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RPM Festival

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.

RPM24: We are looking for any work that experiments with the formal possibilities or hybrid form of film, audiovisual, animation and video.

Shorts under 10mins
Medium Length under 20mins
Essay and Documentary under 30mins
Thematic Category: Water under 15mins


Submit your work (produced after Jan. 1st, 2023)
through FilmFreeway. Selections by Sept. 1, 2024.

Revolutions Per Minute Festival 2023 - 2024 was co-hosted by
Art and Art History Department and Cinema Studies at UMass-Boston, Goethe-institut Boston , Brattle Theatre in Cambridge & Harvard FAS CAMLab.
RPM Series at Boston City hall presented with the support of a grant from Mayor's Office of Arts & Culture. For more info: contact@revolutionsperminutefest.org




RPM24
PROGRAMS


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March 14th, 9PM

another horizon
Stephanie Barber


  • Brattle Theatre
    40 Brattle Street
    Cambridge MA
    617-876-6837




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    March 15th, 7PM
    FILM FARM

    Made by Hand


    Harvard CAMlab
    Lower Auditorium
    485 Broadway
    Cambridge MA 02138



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    March 15th, 9PM
    Philip Hoffman

    Collaborations & Meditations
    45-year practice

    Harvard CAMlab
    Lower Auditorium
    485 Broadway
    Cambridge MA 02138



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    March 16th, 7PM
    Jim Finn

    The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology
    Harvard CAMlab
    Lower Auditorium
    485 Broadway Cambridge MA 02138



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    March 16th, 9PM Breathscapes
    Curated by
    Kalpana Subramanian

    Harvard CAMlab
    Lower Auditorium
    485 Broadway Cambridge MA 02138



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    April 16th

    RPM @ Colgate University

    Program 02: Transformations (16mm)


  • Alternative Cinema
    Colgate University

    13 Oak Street
    Hamilton, NY



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    April 17th, 6PM
    Vitreous Chamber:
    Malic Amalya &
    Nathan Hill


  • Brattle Theatre
    40 Brattle Street
    Cambridge MA
    617-876-6837


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    April 30th
    Sense of Places

    Boston City Hall Plaza
    CIVIC PAVILION

    1 CITY HALL SQUARE, BOSTON, MA 02201

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    Thursday
    March.14
    9PM
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    • Thursday, March. 14th, 9PM
      Brattle Theatre
      40 Brattle St.

      Cambridge MA



    another horizon

    Stephanie Barber



    RPM Film Festival and the Brattle Theatre are proud to announce the screening of solo artist Stephanie Barber. Famed for her avant-garde vision and unparalleled mastery of visual poetry, Barber stands out as an extraordinary talent, captivating audiences with her innovative storytelling and immersive cinematic experiences.

    With an exceptional ability to push the boundaries of traditional filmmaking and video art, Stephanie Barber has become a trailblazer in the realm of experimental cinema. Her keen eye for detail and flair for the unconventional invite viewers on a transformative journey of introspection and discovery, redefining the art of storytelling through the lens of avant-garde creativity. From intricate montages to evocative soundscapes, Barber's films serve as a testament to the boundless power of experimental storytelling, challenging perceptions and igniting the imagination of audiences.

    Sponsored by RPM Festival, Brattle Theatre, Art and Art History Department & Cinema Studies Program at UMB, SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies & Experimental Film and Media Special Interest Group)






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    another horizon
    2020 | 00:08:54 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm film to HD

    Oh My Homeland
    2020 | 00:03:50 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm film to HD

    3 peonies
    2017 | 3m 13 sec | color | sound | 16mm to HD

    The Hunch that Caused the Winning Streak and Fought the Doldrums Mightily
    2010 | 00:02:05 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | DV video

    dwarfs the sea
    2008 | 00:06:15 | B&W | Stereo | 4:3 | DV video

    the visit and the play
    2008 | 00:08:00 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | DV video

    BUST CHANCE
    2010 | 00:07:00 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | miniDV

    flower, the boy, the librarian
    1997 | 00:05:00 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm to video

    total power dead dead dead
    2005 | 00:03:00 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm to video

    shipfilm
    1998 | 00:04:00 | B&W | SILENT | 16mm to Video

    dogs
    2000 | 00:05:00 | color | sound | 16mm to Video

    letters, notes
    1997 | 00:06:00 | color | Sound | 16mm to Video

    the information
    2022 | 00:01:12 | Color | Sound | 4:3 | video

    Total: 70mins

    Post-screening discussion:
    Stephanie Barber & Kalpana Subramanian

    Stephanie Barber is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Many of her videos are concerned with the content, musicality and experiential qualities of language. They ferry viewers through philosophical inquiry with the unexpected oars of play, emotionalism, story, and humor. Many balance several seemingly unrelated concepts––subtly suggesting or brazenly demanding a focused and imaginative reception. Many create gently complex, emotional studies. Others are funny; a sorrowful sort of funny. There are videos of obsessive observing and ambient sounds; small artificial fireworks, animals, and silence. They are tightly wound, dense, and light simultaneously. Barber's films and videos have has been 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. Her essays, stories and poems have been published in books, magazines and online journals.

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    another horizon
    2020 | 00:08:54 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm film

    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.

    Another Horizon is an experimental documentary, a meeting of fact and fiction. 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. I created the long scrolling collage out of found images. After filming the collage I physically scratched the horizon line out of each frame, further enunciated this space between.

    I lived, for a few months, in Richard, and his wife Mary’s, apartment, the site of their Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans. Of course, as priests and priestesses Richard and Mary spoke often of death, transcendence, ethics and health. Our days were slow and filled with philosophical rumination, Richard, a brilliant old man schooling a young wandering wonderer. I recorded most everything on cassette tapes back then and some of those have made it here to the present. To this horizon we’re at now.

