“The more real a thing it is, the more mysterious it becomes.” Jack Chambers

Early Monthly Segments is pleased to host the launch of three small books by Barbara Sternberg. Every Day 1, 2, 3 looks at the process of living and the process of filmmaking—how the quotidian influences the creative practice and how one moves from the real world to the imaginative world of artmaking. The launch will be accompanied by a short screening of four films followed by a discussion on the relation between filmmaking and book-making.

To celebrate our sixth anniversary we’ve assembled an evening of determined visual magic, radical geometry and single frame exaltation. Takashi Ito’s sublime Spacy uses the Droste effect (or mise-en-abyme), to turn 700 photographs of a gymnasium into a glorious ten-minute kinetic voyage. Paul Sharits’s seminal Ray Gun Virus is a colour field flicker film that offers a visceral palette of sensory pleasures. Rose Lowder’s Scenes de la vie francaise: La Ciotat is from her four-part series “Scenes de la vie francaise” which references the Lumieres and shows two versions of the same scene, shot frame by frame acutely examining the impact of scale, duration and time. La Ciotat features animated landscapes of the port, dry docks, shipyard workers, launched tankers, fishermen and the beach, showing us contrasting views of the Cote d’Azur port city with graceful perception.

This month Early Monthly Segments is delighted to be presenting three films that are distinguished by their political and critical resonance while exhibiting a profound, poetic and unique handling of the materials and form of film. In Light Reading Lis Rhodes uses a series of still photographs to suggest a mystery, or perhaps more accurately to explore the tropes of the language of mystery. Layering images and text both still and moving, and playing with repetition and image registration and measurement Light Reading is as much about the characteristics of film and photography and who is the subject and/or the object of such as the story it skirts. Similarly layered and elliptical A Cold Draft functions as a multifaceted poetic reportage of the experience of those left behind in the trickle down dystopia of the 1980s UK. The voice of a single narrator comes to embody a chorus of defeated subjects surviving perpetual oppression. Susan Oxtoby’s All Flesh Is Grass revolves around the exploration of the ruin of a 19th century shopping arcade in Buffalo NY, combined with footage of spaces, friends, children and characters in Toronto and in New York City.