Revolutions per Minute festival, an artist run festival, is dedicated to short-form poetic, personal, cinematic work in experiments, essay film, animation, documentary, video and audiovisual performance.
RPM23: We are looking for any work that experiments with the formal possibilities or hybrid form of film, audiovisual, animation and video under 12 minutes (and the medium length category will accept the work from 12 mins to 30 mins) .
Submit your work (produced after July 1st, 2021)
through FilmFreeway.
Selections by Sept.1, 2023.
Revolutions Per Minute Festival 2022 - 2023 was co-hosted by
Art and Art History Department and Cinema Studies at UMass-Boston, Brattle Theatre in Cambridge & Harvard FAS CAMLab.
RPM Festival 2022 Screening Series presented with the support of a Festivals Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
For more info: contact@revolutionsperminutefest.org
Public Reception: 9.29.23 from 5-7PM
Artists include: Brit Bunkley, Heather Cassano, Abigail Hendrix, Jodie Mack, Kym
McDaniel, Tess Martin, and Vito A. Rowlands
This year's exhibition, titled Room to Breathe, was co-curated by Samuel Toabe,
Director of University Hall Gallery, and Wenhua Shi, Associate Professor of Art and Art
History. A total of seven video installations were juried from forty-seven submissions.
The exhibition explores the possibility of the exhibition space to act as a site or a
sanctuary for energizing, renewing, and meditating.
Dear Hart - How they dream. How we dream. - Brit Bunkley
(2023, 3:38m loop, Sound, Color, Digital, New Zealand)
M*U*S*H* - Jodie Mack
(2022, 8m loop, Color, Silent, 16mm to Digital, UK/USA)
Nimueh Triptych - Abigail Hendrix
(2023, Three-channel 9:29m loop, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital, USA)
Madness - Heather Cassano
(2022, Three-channel 16m, 24m & 24m loop, Color, Sound, Digital, USA)
Still Life with Woman, Tea and Letter - Tess Martin
(2022, 2:14m loop, Color, Sound, Digital, Netherlands)
Invisible World - Kym McDaniel
(2022, 4:51m loop, Color, Sound, Digital, USA)
Immaculate Generations no. 1
- Vito A. Rowlands
(2022, 11m loop, Color, Sound, Digital, Belgium/USA)
Dear Hart - How they dream. How we dream.
- Brit Bunkley
(2023, 3:38m loop, Sound, Color, Digital, New Zealand)
"Dear Hart, How they dream. How we dream" consists of animations of a hybrid Père David's deer combined with video footage where deer inhabit human space in a deep fake video of dreams.
The Père David's deer is an unusual animal whose antlers grow like tree branches - a chimerical animal. “The species is sometimes known by its informal name, sì bú xiàng… literally meaning four not alike… or like none of the four...The hooves of a cow but not a cow.
Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand-based artist and videographer whose practice includes the construction of large-scale outdoor sculpture and installations as well as the creation of ‘impossible’ moving and still images and architecture designed using 3D modeling, video editing, and image editing programs.
Bunkley, an NZ/USA citizen, has also been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Rome Prize Fellowship in the USA.
M*U*S*H* - Jodie Mack
(2022, 8m loop, Color, Silent, 16mm to Digital, UK/USA)
Vital grief finds interplanetary putrescence.
Jodie Mack
is an experimental animator. Her films unleash the kinetic energy of material remnants of domestic and institutional knowledge to illuminate the relationship between decoration and utility. Straddling the boundary between rigor and accessibility, her cinema questions how we ascribe value to things.
Nimueh Triptych - Abigail Hendrix
(2023, Three-channel 9:29m loop, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital, USA)
Nimueh is a hybrid 16mm and digital 3-channel installation that explores the mythologizing of the body after violence and death.
Abigail Hendrix iis a writer, photographer, and filmmaker based in Boston, MA. With a BA in anthropology from the University of Washington, Hendrix is currently pursuing an MFA in Film and Media Art at Emerson College with emphases on animation, experimental media, and ethnography. Hendrix has edited short documentaries and concert videos for Smithsonian Folklife, Smithsonian Folkways, and The Roadwork Center, and has written screenplays and non-fiction prose pieces for various publications such as Smithsonian Folklife.
Madness - Heather Cassano
(2022, Three-channel 16m, 24m & 24m loop, Color, Sound, Digital, USA)
MADNESS is a three-channel video installation featuring archival video, moving imagery from mental institution cemeteries, and text-on-screen detailing the number of graves present at each gravesite. The archival video is taken from a series of films produced in the early 1950s featuring Dr. Heinz Lehmann describing eight forms of "mental symptoms" as they appear in the mentally ill. Mental institutions and state school cemeteries exist in every state in the contiguous United States.
Heather Cassano is a documentary film and media artist working at the intersection of observational and poetic documentary. Her work often frames narratives through her personal experiences, exploring the idea of “otherness” as it relates to mental health, disability, and established social norms. She has presented work in the form of documentary films, multi-channel video installations, and still photography.
Still Life with Woman, Tea and Letter - Tess Martin
(2022, 2:14m loop, Color, Sound, Digital, Netherlands)
A photograph is a window into the past, but sometimes the border between the past and the present is not entirely clear. This stop-motion animation invites us to think about our relationship to time by portraying one woman caught in the middle.
Tess Martin is a filmmaker/visual artist based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her work is informed by hand-made animation techniques and their potential to explore the human condition. Persistent themes are our place in nature, our relationship to the past, and how memory and perception inform identity. She creates short films, interactive installations and paintings/prints.
Invisible World - Kym McDaniel
(2022, 4:51m loop, Color, Sound, Digital, USA)
To apply for an accessible or Crip parking placard, a doctor within the state must approve the application. As part of the application, there are six medical conditions which qualify a person for a placard. These conditions include: (1) cannot walk two hundred feet without stopping to rest; (2) cannot walk without the use of an assistance device; (3) is restricted by lung disease; (4) uses portable oxygen; (5) has a cardiac condition; (6) is severely limited in their ability to walk due to an arthritic, neurological, or orthopedic conditions. Many people with disabilities are included in these categories, and many are not.
Kym McDaniel (she/her) is queer, invisibly disabled, experimental filmmaker, choreographer, and performer. She began working in video after a head injury changed her relationship to her body, dance, and choreography. She uses image collages, text, gesture, and the body to explore chronic illness, queerness/disability, and structural dissociation. She is an AmSAT Alexander Technique teacher and has an MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Immaculate Generations no. 1 - Vito A. Rowlands
(2022, 11m loop, Color, Sound, Digital, Belgium/USA)
If the eyes are the window to the soul, "Immaculate Generations no. 1" presents its viewer with a singular look into thousands of souls. Equal parts Carl Sagan and William Blake, this flicker film is composed of tens of thousands of individual retinal photographs from public databases. Animated between 12 and 24 frames per second, they make for a dazzling rush into the maelstrom of life as we perceive it. Every retinal exposure is a galaxy, replete with its own sun, star-studded clouds, and light refracted through time and space.