    --SB

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    Oh My Homeland
    2020 | 00:03:50 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm film to HD

    In 1985 the great soprano Leontyne Price sung the title role in Verdi’s Aida as her farewell opera. After the ‘O patria mia’ aria, the audience breaks into a four-minute applause. 'Oh My Homeland' is the third in a series of minimal single shot 16mm films I’m currently building. It’s a film about representation, art, and material exchange. It’s a film about endings. It’s a film about identity, love, power, patriotism and the transcendent potential of art through the viewing of a face receiving adoration. A minimal gesture akin to the practice every portrait painter or mother recognizes as ineffably powerful. It is essentially a readymade and like my book 'Night Moves' and my video "Tatum's Ghost" it continues to explore Youtube as a cultural and social archive.

    Oh My Homeland, while being simply a shot of Ms. Price’s face as she receives the applause and before returning to the role, expands with the unaltered meditation on the shot. The transformational power of art for society and the maker alike; the implication of Ms. Price’s race and the context to which she dedicated her life; the staggering political implications of the Verdi aria (a mournful and complicated love letter to Aida’s homeland) in a time in which love of (my) country is hard to muster.

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    3 peonies
    2017 | 3m 13 sec | color | sound | 16mm to HD

    A brief, poetic 16mm film on a simple sculptural action. An experimental film in which the simplicity of the image is offset by the sonic implications.

    What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. What begins as a reverence for natural beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field work of high modernism which, in many cases eschewed the banality of such ‘natural’ beauty. The collaged soundtrack suggests weightier concerns, gently insistent behind the flatness of the utilitarian sounds of ripping tape.

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    The Hunch that Caused the Winning Streak and Fought the Doldrums Mightily
    2010 | 00:02:05 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | DV video

    The interior was delusional like any visual psyche. The couches and plants, rugs and paintings were all in cahoots and up in arms over the cahootery. The explorers were under-qualified and cowardly.

    These interiors — the photos hung on the walls, the furniture and rugs, houseplants and televisions — are collaged from photos of various domestic items from Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian homes brought together to suggest one continuous home. I'm interested in the tension between the visible and the invisible cultural markers represented here. The British parade matted into the televisions, the Japanese musician and Ethiopian music exaggerate this collision.

    — SB

    Originally created for Milwaukee International with The Suburban's exquisite corpse video for the "No Soul For Sale" show at the Tate Modern.

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    dwarfs the sea
    2008 | 00:06:15 | B&W | Stereo | 4:3 | DV video

    Small biographies and musing generalizations––men’s relations to each other and their lives. There is hope and loneliness, companionship and isolation and the simplest of filmic elements to contrast the complexity of human emotions. The delicacy of the formalist writing moves the listener from intimacy to universalism and back again, swaying gently to and fro like the rocking of a ship.

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    the visit and the play
    2008 | 00:08:00 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | DV video

    A playful and dark conversational study—wrapping prose poetry into the recognizable conversational form and allowing both connections and missed meanings. First the ladies visit, the image—a roving camera lovingly viewing a still image—calls up both the progress and stagnancy of their talk, then they go to watch a play—on a television, in a snow garden. In many ways the play references the cadence of the ladies' conversation—the tedious animosity and lack of attentive or appropriate response. I am thinking about the art of conversation, the various directions this art takes and the ways one's receptivity to dialog changes when the subjects creating this dialog are taken out of the equation, or suggested scantily.
    -- SB

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    BUST CHANCE
    2010 | 00:07:00 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | miniDV

    the audience's engagement with the smallest subtleties and less than (usually considered) spectacular elements of theater is impressive and speaks volumes on the patience and acuity of modern viewers. their finely tuned sense of humor and rapt and continuous focus warms the cynics' icy exterior. likewise, the feedback loop of mutual artistic understanding and respect from the performing elements and receptive viewers, and back again, fortifies those who wish to love art and believe it must have revolutionary value. all are satisfied and feel good in the showing of satisfaction.

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    flower, the boy, the librarian
    1997 | 00:05:00 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm to video

    It's a love story, with the usual dashing figures and old habits of spelling, repetition and listing.
    V-A-S-T;
    V-A-S-T;
    V-A-S-T;
    N-E-E-D;
    "In a certain way, the title tells you everything, the simplicity of S. Barber's FLOWER, THE BOY, THE LIBRARIAN is somewhat misleading in terms of its content or how the hidden poetry of those contents are discovered. The work hints at a vast space which takes the form of these three characters (the flower, the boy and the librarian) but, at the same time seems not to be fixed on these things, but to represent something else, something mysteriously luminous." - Gregg Biermann

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    total power dead dead dead
    2005 | 00:03:00 | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm to video

    a love letter to the charm of two dimensional images and a struggle for attention. confusion over the inequity of the mortality of images and that of humans. (slightest indictment). the spectacle awaits our adoration, gives a tender, false intimation of collusion.

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    shipfilm
    1998 | 00:04:00 | B&W | SILENT | 16mm to Video

    this is probably the most heartbreaking film i have made, the pacing is romantic and simple, haiku-esque pauses and inclusions, with the words contrasting this poetry with their factual, disinterested narration. and that narration is a simple statement of failure, one which lies, not in any action, but in the pre-thought to that action, the hope or faith one holds in oneself, one's knowledge or abilities.

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    dogs
    2000 | 00:05:00 | color | sound | 16mm to Video

    a mini revolution. wrong choices. the divorce of ethereal beauty and mystery so common in experimental films, in my films. what begins as devastatingly awkward or 'tender' unfolds itself to show a deceptive, strangely rigid literary formalism commented upon by the content. the two dance around (form and content) moving towards and away from each other in the tricky, clear dialogue. hyper-reflexivity, art and love--and the role faith plays in each of these. i myself feel safest around purposefulness, can read more clearly an artists work when i trust that choices have been weighed, bear meaning. this film requires a great deal of faith, because it is strange and labile. its device-ness is so apparent as to have left it naked, and then so naked as to be, perhaps, closed again (so that it is possible i have lied about the divorce).
    - SB

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    letters, notes
    1997 | 00:06:00 | color | Sound | 16mm to Video

    this film brings found photographs and letters to create new mini narratives. death and disease are set blithely beside, and given equal importance as, the sighting of a skunk or love sick scribblings.

