Barbara Hammer
May 15, 1939 – March 16, 2019

Feminist filmmaker and pioneer of queer cinema, Barbara Hammer made over 90 moving image works as well as performances, installations, photographs, collages and drawings.

Psychosynthesis

1975 | 8 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm

The sub-personalities of me as baby, athlete, witch and artist are synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and color layers coming together through the powers of film.

This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

Double Strength

1978 | 15 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm

A poetic study of the stages of a lesbian relationship by two women performance artists from honeymoon, through struggle, to break-up, to enduring friendship. Starring Terry Sendgraff on trapeze.

This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

Tourist

1985 | 4 minutes | COLOR/B&W | SOUND | 16mm

"The slide of the image into politics finds concrete expression in the film TOURIST as the word 'spectacle' nestles in the Hollywood Hills like an Edward Ruscha painting.
Psychic desires of 'tourists' permeate the architecture of seeing. The fleeting spectacle is a series of imaginative possessions, a conquest through the gaze accented by the shots fired on the video arcade game soundtrack. The tourist 'look' is as ephemeral as the animation of the collage suggesting a miniaturizing and glazing of the grandiose wonders of the world."
- Kathleen Hulser,
"Frames of Passage: Nine Recent Films of Barbara Hammer, " Centre Pompidou, Paris Exhibition: "Film and Text" Exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1988

Vital Signs

1991 | 9 minutes | COLOR/B&W | SILENT | 16mm

This film is dedicated to John Wilbert Hammer,
Curt McDowell and Vito Russo.

The film employs images and text to intertwine Western constructions of death that place death far away from home in a seldom visited cemetery with Hammer's personal interactions with a skeleton, clips from Renais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour, text from Foucault's Birth of a Clinic and scenes from a hospital intensive care unit.

Sync Touch

1981 | 12 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm

A lesbian/feminist aesthetic proposing the connection between touch and sight to be the basis for a "new cinema." The film explores the tactile child nature within the adult woman filmmaker, the connection between sexuality and filmmaking, and the scientific analysis of the sense of touch.

Available Space

1979 | 20 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm on video

"Available Space is a film made for performance on a 360 degree rotary projection table. A woman breaks through confining architectural space, the limited space of a film frame, and the boundaries of a movie screen. Unexpected angles, corners, slants, floor and ceiling are engaged in unexpected play and projection. The film can also be shown as a single channel without live performance."
— Barbara Hammer

House Pieces - Christine Lucy Latimer

2020 | 3 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Years ago, my Mother sold her home. Hundreds of high dynamic range digital photos were taken to provide to the real estate agent for the online sale listing. The images were left on an SD card that was strangely stored and subject to environmental degradation. Disassembling each damaged, barely there high dynamic range photo into its light and dark component parts, I build a VHS cascade of house pieces (never quite reconstituting what was).

Unarchive - Cecilia Araneda

2020 | 12:53 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Unarchive juxtaposes the filmmaker’s father’s life with the political history of Chile – his birthplace – over the past century. It reflects on how we remember and how we forget, and the role of the camera in transcending the complex place in between.

Ventana - Edgar Jorge Baralt

2020 | 10:30 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A retrieved picture of a window elicits memories and the impulse to recreate a lost site. By this same window, an eight year old child feels the cold air on his face and imagines the future.

Porvenir - Renata Poljak
2020 |12 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Dreaming of better lands, from generation to generation, because of poverty, hunger and wars, we voyage across the seas. Geography is destiny. Do our bodies retain the memories of our grandfathers; are memories of running away in search of better lands imprinted on our bodies? "Porvenir" means "future" in Spanish. Porvenir is the only town in Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of the world, founded by Croatian immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century.

Malembe - Luis Arnias

2020 | 13 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Through its rhythmic montage and mix of observational and surreal imagery, Malembe forges oblique linkages between the United States and Venezuela, conveying the strange dissociation of being uprooted, of living between places.
As a knife cuts through sky, through snow, and through fruit, quasi-ethnographic footage—with its conventional markers of music, food, ritual—joins with home-movie auto-portraiture of a New England winter, communicating a sense of dislocation at once vertiginously queasy and absurdly comic.

