The Film and Media Studies Program, the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, The Visual and Cultural Studies Program from the University of Rochester, and the Humanities Department at the Eastman School of Music welcome pioneering performance artist and avant-garde filmmaker Carolee Schneemann with filmmaker Marielle Nitoslawska, presenting a screening of Breaking the Frame (2013), a feature-length documentary portrait of Schneeman. A pioneer of performance and body art as well as avant-garde cinema, Schneemann (Meat Joy, 1964 and Fuses, 1967/2007) has been “breaking frames” of the art world for five decades, challenging assumptions of feminism, gender, sexuality, and identity. Nitoslawska (Bad Girl, 2002, and Sky Bones, 1999) has made numerous film essays, both feature length and short form, on ground-breaking movements and artists such as Domingo Cisneros, Szczepan Mucha, and Jozef Robakowsk, and teaches film production at Concordia University in Montreal.

Sight Unseen is honored to have Filipe Afonso, Curator with Collectif Jeune Cinéma, to present a collection of works from CJC. Founded in 1971, Collectif Jeune Cinéma promotes experimental moving image work including the distribution of experimental cinema, regular monthly screenings and the yearly Different and Experimental Cinema Festival of Paris (FCDEP). CJC’s catalogue includes more than 1,300 films from more than 350 filmmakers.

The emotional, physical and aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to the causal explanation we attribute to it but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture, to its own personal vibration. So just as directors and cinematographers (even those who will never make abstract films) have everything to gain by refining their knowledge of visual materials and textures, we can similarly benefit from disciplined attention to the inherent qualities of sounds. – Michel Chion, The Three Listening Modes, The Sound Studies Reader, 2012

Ricard Prize winner in 2010, the french artist Isabelle Cornaro confronts in her films a series of found objects to different patterns or gestures borrowed from the history of art, reinvesting in this way the problems raised by the notions of ornamental and readymades. Conceived by the artist as a space for dialogue between films and other cinematic objects produced outside the mainstream industry, the film program Somnis Facere draws the outlines of a utopian and immaterial exhibition. Isabelle Cornaro will introduce the screening.

Microscope Gallery is very pleased to welcome back Paris-based curator and researcher Enrico Camporesi for a second survey of 16mm films selected from the Light Cone collection (Paris). The evening includes works by Jean-Pierre Bertrand, David Wharry, Unglee, Jakobois, and Téo Hernandez that have rarely, if ever, screened in the US.

This program gathers five films from the early 1980s, and wishes to present an overview of a diverse variety of artistic practices of the time. Ideally the works presented in the program revolve around two main axes: narrative and form. At first the importance of 'structural' filmmaking can still be witnessed. The inquiry into the specific properties of film is developed both in an unconscious, indirect way (as in The Diamon'd by conceptual artist Jean-Pierre Bertrand) or else dismantled with sense of humor (as in the work of Jakobois). Narrative, in its deconstructed configuration, is at the core of the works by Unglee and David Wharry, the two of them openly playing with genre codes and tropes (science-fiction and mystery).