    "letters, notes was neither too long nor too knowing and produced the most profound occasion of un remembrance on my part. Too busy trying to figure out what it all meant, I neglected to note down the words passing across the screen or what was beneath them, but I can tell you I was strangely moved, and I desire to see it once more just so I can again become so wrapped up that I forget to remember." --jeff lambert, senses of cinema

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    the information
    2022 | 00:01:12 | Color | Sound | 4:3 | video

    sometimes, among the rubble of the endless forgetting and re-membering of our personal and collective histories, an artifact emerges. a clue, a document. hard evidence. maybe we struggle to contextualize these fragments, maybe we marry them to other fragments and build new narratives in an attempt to squint back through the past and explain to ourselves how we got here. the information is a short exclamation mark of a video, fragments asserting themselves as whole auto-ethnographies.

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    Friday
    March.15
    7PM
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    • Friday, March. 15th, 7PM
      Harvard Fas CAMLab
      Lower Auditorium
      485 Broadway
      Cambridge MA 02138



    Made by Hand

    Film Farm: 30th Anniversary Screening



    For 30 years, between the greenery and the rivers near Mount Forest (Ontario, Canada), a unique retreat for filmmakers takes place at the Film Farm, conducted by Philip Hoffman and a dedicated staff of innovative film artists (Rob Butterworth, Christine Harrison, Deirdre Logue, Scott Miller Berry and Terra Jean Long). Founded in 1994 as the Independent Imaging Retreat, Film Farm is an artist-driven, intensive, week-long analogue filmmaking workshop and is a central part of Canada’s experimental film scene. The Film Farm has initiated and enhanced the work of local, national and international filmmakers and has expanded the traditions of experimental filmmaking in Canada and beyond. The workshop concentrates on hand-processing of 16mm film, most recently (since 2012) working with botanical developing processes. Works of the Film Farm are influenced by the methodology of Process Cinema, developed over many years through Hoffman’s own filmmaking and through his teaching at York University in his Process Cinema course (circa. 2007). In Process Cinema, artists replace the usual protocol of the script or screenplay, with a direct engagement with the world through the hand-cranked Bolex camera and hand-made analogue filmmaking processes. Having now produced almost 300 `graduates’ (of whom almost two-thirds are women) and over 100 completed works, the Film Farm has helped sustain a spirit of discovery and risk in contemporary experimental filmmaking. For many of the filmmakers in the program, the Film Farm has been a catalyst as they embarked on their practice of artist filmmaking.

    The first part of the program begins in the 1990’s when the Film Farm and its methods of hand processing celluloid with conventional photo chemicals was established with many films completed on 16mm. The second part of the program reflects recent concerns as the Film Farm turned to more ecologically friendly processing practices, using local flowers and plants to develop the films, and finished as digital films. As well the second part of the program highlights the Film Farm-Saugeen First Nation collaborations, which have been taking place since 2018 in Chippewa Hill near Southampton, Ontario. The Saugeen Takes on Film works are a collaboration between Film Farm and the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film, with artists, storytellers, knowledge keepers, and youth from the community. The workshop was also a collaboration with Saugeen First Nation Employment and Training Centre, and funded by the Ontario Arts Council and through Archive/Counter Archive, York University.

    Sponsored by RPM Festival, Harvard FAS CAMLab, Art and Art History Department & Cinema Studies Program at UMB, SCMS ExFM SIG (Society for Cinema and Media Studies Experimental Film and Media Special Interest Group)






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    Across
    3 min 16mm Sd 1997 (Canada)
    By Cara Morton


    Minus
    3 min 16mm Sd 1999 (Malaysia/Canada)
    By Chris Chong


    We Are Going Home
    10 min 16mm Sd 1998 (USA/Canada)
    By Jennifer Reeves


    Hardwood Process
    13:30 min 1997 16mm Silent (USA/Canada)
    By David Gatten


    Unless You’re Living It
    8:22 min 16mm to HDV Sd., 2019 (USA/Canada)
    By Sarah Bliss


    Casa de la Noche (House of Nights)
    13:30 min 16mm to HDV Sd 2017 (Cuba/Canada)
    By Marcel Beltran


    Dandelion
    2:15 min 16mm to HDV Silent 2018 (Aust./Netherlands/U.K./Canada)
    By Karel Doing


    It Matters What
    9 min 16mm to HDV Sd 2019 (Chile/Canada)
    By Francisca Duran


    Ancestors’ Gift
    3 min 16mm to HDV Sd 2019 (Saugeen Nation/Canada)
    By Natalka Pucan


    Everything is Right Here
    5:47 min 16mm to HDV Sd 2021 (Saugeen Nation/Canada)
    By Adrian Kahgee


    Total: 70mins

    Post-screening discussion:
    Philip Hoffman & Kathryn Ramey

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    Across
    3 min 16mm Sd 1997 (Canada)
    By Cara Morton

    Across is shaped through unity; the film is about crossing a bridge. The central tension in this lovely film is built upon a desire to connect with an image from the filmmaker’s past. The metaphoric journey forward to see the past is conveyed through a hand-held camera travelling at a great speed across a dirt road, through fields, along fences and through woods. Different color stocks combine with high contrast black and white images of the bridge while on the soundtrack we hear a river. An intensity and anticipation is created in the movement and in the juxtaposition of the different elements. -Janine Marchessault Women, Nature and Chemistry: Hand-Processed Films from Film Farm.

    Cara Anne Morton (1968 - 2012) was passionate about sharing her experience as an artist and experimental filmmaker with local community members, and advocated a do-it-yourself approach to creating art, with particular interest in the creative process, over final products.

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    Minus
    3 min 16mm Sd 1999 (Malaysia/Canada)
    By Chris Chong

    Minus is a hand-processed, unedited stream of movements. After subtracting most of what took place before the camera, what is left is remnants of light and rhythm, traces of a body in motion. This was Chong's first 16mm film, and demonstrates the kinds of rich results that can be obtained from simple, highly restricted means and techniques. -Chris Gehman ` The Independent Imaging Retreat’, The Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film (Program Notes 2004).

