Program 7
curated by Syd Staiti
Sunday, December 10th, 2017 @ 7pm
The Lab (2948 16th Street, SF, CA)
Total running time: 78 minutes
$6 - 10 sliding scale (advance tickets here)
Moments from the Fall
Christina Hunt
2013 | 6 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
The fall into a deep internal processing of one’s past becomes a repetitive act on the verge of over analysis, revealing and breaking down layers. Submerged in the gravity of life changes one is pushed to step forward to a free fall. Yielding control, sharing visions of a present experience, the journey becomes an aesthetic release from formality, a lightness of being.
-CH
The Watchmen
Fern Silva
2017 | 10 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
In The Watchmen, pulsating orbs, panopticons, roadside rest stops, and subterranean labyrinths confront the scope of human consequences and the entanglement of our seeking bodies. Regressions in missing time, caught in the act of captivity, confined to the carceral and perpetuated by movie sets, television sets, and alien encounters at bay. The corporeal cycle of control revolves as steadily as the sight of those who watch from above.
-FS
¡PíFIES!
Ignacio Tamarit
2016 | 4 minutes | Argentina | 16mm | color | sound
¡PíFIES! (from the Spanish slang “mistake”) is the kind of film I would like to see when I screen home movies, but that I never end up finding. From clippings of my own collection of home-movies, I built a rhythmic collage where at first the focus was placed on the films’ technical problems: violent pans, out of focus, insane zooms, abrupt cuts or what would have been discarded by the cineaste instead of being kept in the final cut. However, ¡PíFIES! ends up being an eulogy to the home movie filmmaking, to the construction of these amateur handmade films, to the filmmakers who shoot their families, their exotic trips and their daily lives so that they can be remembered.
-IT
Austerity Measures
Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell
2012 | 9 minutes | Greece/Germany | 16mm | color | silent
A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces - of grafitti'd marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls - hand-processed in red, green, and blue.
-GC & BR
Arrábida
Tinne Zenner
2017 | 16 minutes | Portugal/Denmark | 16mm | color | sound
A film centered on the production of landscape and concrete in the Arrábida Natural Park, Portugal. Covering a vast area of coast, caves, mountains and forest, the park is inhabited by a massive concrete factory that branches through the landscape. Documenting the various layers of the sourced material, the factory body and the constructed landscape, the film looks at how time is physically embedded in the matter and how the molecular particles act in a circular re-shaping of the whole. The film merges 16mm footage shot in the area of Arrábida with 3D animation of the topographic landscape as an equal analogue layer. Há só uma terra. There is only one earth.
-TZ
Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant
Jodie Mack
2017 | 4 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | silent
A eulogy for wasted potential sends the out of date to the out of body: trash to treasure. An appetite for destruction charts the product life cycle, interrupting the horizon through an intersection of perspectives.
-JM
Castaic Lake
Brigid McCaffrey
2010 | 29 minutes | USA | 16mm | color | sound
Taking its course, the camera drifts in to the coves and surveys the shorelines of a multi-use reservoir to unearth fragments of its young history and consider a series of possible relationships to this artificial environment. Visits are filled with a sense of potentials and the unseen, the lake’s surface separating what is buried and what is to come. Municipal orchestrations, recreational episodes, and small pageants trace this body’s perimeter.
-BM
Christina Hunt
From an early adolescent age Christina has been compelled to document the experiences of her family and the world around her. Her goal as an artist is to create an honest emotional experience where form and content are in conversation with each other, ultimately revealing a space for reflection. Christina’s films have screened at various screenings and festivals including the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA and Anthology Film Archives in New York, NY. She is a founding member of the Boston based AgX Film Collective. Professionally she works in various post production roles. For the past ten years Christina has been DIT, assistant editor and sound editor for Cambridge based documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. For nine years she has been the Film Post Production Manager at Emerson College guiding students and professors throughout their entire production process.
Fern Silva (b. 1982, USA/Portugal) is an artist who primarily works in 16mm. His films consider methods of narrative, ethnographic, and documentary filmmaking as the starting point for structural experimentation. He has created a body of film, video, and projection work that has been screened and performed at various festivals, galleries, museums and cinematheques. He studied art and cinema at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He is Visiting Faculty at Bennington College and is based in New York.
Ignacio Tamarit (1991, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a filmmaker, teacher and musician. He studied at the Centro de Investigación Cinematográfica and at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires. He has given film workshops at the Big Sur Contemporary Art Gallery, C3 Centro Cultural de la Ciencia y Lumiton Museo del Cine Usina Audiovisual, where he also works as an archivist, programmer and film curator. His films have been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Mar del Plata (Argentina), Centro Cultural San Martin (Argentina), Palais de Glace (Argentina) Onion City Film Festival (USA), Slamdance Film Festival (USA), Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata (Argentina) BAFICI (Argentina) Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland), (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico (Spain), Exis Experimental Film And Video Festival (Korea), Festival Internacional de Cine Lima Independiente (Peru), KLEX (Malasia), Linoleum Festival of Contemporary Animation and Media Art (Ukraine), Antimatter Media Art (Canadá), Curta 8 (Brazil), Los Angeles Film Forum (USA) among others.
Guillaume Cailleau (b.1978, France) is an artist and filmmaker interested in everyday occurrences who reveals their extraordinary aspects by representing them in unusual forms and contexts. Influenced by American avant-garde and Expanded Cinema, the formal elements of his films comment directly on their subjects and foreground the production process; they often feature anti-spectacular approaches to extreme situations. His solo work has been shown worldwide in film festivals and museums. His short film LABORAT won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2014.
Ben Russell (b.1976, USA) is an artist and filmmaker whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia. His films and installations are in direct conversation with the history of the documentary image, providing a time-based inquiry into trance phenomena and evoking the research of Jean Rouch, Maya Deren and Michael Snow, among others. Russell received a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize (IFFR 2009) for his first feature film Let Each One Go Where He May, and is an exhibiting artist in documenta 14. His second feature film, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (co-directed with Ben Rivers), premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2013. Curatorial projects include Magic Lantern (Providence, USA, 2005-2007), BEN RUSSELL (Chicago, USA, 2009-2011), and Hallucinations (Athens, Greece, 2017). He currently resides in Los Angeles.
Tinne Zenner (b. 1986, Denmark) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen. She holds an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Working with analogue film and 3Danimation, her work explores the physical structures, in which layers of history, politics and collective memory are embedded. Her work has been shown at a number of international film festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Projections - New York Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Image Forum Tokyo, Sheffield Fringe and Courtisane Festival. Zenner is a co-founder and member of Sharna Pax, a film collective based in London and Copenhagen working between the fields of anthropology, documentary and visual arts.
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.
Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Projections at the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2014 "25 New Faces to Watch" and one of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' YBCA 100 in 2015, she is an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College. She is a 2017/18 Film Study Center Fellow and Roberta and David Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Brigid McCaffrey is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker whose work focuses on environments and people in precarious states of flux. She has exhibited internationally at festivals and venues including BAFICI, DocLisboa, the Hammer Museum, MOCA , IFFR, Other Cinema in San Francisco and the Los Angeles Filmforum. Castaic Lake was awarded Best Cinematography at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2011. Paradise Springs received the Marian McMahon Award at Images Festival in 2014, and was presented by Ballroom Marfa for the 2015 edition of Artists’ Film International. She was a featured artist at the 2016 Flaherty Seminar.