Vito A. Rowlands(Antwerp / 1986) is a Belgian filmmaker and scholar whose films have toured internationally. His feature script "Elvis, We Like Your Music," was a finalist at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival Development Track, and his short "Into the Silver Ether" (2020) was in competition at the Raindance, Brooklyn and HollyShorts film festivals. Vito has taught in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Copenhagen, as well as at Columbia University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Experimental Film and Media at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and a 16mm film instructor at Mono No Aware in Brooklyn.
We are delighted to announce the upcoming mini retrospective program for solo artist Vincent Grenier at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge on September 27th at 7pm. This event will showcase a total of 11 pieces spanning Grenier's impressive five-decade-long cinematic practice.
The program will commence with Mend, an early piece shot on 16mm film in 1979, and will extend to his more recent creations, Moonrise (2022) and Wishbone (2021), which is in Grenier's signature style: the simple gestures of everyday life (Nicole Gingras, La revue de la Cinémathèque, Montréal). Throughout his career, Grenier has deeply explored the fundamental aspects of the moving image; light and shadows, stillness and movements, and durations.
We sincerely hope you can join us for this event honoring the exceptional contribution of Vincent Grenier to experimental cinema.
Tabula Rasa
Orig: 16 mm. 1993-2004, originally edited on DV, Video, 7:30 min. color, sound.
Re-scanned to FHD /2K format 8-20-2018
Mend
Orig: 16mm, 1979, 5 min. b&w / silent.
Time’s Wake
Orig: 16mm, 1987, 12 min. color/B&W, silent.
Tremors
16mm, 1984, 13 min. color, sound.
You
Orig: 16mm, 1990 (revised 2014), 11:45 min. color, sound.
Surface Tension
Orig: 16 mm, 1995, 4.5 min. color, mono.
Color Study
Orig: Mini DV, 2000, 4:30 min. color, stereo.
Wishbone
HD Cinema (4:3), 2021, 1:10 min. color, stereo.
Moonrise
HD Video, 2022, 4:40 min. B&W, sound.
Commute
HD Cinema (4:3), 2018, 6:10 min. color, stereo.
While Revolved
(Orig 16mm, 1976, 18fps silent) HD Digital, 2022, 9:22 min. color, sound.
total: 71 mins
Vincent Grenier is a native of Quebec City, Canada. He has lived largely in the US, mostly New York City and upstate New York. In spite of this, he was a frequent contributor to the Montreal art scene of the 70’s and 80’s and the San Francisco bay areas where he received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 70's.
Grenier's experimental films and videos have earned numerous awards and have shown in North America, Europe and China at major museums, showcases and festivals.
Grenier has made over two dozens films and since 1990 as many videos. His work was the subject of retrospectives at Media City film Festival, Windsor, Ontario and Images Film & Video Festival's Canadian Images Spotlight, in Toronto.
One of his video, Tabula Rasa, was screened in the “Best Avant Garde Films & Videos of the Decade” (2000-2010) program at the Lincoln Center, NYC and his recent work Watercolor received the Stellar award for Experimental Works at the Black Maria Film & Video Festival and the First Prize, experimental category, at the Athens Film Festival, Ohio.
For many years one of his video has screened each year at Views from the Avant Garde section of the New York Film Festival.
He has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2010 and the Stan Brakhage Vision Award in 2019. He lives in Ithaca NY and teaches at nearby Binghamton University.
Tabula Rasa
Orig: 16 mm. 1993-2004, originally edited on DV, Video, 7:30 min. color, sound.
Re-scanned to FHD /2K format 8-20-2018
Filmed in a South Bronx high-school, Tabula Rasa attempts through sound image juxtapositions, digital manipulation and layering to deal at once with the propensity to mislead and eloquence of the recorded image. The ambiguous qualities of appearances, so assiduously cultivated by institutions, the motivations found in the clues that tells the history of objects, colors, textures, architecture and ultimately, psychological states of mind are but some of the players in this poetic and cultural happening.
Mend
Orig: 16mm, 1979, 5 min. b&w / silent.
Is it happening in the screening room or on the screen; in a snowstorm or inside; what isn't surrounding and what is? From filming Ann sewing, on a grey winter day.
Time’s Wake
Orig: 16mm, 1987, 12 min. color/B&W, silent.
A collection of 'windows' on a personal past, TIME'S WAKE (once removed) is made from home movie and other types of footage I collected through the years when I went back to visit my parents at l'Ile d'Orléans, Québec. Through the use of the double exposure, fragmentation, motion and stillness are linked with memory. -VG.
Tremors
16mm, 1984, 13 min. color, sound.
Tall buildings and cars are filmed through the Kinemacolor process, variable color filters and a water lens. Sturdiness jousts with fragility, past with present, alienation with tenderness, abrasiveness with sensuality, red with green. (The Kinemacolor process was used in 19l5 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, red and green filters.) -VG.
YOU
Orig: 16mm, 1990 (revised 2014), 11:45 min. color, sound.
No I? Should separate worlds be mixed? Knowing what one wants. The absurd and the hurt. Images for what you did.
Surface Tension
Orig: 16 mm, 1995, 4.5 min. color, mono.
This film was shot in color but using the Kinemacolor process, a process which was used in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized red and green filters.
Color Study
Orig: Mini DV, 2000, 4:30 min. color, stereo.
“It is interesting to think about Color Study in relation to the purely cinematic-photochemical nature of a work like Kurt Kren’s Asyl with its multiplicity of delicate composite imagery and overlapping seasons that create a feeling of all time being simultaneous. In Asyl, solar light cohabitates with the film - the emulsion receives singes and burns that inscribe the image and are reconstituted in projection as muted radiance. In Color Study, a cat’s eye like chatoyancy of splattered color, the precise mimicry of natural color combined with unnatural color fields, creates and breaks illusion. Color manufactures a kind of implied time lapse where it does not technically exist. A spatial jigsaw, combining the autumnal and the verdant. The invented light and color of the digital process creating an acid wash.” -- Mark McElhatten
Wishbone
HD Cinema (4:3), 2021, 1:10 min. color, stereo.
The basis of Wishbone is a still life on a tabletop near a window. In addition to a small figurine of a Buddha-like weightlifter, and a nondescript glass prism, the composition is anchored by the titular wishbone. It is situated inside two different drinking glasses, its branches contained as it tapers into a juncture that hovers between both containers. But this still life doesn't remain still for long. Grenier overlays the tabletop with a flowing river, complete with a rower in a tiny kayak.