    Chris Chong Chan Fui is a Malaysian artist and filmmaker, who has worked in both Malaysia and Canada. Originally from Borneo, Chong lived and worked in Canada for a number of years after attending the University of Calgary as an international student. He had returned to Malaysia by the time of his 2009 feature film debut Karaoke. The film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight stream at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival; and later won the Mavericks Award at the 2009 Calgary International Film Festival.
    He has since concentrated primarily on art, including work in photography, painting and video installation.

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    We Are Going Home
    10 min 16mm Sd 1998 (USA/Canada)
    By Jennifer Reeves

    We Are Going Home is a gorgeous surrealistic film that has all of the characteristics of the trance film and more. It is structured around a dream sequence that has no real beginning or end. The first image we see is of a vending machine dispensing ‘Live Bait’ in the form of a film canister. A woman opens the canister to find fish roe (eggs). The equation of fish roe and film, no doubt a nod to the Surrealists, opens up those ontological quandaries around mediation and truth. It is this promise of direct contact along with the return “Home” in the film’s title that gives some sign that the highly processed landscapes belong to the unconscious. (Lux, London - Janine Marchessault)

    Jennifer Reeves has made 25+ film-works since 1990; from avant-garde shorts to expanded cinema performances and experimental features. Reeves’ work has shown extensively from the Berlin, Toronto, and Hong Kong Film Festivals to the Museum of Modern Art, universities, and microcinemas worldwide. Reeves’ acclaimed visceral and personal works immerse viewers in intricate, unfamiliar cinematic territory. Her work elucidates themes of mental health, feminism and sexuality and the natural world.

    Reeves started making films in 1990. She continues to do her own writing, cinematography, editing, and sound design. Her subjective and personal films push the boundaries of film through optical-printing and direct-on-film techniques.
    Since 2003 Reeves has collaborated with celebrated composers/ performers, including Marc Ribot, Skúli Sverrisson, Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Anthony Burr and Eyvind Kang. As the daughter of a trumpeter, gravitating toward film and music collaborations was quite natural for Reeves. Her most ambitious film and music performance, the feature-length double-projection WHEN IT WAS BLUE (2008), premiered at Toronto International Film Festival with live music by composer/collaborator Skúli Sverrisson. Her multiple-projection films with live music have been performed internationally, from the Sydney Opera House and the Berlinale to RedCat in Los Angeles and the Wexner Center in Ohio.
    Reeves has taught film and animation courses at The Cooper Union School of Art since 2005.

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    Hardwood Process
    13:30 min 1997 16mm Silent (USA/Canada)
    By David Gatten

    A history of scarred surfaces, an inquiry, and an imagining: For the marks we see and the marks we make, for the languages we can read and for those we are trying to learn. Reproduced by hand on an old contact printer resulting in individual, unique release prints. - David Gatten

    Hardwood Process made by David Gatten is a handmade diary film, which not only records scarred surfaces of the hands, the floors and the film emulsion, but also reveals his memories of the emotional events. Gatten started making Hardwood Process as he was participating in Film Farm Retreat in 1996. During the Film Farm Retreat, Gatten learned to experiment with various hand processing techniques, chemical treatments, and optical and contact printing. He was excited about this experience and intended to make something about it. As he says in Interview With David Gatten, an article in Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration- Essays/Interviews written by Scott MacDonald, “I wanted to make a contribution to the conversation; I wanted to share what I was excited about.”

    Over the last 19 years, David Gatten (b. 1971, Ann Arbor, Michigan) has explored the intersection of the printed word and moving image. The resulting body of work illuminates a wide array of historical, conceptual, and material concerns while cataloging the variety of ways in which texts function in cinema as both language and image, often blurring the boundary between these categories. These movies measure the movement of desire across distance, and the manner in which words, books, letters, and other written or printed communications might both produce and mediate that distance.
    Using traditional research methods (reading old books) and non-traditional film processes (boiling old books) the films trace the contours of private lives and public histories, combining philosophy, biography, and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures. Exploring the archive in unusual ways and making connections across categories of knowledge and fields of meaning, Gatten’s movies construct new compositions and generate unexpected conclusions from 19th c. scientific treatises, “out-dated” 20th c. instructional texts, and rare books from 18th c. personal libraries.

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    Unless You’re Living It
    8:22 16mm to HDV Sd., 2019 (USA/Canada)
    By Sarah Bliss

    A portrait of place and power in rural white Ontario that challenges the correlation between seeing and knowing, and the ravages of late-stage capitalism. Hand processing, contact printing, tinting and toning engage the film as a body that, like the residents of Mount Forest, sustains injuries, wounds and burdens, but also has the capacity for delight, revelatory pleasure, and transformation.

    I’m a filmmaker, artist, educator and Buddhist practitioner who facilitates presence and attunement with the sensate, desiring body. I work artisanally with hand-processed celluloid film and with video to make experimental and documentary films, kinesthetic immersive installations, artist books and performance that engage personal and social history. Of particular interest is the relationship between art practice and dharma practice. My work is shared and screened internationally at museums, galleries, film festivals, microcinemas, and backyards. I’ve been recognized with fellowships from the Flaherty Seminar, the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2019 Film and Video finalist; 2013 New Media/Installation fellow), and Scotland’s Alchemy Film Festival, am an Independent Imaging Retreat alum, and a recipient of a Lightpress Grant from the Interbay Cinema Society. I received a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, teach cameraless filmmaking, and am a member of Boston’s AgX Film Collective.
    - Sarah Bliss

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    Casa de la Noche (House of Nights)
    13:30 min 16mm to HDV Sd 2017 (Cuba/Canada)
    By Marcel Beltran

    This is Cuban filmmaker Marcel Beltran’s poetic dirge about his country as told by his father in the last days of his life. Beltran uses techniques of hand processing, solarisation, split toning and tinting to reflect the depth of emotions which weave through this portrait of Havana. “Shot in Havana and processed at Phil Hoffman's Film Farm, Marcel Beltrán's Casa de la Noche explores those same histories from the point of view of an insider, as a lived experience that is evocatively mirrored through ripped and torn celluloid.” — Chris Kennedy, TIFF

    Marcel Beltrán (b. 1985, Moa, Cuba) is a film director, editor and producer currently living and working in São Paulo, Brazil. His films have screened internationally at festivals such as IDFA, Hot Docs, MoMA Doc Fortnight, Locarno, DOC NYC, RIDM, FICG, among others. Founder of Mediocielo Films, professor at EICTV and Chavón | The School of Design, consultant for projects in development and facilitator for sustainability in the arts. He is currently in the writing phase of MOA, his first fiction feature film.

