Jonathan Schwartz is an American experimental filmmaker who has been making poetic non-fiction 16mm films for over a decade. In both his travel films and his more diaristic work he draws influence from certain traditional approaches to observational filmmaking as well as from mentors Saul Levine and Mark LaPore. The soundtracks to his films are stitched together from rich textural field recordings and subdued synch-sound that slides above the images. In Den of Tigers, filmed in Calcutta, India, the clang and hum of an outdoor marketplace gives way to a quick jam of tablas and chengilas, or a man’s voice explaining that perhaps “…where you are sitting right now, it might have been the den of a tiger.” But what we see are haircuts performed on the side-walk, books stacked floor-to-ceiling, eggs boiling in a broad black pan. The perceptual experience is condensed by layering images and sound from different moments, but in the very same way it is expanded and a third space created through the happy montage. Where one moment in Nothing is Over Nothing an open door is abruptly closed by a disembodied hand, in another the filmmaker himself is smiling into the camera and offering flowers; perhaps it is an unspoken reconciliation between the intimacy of shared personal experience and the slight melancholy of being in a foreign place. In other works, like his 33 1/3 series of in-camera edited films, the aural and visual attention paid to color, shape, and texture is more explicit. What remains familiar throughout is the lyrical sense to editing and the opaque layering of sound and image. Based in Brattleboro, Vermont, Jonathan joins us in Portland for a two-night survey of his films and discussion of his practices.

At the invitation of art cinema OFFoff, Courtisane is very pleased to present a program composed of films made and chosen by artist and filmmaker Alexandra Cuesta (EC/US). Inspired as much by Walker Evans‘s reticent street photography as by Bruce Baillie’s sensuous film poems, her work manages to strike a delicate balance between the mundane and the poetic, the material and the intelligible. Public places and urban landscapes are observed in their splendor and singularity through the abstract and vernacular figures of everyday life, exploring the constructions of space and structures of time that can be found in the order and disorder of people’s daily movements and environments. These filmic portraits in motion, elegantly composed of textures of light and fragments of bodies, are reminiscent of an approach that Flaubert once referred to as an “absolute way of seeing things”, manifesting the sensible intensities of the most ordinary things, on the point of disentangling the connections that make them into functional objects. It is precisely in this point of tension that the sensibility of Alexandra Cuesta’s work is situated, perpetually oscillating between a fleeting play of correspondences and a surface of percepts and affects that is there for us to engage with.

The playful and poignant films of German filmmaker Ute Aurand, a key figure in Berlin’s experimental film scene since the 1980s, emerge from her intimate relationship with people and places. Drawing on traditions of the diary film, feminism and artisanal practices, her handcrafted 16mm films are filled with joy at the small details of life – from observations of landscapes to friends filmed over many years. Her exuberant films reflect on memory as much as they celebrate the here and now. These screenings presented by the artist will highlight the range and breadth of Aurand’s filmmaking.

Curated by George Clark, Assistant Curator Film, Tate Modern

As part of the Free to Love: Cinema of the Sexual Revolution seriesFilmmaker Barbara Hammer will appear in person to introduce her work and hold a post-screening discussion.

Programme:- A Gay Day (USA, 1973, 16mm, 3 min.)- Menses (USA, 1974, 16mm, 4 min.)- Dyketactics X 2 (USA, 1974, 16mm, 8 min.)- Women I Love (USA, 1976, 16mm, 27 min.)- Multiple Orgasm (USA, 1977, 16mm, 10 min.)- Double Strength (USA, 1978, 16mm, 15 min.)- No No Nooky TV (USA, 1987, 16mm, 10 min.)

Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage