Christopher Harris’s films often examine geographic space as a locus for competing layers of representation and perception. still/here (2000) is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, Missouri, an area populated almost exclusively by working-class and working poor African Americans. The film explores the vestiges of a once-thriving community through evocative imagery of derelict cinemas, fading billboards, and abandoned domestic spaces, asking the viewer to reflect on the causes of this decay.

The five-program series "Troubling the Image: New + Restored Experimental Cinema" features an eclectic and wide-ranging group of works that celebrate the vibrancy of experimental and almost-experimental cinema from near and far, now and then.

The five-program series "Troubling the Image: New + Restored Experimental Cinema" features an eclectic and wide-ranging group of works that celebrate the vibrancy of experimental and almost-experimental cinema from near and far, now and then.

Landscapes of Light features works about place that alternate between close observations of the everyday and more expansive and dislocated views of the world. This program is anchored by two beautiful films by Dane Komljen, Our Body (2015) and All Still Orbit (2016; co-directed by James Lattimer), that imbue place with tenuous histories, personal and political. Arash Nassiri’s Tehran-geles (2015) is a nocturnal flight around the buildings of Tehran, a disorienting view of lights, commercial structures, and signage that could double for Times Square or Las Vegas. Also showing are Peter Hutton’s Boston Fire (1979), Julie Murray’s Distance (2010) and Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field (2016). Onscreen preshow is Lois Patiño’s video Strata of the Image (2015).

Frames of Resistance explores Wolf Vostell and other Fluxus filmmakers’ use of film as political interventions into the built environment and the media landscape. Vostell proposed this list of films to be shown during his visit to the MCA in January 1970 when he supervised the production of Concrete Traffic. Screening are Vostell’s films Sun in Your Head (1963), Starfighter (1967), and others.

Presented by UChicago Arts, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Film Studies Center.