Sound Spring Seq. #6: The School and The Home
- CATALINA Jordan Alvarez

2020 | 11 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

In Sound Spring, residents of Yellow Springs, Ohio narrate their personal entanglements with its larger history. Some villagers trace their roots six generations to the Conway Colony--formerly enslaved people who were helped to settle here by the abolitionist son of their slaver. The film also recounts the former glory of Antioch College, one of the most progressive colleges in the country, whose enrollment is now decimated. Its illustrious alumni include Coretta Scott King, who eventually transferred, as she struggled to carry out her internships because of racism in the village. By becoming actors lip-syncing to their own interviews, these villagers unfold stories across time, creating a collage of past and present.

KOPACABANA.
- Marcos Bonisson, Khalil Charif

2020 | 9:58 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A film made through a collage of current and archive images in Super 8 and digital, set in a Copacabana as an epicenter of intercultural, social and sensory experiences.
An experimental work narrated by the significant speech of the poet Fausto Fawcett, and sonorized by the musician Arnaldo Brandão.

Sandbox - Shi Zheng

2020 | 6 minutes | COLOR | SILENT

In the series Hovering at the Convergence of Entrances and Exits, the artist directly uses the coded game as a carrier to nestle metaphors of the virtual world and creative space in the idea of the sandbox.
He appropriated the satellite imagery of particular locations that he chose on Google Earth and reconstructed the corresponding virtual scenes in Cities: Skylines.
Each video focuses on an architectural scene simulated by the artist, primarily overpasses and highways, indicating variant examples of a single type of industrial infrastructure.

Geiser’s films have been screened at the National Gallery of Art, Microscope Gallery, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, MOMA, Pacific Film Archives, the Centre Pompidou, the Salzburg Museum, San Francisco MOMA, LACMA, the Sharjah Biennial, and NY Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, London International Film Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival, Curtas Vila do Conde, and Hong Kong International Film Festival.
Geiser’s films are in the collections of MOMA, The NY Public Library’s Donnell Media Center, CalArts, and others.
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, an OBIE Award, and funding from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation, NEA, Center for Cultural Innovation, MapFund, and others.

Ghost Algebra

2009 | 7:30 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Digital video (shot on 16mm film; screening format DigiBeta NTSC)
Sound collage : Janie Geiser
sound mix Kari Rae Seekins

Under erratic skies, a solitary figure navigates a landscape of constructed nature and broken bones. She peers through a decaying aperture, waiting and watching: the fragility of the body is exposed for what it is: ephemeral, liquid, a battlefield of nervous dreams.

Using found and natural objects, rephotographed video, medical illustrations, and other collage elements, Ghost Algebra suggests one of the original meanings of the word “algebra”: the science of restoring what is missing, the reunion of broken parts.

Arbor

2012 | 8 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

(16mm to digital video)
Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound Mix: Kari Rae Seekins

From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. Arbor suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings, layerings, inversions, and the introduction of dimensional elements, including flowers and leaves. The photographs’ subjects rarely engage the camera; they are glimpsed, rather than seen. They look elsewhere, and wait for something inevitable. Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of Arbor cycle through their one elusive afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know--- and becoming shadows in their own stories.

Fluorescent Girl

2018 | 1:5 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Digital video
Sound design: Janie Geiser

Fluorescent light reflects on a girl's image, found in a book of photographs in a bookstore. She merges with other images of shadow and light, highlighting her ephemerality and ours.
The photograph, Tailor’s Apprentice (1953), is by Paul Strand.

Flowers of the Sky

2016 | 9:12 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound Mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price

Flowers of the Sky (a medieval term for comets) draws on two panoramic photographs, found in a Los Angeles thrift shop, that depict a gathering of members of the Eastern Star, a Masonic order. In the first photograph, taken at a banquet meal, the participants are seated at tables and facing the camera. In the second photograph, everyone is dressed in ritual robes, looking away from the camera and toward a stage. A single figure stands there, centered on this platform, and faces them. Everyone is suspended, expectant.
Through isolating parts of the photographs and highlighting the different groupings of the Eastern Star members, Flowers of the Sky reveals and obscures the original events. There is a sense, looking at the photographs, of watching and waiting for something to happen, something beyond the experience of daily life. And something does. Nature reasserts herself, the figures double, vibrate, and rise, trying to escape their emulsive lives, suggesting a rapture that extends beyond their printed world.

Absent Objects

2020 | 7:41 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price

Three empty photo albums, vessels of lost time and memory beyond reach.

“Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.” - Holly Willis, RES

Valeria Street

2018 | 11 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Music composed by Laura Steenburge
Sound design: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins

Catalyzed by unearthed photographs of her father and his colleagues around a conference table in a generic mid-century office, Valeria Street charts a personal-political path through the recesses of America’s industrial ecosystem. Using frame-based filmmaking, collage, i-phone video, and re-photography, Geiser investigates an array of images (photographs, geometric diagrams, blueprints, live-action landscape shots) in a prismatic reflection on power, work, landscape, and family.

The interplay of filmic layers (in Geiser’s work) creates a complex aesthetic of collage, a term borrowed from art history but also used in cinema to describe the collage film or, more generally, the principle of montage. The collagist structures of Geiser’s rephotography films engage critical issues of surface, space, and film history in distinctly hauntological terms, which, following Derrida, constitute an aberrant space, wholly other, infinite and ungraspable.”
---Genevieve Yue

Cathode Garden

2015 | 8 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Sound Collage: Janie Geiser
Sound Mix: Kari Rae Seekins


A young woman moves between light and dark, life and death; a latter day Persephone. The natural world responds accordingly. Neglected negatives, abandoned envelops, botanical and anatomical illustrations, and found home-made recordings re-order themselves, collapsing and re-emerging in her liminal world.

“Janie Geiser’s gift for cutting between private, encoded images to create dense montages that defy ready interpretation, as vibrant as ever in Cathode Garden.” - Tony Pipilo, Artforum

Curiosities From the Anthropocene
- John Knecht

2020 | 10 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

An animation that looks at the state of the world in a post human late anthropogenic world.

Move - Douglas Urbank

2020 | 4:34 minutes | B&W | SOUND

A nature of children, birds, and insects

600 Moons - Cindy Stillwell

2020 | 8 minutes | B&W | SOUND

A young woman takes a walk in the woods and slips into another realm wherein she glimpses her future self.
If we live long enough, we will have seen six-hundred moons at fifty years of life on earth.
600 Moons is a wordless experimental film that wonders about the fluidity of time, the fragility of our existence and what happens when we die. Shot in Ontario and Montana on 16mm, the film was hand processed with a variety of techniques including developers made from herbs and weeds.

One should never be cured - Vincent Guilbert

2020 |8:30 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

"How hopeless it is
It would be better for me to sink beneath the waves
Perhaps then I could see my beloved from the Moon Capital"
A super 8 rendition of a 19th century woodblock print by Japanese artist Yoshitoshi.

Mountains meet the Sea - Kathleen Rugh

2020 | 4 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Escape into a natural world that stretches from the mountains of Colorado to the ocean’s edge in Oregon. Journey through fleeting moments when these distant landscapes become one through layered exposures on film.

another horizon - stephanie m barber

2020 | 9 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

the horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart. also, here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is scratched between two voices. jayne love reads a text i wrote for her, short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of richard (oswan) williams' beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons to me.

Field Resistance - Emily Drummer

2019 | 15:54 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Charging scenes of the present with dystopian speculation, Field Resistance blurs the boundaries between documentary filmmaking and science fiction to investigate overlooked environmental devastation in the overlooked state of Iowa. Footage collected from disparate locations—a university herbarium, karst sinkholes inhabited by primordial flora and fauna, a telecommunication tower job site, a decaying grain silo, among others—interlocks to evoke a narrative of present danger and future disaster, of plant expansion and humanity’s retreat. The film rejects the human individual as the focus of narrative cinema, and, instead, adopts the perspective of a symbiotic “implosive whole” in which human and nonhumans are related in an overlapping, non-total way.

Nod. Wink. Horse.
- Ollie Magee

2020 | 4:42 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A film behind a horse. Obscuring the narrative. My act of self-destruction.

The Goose - Ahmed Ismaiel Nour

2020 | 5:17 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A visual depiction of the internal world of a traumatized Syrian woman refugee, a former pianist and colors lover, as she tries to evade the constant questions of her troubled mind. The film deploys the capacities of digital and 16mm film, black & white and color, and painting on 16mm film to trace the audio-visual imagination of the protagonist.

I Was a Free Dog - Yuula Benivolski

2020 | 11 minutes | B&W | SOUND

Two sisters see each other on an ocean beach for the first time since childhood. Sound recordings from the sisters’ home country accompany this landscape: an orchestra of air raid sirens, ocean waves and tropical birds, all indicate that we are within multiple realities. These recordings create impossible spaces that exist simultaneously and imitate the psychic effects of a diasporic existence.