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    Dandelion
    2:15 min 16mm to HDV Silent 2018 (Aust./Netherlands/U.K./Canada)
    By Karel Doing

    A couple of years ago I have discovered new possibilities for the creation of images on film-emulsion by using the internal chemistry of plants. This technique is a combination of photograms and chemigrams and because of the lack of an accurate term I have named this method 'phytogram'. I have worked with this idea in my back garden, using available plants and weeds. Dandelions turned out yield particularly good results. This short film is entirely dedicated to the power and beauty of this humble plant. –Karel Doing

    Karel Doing is an experimental filmmaker and researcher who has worked across the globe with fellow artists and filmmakers, creating a body of work that is difficult to pinpoint with a simple catchphrase. In Ruins and Resilience he weaves autobiographical elements and critical reviews together with his wide ranging interdisciplinary approach, reflecting on his own practice by positioning key works within the context of a vibrant experimental film scene in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Doing demonstrates how experimental filmmakers have continued to renew their practice despite the almost total demise of analog motion picture film and the constant neglect of this art form by institutions and critics. Written in a fluent and accessible style, the book looks into the connections between the work of groundbreaking artists within the field and subjects such as transgression, improvisation, collectivity, materiality, phenomenology, and perception. Specifically, intersections with music and sound are investigated, appealing to the idea of the cross-modal brain, the ability to perceive sounds and images in an integrated way. Instead of looking again at the "golden era" of experimental film, the book starts in the 1980s, showing how this art form has never ceased to surprise and inspire. The author's hands-on engagement with the medium is formational for his more theoretical approach and writing, making the book a highly original contribution in the field that is informative and inspiring for academic and practitioners alike.

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    It Matters What
    9 min 16mm to HDV Sd 2019 (Chile/Canada)
    By Francisca Duran

    Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework elucidated through theorist Donna Haraway, taken from her essay Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction. The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact-prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant material and dried for hours in direct sunlight.

    Francisca Duran is a Chilean-Canadian experimental media artist who creates films, video installation, and 2D, photo-based, mixed-media works about history, memory and violence. Duran has exhibited internationally at film festivals and venues including Edinburgh International Film Festival, International Film Festival at Rotterdam, HotDocs, Arkipel, Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Film Forum, John Hansard Gallery and Gallery 44. Duran holds an M.F.A. from York University and a B.A.H. from Queen’s University. Her practice has been supported by research, travel, and production grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

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    Ancestors’ Gift
    3 min 16mm to HDV Sd 2019 (Saugeen Nation/Canada)
    By Natalka Pucan

    This film explains the message of the Dish and One Spoon Treaty and what that message means to one Anishnabek family. This films shows how Anishnabek ancestors work through the people to maintain and strengthen our individual sovereignty to the land and its resources and how it is passed from one generation to another.

    Natalka Pucan is a proud member of the Anishinabek Nation and registered member of Saugeen First Nation. Throughout her career she has worked with children and youth in a variety of capacities. Currently, she works as an Ojibway language instructor in a public school setting. Her work has focused on teaching children and youth about their culture and heritage. An avid beader, sewer and dancer, Natalka uses cultural knowledge and heritage as a catalyst and guide when developing her art. A new and emerging artist in the film field, Natalka Pucan tells stories of her people and nationhood. Natalka is beginning to develop stories through the film lens. Learning in the field to bring stories to life thru song and picture. Film making is another avenue for Natalka to express and share cultural stories and tales.

    STOF is a result of a collaboration of the Saugeen First Nation Employment and Training Centre, Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film and the Film Farm.

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    Everything is Right Here
    5:47 min 16mm to HDV Sd 2021 (Saugeen Nation/Canada)
    By Adrian Kahgee

    In Everything is Right Here, I present my metaphorical survival bag, as influenced by an Anishnaabekwe Elder’s words, ”Everything we need is right here! All we have to do is give thanks.” In giving thanks, we acknowledge that there is an interdependence amongst all our relations. I explore this framework of understanding through my film, which I hand processed using flowers. I chose to work with processing in dandelions, a plant that is not native to my territory, and with trilliums which are indigenous to our territory. At the center of my metaphorical bag is cultural knowledge that is deeply woven into the land and offered up to me in aid, as I navigate and adapt to change. As represented through my dress, made of an emergency survival blanket, I carry and wear that knowledge through change. I accept these gifts and the responsibilities that come with them, for everything I touch, I change.

    Kahgee from Saugeen First Nation territory, develops her film with dandelions (a colonial plant) and trilliums (indigenous to the Saugeen territory) to consider their histories (how they came to be on the land) and their medicinal properties. At the center of my metaphorical bag writes Kahgee, is cultural knowledge that is deeply woven into the land. Plants are also connected to understanding the world in terms of change, transformation, survival and interconnectedness. –Janine Marchessault & Philip Hoffman, “Blooming Harmonics: Feminist Ecologies of Process Cinema”, Expanded Nature, Lightcone, 2022.

