PROGRAM 1
Oh My Homeland
Stephanie Barber | USA | 16mm | 2019 | 4 min
In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sung the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause. Oh My Homeland is the third in a series of minimal single shot 16mm films I’m currently building. It’s a film about representation, art, and material exchange. It’s a film about endings. It’s a film about identity, love, power, patriotism and the transcendent potential of art through the viewing of a face receiving adoration. A minimal gesture akin to the practice every portrait painter or mother recognizes as ineffably powerful. It is essentially a readymade and like my book Night Moves and my video Tatum's Ghost it continues to explore Youtube as a cultural and social archive.
Oh My Homeland, while being simply a shot of Ms. Price’s face as she receives the applause and before returning to the role, expands with the unaltered meditation on the shot. The transformational power of art for society and the maker alike; the implication of Ms. Price’s race and the context to which she dedicated her life; the staggering political implications of the Verdi aria (a mournful and complicated love letter to Aida’s homeland) in a time in which love of (my) country is hard to muster. – Stephanie Barber
Stephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay and dialectic works. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human existence (its morbidity, profundity and banality) with play and humor. Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals. Barber is currently a resident artist at The Mt. Royal MFA for Interdisciplinary Art at MICA in Baltimore, MD and a teaching artist for The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and Image Text Ithaca.
A Return
James Edmonds | UK / Germany | 16mm | 2019 | 6 min
To return again. To re-align is the object of these visits, perhaps. Geography of origin becoming catalyst for an inner re-alignment with the secret, private, unspoken work of one’s being. Peering into layers, sliding planes of windows and time, the fragmentary gesture of the dance. A series of rapid contrasts, a synthesis of elemental and everyday experience. Structures shift and intermingle, two worlds become one. – James Edmonds
James Edmonds works primarily with super8 and 16mm film as well as painting and music. His practice is driven by a personal poetics in which the act of recording the everyday becomes both a materialist, formal structure and a highly subjective experiential reality in itself - a complex synthesis of presence and memory. His films have been shown at festivals such as TIFF, NYFF, AAFF, Oberhausen, Curtas Vila do Conde and L’ ge d’Or Brussels, amongst others. Solo/duo presentations have occurred at (S8) Mostra Internacional de Cinema Periférico A Coruña, Cinema Parenthèse Brussels, Nocturnal Reflections Milan, 3 137 Athens and Another Vacant Space Berlin. He occasionally writes texts on film and from 2015-2018 curated and ran a film series in Berlin called “Light Movement”.
Surviving You, Always
Morgan Quaintance | UK | DCP | 2020 | 18 min
The proposed metaphysical highs of psychedelic drugs versus the harsh actualities of concrete metropolitan life. These two opposing realities form the backdrop of an adolescent encounter told through still images and written narration. – Morgan Quaintance
Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. He is the recipient of the 2021 Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the 2021 Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal, both for the film Surviving You, Always (2021); the 2020 New Vision Award at CPH:DOX and the 2020 Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal , both for the film South (2020) . Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.
Seven Years in May (Sete Anos em Maio)
Affonso Uchôa | Brazil | DCP | 2019 | 41 min
One night in May, seven years ago, Rafael was arriving home from work. Opening the gate, someone called his name. He looked back and saw people he didn’t know. Rafael left his home, taken by these unknown people and he never came back. Since then he has lived as if that night has never ended.” – Affonso Uchôa
Rafael’s intimate account meets the collective testimony of an entire nation oppressed by poverty, police repression, and institutional corruption. Seven Years in May could be read as a political fable that prefigures Brazil’s complex situation, but also as a mythological tale full of hope, in which it is still possible to imagine another future for the country. – Elena Lopez Riera
Affonso Uchôa is a filmmaker based in Contagem, Brazil. He has directed several films that have screened and won awards at international film festivals, such as his 2014 film A Vizinhança Do Tigre (The Hidden Tiger). His previous works include Desígnio (2009), Afternoon Woman (2010), and Araby (2017) (co-directed with João Dumans).
TEAL
Björn Kämmerer | Austria | 35mm | 2019 | 5 min
Shooting silently at 25 frames per second, Kämmerer trains his lens on a series of free falling mirrors whose burnished, teal-colored backsides face the camera as they drop vertically through the frame. Against an all-black backdrop, the mirrors fall at rhythmically timed intervals, crashing to the surface in fits of syncopated destruction. As each pane shatters, reflective shards erupt outward, catching brief hints of the surrounding studio lights before being swiftly folded into the film´s clipped montage. The modulating sense of depth and verticality produced by these contrasting elements creates optical patterns and illusions within the 35mm frame that slowly dissolve spatial coordinates by allowing the profilmic event to shape and reshape the viewer´s perception from moment to moment. A tautological consideration of space, disposability, and cinematic iconography (and as such a literal object lesson in repetition), TEAL recalibrates the mind's eye through the subtle application and disruption of familiar forms. -Jordan Cronk
Björn Kämmerer works with film and video art. He was born in Stralsund (GDR), grew up in Berlin, and lives and works in Vienna. From 2002-2008, he studied at Kunstuniversität Linz (Experimental Media Art), and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Art and Digital Media). Since 2003, he has created sixteen moving-image works including ARENA (2018), NAVIGATOR (2015), TORQUE (2012), and Gyre (2010).
República
Grace Passô | Brazil | digital file | 2020 | 16 min
The pandemic brandishes the extent of the necropolitics operating in the country and its society goes through a crisis of ethics amidst a government which is the exact expression of colonialist power. República is a film made at home, with a domestic structure, at the beginning of the 2020 quarantine, in downtown Sao Paulo in the neighborhood Republic. - Filme República
Grace Passô is an award winning director, actress and screenwriter, who works in theater and cinema. Her works are widely recognized and acclaimed within the contemporary arts and cultural spheres of Brazil. Passô has acted in the films Praça Paris, In the Heart of the World, and Long Way Home. She co-directed the 2019 film Vaga Carne (with Ricardo Alves Jr.) which was based on the theatrical work that she authored. Most recently, Passô was a featured artist in the 2021 Flaherty Film Seminar and she is preparing for an upcoming exhibition at the Bienal de Arte de São Paulo.
PROGRAM 2
Cavalcade
Johann Lurf | Austria | 35mm | 2020 | 5 min
For Cavalcade, Johann Lurf designed and constructed a 150cm-diameter water wheel, with one face divided into various patterned circles of varying shapes and color. It was then fixed in place in a stream; we observe the wheel in rest, motion and rest again from a single vantage point, as it is illuminated by strobe lights synchronised with 35mm cameras. Clockwise and anticlockwise movement disorientingly, magically interweave. Over three minutes the revolutions accelerate in audibly mechanical crescendo, blades spurting water into air; eventually, the atmospheric tree-heavy waterside calm of the night reasserts itself. A hypnotic nocturne which gracefully intersects experimental cinema with the sensational world of the funfair - Lurf's title is evocatively redolent of showbiz spectaculars - Cavalcade provides a fleeting but indelible light in the darkness. This vision persists. - Neil Young
Each time the film flow is interrupted to record an image, the strobe light seemingly freezes the motion of the waterwheel - unleashing its motion patterns and creating an illusion of reversed motion and standstill - contradicting its actual speed. Our perception is tricked twice simultaneously: the illusion of the moving image is created in camera while the illusion of standstill is enforced by the strobing on the water wheel's patterns. -Johann Lurf
Johann Lurf is an artist working primarily with the moving-image. He studied film at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. Since 2003, he has created over a dozen films including the 2017 found-footage feature-length film ★. His works have screened widely at numerous international film festivals and cultural institutions. “Lurf’s films examine various modes of (both human and technologically-aided) vision and motion, but his more formally-oriented filmic experiments are always accompanied by strong narratives that, however subtly, examine society, codes, norms, perception, and the history and development of cinema itself.” (Austrian Cultural Forum New York)
"The red filter is withdrawn."