A Flying Centre of Gravity
- Janice Howard

2020 | 5:17 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

This experimental digital video originates from a walk with the artist’s mother whose life has changed since the onset of Parkinson’s disease. A Flying Centre of Gravity is an attempt to encounter some of the physical and emotional dynamics of human experience and to explore the ways in which one might try to locate oneself in relation to such a paradoxical ‘space in-between’.

JUST LIKE THE FILMS - Sara N. Santos

2020 | 10 minutes | B&W | SOUND

"I always needed fiction to make sense of reality". A cinematic image fills the void left by the death of a loved one. This is a film about loss, loneliness and the love for the movies.

You Used to Be Happy - Roger Deutsch

2020 | 6 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

"What can I do to make you happy again?"

Keeping Together In Time
- Alison Folland

2020 | 8;48 minutes | COLOR & B&W | SOUND

This film is an attempt to define an imaginary word. “Teleomeric" was a word my husband used to use, before he had a stroke and lost his language. Now I am left with the memory of a word which I cannot find in the dictionary. The closest word I can find to “teleomeric” is “telomeric", meaning belonging to the telomeres, or the ends of the chromosome, which protect their information, and prevent them from sticking together. In this sense, the film is actually about the search for those rare moments of consolidation, which that keep us afloat.

notes from the kingdom of the sick
- Felicity Palma

2020 | 6:32 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

notes from the kingdom of the sick examines notions of time and temporality from the confines of a waiting room and represents the filmmaker's experience as a young woman living with breast cancer.

Self Portrait with Bag - Dianna Barrie

2021 | 6:05 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A camera-less portrait of the artist. Super 8 cartridges placed inside a black cotton bag, the film advanced via a hand crank. The tiny gaps in the fabric weave make for dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of tiny pinhole lenses.

Monsieur Jean-Claude
- Guillaume Vallée

2020 | 7:41 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Jean-Claude Van Damme is back, and this time it's personal. Seventy-two photograms constructed from a 35mm trailer of JCVD's opus The Quest (1996). Re-examining conceptions of masculinity by deconstructing some of the images I watched repeatedly as a child.

Maya at 24 - Lynne Sachs

2020 | 4:27 minutes | B&W | SOUND

Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise - as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather - like the wind - something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Eleven years later, I pulled out my 16mm Bolex camera, as she allowed me to film her - different but somehow the same. Recently, at age 24, Maya took another spin -- we look at one another, moving, filling space, aware. Completed during the 2020 pandemic, the film includes the intimate yet awkward rhythms of our two voices while living together during quarantine.” – Lynne Sachs

I look into your eyes as I heal what I’ve been wounded - Laurene Praget

2020 | 2:30 minutes | B&W | SOUND

This video self-portrait is about how the patriarchal system enters our beds, our hearts, the depths of our personal lives. It enters into everyday life and comes to touch our bodies and lives since we are children and leaves marks, less or more profound, depending on the history of each one. In the form of a video-poem, it is an intimate and personal project while it comes to dealing with feelings common to many women, reaffirming the saying that the personal is political.

Tri and Khanh - Daphne Xu

2020 | 3:21 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A portrait of father and son. Tri visits Khanh's house in Hull, MA as they cope with his illness.
I brought a Bolex along with me on a visit to see Khanh in early 2019. This was the first roll of 16mm film I ever shot. The serendipity of its accidental in-camera edit reassures me of the magic of filmmaking, even in moments of grief.

In memory of Phuong Kien Khanh 1951 - 2020.

婦人 (Fujin)
- Rachel Makana'aloha O Kauikeolani Nakawatase

2020 | 6 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

*Please Note: subtitles are left off as artistic intent* 婦人 (Fujin) [foo-jeen] noun/plural noun, can be translated as a more formal or polite way to refer to a woman, such as “lady” or “madam” and in some contexts can mean “sisterhood” or “womenfolk.” This footage of my great-grandmother and aunties getting ready for a night out is a glimpse into femininity and womanhood among aging Asian Indigenous women, free of the western ethnographic gaze that has haunted many portrayals of bodies of color.

Two Sons and a River of Blood
- Amber Bemak & Angelo Madsen Minax

2020 | 10:30 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A queer woman is pregnant. The self-made family unit of two dykes and a trans man imagine a kind of erotic magic that will allow for procreation based solely on desire. Together they enact a public sex ritual to symbolize their hopefulness for multiplicity, acknowledging their cyborg bodies as technological interventions. When the queer woman miscarries her child, the three begin to build their own mythic understanding of where bodies live when they are not inside us. They create a story to trace movement of the non-body, from a hole, to a river, to a room. Images of an imaginary white room, an ikea-esque torture chamber of stillness, haunt them. As a parallel emerges between the pregnant body and the trans body, the techno-sex act becomes the key and a pyramid becomes the portal to access this other world of non-bodied existence.

