Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, March 12 at 7pm for Constructed Visions, a screening showcasing a curated selection of films by Chris Kennedy, including a special preview of a new work-in-progress. A discussion with the filmmaker will follow the screening.
Kennedy’s films are characteristic of the blend of formalist exploration of cinema and critical engagement with social realities. Utilizing techniques such as conceptual multi-framing, hand processing, superimpositions, and multiple exposures, Kennedy probes how film form influences our optics. His unique blend of technical rigor, minimalist approach, and thoughtful attention to the surrounding world helps reveal the constructed nature of visual perception and challenge dominant ways of seeing, establishing Kennedy’s unique position in the world of contemporary experimental cinema.
Brimstone Line (2013, 10 minutes) Three grids are placed along the Credit River in rural Ontario. They become devices through which the stationary camera, pointing upstream, delineates the landscape. They motivate the movement of the zoom, which intensifies our sense of the field of view, narrowing vision and flattening space. The river, framed momentarily, flows past.
The Initiation Well (2020, 3 minutes) The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two wells for performing initiation ceremonies built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them. Sound design by Samuel La France.
Watching the Detectives (2017, 36 minutes) Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took to the Internet chat rooms to try and find the culprits. Users on Reddit, 4chan, and other gathering spots poured over photographs uploaded to the sites, looking for any detail that might point to the guilt of potential suspects. Using texts and jpegs culled from these investigations, Watching the Detectives narrates the process of crowdsourcing culpability.
For more information, contact [email protected].
Chris Kennedy (b. Maryland) is an independent filmmaker, film programmer, and writer based in Toronto. He is the Executive Director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT). His short experimental films have screened at over one hundred film festivals worldwide and have been featured in solo shows at the Los Angeles Film Forum, Nam June Paik Art Center, the La Plata Semana del Film Experimental, the Pacific Film Archive, and Container, Brisbane. His film Watching the Detectives won the Ken Burns Award for the Best of the Festival at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2018. His work as an artist and programmer operates in dialogue with the history of film as art, exploring the medium’s materiality in a contemporary context.
https://www.e-flux.com/events/591182/constructed-visions-films-by-chris-...