– Michael Sicinski
Moonrise
HD Video, 2022, 4:40 min. B&W, sound.
A wild montage of everyday sounds that impersonate rain drops, anthropomorphize eyeballs floaters.
COMMUTE
HD Cinema (4:3), 2018, 6:10 min. color, stereo.
Distinct fields on the same screen, foreground each other, invite comparisons, between different times and spaces, and the constructed and natural processes that inescapably defines us thru textures and emotional spaces. Commute does refer to regular travels between one place and an other, but also to substitutions, and exchanges.
While Revolved
(Orig 16mm, 1976, 18fps silent) HD Digital, 2022, 9:22 min. color, sound.
Restored version with soundtrack by Etienne Grenier
An elusive film that highlights, in a series of movements, the magnified chemical soup of the emulsion as the camera lens is trained on both a closely foregrounded granular surface and a complex set of sinking, rising and emerging spaces behind it, subtly shaped by the focusing abilities of shadows. Sound introduce other layers and ideas about movement and space bringing new understandings and articulations to this sculpture like cinema.
IT IS NOT SPRING, UNTIL ALL FLOWERS BLOSSOM. - Curry Tian
(2020, 6, sound, Color, Digital)
Amusement Ride - Tomonari Nishikawa
(2019, 6, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
Another horizon - Stephanie Barber
(2020, 9, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
A Perfect Storm - Karel Doing
(2022, 3, Color, Sound, 35mm to Digital)
Summer Light For Tula - Silvia Turchin
(2021, 9:24, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
Fragile - Sasha Waters
(2022, 8, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
Move - Douglas Urbank
(2021, 4:35, B/W, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
SAYOR - Kathryn Ramey
(2022, 10, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
Laomedeia - Youjin Moon
(2019, 11:04, Color, Sound, Digital)
runtime 67 mins
AutoMata
Automata is an artist-run non-profit organization located in Los Angeles, California, dedicated to the creation, incubation, and presentation of experimental puppet theater, experimental film and music, installation, and contemporary art practices centered on ideas of artifice and performing objects. Automata stands at the fulcrum points between objects and performance, artifacts and ephemera, magic and mechanics, artifice and interface.
RPM hits the road once again! Coming up is a special event called Elemental Findings,
a collaborative screening set to take place on June 21st at Automata in Los Angeles, a non-profit organization run by artists.
This exciting program marks the start of the 2023 celebrations, commemorating the 10th anniversary of RPM's inception and its fifth year in Boston.
The lineup for this event features curated works from the past five years, showcasing artists who have contributed multiple pieces to various festival
editions. Among the featured artists are Stephanie Barber, Karel Doing, Youjin Moon, Tomonari Nishkawa,
Kathryn Ramey,Curry Tian, Silvia Turchin, Douglas Urbank, and Sasha Waters.
For further details and additional information, please visit:
AutoMata
Presented by
Revolutions Per Minute Festival and AutoMata.
Special thanks:
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu & AutoMata
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer, and curator whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s creative activity starts from a life event, an anomaly in language or in the material world. It continues by employing methods drawn from both Eastern and Western practices and philosophies. Her working method at various times involves handcrafted material, mixed media, and experimental interchange between new and old technologies.
She is a lecturer at CalArts, teaching experimental film. She is co-curator of Move Screen, Process Cinema, the founder of Experimentalist Media Collective, the editor of B-Journal, and serves as a programmer for the Experimental session of Slamdance Film Festival.
IT IS NOT SPRING, UNTIL ALL FLOWERS BLOSSOM. - Curry Tian
“ IT IS NOT SPRING, UNTIL ALL FLOWERS BLOSSOM ” (a quote from Shui Mak Ka, one of the factory workers initializing the 1982 Garment Strike) is a homage to
the overlooked and objectified laboring body of Asian Immigrant Women in the western world, with an eye on the garment factory owners and workers within the New York
garment production sector as a representation of the US social panorama.
With reference to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelars’s topo-analysis theory from his literature work The Poetics of Space — a form of research that examines the
intimacy of objects and spaces; the working space itself becomes the representation of one’s identity, cultural behaviour and a kind of consciousness. Thus, this
collaborative project aims to explore the poetic relationship between these women factory worker’s invisible social identity, the workspace, movement and fashion in the
Chinese diaspora in America, dating from the 1970s to present times.
Curry Sicong Tian is a US-China based multidisciplinary filmmaker and artist, whose talent ranges across Director, concept/digital, 3d, and photographer, and not in a segregated way but artfully blending the vastly different mediums into a seamless harmony of leading edge expression.
In 2020, Curry won an Academy Award for her student short film “Simulacra”, and in such a short span of time went on to create masterful works for clients such brands as Mercedes, Apple BEATS, Chanel, L’oreal, Canon and more. Her visual creation of the 88rising MainStage Coachella performances, made waves at the world’s premiere music festival.
Amusement Ride - Tomonari Nishikawa
(2019, 6, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
Shot with a telephoto lens from inside a cabin of Cosmo Clock 21, a Ferris wheel at an amusement park in Yokohama, Japan. The distorted image shows the structure of the Ferris wheel, focusing on the intermittent vertical movement, which resembles the movement of a film at the gate of a film projector or camera.
Tomo NIshikawa
Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on process itself. His films have been screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. In 2010, he presented a series of 8mm and 16mm films at MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and his film installation, Building 945, received the 2008 Grant Award from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Spain. He served as a juror for the 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2012 Big Muddy Film Festival, and the 2013 dresdner schmalfilmtage. He is one of the co-founders of KLEX: Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival and Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image. He lives in Japan/USA, currently teaching in Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
Another horizon - Stephanie Barber
(2020, 9, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
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.
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.
A Perfect Storm - Karel Doing
(2022, 3, Color, Sound, 35mm to Digital)
A Perfect Storm is a landscape film or, more precisely, a landscape imprinted on the film's emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve. The film consists of sequences that are intricately composed and parts that are completely 'self-organised'. As such plants appear not merely as inanimate objects but rather as characters who are expressive in their own right. Such otherworldliness is also reflected in a sequence of gargoyles, providing a link to the hidden animist tendencies that prevail in human culture. This primordial expressiveness is underlined by an improvised guitar solo by the inimitable Florian Magnus Maier.
Karel Doing is an independent filmmaker, photographer, writer and researcher currently based in Oxford, UK. In his practice he investigates the relationship between culture and nature by means of analog and organic process, experiment and co-creation. Doing's work has been shown internationally in the context of film festivals, museum and gallery exhibitions and live events, including solo exhibitions in London and Paris. In 2012 he received a FOCAL award for his film Liquidator. He regularly gives workshops in analog film and photography practice and teaches at Ravensbourne University and the University of the Arts London.
