Thursday, 1/14, 6:30pm at Studio-X: "Land and Noise, Space and Silence"

A selection of experimental non-narratives that explore cities of silence, suburbs of noise, indoor discomfort, and a prison wall. Special appearances by filmmakers Benj Gerdes and Katherin McInnis. Free literature.

Featuring:

Democratic Looking, Benj Gerdes, 1:30, 2008
Horizon Lines, Katherin McInnis, 1:00, 2009
Null X, Jans Groot, 6:00, 2004

The Shutdown, Adam Stafford, 10:00, 2009
In Order Not To Be Here,Deborah Stratman, 33:00, 2002
And recent work by Pawel Wojtasik

Free and open to the public. Drinks and talking afterward. RSVP:  gdb2106@columbia.edu

Where: Studio-X New York, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610. 1 train to Houston Street
http://www.arch.columbia.edu/studiox

[Studio-X is a downtown studio for experimental design and research run by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.]

Democratic Looking

Benj Gerdes, Single-channel video, 1:30, 2008

A rally, some questions, bodies in each other’s space.
Horizon Line

Katherin McInnis,1:00, 2009

Horizon Line excavates the relationship between social and natural geographies at Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the first prisons in the United States. The walls were painted to reflect the horizon line outside the walls; the prison’s decay has turned this two dimensional land and sky into intricate textures and layers: a physical incarnation of the passage of time. This is the first work in a series.

Null X

Jans Groot, 6:00, 2004

0000 0000 1110 0111 (NULL X in binary code) is a film about the contemporary built environments. The form of many buildings and infrastructural elements are characterised more and more by an apparent introversion. The place (X) is no longer clearly defined, and the result is that large parts of the landscape of an industrial estate, of vast parking-lots and of shopping malls. The shooting took place around Benidorm, in the anonymous zone on the edge of this pre-eminent Non-Place. The camera tries to watch the world as a projection through a mesh, according to the mathematical perspective.

The Shutdown

Adam Stafford,10:00, 2009

At night, the boring, drab green landscape near the Scottish villages of Falkirk and Grangemouth transforms into a mysterious, almost divine black and orange purgatory. Torches illuminate the discharge of the chemical factories and the smokestacks seem like a silent city. Bissett grew up in this industrial environment and talks about the accident in the factory that left his father disfigured. Menacing music accompanies the raw tone of his voice. He introduces the smokestacks as fire-spouting monsters that gave his father hell and left him with terrible burns. Bissett discusses the orange glow that descends upon the houses, lovers' lanes, and soccer fields of the Scottish villages. At first it seems romantic, but it also serves as an everlasting reminder of the chemical company's more dismal effects: from cancerous substances that cause birth defects to deadly accidents on the job. The footage that cinematographer Leo Bruges shot of the landscape -- an illuminated ghost town -- are like still lifes that illustrate the story Bissett recounts in the voice-over.

In Order Not To Be Here

Dir Deborah Stratman, 33:00, 2002

An uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st century hollowness… an emptiness born of our collective faith in safety and technology. This is a new genre of horror movie, attempting suburban locations as states of mind.

12/13 THE THREE ROOMS OF MELANCHOLIA at UNNAMEABLE BOOKS

A terrible evening in somewhat cold (not cold enough?) December.

We present the stark, gloomy, spacious, kid-friendly,
The Three Rooms of Melancholia
in Unnameable Books awfully cluttered and low-ceilinged basement, at six o'clock on a Sunday.
Gin and no other refreshments will be served. Warm gin.
And snacks, but...
There will probably be chairs provided.

Please come. No, don't bother.

The Three Rooms of Melancholia reveals how the Chechen War has psychologically affected children in Russia and in Chechnya. Divided into three episodes or 'rooms,' the film is characterized by an elegantly paced, observational style, which uses little dialog, minimal voice-over commentary and a spare but evocative musical score.
Room No. 1, "Longing," set in a military academy in Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg, portrays the highly regimented lives of the young cadets, most of them from broken or dysfunctional families, who are being trained for future roles in the Russian army. While showing their military drills, classroom sessions, church ceremonies, and recess period, the film briefly profiles several of the boys, whose stories reflect the political turmoil of contemporary Russia.

