their learned compulsion to perform their gender according to the unspoken rules of contemporary “romance.” (Jaimie Baron)
- E by Anna Malina Zemlianski (Germany, digital video, sound, color, 2018, 02:21) In the unearthly world of E, hand-made meets hi-tech as characters appear to consume one another with their own, trafficked liknesses. Constructing her work entirely from laser-printed film stills (approximately 770 in total) lifted from Niklaus Schilling’s 1972 horror film, Nachtschatten, Zemlianski tears, collages, and paints these images with pastels and charcoal, then scans them back together into a bracing animation set to the eponymous song (“E”) by the Berlin-based band, Comb. (Lauren Berliner/Greg Cohen)
- Only the Dead by Aaron Valdez (USA, digital video, color, sound, 2016, 03:45) Repetition gives rise to hilarity as a dramatic male voiceover pronounces the word “dead, “the phrase “where he dies,” or variations thereof over and over again in Aaron Valdez’s Only the Dead. Yet, the silliness of the supercut form is countered by the awareness that we are looking – however briefly and obliquely – at images of actual dead bodies aired previously on the reality show The First 48. The televisual iconography of real human death – a motionless hand or foot, a spatter of blood, a slumped body only partially visible behind a door – is articulated as an impoverished vocabulary for representing genuine trauma. In this film, each cut is literally correlated with the extinguishment of a human life. (Jaimie Baron)
- derivation of the mean lifetime by Phoebe Tooke (USA, digital video, b/w, sound, 2015, 08:40) A single black and white photograph of scores of children sprawled in a field of grass, shot from overhead and at an appreciable distance. Slowly, subtly, a series of “meditative gestures” (as the artist refers to them) begin to “animate” the stillness of the original image. Something has gone awry. Time and loss pervade the stillness, though nothing appears to have changed… or has it?.. The result is a deeply evocative, disquieting investigation of attention, memory, disappearance, and human folly, made all the more poignant (if no less mysterious) by the revelation of the photo’s title and date at the end of the work. (Greg Cohen)
- Drive with Persephone by Mille Feuille (Canada, HD video, color, sound, 2018, 10:30) On the most basic of levels, Drive with Persephone recasts the ancient myth of Persephone’s abduction in the language of YouTube “drive-with-me” vlogs. On closer inspection, the work is so much more, perhaps above all in its compassionate register of the perils and exultations of adolescence, and the wisdom and cruelty of old age. A timely, potent rumination on the enduring, immutable cycle of life and death, Mille Feuille’s video confronts—with a mixture of stoicism and defiant hope—the unmooring of social life in our apparently hyper-connected world. (Greg Cohen)
- Sand by Brice Bowman (USA, 8mm transferred to digital video, color, sound, 2015, 08:48) At the outset of Brice Bowman’s Sand, the frame of the rephotographed home movies that furnish the raw material for his film appears shunted slightly towards the lower right quadrant of the screen. It is a harbinger of the spectral, mesmerizing experiment to ensue, alerting us to the uncanny sense of loss that comes with the recovery of private documents. Here, the medium of film is adapted to the format of the family album… in this case one that is scavenged from an estate sale, a flea market, a rummage store somewhere. To the vaguest sounds of beach-goers and ocean waves, we scroll and scan, sift and sort—turning slowly here, flipping more quickly there—through a humble catalogue of past lives and forgotten places, in all their affecting, comforting anonymity and triviality. (Greg Cohen)
- The Was by Soda_Jerk (Australia, HD video, color, sound, 2016, 13:40) A sample-based video for now, about the time before now. Part experimental film, part music video and concept album, The Was is the collaborative meeting of Australian sample artists Soda_Jerk and The Avalanches. Constructed from over a hundred rotoscoped film samples, The Was is a de/tour de force through the neighborhoods of collective memory. (Soda_Jerk)