Summer Light For Tula - Silvia Turchin
(2021, 9:24, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
"Summer Light for Tula" is a garden symphony of sorts, a tribute to the light and beauty, and an effort to reconcile with death.
Silvia Turchin is a Bay Area experimental and documentary filmmaker whose work is concerned with memory and loss.
Her films are experiential in style, encouraging viewers to immerse themselves in keen visual and aural observation of urban and natural landscapes.
Silvia is currently Associate Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at California State University Monterey Bay and
has also taught film production at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Fragile - Sasha Waters
(2022, 8, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
"Maybe I will cast a younger woman to perform me, the 'hockey mom' in the voiceover..." And so I did: six women a decade or more younger than I am, all artists I admire, speak a personal meditation on the early history of cinema, the anxiety of aging, and the woeful comedy of professional envy. 16mm footage of six “magic lantern” glass slides from the turn of the last century wryly evoke the Structural film tradition of anti-illusionist cinema and demystification.
"Hockey mom" performed by T.J Dedeaux-Norris, Lori Felker, Kelly Gallagher, Penny Lane, Jesse McLean and Courtney Stephens.
Sasha Waters is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Since 1998, Sasha has produced and directed 18 documentary and experimental films, 14 of which originate in 16mm. With the exception of her first documentary, she has edited of all of her films. Embracing a personal, artisanal approach to craft, she also served as the cinematographer, primarily in 16mm, and sound editor, on ten of them.
Move - Douglas Urbank
(2021, 4:35, B/W, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
A nature of children, birds, and insects. Made from a series of contact printings taken from different found footage films and other materials onto 16mm negative, part of the soundtrack from a film with the image blacked out.
Douglas Urbank, based in Boston, Massachusetts, is an artist with a background in sculpture and drawing who began to experiment with filmmaking in 2008. His short films have screened in festivals and curated programs nationally and internationally. Since 2001 he has hosted a radio program devoted to experimental, improvisational, and other unconventional music and sound art. He is also a member of Fort Point Theatre Channel, an independent theater company that brings together an ensemble of artists from the worlds of theater, music, and visual arts. And he is a founding member of the AgX Film Collective. He works to promote cross-pollination between art forms on the fringes of alternative culture: experimental music, film and theater.
SAYOR - Kathryn Ramey
(2022, 10, Color, Sound, 16mm to Digital)
An acronym for swimming at your own risk, SAYOR refers to a forum without a moderator. Three years in the lives of three AMAB (assigned male at birth) children with a parent/observer. What does it mean to be a male in the 21st century?
Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing, and various direct animation techniques. Most recently she has been focused on creating an anti-colonial film practice with collaborators in Puerto Rico and researching environmentally friendly photochemical processes utilizing indigenous flora. She is deeply committed to sharing her knowledge of alternative analogue technologies through workshops and publications.
Laomedeia - Youjin Moon
(2019, 11:04, Color, Sound, Digital)
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.
Youjin Moon is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker based in Boston. Moon holds MFAs in Painting and Film/Video from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has shown her work at national and international film festivals and exhibitions, including the 2016 deCordova New England Biennial, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, and the 56th Ann Arbor Film Festival. She received the Korean EXiS Award at the 12th and 16th Seoul International Experimental Film and Video Festival.
Arnulf Rainer - Peter Kubelka
| 1960| 6’30”| 16mm | Austria
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G - Paul Sharits
| 1968| 12’| 16mm | USA
2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test - Kurt Kren
| 1960 | 4’5” | 16mm| Silent | Austria
X-TRACTS - Leslie Thornton
| 1975 | 8’30’| 16mm| USA
Ruby Skin - Eve Heller
| 2005 | 4’30" | 16mm | USA
Razzle Dazzle - Jodie Mack
| 2014 | 5’ | 16mm | Silent | USA
Untitled for William P. - Mike Piso
| 2016 | 6’46” | 16mm | Silent | USA
Portrait - Douglas Urbank
| 2014 | 5’16”| 16mm |Silent| USA
A Proposal to Project in 4:3
- Viktoria Schmid
| 2017| 2’| 16mm | Austria
The Invisible Cinema 3 - Philipp Fleischmann
| 2017 | 43" | 16mm | Silent | Austria
Untitled (Generali Foundation Vienna) - Philipp Fleischmann
|2015 | 34" | 16mm | Silent | Austria
Notes after Long Silence - Saul Levine
| 1989 | 15’| 8mm - Digital | USA
Answer Print - Mónica Savirón
| 2016 | 5’ | 16mm - Digital | Spain & USA
Navigator - Björn Kämmerer
| 2015 | 7’| Digital | Silent | Austria
Besenbahn - Dietmar Offenhuber
| 2001 | 10‘| Digital | Austria
Light Matter - Virgil Widrich
| 2018 | 5’ | Digital | Austria
runtime 97 mins 54 secs
A joint event between RPM Festival in Boston and Millennium Film Workshop in NYC is set to take place,
showcasing a special program titled "Notes after Long Silence: On Austrian and American Structural Film".
The first screening is scheduled for May 4th at 8PM, Thursday, at UMass-Boston's University Hall 2300, with the entire program subsequently
traveling to Millennium Film Workshop for a second showing on May 6th at 7PM. This program has been made possible thanks to the generous
support of various organizations, including the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture (BMKOES), Austrian Cultural Forum New York,
UMass Boston's Art and Art History and Cinema Studies, and Millennium Film Workshop.
Filmmakers:
Peter Kubelka
Paul Sharits
Kurt Kren
Leslie Thornton
Virgil Widrich
Philipp Fleischmann
Saul Levine
Eve Heller
Jodie Mack
Mónica Sávirón
Mike Piso
Douglas Urbank
Björn Kämmerer
Dietmar Offenhuber
Viktoria Schmid.
A curatorial project by
Nicole Prutsch, Mike Piso, and Wenhua Shi.
Presented by Revolutions Per Minute Festival and Millennium Film Workshop.
Supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture (BMKOES), Austrian Cultural Forum New York, UMass Boston (Art and Art History, cinema studies), and Millennium Film Workshop.
Special thanks to Genevieve Carmel, Stefan Grabowski, Joe Wakeman, Paul Echeverria, Ty Ueda, AgX Film Collective, sixpackfilm, Canyon Cinema, Filmmakers’ Coop, Millennium Film Workshop, Umass Boston, Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture (BMKOES), and Austrian Cultural Forum New York.
Notes after Long Silence.