Room No. 2, "Breathing," filmed in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, the former Soviet republic fighting for its independence, shows the widespread destruction wrought by the Russian shelling and bombardment, a city where families struggle to survive in barely habitable buildings, packs of stray dogs roam the streets, Russian military vehicles clog the roads, soldiers monitor roadblocks, and a courageous woman attempts to rescue orphaned or semi-orphaned children from the violence.
Room No. 3, "Remembering," filmed in the neighboring Islamic republic of Ingushetia, focuses on children in refugee camps and in a makeshift orphanage, including a young boy found living in a cardboard box, a 19-year-old girl traumatized by her rape at the age of 12 by Russian soldiers, and a roomful of children transfixed by televised images of the deadly aftermath of the crisis in which a Moscow theater audience was held hostage by Chechen terrorists.

"I passed out, from boredom and sadness." —Stephen Holden, The New York Times. 

Unnameable Books is at 600 Venderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
The event is in the basement, next to the broiler.
Sunday, December 13 at 6pm

Jackie Raynal, November 21, 8:30pm

Realisation  

 

This is the third screening in a 4-part retrospective Red Channels has organized with UnionDocs -- a new "microcinema" based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn -- surveying the life and work of Jackie Raynal. UnionDocs focuses its efforts on the presentation and study of non-fiction and documentary arts, so we've selected a number of pertinent and expressive works from Jackie Raynal's filmography, spanning over 45 years, and representing various aspects of her multifaceted career as editor, filmmaker, exhibitor, distributor, and documentarian. It is a bit of a sequel to last April's "Cinema According to Jackie Raynal" series, curated by Marie Losier for the French Institute Alliance Française.

The third program in the series (part of a double feature), REALISATION, pairs Raynal's first two directorial efforts, both of which could be considered "non-fiction," back-to-back. As wildly different from other documentary films as they are from each other, these films feel as provocative and iconoclastic as ever, over 40 years after the fact. Performance, exhibitionism, deconstruction, and confrontation are all on full display -- if anything making for a more challenging presentation today than they were upon initial release. We're nervous just thinking about this one...

--Merce Cunningham - Etienne Becker, Jackie Raynal, & Patrice Wyers, 1962, 13 minutes
--Deux fois (Twice Upon a Time) - Jackie Raynal, 1969, 65 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 78 minutes | 16mm & Digital Projection

DocTruck will be in attendance, and on some sort of panel thing afterward. 

The Brooklyn Socialite Covers Akerman

And the long shot, and many faces, "in Russian without subtitles + diegetic music"

FROM THE EAST -- filmref treatment

The opening image of D'Est is of an unhurried, stationary shot of a green hazed, obscured highway at twilight, as the intermittent hum and audibly shifting Doppler frequency of a distant, revving engine from an occasional traversing vehicle - some errantly never materializing on screen - provide the sole, false anticipation of a visual break from the seeming interminable view of the desolate, anonymous urban landscape. A subsequent montage of quotidian shots establish the season as summer in Eastern Europe: a daylight interior shot of an open window overlooking a lush meadow, a Cyrillic café sign swaying in the wind, a man wearing a sleeveless undershirt leisurely sitting on a public bench while smoking a cigarette (with a beer bottle politely set to the side of the frame at the foot of the bench for the duration of the shot), an elderly couple playing a board game by an open window, a group of revelers spending a lazy day on the beach, a crowd gathering at an amphitheater for an outdoor concert. Three instances of relative motion in the early sequences of the film reinforce the underlying dichotomy of these introductory images: an extended dolly shot of an elderly woman slowly (and laboredly) walking uphill as a sprightly child on a bicycle momentarily whisks past her; a car longitudinally speeds past a lone tree on a rural dirt road before a plodding, horse-drawn cart eventually reaches the same intersection and transects the vertical axis of symmetry demarcated by the tree on the horizon; a motorcycle crosses a rural intersection at full throttle as another horse-drawn cart lumbers through town and turns to travel in the opposite direction. In each episode, the apparent relativism of the subjects' coincidental juxtaposition serves as a visual metaphor for the transitory juncture (and intersection) between past and present (or more appropriately, future), traditional and modern ways in the rapidly transforming socioeconomic landscape of the region in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is this cultural climate of uncertainty, directionlessness, and supplanted expectation that is inferentially punctuated in Chantal Akerman's ingeniously metaphoric transitional shot of a billboard outpost sign in the unusual shape of an upended cross that serves, not only to indicate the bellweather changing of the natural seasons (and political climate), but also the film's thematic progression from a sense of stasis to physical transience and migration as a group of people are shown walking through dirt roads and empty streets carrying suitcases, visual imprint that are thematically presaged (and figuratively set into motion) in a preceding, double entendred, culminating shot of peasant women cadently harvesting potatoes (a root vegetable) into galvanized steel pails in an open field at the end of the farming season.