Whirlwind - Adolfo Ruiz

2020 | 1:28 minutes | B&W | SOUND

The process of drawing this film, frame by frame, coincided with a unique sense of time and space that emerged during the pandemic. Rendering visuals within a bounded paper surface became analogous to daily rituals within a bounded living space.
Influenced by early twentieth century animation, this film attempts to visualize new rhythms of life emerging during a time of rapid sociocultural change—shifting away from carefully controlled perspectives and vanishing points, while depicting a constant sense of movement and transformation.

Entre Les Images - Vito A. Rowlands

2020 | 4 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A young woman laments the loss of her innocence and mourns her lover as Europe is ravaged by war in the summer of 1914.

"Entre Les Images" is a found footage film composed of preserved 35mm nitrate film frames from over 100 silent films, a large number of them irrevocably lost or only partially preserved, with nothing to mark their presence outside of these majestic few frames. As a whole, they represent the hopes, dreams, and promises of tumultuous times that left their scars on its media, perpetuating life and death between every frame.

Expo Film (this film is my memory) - Penny McCann

2020 | 9:26 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Using anonymous home movie footage of Expo ’67 in Montreal, the artist sets out to recreate a memory that perhaps never existed.
Celluloid manipulation and sound decay techniques coalesce to transform the mythic landscape into a sublime expanse of disintegrated memory. Sound design by Edmund Eagan.

Lost in Her Hair (Monday) - Pegah Pasalar

2020 | 6:27 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Lost in her hair (monday) starts with an excited young Iranian girl getting ready for her first day of school. As her mother is brushing her hair and dressing her, she has varied conversations with off-frame family members that reflect cultural specificities.

Night and Day - Yanbin Zhao

2020 | 13:43 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Being trapped in United States and self-isolated, I had a video chat with my family in China. Back in January, I shot a roll of film recording the sunset at Santa Monica beach, and rewatching it now, I decided to prolong the dusk as an attempt to erase the decisive boundary which separates night and day.

Reminiscences of 15 musicians in Beirut
- Charles-André Coderre

2020 | 13 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Ya Garat Al Wadi is a popular piece of Egyptian music arranged by the legendary composer Mohammad Abdel Wahab and written by the poet Ahmad Shawqy in 1928. More than 90 years later, this film documents a contemporary orchestra of 15 musicians, formed by the initiative of the experimental composer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart), over the period of five days in Beirut to once again reinterpret this great classic of Arab music.

Home, Closed
- Wobbe F. Koning
2020 |3:43 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

An empty room.
Rusty Wood enters, alone. Finds a throne, makes himself at home.
Knock, knock, who’s there?
Will the intruder challenge him for his chair?

4pm, Coffee - Dicky Bahto

2020 | 1:09 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Daily afternoon ritual. Made with the help of my partner, Patrick Londen, and featuring Katoosh.

To All Those - Josh Weissbach

2021 | 6:25 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A city symphony in miniature, dedicated to anyone who has gotten lost in thought while stuck on the midwinter train. to all that unfolds in those private reveries.

Recollection - Premonition - Kent Tate

2021 | 2:32 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Am I him or am I not? Did I know her or did she know me? I'm not certain who they are yet I feel I have always known them and I can’t help but wonder what became of them. A figure appears then dissolves as the film becomes a memory map. An other figure then appears and merges into the topography of the aged film before once again the first figure briefly reappears.

Liminal Poem - Susan DeLeo

2019 | 3:53 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

In an hypnotic reverie one meanders into and out of several earthly dreamscapes, free from the constraints of time and space. Shot on Super 8mm.

First Hypnotic Suggestion
- Brittany Gravely & Ken Linehan

2020 | 10 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

First Hypnotic Suggestion conjures telepathic transference, hypnosis and collective dream space. Through its spectral tele-cinematic waves, the analogue horror-film protagonists participate in paranormal and fringe scientific experiments, attempting to comprehend the immaterial and incomprehensible expanses of their perception—simultaneously aided and obstructed by the temporal interventions and technological mediations of their transitory parallel dimension.
This double-projected film may either be presented and augmented by the filmmakers using components of live sound and manipulated projections, or screened “traditionally” with sound produced from dual, independent optical tracks. Left and right soundtracks, synchronized with their respective images, are intended to engage in subtle, unpredictable shifts and alignments, naturally fluctuating from screening to screening.

