The Risky Visions of Barbara Hammer
12 June - 01 July 2012
Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris

Since the early 1970s, Barbara Hammer has claimed the double identity of feminist and lesbian activist. Pioneer of queer cinema, she has gained an international reputation in the field of American experimental cinema.

From her earliest films (X, Dyketactics, Superdyke), her boldness is evident in the enthusiastic and lyrical exploration of sexuality and women’s pleasure, previously terra incognita in the geography of cinema. For this, it invents new formal representations of flower and plant outbursts (Women I Love) to a symbolic vocabulary close to Surrealism, revealing its proximity with Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun (I Was / Am I, Psychosynthesis) and two recent works (Maya Deren’s Sink and Lover Other: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore).

The creative energy of Barbara Hammer fires up all of the rich technical syntax of the avantgarde: superimposed layering of images, visual collage, coloring or alteration of the film, de-framing, use of solarized and negative film, and editing in post production to transform the movie into poetic form by manipulating the film before our eyes (Endangered). All these effects contribute to the technical deployment of a work rich in radiant colors and sounds more and more skillfully worked (Generations). Even in her many films shot in black and white, Barbara Hammer is a filmmaker of light and perceptual experiments. She is also highly attentive to the accompanying sound of her films: music and sound effects that give a color, a tone, sometimes lyrical and sometimes humorous, to films that accompany the memory they hold.

Nomadic Archive: Abraham Ravett presents the Works of Tom Joslin
Saturday, June 2, 19:30h
UnionDocs
322 Union Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Abraham Ravett in attendance for screening and discussion.

Abraham Ravett will screen and discuss two of Tom Joslin’s works: Blackstar: Autobiography of a Close Friend from 1976, and the posthumously assembled work The Architecture of Mountains (2010).

Ravett writes the following about the project: Before he left for LA in 1981 to pursue a career in Hollywood, documentry filmmaker Tom Joslin completed an innovated and to this day, historically significant film called Blackstar: Autobiography of a Close Friend (1976, 85 minutes, color, sound, 16mm). It was one of the first autobiographical, diary format films that addressed the issue of gay identity and coming out to one’s family. It’s a beautifully made film, formally inventive, and still resonates on many fronts.

When Tom passed away from AIDS, he left all his video tapes from another autobiographical project he had been shooting in LA to a former student named Peter Friedman who in turn, found the resources to construct the much acclaimed film, Silverlake Life: the View from Here.

Prior to leaving Hampshire College in 1980, Tom was working on another film inspired by Jose Argüelles book, The Transformative Vision: Reflections on the Nature and History of Human Expression. Shot in sync and MOS on 16mm, the footage reflects Tom’s interest in perception, human consciousness, and signaled his evolving interest in fusing non-fiction, experimental and dramatic genres. All the original materials for this unfinished film were stored at the LA home of Ken Levin another former Hampshire College student who along with several other students, worked with Tom on this project, which he called The Architecture of Mountains (62 minutes).

Think:Film
International Experimental Cinema Congress 2012
10-14 October 2012
Akademie der Künste am Hanseatenweg, Berlin

Following a period of diversification of experimental forms of artistic production, it has become necessary to come up with new ways to think about film and the types of thought created by it and within it.

The ability to break down and translate image and sound into digital codes represents a fundamental shift in filmmaking practice and has led to massive changes with regard to production technology. The concentration and processing of different time-based art forms within computers has let loose a wealth of new synesthetic opportunities, many of the examples of which were anticipated by certain advanced film forms. Practices that used to be the strict reserve of the experimental, avant-garde and underground film genres have been seized upon thanks to these new technologies, placed in new commercial contexts and popularized. In this way, the economic history of the "avant-garde" has become of relevance above and beyond its cultural impetus. The position of artistic authorship and curatorial and production activity within this new distribution landscape needs to be reflected upon in new ways.

The central goal of Think:Film is to make a philosophical reassessment of the special position enjoyed by film and the cinematic image in artistic and intellectual practice and to redefine what this position might be. What direct influence does the cinematic image have on current thought and how can film itself become a way of thinking? The congress is not concerned primarily with film genres, but seeks instead to pose fundamental questions: What is thought in connection with cinematic images and what are these images in connection with thought? Which types of images trigger which types of thought, which are capable of eradicating which types of thought? Which types of images can become an integral part of which types of thought? Which cinematic images are in circulation and which kind of thinking does this point to?