Light Industry: Riddles of the Sphinx
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:30pm
220 36th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), 5th floor
11232, Brooklyn, NY, USA
Introduced by Emma Hedditch

Riddles of the Sphinx
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 16mm, 1977, 90 mins

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film addresses the position of women in patriarchy through the prism of psychoanalysis. Riddles of the Sphinx draws on the critical writings and investigations by both filmmakers into the codes of narrative cinema, and offers an alternative formal structure through which to consider the images and meanings of female representation in film.

The film is constructed in three sections and 13 chapters, combining Mulvey's own to-camera readings around the myth of Oedipus's encounter with the Sphinx with a series of very slow 360 degree panning shots encompassing different environments, from the domestic to the professional. Louise, the narrative's female protagonist, is represented through a fragmented use of imagery and dialogue, in an attempt to break down the conventional narrative structures of framing and filming used to objectify and fetishise women in mainstream cinema. This could be seen as a formal development of the Lacanian analyses that Mulvey had applied to the female image in film in essays such as 1975's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (in Screen).

Riddles of the Sphinx attempts to construct a new relationship between the viewer and the female subject, presenting her through multiple female voices and viewpoints. The dialogue, constructed from the different voices of Louise, her friends and fellow workers, brings a shifting and ambiguous range of meanings to the film, in contrast to the explanatory authority associated with a conventional voice-over. Other voices and images from outside the film's narrative world also question and disrupt pre-supposed meanings and symbols of the woman within and without the screen; from the mythical enigma of the Sphinx to the appearances of artist Mary Kelly and Mulvey herself.

As Mulvey herself subsequently put it, "What recurs overall is a constant return to woman, not indeed as a visual image, but as a subject of inquiry, a content which cannot be considered within the aesthetic lines laid down by traditional cinematic practice." - Lucy Reynolds

Tickets - $7, available at door.

No Festival Required And Deus Ex Machina Present
Luminous Triptych: Experimental Films by Angelina Krahn, Karen Johannesen, Rick Bahto
Saturday January 9, 2010 8 pm (doors open at 7:45)
Deus Ex Machina, 1023 NW Grand Avenue Phoenix AZ 85007

Admission $6.00 (dollar off for students with i.d. and Support Card members)
Limited seating, Adult content

Working from different aesthetic and conceptual backgrounds, the films of these three artists share an ethos of handmade, personal cinema. All films will be screened from actual 16mm and Super 8mm film on actual film projectors!!!

Angelina Krahn utilizes a wide palette of alternative techniques in her films, perhaps most poignantly in Stigmata Sampler, in which she sewed into the surface of the film to cover up and obscure images of her own body.

Karen Johannesen’s masterful editing and single-framing techniques serve to embody studies into quantum mechanics, bringing to vision in delicate landscapes a world “teeming with billions of unrealized possibilities”.

Rick Bahto’s in-camera edited works use the people and places of his everyday life as the basis of studies in movement, rhythm and duration, creating a tension between pre-determined structures and a freedom of improvisation.

This is the first time any of these films have been seen in Arizona.