Lightmare - Josh Drake

2020 | 6:56 minutes | B&W | SOUND

Lightmare was inspired by a group of youths who used to race motorcycles by my house. They would sometimes ride when I was trying to get my young daughter to sleep and caused great aggravation for me. The neighbors became quite worried as well and eventually the police were engaged to stop the racing, unsuccessfully. Stories began to spread about who the youths were and what poor conditions their parents were raising them in. The film attempts to capture the anxiety of the neighborhood, using negative space as a mask to subvert the audience’s expectations of horizon and depth. In contrast, much of the content underscores the triviality of the perceived threat. High levels of film grain enhance the effects of pareidolia, paralleling the human impulse to create stories for the unknown riders.
Music by Wes Filer
Sound by Josh Drake
Final mix by Emeen Zarookian

In and Out a Window - Richard Tuohy

2020 | 12 minutes | B&W | SOUND

Our front window from inside and out.

Laomedeia - Youjin Moon

2020 | 11 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Laomedeia is an experimental video that travels through transitional spaces, which continuously unfold into different dimensions in a nonlinear trajectory. The migrating elements, such as water, birds, and trains, allow the viewer to navigate between painterly compositions of oceanic landscapes and cosmic spaces.

Press Pound to Connect
- Alexander Fingrutd

2020 | 2:22 minutes | B&W | SOUND

This film was hand processed, shot on 16mm film, and created using a masking technique and appropriated images. The nine equal parts reference the Pound Symbol on a telephone keypad. Here, it is used as a symbol for connection. We are connected to more than what is immediately around ourselves: to each other, the planet, and the farthest galaxies. What distant things are having an effect on us and what are we non-visibly affecting? The similarities between these connections are represented through overlapping images. It shows a change in perspective, going from the individual singular self, to a view where there is no divide between self and other. It brings us to a cosmic, all-encompassing view, divided in space and tied together through telephone wire.

A Cosmic Tapestry - Shi Yun Teo

2020 |4:02 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Believing in the existence of a reality beyond the material world. In this film, I want to explore the relationship of the space, between us and everyone, the energy that we share. All energy we have is only borrowed and one day we have to return it. In a way, it is a metamorphosis: Sun to plants, plants to animals or humans, humans to nature — ashes scattered in the ocean or buried deep in the ground, returning back to nature. This is the reunion of all energy mixing together, leading to the void where we share the same space, memory and time but at a different speed.

Soil
Plants
Sea
Sun
Animals
Humans
are all equal,
belief in their existence is love & love needs a reality.

Culture Leap (non-linear) - Roger Horn

2021 | 2:23 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

The primacy of culture. Culture over race.

Eidolon - Mike Rollo

2020 | 3:40 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

The seer passes beneath branches, crosses fields, observes the quiet corners of creation. Bright and dark take turns showing their faces, a two-sided phantasm, one energy shape-shifting through time. The seer makes note, gleans eidolons.

A Place in the Cosmos- Gavin Hipkins

2020 | 9:26 minutes | B&W | SOUND

Located in rural Aotearoa New Zealand, a full-scale concrete adaptation of Stonehenge is an active observatory and portal to other worlds. Shot on Super 8mm, this end-of-time silent film navigates science fiction tropes through spatial circularity and cosmic rhythms.

Zero Length Spring - Ross Meckfessel

2020 | 16 minutes | B&W | SOUND

A walk through corridors and rooms culminates in a familial Reiki session - what’s underneath and within. Zero Length Spring is an apotropaic film, imprinted by rituals and symbols, basking in ruptures of the body and the earth. Through ASMR brush tracks and the language of self-help therapy, film surface abrasions and alleged paranormal photos, the film gives shape and form to various unseeable forces. You’re worth it, you deserve love, you can grow.

Landing - Chantal Partamian
2020 |2:08 minutes | B&W | SOUND

A poetical essay that very briefly explores fragments of a long distance relationship, when two lovers meet, when they are caught in transit.
To be queer and to linger between states, between nation-states.

