This program celebrates the publication of Millennium Film Journal No. 65 “Architecture On Screen and Off” with a special screening of works featured in the issue. The title refers to recent moving-image artists’ considerations of the built environment and its connection with character, politics, social norms, class, race and gender.

Born in Jodhpur, India, Shambhavi Kaul lives in the U.S. where she teaches filmmaking at Duke University. As skillful with found footage as with her own gorgeous landscape cinematography and hand-processed 16mm, Kaul’s films are marked by a distinctly pensive but playful character. Kaul’s cinematic constructions conjure uncanny, science-fictive non-places. They present to us other worlds – our natural world becomes surreal, familiar set pieces and settings in found-footage films are revealed to be hollow and eerie, hints of narrative threads appear and recede.

This program pays homage to queer cinema pioneer Barbara Hammer in the context of the theme of feminist film genealogies by placing two of Hammer’s films beside a work by her mentee, Joey (formerly known as Gina) Carducci, and a film they made together. Hammer’s Dyketactics articulates lesbian desire and sexuality through the physicality of the female body and the materiality of the film medium.