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    Friday
    March.15
    9PM
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    • Friday, March. 15th, 9PM
      Harvard Fas CAMLab
      Lower Auditorium
      485 Broadway
      Cambridge MA 02138



    Philip Hoffman

    Collaborations & Meditations
    45-year practice



    The short films in this program reflect a mix of formal experiments and collaborations that often feed into and fuel some of my longer poetic narratives, essay and autobiographical films, spanning my 45-year practice. The first half of the program are mid-career works which experiment with techniques of fragmentation through shooting, editing and through photo-chemical processes. The second part of the program consists of more recent works, where the worlds of plants and animals, both domesticated and wild, rub up against a filmmaking ecology derived primarily from various hand-made filmmaking processes: flower-processing/tinting as well as biodegradation/decay techniques of celluloid. – Philip Hoffman

    Sponsored by RPM Festival, Harvard FAS CAMLab, Art and Art History Department & Cinema Studies Program at UMB, SCMS ExFM SIG (Society for Cinema and Media Studies Experimental Film and Media Special Interest Group)






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    river
    15 minutes 16mm Sil. & Sd., 1978-89
    thanks to Richard Kerr, Bruce Gauthier, Garrick Filewod

    Kokoro is for Heart
    7 min., 16mm Optical Printed, Sd., 1999
    Philip Hoffman (Camera, Optical Printing and Editing)
    Sound Composition and Performance: Gerry Shikatani

    Chimera
    15 min., S8 Kodachrome Optical Printed to 16mm, Sd., 1995
    Music: Tucker Zimmerman

    Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun)
    10 min., 35mm photogram to HDV, Sil., 2024.
    By Philip Hoffman in collaboration with Alexander Granger and Jason O’Hara

    Deep 1
    15 min., 35mm or 16mm Flower-Processed to HDV, Sd & Sil., 2023

    Total: 62 mins

    Post-screening discussion:
    Philip Hoffman & Ethan Berry

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    A film artist of memory and association, Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s pre-eminent diary filmmaker.

    Philip Hoffman was born in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, from families of European immigrant-settlers who came to Canada (Winnipeg/paternal and Kapuskasing/maternal) in the 1920’s. Hoffman’s filmmaking began with his boyhood interest in photography. As semi-official historian of family life, he became intrigued by questions of reality in photography and later in cinema. Hoffman’s autobiographical films are deeply troubled in their remembrances; he dusts off the family archive to examine how estrangement fuels a fascination with the familiar surroundings of home. He is keenly attuned to the shape of seeing, foregrounding the image and its creation as well as the manufacture of point of view.

    Hoffman’s recent work explores flower processing of motion picture film. This research resulted in his 2019 film, vulture, which received the Kodak Cinematic Award from Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Fugas Award at Documental Madrid. He is the artistic director of The Independent Imaging Retreat, a.k.a. Film Farm, which has been in existence for 30 years. In 2016 Hoffman received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts which is given for outstanding achievements in arts and culture in Canada. Currently Hoffman teaches `Process Cinema’ in the Cinema and Media Arts Department at York University in Toronto.

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    river
    15 minutes 16mm Sil. & Sd., 1978-89 Thanks to Richard Kerr, Bruce Gauthier, Garrick Filewod

    “river is a geographical portrait photographed over the course of a decade in four distinct styles, it is a meditation on natural flux and the inexorable temper of change, and the way technology mediates our encounters with our environment. It marks, above all, a return to a childhood pastoral retreat.” – Mike Hoolboom, Fringe Film in Canada, 1997.

    “The Saugeen River was named Sauking, ‘where it all flows out,’ by the Ojibwa in the early 1800s. It runs into Lake Huron, in central Ontario. The place where I know it is twenty miles south of Owen Sound, near Williamsford, where I spent lots of time in my youth exploring. The film is an archaeology of how I have come to know this river, shot over 12 years.”
    In 1977, I arrived with a wind-up 16mm Bolex and one roll of 16mm colour film a shot an in-camera passage, no editing; in 1981 I returned with a half inch, reel-to-reel black and white video portapak and captured the river’s flow; in 1984, indoors, I used a rear screen set-up to copy the footage shot in 1977. Finally, in 1989, I went for the first time beneath the surface of the water, the 16mm camera loaded with the ‘mysterious’ black and white hi-con printer stock, with thoughts of loss, and my uncles sudden death, on my mind. – P. Hoffman

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    Kokoro is for Heart
    7 min., 16mm Optical Printed, Sd., 1999.
    By Philip Hoffman (Camera, Optical Printing and Editing)
    Sound Composition and Performance: Gerry Shikatani

    Kokoro is for Heart features poet Gerry Shikatani and explores the relationships surrounding language, image and sound, set to the backdrop of a gravel pit down the road from the Film Farm.

    “…introducing a glitch into the material that can either be rejected as a mistake or accepted as part of the process. As Hoffman describes: When I got the footage back from the lab I was disappointed because of the periodic flipping of the image. I soon realised that the malfunctioning camera rendered the filmed-nature, unnatural…what is nature? What is natural?” – Kim Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, 2020

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    Chimera
    15 min., S8 Kodachrome Optical Printed to 16mm, Sd., 1995.
    Music: Tucker Zimmerman

    “The film consists of collected, diaristic images amassed through Hoffman’s travels. Uluru... Russian shoppers, a Cairo market, and day to day images from home and away... make floating appearances. These have been gathered on the run, and then reconstituted with an uncanny ephemeral floating rhythm, a dance of light, and replaying, with commendable control, the idea of visual music, visual jazz. Though the method of collection may have had an air of arbitrariness about it, the meticulous construction and focus on rhythm in the finished piece suggest an artist who has learnt to master technique so as to let it speak for him about ‘other’ things.” - Dirk de Bruyn, Melbourne Film Festival Catalogue 1996

    “In 1989 I finished the film Kitchener-Berlin and put a close to a cycle of work which dealt directly with myself, and how self is expressed/constructed cinematically. At the same time I took my old super-8 camera out of the closet, and began collecting images, using the single-frame-zoom. Cubist in its visual delivery, the single-frame-zoom builds a splayed reality that brings together disparate vantage points simultaneously, and serves as the glue that blends and bonds peoples, places and spaces in Chimera.
    The film was shot during a time when I had the opportunity to travel, a time of tremendous change when the Berlin Wall was coming down and the internet was going up, between 1989 and 1992 in Leningrad, London, Cairo, Helsinki, Sydney and Uluru. It was optically printed and edited in Helsinki in 1992; completed in Mount Forest in 1995.” - P. Hoffman

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    Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun)
    10 min., 35mm photogram to HDV, Sil., 2024.
    By Philip Hoffman in collaboration with Alexander Granger and Jason O’Hara

    These motion picture photograms were initiated through a five hour plunge into the darkroom; remembering the Galician celebration of flowers on the road in Baiona, near Vigo in 2019, here too we made a floral carpet of photograms. – P.Hoffman

    A Procession of herbs “emerge in all their structures, colors and epidermis. The motion picture itself becomes a plant which delicately stretches petioles and petals.” – Séance #3-Sentir Comme une Plante, Muséum National d’Histoire naturelle, Paris.