Figure Minus Fact - Mary Helena Clark

2020 | 13 minutes | COLOR/B&W | SOUND

Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects. Figure Minus Fact draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subjectless portrait of loss. (MHC)

The Photoplay Obeys the Laws of the Mind
- Gloria Chung

2020 | 12 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Using the closest thing we can share for time travel--the moving image--to ask questions of time relative to light, motion, and mass.
Does light create, prolong, reverse time? Does motion alter our experience of time? Does mass warp our sense of time?

167th St. Bronx

1983| 35 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

167st Bronx
May 1, 1983 Hip Hop street jam on 167th St. in the Bronx, NY.
Organized by BEAR.

Introduction
by Pacey Foster

Founder of the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive
Post-screening Q&A
with Pacey Foster and Bob Harris

Pacey Foster
Associate Professor of Management at UMass Boston

In 2016, Professor Foster launched the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive in collaboration with the UMass Boston’s Healey Library and Special Collections and the Boston Public Library.

For more info: Please visit
the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive

Three Films by Luther Price (Tom Rhoads)
Acclaimed Massachusetts experimental filmmaker Luther Price (also known as Tom Rhoads) passed away last June and now Boston’s avant-garde film community comes together to celebrate his life and work with this special 16mm screening of three of Price’s early films.

No Brattle member passes accepted for this event ($12 discount tickets are available for Brattle members)

7:30PM
Brattle Theater, Cambridge, MA

Green
Tom Rhoads (Luther Price) | 1987-1988 | 36 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Preserved by Bard College through the National Film Preservation Foundation

Green is a world where ghosts live.
Emerging from silent memory,
they enter an image of reality, cool, crisp and static.
Tromping forward,
time unravels tracing to points of the past,
conjuring the familiar,
reliving events unresolved, revealing very little.

Beauty is continually redefined,
celebrating life and death in a plastic world haunted.
It is a romantic suicide.

– Tom Rhoads

Warm Broth
Tom Rhoads (Luther Price) | 1988 | 36 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Preserved by Bard College through the National Film Preservation Foundation

Carolee Schnneman had once [remarked] that watching Price’s Warm Broth (1988) was “an indelible experience.
That really is the apposite word when describing Luther’s movies—indelible. They stay with you, like a childhood memory, or a scar.”
Warm Broth, made when Price was going by the name Tom Rhoads, is directly informed by Price’s own childhood memories.
He appears dressed as his mother as she goes shopping, hangs laundry, and so on.
“There’s a moment in the film when sound and image sync exquisitely,” wrote Tanner Tafelski or Hyperallergic in 2015.
“During a rigid and recurring shot of the mother from the chest down, we see her hands peeling potatoes (shades of Jeanne Dielman) at a counter.”
At one point, “her hand swiftly goes to her wrist. It’s gasp-inducing, even though she doesn’t cut but merely scratches herself.
In the next shot, a fudge bar melts, or associatively bleeds, and a pool of chocolate forms around a wooden stick.
Through editing and montage, Rhoads reveals the violence inherent in such charged images.”

–David Hudson

Sodom
Luther Price | 1989 | 16 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

“a vision of hell crafted from old gay porn, cheap color films faded into a sickly shitlike yellow-green-brown, with faces of men jittering inside hole-punched haloes, evoking at once ecstasy and torment.”

– Ed Halter

All Films produced on Super 8 and presented on 16mm

Price was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts in 1962. He received a BFA in Sculpture and Media/Performing Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he studied with Saul Levine. Before taking the name Luther Price, he worked under various pseudonyms, including Brigk Aethy, Fag, and Tom Rhoads. While at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Luther collaborated with students in the Studio for Interrelated Media on many projects including creating events, performance art, music projects[4] and exhibitions. He was an experimental filmmaker whose work has been widely screened in the United States and Europe at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. He was an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts teaching his popular "Hand-made Films" curriculum.

Price's Super 8mm and 16mm films are usually constructed from found footage and often include controversial subject matter, such as pornography, surgical footage, and psychodramatic performances, as well as physical interventions into the actual material of the film stock. Later in his career he began crafting individual 35mm slides shown on slide projectors. His work was featured prominently in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Roberta Smith of the New York Times called him "one of the Biennial's stars." Ed Halter selected his Inkblot films as the Best Film of 2011, noting "[his films] struggle through the projector with an unsettlingly existential corporeality." His films are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York, and Light Cone in Paris. He was represented by Callicoon Fine Arts. He died at his home in Revere, Massachusetts on June 13, 2020 at the age of 58.