Minjung Kim | S. Korea | digital file | 2020 | 12 min
Numerous colonial places, including coastal caves and military bunkers on many Oreums (small volcanoes inside a main volcanic crater) as well as memories of uprisings and massacres are found in every corner of Jeju Island. This work is based on René Magritte's “La Condition Humaine” (1935), which offers a view of the outside of a cave superimposed on a canvas. It also includes some quotes from Hollis Frampton’s performance “A Lecture,” making it the voice for the entire work. - Minjung Kim
Minjung Kim is an artist and a filmmaker based in Seoul, Korea, working primarily in the medium of film and video. She studied Visual Communication Design at Hongik University, Seoul, and earned an MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work has screened at international film festivals and media art venues including Berlinale, Toronto International Film festival, Sheffield Docs, Edinburgh International Film Festival, SIFF and DMZ docs. Her films have received awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, EXiS, Black Maria and Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival.
Apiyemiyekî?
Ana Vaz | Brazil | 16mm > DCP | 2020 | 27 min
Produced from within a series of works dedicated to constructing a critical cosmology of the military dictatorship in Brazil in the exhibition “Meta-Archive 1964–1985” at Sesc-Belenzinho, this cinematographic portrait takes its starting point from Brazilian educator and Indigenous rights militant Egydio Schwade’s archive – Casa da Cultura de Urubuí – containing over 3000 drawings made by the Waimiri-Atroari, a people native to the Brazilian Amazon, during their first literacy process. Based on Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, drawings became one of the first methods of knowledge exchange and production between them. During these exercises, the most recurrent question posed by the Waimiri-Atroari was: Why did Kamña (“the civilized”) kill Kiña (Waimiri-Atraori)? Apiyemiyekî? (Why?). The drawings document and construct a collective visual memory from their learning process, perspective, and territory while attesting to a series of violent attacks they were subjected to during the dictatorship. The film animates and transposes their drawings to the landscapes and sights that they narrate, searching to echo their question and trusting that memory is a necessary engine to build a common future. - Berlinale Forum Expanded
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker whose films, installations and performances speculate upon the relationships between myth and history, self and other through a cosmology of references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation in exploring the f(r)ictions imprinted upon cultivated and savage environments. A graduate from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Le Fresnoy, Ana was also a member of the SPEAP (School of Political Arts), a project directed by Bruno Latour. Recent screenings of her work include the NYFF, TIFF, Courtisane, Cinéma du Réel (Grand Prix) & specific focuses dedicated to her work at the Flaherty Seminar (USA) and Doc's Kingdom (Portugal). Her work has featured in major group shows such as the Moscow Biennial of Young Art & the Dhaka Art Summit. In 2015, she received the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of artistic excellence and innovation in her moving-image work.
There? Where?
Babette Mangolte | USA | 16mm | 1979 | 8 min
A naive look at Southern California by an outsider, and/or an essay on displacement through the disjunction of Californian images and off screen voices. Where is the location of these voices, here or there? Are the images near or far in relation to the voices? Are the images commenting on the images or vice versa? - Babette Mangolte
Babette Mangolteis a French cinematographer, film director, and photographer and she has lived and worked in the United States since 1970. Mangolte has directed over twenty films including What Maisie Knew (1975), The Sky on Location (1978), Visible Cities (1991), Les Modèles de Pickpocket (2001), Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramović (2007), and Edward Krasiński’s Studio (2012). She is also known for her photographic archive, which documents the experimental theater, dance and performance scene of the 1970s and 1980s including the performance works of notable choreographers such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, and Yvonne Rainer. As a cinematographer Mangolte has collaborated with Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Snow, Jackie Raynal, Sally Potter, Marcel Hanoun, and Jean Pierre Gorin among others. Mangolte is interested in creating architectural spaces, which propose various modes of interactivity for the spectators with the photographs, films and texts shown in her installations. Her work has been the subject of several retrospectives and is in the permanent collection of the Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, Reina Sofia Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, and MoMA New York.