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    Deep 1
    15 min., 35mm or 16mm Flower-Processed to HDV, Sd & Sil., 2023

    In Deep 1 winged and four legged animals, both wild and domestic, traverse the frame marked by a hand-made practice.

    Filmed from 2020 - 2022, processed and decayed with hyacinth & lichen extract, the film is built on a sustainable practice: images and the imaging making process evolve out of "a complex material engagement with an eco-system that draws out the expressive possibilities of living things beyond conventional forms of representation". -Kim Knowles on Hoffman's practice from “Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices”, 2020.

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    Saturday
    March.16
    7PM
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    • Saturday, March. 16th, 7PM
      Harvard Fas CAMLab
      Lower Auditorium
      485 Broadway
      Cambridge MA 02138



    Jim Finn

    THE APOCALYPTIC IS THE MOTHER OF ALL CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
    Written & Directed by Jim Finn

    Runtime: 63mins52secs, 2023


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    A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity. The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology and influence is told by piecing together 20th Century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes with flute, acoustic guitar and mellotron contrasts with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Montano and filmmaker Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journeys. The film tries to capture the disturbing reaction Paul and his letters had in the early days of Christianity. The use of live action, animation, found footage and original music was a way to recover his biography from the brains of 20th Century humans so that in some perhaps misguided Utopian impulse, we can build something new out of it for the future. “

    Sponsored by RPM Festival, Harvard FAS CAMLab, Art and Art History Department & Cinema Studies Program at UMB, SCMS ExFM SIG (Society for Cinema and Media Studies Experimental Film and Media Special Interest Group)






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    “Holy reconstructions of the sons of God, Jim Finn! Our favorite political atomizer gets holy in his new documentary crusade and decides to tell the story of the apostle Paul…”

    — Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente 2023

    “The curious title refers to a paper of the German theologist Ernst Käsemann, whose research snatched Paul from the grasp of the Antisemites who had usurped him and placed him back in the tradition of Jewish mysticism. That is also the objective of Jim Finn’s film as it gleefully dissects two thousand years of appropriation and propaganda in a wild ride through history.”

    —DOK Leipzig

    Post-screening discussion:
    Jim Finn & Jocelyn E. Marshall

    Dr. Jocelyn E. Marshall is faculty in the Departments of Visual & Media Arts and Writing, Literature, & Publishing at Emerson College. She previously was a Dissertation Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. Their interdisciplinary projects focus on contemporary U.S.-based diasporic women and LGBTQ+ artists and writers, researching relationships between historical trauma and queer and feminist activism. Her research has been supported by the Mark Diamond Research Foundation, New York Public Library, J. Burton Harter Foundation, Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory, the Trauma Research Foundation, and several home institutions and professional organizations. They have work featured or forthcoming in the Journal of American Culture, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Public Art Dialogue, and Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, among others. She has also curated exhibitions of contemporary art, including Being In-Between | In-Between Being (UB Art Galleries, 2020-21) and Creativity in the Time of Covid-19 (Buffalo Arts Studio, Buffalo Game Space, and Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center, 2023). In 2022, they co-edited a collection on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Addressing Gender-Based Violence in the Classroom, and in Spring 2023 edited an issue of Rutgers University’s feminist journal Rejoinder, themed “Textual-Sexual-Spiritual: Artistic Practice and Other Rituals as Queer Becoming and Beyond.” She currently co-chairs the Gender & Feminisms Caucus at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies and is a contributing editor at Art Journal Open for the Feminist Interview Project Series.

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    ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

    Jim Finn’s movies have been called ‘Utopian comedies’ and ‘trompe l’oeil films’. The New York Times wrote, “Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art, Mr. Finn’s meticulous, deadpan mockumentaries often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe." His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His films have screened at international, avant-garde and underground film festivals like Rotterdam, Valdivia, BAFICI and the New York Film Festival as well as museums, cinematheques and microcinemas. He was born in St. Louis in 1968 and was raised by Catholic Midwestern salespeople.

    Aura Photograph of the director by Glenna van Nostrand

    DIRECTOR STATEMENT

    When I began the research into Paul the Apostle, I didn’t realize how many new books were written annually about him with new translations, interpretations and historical research. For scholars, the gospels and letters of Paul are archeological treasures revealing new things for each generation about the times they were written in and the people they were written for. I structured the film about Paul’s life, obsessions and legends on ancient Greek words in his letters: Apocalypsis (unmasking, unveiling, revelation), Charismata (divinely conferred gifts), Porneia (illicit sexual activity weirdly translated as fornication), Ethnos (pagan gentiles), Ekklesia (democratic assembly of believers), Koinonia (fellowship), Stenazo (the groaning pain of laboring through childbirth), Pistis (faithfulness or loyalty) and Parousia (presence of God, the arrival of the Kingdom of God on Earth).



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    Saturday
    March.16
    9PM
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    • Saturday, March. 16th, 9PM
      Harvard Fas CAMLab
      Lower Auditorium
      485 Broadway
      Cambridge MA 02138



    Breathscapes

    Curated by Kalpana Subramanian

    Thirteen experimental works that take us on a journey into landscapes of ‘ cinematic breath .’ Piercing through layers of cinematic materiality and consciousness, the films in this program explore the embodied and affective materialities of the medium. Remediating the world through memory, absence, loss, rapture, longing, they collectively evoke a 'breathful' poetics of cinema. This program, curated by Kalpana Subramanian features works by Sandeep Ashwath, Louise Bourque, Crystal Z Campbell, Erin Espelie, Ja’tovia Gary, Janie Geiser, Anna Kipervaser, Lynn Marie Kirby, Kim Munro, Peter Rose, Lei Lei + Thomas Sauvin and Erica Sheu.