On Austrian and American Structural Film.
In the early 1960s, a number of filmmakers emerged in the United States and Europe to produce remarkable films that challenged any previous formal tendency
in avant-garde filmmaking. The Structuralist filmmakers—including Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits
, and Kurt Kren––arranged their shots according to mathematical principles, attempting to produce non-narrative and non-illusionist films
to oppose the cinematic apparatus. Similar to the advent of Minimalism in painting and sculpture, structural films insisted on shape, and their content was
minimal and subsidiary to the outline. For instance, in his film 2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test (1960), Kurt Kren employed a strictly
serial sequence technique to present 48 portraits from the Szondi Test for "experimental diagnosis of human impulses" in various frame sizes and
pre-specified lengths. Meanwhile, Peter Kubelka used the most radical version of Structural arrangements to produce the first Flicker
Film, Arnulf Rainer (1960), which consisted solely of black or white frames coupled with either silence or white noise on the soundtrack.
The Flicker(1966) by Tony Conrad, another landmark in Structural filmmaking, gradually increased the frequency and pattern
complexity of black and white frames to create stroboscopic effects that could cause visual hallucinations and even epileptic seizures.
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) by Paul Sharits further complicated the frame-by-frame approach with chromatically-varied frames
and combinations of visual and auditory repetition.
The Structural Film movement and its aesthetic principles—including serial cuts, static frames, and flicker effects—influenced several filmmakers of the next generation.
Leslie Thornton, for instance, a student of both Kubelka and Sharits, further developed the Structuralist approach in her debut experimental film X-TRACTS (1975),
which features cut-up readings of her high school diary paired with images of herself, once again exploring the territories of rhetoric, linguistics, and narrative structures.
Kubelka's co-founded institutions, the Anthology Film Archives in New York and the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna,
along with filmmakers like Saul Levine, continued to pass on the strategies of Structural Film to inspire younger generations of filmmakers to continue pushing
the boundaries of structure and materiality of film. The upcoming screening program, Notes After Long Silence, which takes its title from one of Levine's films,
traces the historical conversation of Austrian and American experimental film to the present day and explores the aesthetic and cultural limits pushed by filmmakers from both countries.
The program features works from members of the AgX Film Collective in Boston and the Schule Friedl Kubelka in Vienna, with films distributed by sixpackfilm, Canyon Cinema, and Filmmakers' Coop.
Arnulf Rainer
Peter Kubelka
| 1960| 6’30”| 16mm | Austria
This is a film composed entirely of frames of solid black and solid white, which Kubelka strings together in lengths as long as 24 frames and as short as a single frame. When he alternates between single black and white frames, a rapid flicker of motion-pictures projection; during the longer sections of darkness one waits in nervous anticipation for the flicker to return, without knowing precisely what form it will take. (Fred Camper) Arnulf Rainer, an architecture built in time by cinema uses only the four essential elements of the medium: light, darkness, sound and silence. (Peter Kubelka) With Arnulf Rainer, his third metrical film, Kubelka arrived at the most elemental components of cinematography – namely light, absence of light, sound, silence. These are the four poles from which all of cinema, all of film is suspended. Stretched to their utmost limits, all illusionism is driven out. The last trace of a spatial reproduction is extinguished. And the illusion of movement based on visual similarities of sequential frames (whose minor differences disappear upon projection and thanks to the sluggishness of perception are
transformed into an illusion of continuity) is also obliterated.
-- Peter Tscherkassky
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G
Paul Sharits
| 1968| 12’| 16mm | USA
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G uses flickering frames of solid color juxtaposed with positive and negative still images of the poet David Franks—sometimes cutting off his own tongue with glitter-covered scissors, sometimes suffering a series of glitter-stained fingernail scratches across the face. Other rapidly alternating still images of eye surgery and a couple in the midst of intercourse. The soundtrack is a continuous looped recording of the word “destroy” over the entire length of the film.
2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test
Kurt Kren
| 1960 | 4’5” | 16mm| Silent | Austria
Kren´s second film and the first he cut according to a strictly serial, sequence technique: in various framesizes, the 48 portraits from the Szondi Test for "experimental diagnosis of human impulses" are shown in pre-specified lengths (between one and eight frames).
-- Peter Tscherkassky
Kren´s 48 heads refer to a psychological procedure known as the Szondi Test. Running four minutes and shot at various speeds, Kren´s film fragments faces in extreme close-up: eyes, chins, hairlines, foreheads, with an occasional block of images using full-face. The film ends on mouths, viewed so closely as to be nearly abstracted. In 48 Köpfe body parts lose their original identification and become the subject of formal concerns.
-- Regina Cornwell (The Other Side: European Avant-Garde Cinema 1960-1980)
X-TRACTS
Leslie Thornton
| 1975 | 8’30’| 16mm | USA
Thornton's first 16mm film, X-Tracts was made in collaboration with cinematographer Desmond Horsfield.
The film consists of complex and rapid patterning of sound/image segments that are structured by a
formal mathematical schema that determines duration, interaction, and progression. Moving beyond the
critiques of the cinematic apparatus and its analogy to language that were central to that time
(Hollis Frampton's Hapax Legomena or Paul Sharit's T:O:U:C:H:I:N:G, for example), Thornton expands
into the territories of rhetoric, cognition, and linguistics. Composed of a cut-up reading of Thornton's
high school diary paired with images of the filmmaker, fragments of the body in motion or at rest, and
just-occupied spaces, X-Tracts seems both to defy and propose an autobiographical narrative.
The film has been described by Chrissie Iles, curator at The Whitney Museum of American Art,
as the "missing link" between the structuralists and the introduction of a more narratological tendency
in experimental film practice.
Ruby Skin
Eve Heller
| 2005 | 4’30" | 16mm | USA
A found footage film that taps into the poetic tradition of the language cut-up,
while taking filmic advantage of the 26 frame displacement between sound and image inherent
to 16 mm film’s optical soundtrack system. The magenta-shifted fragments of an educational movie on
"Reaching Your Reader" reveal their chemistry where the splicing tape pulled away a “ruby skin” of the emulsion,
leaving a green tear at the edit points. Ruby Skin is a material homage to the disappearing medium of 16 mm film
and some of its idiosyncrasies.
-- Eve Heller
Razzle Dazzle
Jodie Mack
| 2014 | 5’ | 16mm | Silent | USA
Tacky threads luminesce at a firefly’s pace, twinkling through remnants of chintzy opulence and gaudy glamour
prestissimo brilliante. Razzle Dazzle is an iridescent animated flicker film about textiles which lend a new and
dizzying dimension to the illusion of glamour. In her usual psychedelic style,
Jodie Mack takes a look at the material production of desire.