Reverse Shadow
Janie Geiser | USA | digital file | 2019 | 8 min
Rivers run red, planes hover over waters, ships travel in darkness, and towers loom and topple. Disaster seems imminent as the hunters prepare to shoot. The body is a soft target. “I had a recurring dream that I was walking in the woods and a hunter mistook me for a bird. I could hear him moving through the forest. I always woke up before the gun was fired, but that feeling of apprehension would stay with me throughout the day. Lately, even without dreaming this dream, that apprehension is present.” – Geiser
Reverse Shadow draws on a range of sources, from a child’s target practice game to brochures of WW2 warplanes, medical books, panoramic photographs, and iphone videos shot from an airplane seat. The sound collage includes, among other sources, recordings of Cold War shortwave “numbers stations” and an Edison recording of the Rip Van Winkle story. Immersed in an atmosphere of suspended apprehension, we sense disaster is waiting, waiting to happen.
Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, film, installation, and visual art. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its sense of suspended time. Geiser’s films have been screened at numerous international film festivals and other venues including the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, Microscope Gallery, the Guggenheim Museum, MOMA, Pacific Film Archives, the Centre Pompidou, the Salzburg Museum, SF MOMA, LACMA, and the Sharjah Biennial, among many others. Geiser’s films are in the collections of MOMA, The NY Public Library’s Donnell Media Center, CalArts, and others. Her film The Red Book is part of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. One of the pioneers of the renaissance of American avant-garde puppet theater, Geiser creates innovative, hypnotic performances and installations that integrate performing objects, puppets, and projection. Her work has been presented at The Public Theater, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Redcat, The Walker Art Center, and other venues. Geiser’s work has been recognized with a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an OBIE Award. She is a founding Co-Director of Automata, an artist-run performance gallery in Los Angeles.
Early Years
Morgan Quaintance | UK | DCP | 2019 | 15 min
Early Years is a portrait of Jamaican-born artistic polymath Barbara Samuels. It features an account of her first generation, diasporic experience in London, and her discovery of the liberatory possibilities for self-actualisation offered by an early entry into creative life. - Morgan Quaintance
Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. He is the recipient of the 2021 Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the 2021 Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal, both for the film Surviving You, Always (2021); the 2020 New Vision Award at CPH:DOX and the 2020 Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal , both for the film South (2020) . Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.
Personality Test
Justin Jinsoo Kim | S. Korea | DCP | 2021 | 8 min
A private memory is examined and explored through a simple personality test found on the internet. The photographs and sounds, recorded by the interviewee at the forest and other places, become distorted and transformed by the artist or the audience. In the reconstructed forest, the questioner, the interviewee, and the audience start to picture images of an animal, a house, a sound of water, and beyond.
Justin Jinsoo Kim is an experimental filmmaker based in Santa Clarita, CA and Seoul, South Korea. Kim’s work aims to discover new relationships in images and frames by exploring the possibilities of animation techniques. He starts by experimenting with various cinematic techniques and expands to stories related to a personal narrative or a philosophical inquiry. He received an MFA in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. Kim’s work has been selected in various festivals including Annecy International Animation Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival and EXiS (Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul).
God’s Suicide
Harmony Holiday | USA | digital file | 2020 | 15 min
Holiday’s God’s Suicide is a one-man play turned-film that takes Black male vulnerability as its central subject. Adapted from an essay by the artist, this deeply personal work examines the interplay between creative forces and decimating ones in societies infected with the myth of white supremacy. Drawing on archival research and personal history, God’s Suicide focuses on two figures: the author James Baldwin and the artist’s father, the soul musician Jimmy Holiday. As she explains, “Two Jimmys I love and who teach me their startling immortality daily deserve the space to discuss their demons as much as their gifts.”