The film's intrinsic diurnal rhythms of isolated, interior spaces (people sitting at their dinner tables, applying cosmetics, watching television, or eating alone) and crowded, anonymous exterior spaces (most notably in the ghostly, nocturnal silhouette of people passing through the streets amidst the sound of a rock and roll tune from an overdriven radio that eventually dissipates - and is visually reduced - to the entrancing syncopation of alternately blinking, red traffic lights) similarly carries through to the blue-hued, winter images of perpetual displacement and migration as sinuous, hyperextended tracking shots of foot traffic and endlessly winding queues begin to dominate the latter half of the film. As in the earlier sequences, coincidence and synchronicity play an integral role in the resolution of the images as bystanders alternately engage, challenge, appear bemused by, or confront the camera, while others appear (perhaps deliberately) oblivious of its presence (in an understatedly insightful episode, an attractive, handsomely dressed woman feigns indifference at the approaching camera, but inevitably finds the temptation to look too irresistible and is captured betraying a momentary gaze directly into the eye of the apparatus). (Also note that the initial, transitional, nighttime image of a public queue as people stare out into an undefined space is similarly incorporated by Philippe Grandrieux in the post-apocalyptic prelude of La Vie nouvelle, a film that similarly hints of the collapse of a political bloc, in this case, the break up of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkan Wars.) A delirious, sweeping panning shot through the atrium of a grand, central train station reinforces its figurative representation as an existential weigh station for lost souls as interminably waiting travelers come in from the cold and encounter even more queues within for the use of telephone booths, ticketing, train boarding, and departure. Concluding with a truncated traveling shot of yet another, seemingly ubiquitous public queue, the film reveals an intriguingly transitory and unresolved intrinsic reality: a haunted and indelible reflection of spiritual rootlessness and inertia in the wake of a crumbled ideology, human abandonment, and directionless revolution. http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/akerman.html

FROM THE EAST

Thursday, October 29
Doors at 7:30pm
$9

Chantal Akerman's FROM THE EAST at Monkey Town

FROM THE EAST traces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. It is a voyage Chantal Akerman made shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc "before it was too late," reconstructing her impressions in the manner of a documentary on the border of fiction.
By filming "everything that touched me," Akerman sifts through and fixes upon sounds and images as she follows the thread of this subjective crossing. Without dialogue or commentary, FROM THE EAST is a cinematographic elegy.

Icarus Films releases FROM THE EAST on DVD October 6th. DVDs will be available for sale at the screening.

Monkey Town serves fantastic food and drink, by the way.

Kings of the Sky/ Utopia: Part Three/ Dogs of Straw at UNIONDOCS

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

7:30pm at UNIONDOCS
Suggested Donation: $7

Disparate? pieces of contemporary China: the marginalized but fiercely independent Turkic-Muslim community of Ughyurs; a failed mega consumer center; and throngs of Taiwanese together in the streets before the 2008 elections.   

Kings Of The Sky
dir. Deborah Stratman
2004, video, 68 minutes
An experimental documentary about resistance, balance and fame, Kings of the Sky follows tightrope artist Adil Hoxur as he and his troupe tour China’s Taklamakan desert amongst the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy. The film gracefully hovers between travelogue, ethnographic visual poetry, and an advocacy video for preserving a traditional art form.

"Kings of the Sky hovers between a traveler’s diary, a visual poem of ethnographic imagery, and an advocacy video for preserving a traditional art form. It’s as if Stratman ran off, joined the circus and learned a balancing act of her own."
- Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun Times

Utopia: Part 3, the World's Largest Shopping Mall
Directed by Sam Green
2009, video, 13minutes

More than twice the size of the Mall of America, the South China Mall in Dongguan, China, seems to have it all: gondolas, carnival rides, palm trees, Teletubbies. Conspicuously missing, however, are the bustling tenants and hordes of shoppers.  Promo pieces promised a "one-stop consumption center," but what mall developers now have is nearly seven million square feet of empty retail space.  Buoyed by a mellow yet optimistic techno-pop soundtrack, this short film takes us on a tour of this failed monument to consumerism—down its empty escalators and lonely corridors, pausing to speak with the store clerks, maintenance workers, and very occasional visitors. 

Dogs of Straw

Directed by Yin-Ju Chen & James T. Hong
2009, video, 11min

Dogs of Straw is both a portrayal of Taiwan's 2008 presidential election and a meditation on democracy, manipulation, and nationalism. In Taiwan's fledgling democracy, it is only during a presidential election when the "people exists" as a formless abstract multitude removed from concrete social structures.