Untitled for William P.
Mike Piso
| 2016 | 6’46” | 16mm | Silent | USA
For nine years Mike Piso worked in various roles at a day program for artists with intellectual disabilities in the Boston area. This short film is a black-and-white study of many colorful drawings and paintings by William, an outsider artist who attended the program for about ten years before he died at home. He was an artist of few words but created a fascinating and haunting body of work.
Portrait
Douglas Urbank
| 2014 | 5’16”| 16mm |Silent| USA
An imagined portrait, a handmade, stream-of-consciousness improvisation.
A Proposal to Project in 4:3
Viktoria Schmid
| 2017| 2’| 16mm | Austria
Schmid builds her own projection screens ranging from aspect ratios currently in use (in this case 4:3, the format she uses the most often, 16mm being her primary medium) to entirely fictitious ones (the 4:1 Viktoriascope) and if possible she then films them in the exact same aspect ratio. While at the Djerassi Artist in Residency Program in California, the artist constructed a screen with wood and canvas and installed it in the program’s sculpture park. Still standing there, it is an unexpected object on the way to a scenic view of the rolling hills on the Djerassi property. In A proposal to project in 4:3, Schmid shot this site-specific installation over the course of a single day when the screen became projection surface for the subtle interplay of shadow and light from the surrounding trees and shrubs. Cinema without film.
-- Claudia Slanar
The Invisible Cinema 3
Philipp Fleischmann
| 2017 | 43" | 16mm | Silent | Austria
Conceived by filmmaker Peter Kubelka as a ´viewing machine` not
supposed to distract, in which only the film being projected should
“completely dictate the sensation of space”, the history of the
Invisible Cinema went through several locations and appearances (with
more and less ambitious setups, it was built in 1970 in New York City,
then in Vienna in 1989 and later remodeled in that same spot in 2003)
always according to the minimalistic maxim of being a completely black
box, with no reflective surfaces except the screen. That same sense of
visionary austerity, in which the respect for an art of lights and
shadows gives way to an experience of unparalleled vision, is what
Fleischmann seems to have channeled as a sort of filmmaker-medium.
Half phantasmagory, half blueprint in motion, The Invisible Cinema 3
is a 43-second blitzkrieg immersion into the total blackness of the
building whose only diversion is marked by a series of oscillating
white dots (the room lights) that parade through the frame upwards and
sidewards. The result is a cold and hypnotic miniature, a tiny slice
of unmediated reality that throws upon its viewer a barrage of
questions about the nature of the film medium too powerful to leave
the theater unharmed.
High on concept, the fact that Fleischmann’s whole creative endeavor
materializes into less than a minute of silent film (with barely any
image to see) ultimately speaks of an unbreakable pact with the
process rather than of a certain disappointment from the perspective
of the audience.
-- Pablo Marin (filmmaker and theorist)
Untitled (Generali Foundation Vienna)
Philipp Fleischmann
|2015 | 34" | 16mm | Silent | Austria
Philipp Fleischmann builds camera objects for his films. This process results in films that are difficult to assign to existing categories of a film or art theoretical consideration, so that they in turn have the challenge of stepping out of the box and, as it were, of building the terms for what is perceived and its language depending on the situation . All these steps are integral elements of a work and an artistic-methodical sensitization for institutional norms of longing, which perhaps based on Keller Easterling‘s considerations on a living space in infrastructures and Karen Barad‘s concept of intra-action for subject-object relationships as (intra- ) can be described institutionally. In this respect, or consequently, in the case of Untitled (Generali Foundation Vienna), in addition to the film material, there are also photographic recordings from the cinematic-photographic recording instruments. The installation views were taken exactly at the time the exhibition space, which is now history, was closed. The artistic work was not commissioned, instead it seems to be precisely the insistence on reciprocal addressing that unfolds in the films.
-- Rike Frank (art historian)
Notes after Long Silence
Saul Levine
| 1989 | 15’| 8mm - Digital | USA
In title and content NOTES AFTER LONG SILENCE directly alludes to Levine's '60s protest film,
NEW LEFT NOTES, as well as to the SDS newspaper of the same name he once edited. It's also a startling
companion piece to Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July. If Stone is ultimately ambivalent about Vietnam,
Levine is not. A nameless vet in Fourth of July greets Tom Cruise's paraplegic Ron Kovic with 'Just what we need,
another limp dick.' In NOTES AFTER LONG SILENCE, ugly, ruddy close-ups of a flaccid penis begin to dominate the
blitzkrieg montage; the limp dick isn't innocent bystander to America's Fall, but guilty witness. Yet the final
images are of bouncy shtupping, a make-love-not-war, antiheroic corrective to Stone's mythic posturing.
– Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice
Answer Print
Mónica Savirón
| 2016 | 5’ | 16mm - Digital | Spain & USA
The fading that devastates color films occurs in the dark. It is accelerated by high temperatures and, to a lesser extent, relative humidity. Dye fading is irreversible. Once the dye images have faded, the information lost cannot be recovered.
An answer print is the first film after the original has been timed for every shot with fades and dissolves if any. The question that it answers is ‘what is this going to look like’, and ‘what corrections, if any, are needed’
-— Bill Brand
Answer Print is made with deteriorated 16mm color stock, and it is meant to disappear over time. Neither hue nor sound has been manipulated in its analog reassembling. The soundtrack combines audio generated by silent double perforated celluloid, the optical tracks from sound films, and the tones produced by each of the filmmaker’s cuts when read by the projector. The shots are based on a 26-frame length: the distance in 16mm films with optical tracks between an image and its sound.
Navigator
Björn Kämmerer
| 2015 | 7’| Digital | Silent | Austria
Normally a navigational device or navigator serves to provide orientation in unfamiliar territory,
to establish paths in the middle of nowhere by means of geometric aids. But what happens when space and its record,
region and map, merge and begin to intertwine? In NAVIGATOR Björn Kämmerer creates a kind of seeing machine that
executes exactly such a convolution.
Besenbahn
Dietmar Offenhuber
| 2001 | 10‘| Digital | Austria
Perceiving perception: Through media, this is simultaneously possible and impossible. The important thing about moving images is what is moving rather than what is causing the movement.
But the fact sometimes tends to be forgotten that the animated image could not exist without the viewer´s illusionary assumption that he or she is not seeing individual frames but continuous motion.
As a result, it should not surprise when film or videographic experiments are at their core reflections on forms of perception conveyed through various media, their purpose to make accessible the
circumstances under which sensuous experience takes place, which are dictated by the media. This all applies to besenbahn, though the problem is made more complex by the reference to perception which
itself requires the use of technical apparatus. Its subject is not "natural" perception, but perception put in motion by modern means of transportation, and therefore implicitly the history of an epochal
transformation of the way in which time and space is experienced. It has come to a preliminary end in suitable contexts - for example cities such as Los Angeles, which has been shaped by the history of motorization -
where moving perception now seems to be regarded as integral to natural perception.