Harmony Holiday is a filmmaker, writer, dancer, archivist, and the author of five collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and the forthcoming Maafa (Winter 2021). She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, and a research fellowship from Harvard. She’s currently working on a collection of essays and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.
PROGRAM 3
13
Shinya Isobe | Japan | 16mm > DCP | 2020 | 10 min
Shinya Isobe left his camera in exactly the same location and angle for five years to shoot an image of the sunset every thirteen seconds. 13 invites us to contemplate our relationship to the cosmos.
While the days repeat, there is never the same sky. Time that has passed will not return. But, the sun will rise again. -Shinya Isobe
Shinya Isobe was born in Yokohama City, Japan in 1982. He graduated fromTokyo Zokei University’s Graduate School and from the 33rd class of the Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image. His previous works include dance (2009) and EDEN (2011).
Aggregate States of Matters
Rosa Barba | Peru / Germany | 35mm | 2019 | 18 min
Shot in the Andes, Aggregate States of Matters deals with the increasing impact of climate change on remote areas. At its core, the film pivots on the ambivalent negotiation between the binary idea of nature and culture, oscillating within the contemporary discourse on the environment and its complex layers based on scientific, philosophical, spiritual and cultural approaches. The work shows the blurring boundaries between human and non-human actors in communities affected by glacier melting in the Andes. From an extensive dialogue with the local people, Barba draws a critical picture of a world where progress has stopped making sense. – Rosa Barba Studio
Rosa Barba is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born in Italy and lives and works in Germany. Barba is known for using the medium of film and its materiality to create cinematic film installations, sculptures and publications, which inquire into the ambiguous nature of reality, memory, landscape and their role in their mutual constitution and representation. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum, Finland; ARTER, Istanbul,Turkey; Tabakalera, International Centre for Contemporary Culture, San Sebastián; and at Kunsthalle Bremen. Barba has participated in the 52nd, 53rd and 56th Venice Biennale, the 2020 Yokohama Triennale, 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and the 2010 Liverpool Biennale. Barba's works belong to collections such as Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MACBA, Barcelona; and Kunsthaus Zürich.
Kapita
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo | DR Congo | digital file | 2020 | 22 min
“Ka-pi-ta” is the official job title given to Congolese charged with enforcing their white master’s bidding—through domination—over their fellow Congolese on plantations, in factories, in commerce, and other sites of capitalist extraction and production.
From one perspective, this history of exploitation in Congo is well documented from the colonial era to the present. There are a wealth of images of the copper and cobalt mines that fueled the industrial revolution, of the coltan and niobium mines that fuel the electronic revolution. But even in their efforts to reveal violence, such images often render the engines of exploitation invisible. By recording archival footage and intertwining it with contemporary images, Kapita exposes patterns of extraction and burial to decode colonial representations—and exploitation—of central African land and people and mines the archival films for what they make invisible: the black-skinned workers evaporated by cameras calibrated to white, the collateral death and destruction interred in infrastructure. - Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo is an award-winning filmmaker and educator from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His multi-genre artistic works are acclaimed for their provocative Ejo-Lobi (Afrofuturistic) artistic style, which engages historical content to address contemporary sociopolitical and cultural issues. He is founder and Artistic Director of the Yole!Africa cultural center and of the Congo International Film Festival, he also teaches and consults regularly for international organizations addressing social and political inequity among youth through culture and education. He is currently the Artist in Residence at the Stone Center for Black History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Stay With Me, the World is a Devastating Place
Angelo Madsen Minax | USA | digital file | 2021 | 8 min
Stay With Me, The World is a Devastating Place is the result of a deep dive into the year 1970, as archived by Channel 8 News in Dallas, Texas. In a time-warping dramaturgy, the news anchors from 1970 are reimagined as pseudo-divine bearers of a potential truth, transplanted from 50 years in the past and appearing before our eyes to weave a proclamation of impending doom. In poetic decree, we are told in great detail the peril of our world, yet offered no explanation of how to prevent it, nor the definitive cause. From past images, a future-image is constructed. – Angelo Madsen Minax
Angelo Madsen Minax works in film and video, sound and music, text, and media installation. His projects are about love, death, and sex, rendered through personal and collective histories. Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, the Tribeca Film Festival, BAMCinemaFest, KurzFilm Hamburg, the European Media Art Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Berwick Media Art Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, Anthology Film Archives, the BFI, Outfest, Newfest, Frameline, and others. His new film North by Current (2021) will screen on PBS, as part of POV, in the fall of 2021.
Las Breas
Blue Kraning, Laura Kraning | USA | DCP | 2019 | 12 min
Las Breas is an observational portrait of three tar pits, of which there are only six in the entire world. Situated in three distinct landscapes in Southern California – urban Los Angeles, the oil fields of the San Joaquin Valley, and Carpinteria Beach, Las Breas investigates the spaces between archiving the pre-historic and the contemporary industrial landscape. While skeletons of extinct megafauna and vintage animatronic beasts are on display in the heart of Hollywood, the sticky remains of ancient microscopic organisms seep to the surface of both land and sea. Of the earth, yet primordial and impenetrable, the bubbling tar that rises from the depths speaks of past extinction and human exploitation of the earth’s limited resources.
Laura Kraning and Blue Kraning are experimental non-fiction filmmakers whose work reveals submerged layers within natural and man-made landscapes. Their most recent film, Las Breas, premiered at MoMA Documentary Fortnight, received a Director’s Choice Award at the Spectral Film Festival, and screened widely at festivals such as Edinburgh International Film Festival, Recontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin), ZINEBI Bilbao, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Gimli Film Film Festival, Antimatter Media Art, and Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, among others. Formerly based in Los Angeles, they now live and work in Buffalo, New York.
Horizontal Boundaries
Pat O’Neill | USA | 35mm | 2008 | 22 min
Horizontal Boundaries takes on Los Angeles as an uncertain subject, a displaced location in space and time. Shot in and around the city and other locations in California with "the intent to produce "synthetic" depictions of locations made up of multiple and disparate parts," O'Neill combines the visual effects with a visceral soundtrack that demands the total attention of the viewer. As O'Neill writes, the goal is to "present an image that is both clearly understood and obviously altered. Altering the imagery from its original photographic state raises inevitable questions concerning its reception: What are we to believe? How is a representation changed by proximity with another? How does contradiction, itself, represent our experience?" And goes on to point out that, "My films share some of the concerns of other experimental filmmakers worldwide: defining parameters for the representation of space and time, exploiting personal experience as metaphor, using archival materials in a restated context." – Cherry and Martin
Pat O’Neill has been deeply involved in Los Angeles culture since the late 1960’s. A founding father of the city’s avant-garde film scene, an influential professor at CalArts and an optical effects pioneer, he is best known for his short works from the early 1960’s onwards which are highly graphic, layered and reflexive assemblages based on a mastery of optical printing techniques, anticipating our digital landscape well before its time. Several of his avant garde films produced between 1963 and 2006 are considered classics especially 7362 (1967), Runs Good (1970), Saugus Series (1974), Water and Power (1989), Trouble in the Image (1996), and The Decay of Fiction (2002). O’Neill has had several retrospectives of his workArt Basel, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, and Les Abattoirs / Frac Midi-Pyrénées (Toulouse, France). In 2004-2006, 40 years of his work in film, drawing, sculpture, printmaking and photography was the subject of two major exhibitions, one at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the other at Cornerhouse in Manchester, England. O’Neill’s work has been featured in such important historic exhibitions as “Electric Art” (1969, University of California, Los Angeles), the 1991 Whitney Biennial of American Art (New York) and “Los Angeles 1955-1985: The Birth of an Art Capital” (2005, Centre Pompidou). His work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Hammer Museum, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art. O’Neill is represented by Cherry and Martin Gallery.