The thesis presented by besenbahn in this regard would therefore be that the specifically aesthetic quality of such animated perception is absent from the forms of audiovisual representation which are already considered natural
(such as indicating movement by means of a tracking shot): In its fragmentation of the continuum of perception, the "subjective geometry which defines space through intervals of time" (Dietmar Offenhuber) illustrates a manner
of experience which could remain submerged because it is already so familiar.
-- Vrääth Öhner
Light Matter
Virgil Widrich
| 2018 | 5’ | Digital | Austria
Five minutes of pure irritation of the retina in the human eye. It all starts with dim flashes of light slowly intensifying into a staccato of dark and light, with extreme contrasts. Stimulating the eye´s photo-receptors, the impulses work their way to the brain, creating an illusion of color where there is nothing but an inferno of black and white. Virgil Widrich refers to a phenomenon first described by two scientists in the 19th century. The effect is perceived differently by every viewer. You may glimpse some distant colors in the depths of the strobe, or you may be reminded of 1980s´ gaming aesthetics with visuals flashing in red and green.
-- Gunnar Landsgesell (Viennale 2018)
Please note that some parts of the programme are not adapted to people with PSE (Photosensitive epilepsy).
Sound Over Water,
4 mins, 16mm, color/sound, 2009
Orpheus (outtakes),
6 mins, 16mm, col/BW/sd. 2012
The Dragon is the Frame,
14 mins, 16mm, color/sound, 2014
The Glass Note,
9 mins, Digital, col/bw, 2018
Figure Minus Fact,
13 mins, Digital, col/bw, 2020
Exhibition,
19 mins, Digital, col/bw, 2022
Post Screening Q&A
Mary Helena Clark & Malic Amalya
RPM and The Brattle Theatre are thrilled to co-present a program of experimental short pieces by artist Mary Helena Clark. The screening will take place on on April 12, Wednesday 7PM at The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA., titled Figure Minus Fact
Mary Helena Clark is a multi-faceted artist working in film, video, and installation based in Queens, New York. A collection of six short films is classified as trance-like, transparent films, where she explores narrative figures of speech, the materiality of film, and the artifacts from the painting technique trompe l'oeil to CGI models. Using the language of collage, her work investigates dissociative states through cinema, bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code. Her films blend conventions of narrative, language, and genre to shift subjectivities and push the limits of the embodied camera.
Her work has been exhibited at a variety of prestigious venues, including Sundance Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Viennale, Anthology Film Archives, Wexner Art Center, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and MIT List Visual Arts Center. In 2017, her work was featured in the Whitney Biennial.
Post Screening Q&A
with Mary Helena Clark & Malic Amalya
Malic Amalya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual & Media Arts
at Emerson College and is a filmmaker who creates films exploring themes related to attachment, identity, and relationships.
He also curates INFRARED, a program of experimental films from underrepresented queer and trans voices.
Sound Over Water
2009, 4 minutes (16mm)
Blue sky and blue sea meet on emulsion.
Orpheus (outtakes)
2012, 6 minutes (16mm)
Using footage from Cocteau's Orphée, Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames. (Andrea Picard)
The Dragon is the Frame
2014, 14 minutes (16mm)
An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history, and the puzzle of depression. (MHC)
The Glass Note
2018, 9.5 minutes (digital)
In The Glass Note, a collage of sound, image, and text explore cinema’s inherent ventriloquism. Across surface and form, the video reflects on voice, embodiment, and fetish through the commingling of sound and image. (MHC)
Figure Minus Fact
2020, 13 minutes (digital)
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)
Exhibition
2022, 19 minutes (digital)
Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—a Swedish woman’s marriage to the Berlin Wall,
and a suffragette’s hatcheting of Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus—Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition is a maze-like tour through
images and artifacts, a dense cryptography of the forms and objects that hold us in. (Leo Goldsmith)
RPM Festival Solo Artist Program presented with the support of a Festivals Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Attitudes Passionelles, 13 mins, HD, color/sound, 2015
House, 16 mins, HD, col/sd. 2015
Evangelia C’est Moi, 11 mins, 16mm to HD, color/sound, 2017
Keeping Together in Time, 9 mins, 16mm to HD, col/bw, 2020
Are You My Mother?, 5 mins, 16mm to HD, col/bw, WIP 2023
Post Screening Q&A
Alison Folland & Jennifer Montgomery
RPM and The Brattle Theatre are thrilled to co-present a program of experimental short films by filmmaker and performer Alison Folland. The screening will take place on Sunday, March 19 (2PM) at The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA., titled Some Problems of Domestication
Alison Folland is a filmmaker and performer based in Somerville, MA. Her short hybrid films engage questions of affect and truth-value and are directly informed by her work as an actor in the commercial film industry.
Alison studied physical theater at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU/Tisch and film/video art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Her films have been screened at festivals such as Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio), Athens International Film Festival (Greece), Antimatter (Victoria, BC), and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival.
As a performer, Alison has worked with directors such as Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Barbet Schroeder, and David O. Russell.
She is a member of Agx Film Collective and teaches 16mm filmmaking at Emerson College.
Post Screening Q&A with Jennifer Montgomery and Alison Folland
Jennifer Montgomery is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
Her work has been screened internationally at festivals such as Toronto, New Directors New Films (MoMA), San Francisco, Rotterdam, Thessaloniki, Rimini, Edinburgh, and Melbourne.
It has also screened at museums such as the Whitney (NYC), the ICA (London), the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis), and the Pasadena Arts Center, and has had theatrical distribution in American and European repertory theaters.
She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Art Matters, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and received a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.
Attitudes Passionelles
2015 • HD • 13 min
A hybrid video essay exploring topics of romantic ballet, madness, and the relationship between physical gesture and inner state.
House
2015 • HD • 16 min
An adaptation of the “Full House” pilot, set on a half-built house outside Athens, Greece.
Evangelia C’est Moi
2017 • 16mm to HD • 11 min
The joys and heartaches of largesse. A real-life Madame Bovary reflects on her past excesses from her kitchen in austerity-era Greece.
Keeping Together in Time
2020 • 16mm to HD • 9 min
This film is an attempt to define the word, “teleomeric”. It is an imaginary word, taught to me by my husband. He later had a stroke and lost his language, leaving me with the memory of a word that I cannot find in the dictionary.
--AF--
Are You My Mother?
WIP • 16mm to HD • 3 min
Can we have both love and freedom? A child ponders the situation in an animal simulator game.
Alison Folland
Tufts University
Barnum Hall 08
Dana Laboratory, Packard Ave,
Medford, MA 02155
Admission is free
RPM along with Non-Event, Tufts FMS, Tufts Music, and SMFA at Tufts Media Arts, presents the film Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, a film by Daniel Weintraub, which tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator and humanitarian.
Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros. She was one of the world’s original electronic musicians, one of the few women amongst notable post-war American composers, a master accordion player, a teacher and mentor to musicians,
a gateway to music and sound for non- musicians and a technical innovator who helped develop everything from tools that allow musicians to play together while in different countries to software that enables those with physical limitations to create beautiful music.
On the vanguard of contemporary American music for six decades, her story illuminates the pathway to how we got where we are and where the future will take us in the worlds of music, the philosophy of sound, and the art of listening.
Produced in collaboration with executive producer Ione, Oliveros’ partner in life and work, and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc., the film combines rare archival footage, live performances, and unreleased music with appearances by Terry Riley, Anna Halprin, Ione, Linda Montano, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore, Alvin Lucier, Claire Chase, Miya Masaoka, Morton Subotnick, Tony Martin, Ramon Sender and many more ground- breaking artists.
Post Screening Q&A the director Daniel Weintraub.
A Return to the Return to Reason | 2014, 3 minutes , 35mm to HD|
by Sabine Gruffat
Framelines | 2017,10:14 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat
Take It Down | 2018, 12:30 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat
Moving or Being Moved | 2020, 11 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat
XCTRY | 2018, 6:18 minutes |
by Bill Brown
Life On The Mississippi | 2018, 28:13 minutes|
by Bill Brown
Amarillo Ramp | 2017, 24:10 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown
Post Screening Q&A
Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown & Brittany Gravely
Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA 02138
8pm
RPM Festival & Brattle theatre Co-present a program of experimental short films by dynamic artist-filmmaker duo Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown.
They have been making experimental films, documentaries and essay films and performing live electronic improvise for over two decades.
Sabine Gruffat explores different methods to generate content and images, from laser cutting/etching on 35mm film strips to 3D animation. Bill Brown is known for his nomadic filmmaking and transporting us to various destinations.
Seven shorts in this program titled Moving or Being Moved, highlight their praxis in recent 10 years.
Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. In this work, machines, interfaces, and systems constitute the language by which she codes the world. The creation of new ideas means inventing new ways of using existing tools, crossing signals, or repurposing old hardware. By actively disrupting both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat questions the standardized and mediatized world around us. She has produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York.
She is also a filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. These films seek to empower people, encourage social participation, and inspire political engagement. Sabine's films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, and Migrating Forms in New York, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, 25FPS in Croatia, Transmediale in Berlin, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. Her recent video works are distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago, IL.
Bill Brown is a media artist interested in ways landscape is interpreted, appropriated, and reconfigured according to human desires, memories, and dreams. His films have screened at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In addition to his filmmaking, Brown is the co-founder of the Zine Machine: Durham Printed Matter Festival, and the Cosmic Rays Film Festival, an annual showcase of experimental and first-person films.
A tribute to Man Ray's 1923 film, the first film to use his 'Rayograph' technique in which Man Ray exposed found objects onto film negative. The “original” film was digitized with all its aged emulsions, scratches, and splices, then compiled into digital filmstrips. These filmstrips are used to output a dithered and inverted image that a laser engraver etched onto black 35mm film leader.
An abstract scratch film made by laser etching preset patterns onto the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms. The soundtrack is created by filtering and layering the noise made by the laser etched 35mm optical track.
Employing solarized color positive 35mm film and animation of old postcard images of Confederate monuments in North Carolina, Take It Down documents how Southern identity continues to be bound up in the legacy of the Civil War and the Jim Crow Era. The film considers how these old memorials continue to be sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives.
Post-modern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers. In this gaming/ special effects world, movement has become a data set removed from the human body.
Brown re-works 16mm footage that he shot years ago during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Las Vegas. The spatial discontinuities of the road trip are rendered as visual continuities across three frames as Brown goes in search of the next town to fall in and out of love with.
A short essay film about a river and the limits of knowing it. Using Mark Twain’s Life On The Mississippi as a road map, Brown travels from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans and considers ways that river pilots, paddlers, historical reenactors, and civil engineers attempt to know the river through modeling, measurement, and simulation.
Amarillo Ramp
(Brown + Gruffat, 2017, 24:10)
A portrait of sculptor Robert Smithson's final earthwork. Employing filmmaking strategies that are both responsive to the artwork's environmental context and informed by Smithson's own art-making strategies, the filmmakers encounter the Ramp as an observatory where human scales of space and time are set against geological and cosmic scales.
Quiet motors | 2017, 1’24 |
Music by Pierre Bastien
Babylone | 2018, 1’13 |
Music by Kraus
Three motors | 2018, 1’55 |
Sound recording by Ève Couturier and Jean-Jacques Palix
Transports | 2018, 15’50 |
Music by Pierre Bastien, Narassa, Gamelan Voices, Lawrence, mix by Waltraud Blischke.
Volatile | 2019, 9’47 |
Music by Stine Janvin
Korridor | 2020, 1’16 |
Music by Marie-Pierre Bonniol and Walter Duncan (co-director)
Wasser | 2021, 22'35 |
Music by Andreas O. Hirsch, Khaki Blazer, Raymonde, Richard Pinhas, The Dead Mauriacs
RPM Festival & Non-Event Co-present a program of experimental short films by the filmmaker Marie-Pierre Bonniol.
These seven short films are all related to music, with soundtracks by musicians such as Pierre Bastien, Gamelan Voices, and Stine Janvin. The longest of these films is Wasser (2021, 22'35), a powerful abstract essay on water and its transformation into energy, features a soundtrack by Andreas O. Hirsch, Raymonde, Khaki Blazer, Richard Pinhas, and The Dead Mauriacs.
Obsessed by the idea of Imaginary music, Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the “bachelor machine,” and the power of mysteries, Marie-Pierre Bonniol's films –
all recorded on her smartphone – have been presented at Cafe OTO in London, ZKM in Karlsruhe, the National Library of Argentina, Anthology Film Archive in New York, the Alchemy Arts & Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival.
Please note that some parts of the programme are not adapted to people with PSE (Photosensitive epilepsy).
This program is co-presented with
the Goethe-Institut Boston and Non-Event
Post Screening Q&A
Marie-Pierre Bonniol & Wenhua Shi
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street, Boston
Doors: 7:30pm Performance begins promptly at 8pm
Tickets: $10 / $5 for members and students
Advanced Tickets available