    Sponsored by RPM Festival, Harvard FAS CAMLab, Art and Art History Department & Cinema Studies Program at UMB, SCMS ExFM SIG (Society for Cinema and Media Studies Experimental Film and Media Special Interest Group)


    Kalpana Subramanian, PhD is an artist-filmmaker and educator interested in experimenting with film and media through transcultural and interdisciplinary approaches. Her films have been screened at international festivals including the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Toronto International FIlm Festival, Antimatter Media Arts Festival, Flaherty NYC, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and ULTRA Cinema MX to name a few. She has received an Audience Award at the Documentary Festival of History and Archeology (Italy, 2015), an Award for Creative Approach as well as Award for Cinematography (2003) at the Montana CINE International Film Festival) and a Jury's special mention at the CMS Vatavaran Film Festival among other honors. A recipient of a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts award, she is also a recipient of a Fulbright Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder (2015-16), a Humanities Institute fellowship at the University at Buffalo (2022-23) and a UK Environmental Film Fellowship (2006). Subramanian curates film programs and is also a founder of the two series: Cinema of Breath and Meterial Universe. At present she is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo.




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    Transcript
    | 2019, 3'7'' min, color, silent |
    - Erica Sheu


    Incantation
    | 1968-1972, 8'54'', color, sound |
    - Peter Rose


    Grihastha
    | 2020, 1'58'', BW, sound |
    - Sandeep Ashwath


    Gavia stellata (Sea Mew Set with Stars)
    | 2023, 3', color, sound |
    - Erin Espelie


    to hold, to miss
    | 2017, 2' 50'', color, sound |
    - Lynn Marie Kirby


    Currency
    | 2019, 2'53'', color, sound |
    - Crystal Z Campbell


    Remains
    | 2011, 5', color, sound |
    - Louise Bourque


    Absent Objects
    | 2020, 7'41'', color, sound |
    - Janie Geiser


    Recycled
    | 2013, 5'40'', color, sound |
    - Lei Lei + Thomas Sauvin


    An Ecstatic Experience
    | 2015, 6'11'', color, sound |
    - Ja’tovia Gary


    The Futorical Society
    | 2023, 17' , color, sound
    - Kim Munro


    pài-la̍k ē-poo
    | 2020, 1'57, color, sound |
    - Erica Sheu


    With the Tide, with the tide
    | 2022, 2'47, color, silent |
    - Anna Kipervaser


    Total: 70mins



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    Transcript 臨摹
    | 2019, 3'7'' min, color, silent |
    - Erica Sheu

    A fragile film on intimacy. The filmmaker transcribes feelings on film and Sunprint paper with Baby's-breath flowers, its shadow, and old love letters of her father.

    Erica Sheu/徐璐 is a Taiwanese experimental filmmaker whose work reflects spontaneous playfulness, poignancy, and poetic interactions among diaries, cross-generational memories, tactilities, and celluloid film. Her experimental short films have been shown at TIFF Wavelengths, NYFF Currents, IFFR Bright Future, EXiS, TIDF, among others. She holds an MFA in Film/Video from CalArts and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Sheu is a founding member of the Taiwan-based experimental film collective, ReaRflex 後照鏡.

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    Incantation
    | 1968-1972, 8'54'', color, sound |
    - Peter Rose

    Using rapidly edited, superimposed images of plants, trees, water, the sun and the moon, Incantation weaves a dynamic tapestry of organic forms and textures, combining its images with a fierce rhythmic intensity so as to suggest a kind of natural force. The film was shot entirely in the camera in 8mm. The track is breath-based and was derived from Islamic liturgy.

    Since 1968 Peter Rose has made over forty films, tapes, performances and installations. Many of the early works raise intriguing questions about the nature of time, space, light, and perception and draw upon Rose’s background in mathematics and on the influence of structuralist filmmakers. He subsequently became interested in language as a subject and in video as a medium and generated a substantial body of work that played with the feel and form of sense, concrete texts, political satire, oddball performance, and a kind of intellectual comedy. Recent video installations have involved a return to an examination of landscape, time, and vision. Rose has been widely exhibited, both nationally and internationally, having been included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the Centre Pompidou, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Film Society at Lincoln Center, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pew Foundation, the Independence Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and is fond of writing descriptions in the third person.

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    Grihastha
    | 2020, 1'58'', BW, sound |
    - Sandeep Ashwath

    Grihastha is the second stage in the four stages of human life in the Hindu Brahmin tradition. Here the Brahmin boy with the sacred thread becomes a man, taking on the role of a householder. The film celebrates him as a sexual being, and breaks the taboo by queering the gaze.

    Sandeep C. Ashwath is an animator and anthropologist. As an animator, he has worked with traditional forms of Indian storytelling and then moved to exploring verse/text through digitally hand drawn animation. He is a graduate of the Royal College of Art - London, and is currently the Associate Dean of the School of Media, Arts and Sciences at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru, India.

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    Gavia stellata (Sea Mew Set with Stars)
    | 2023, 3', color, sound |
    - Erin Espelie

    Replication in "contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise." (Lev Manovich) Reproducing original watercolors for The Birds of America—which were augmented with friable pastel, chalk, and crayon—caused the naturalist John James Audubon (born Jean Rabin) much consternation; for the red-throated loon (plate 202), he relied upon engraver Robert Havell, who charged £114 for one ream (500 sheets) of paper, copper plates, tin shipping cases, and the work of etching, printing, and aquatinting.

    Erin Espelie is a writer, editor, and filmmaker whose work connects with current scientific research, questions of epistemology, environmental precarity, and fallout from an increasingly image saturated culture. Her poetic, nonfiction films have shown at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute's London Film Festival, the Whitechapel Gallery, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Crossroads Film Festival at SFMoMA, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Imagine Science Film Festival, and more. Her feature-length film, The Lanthanide Series, premiered at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen and won the grand prize at the Seoul International New Media Festival in 2015; an interview about the film appears in The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Oxford University Press, 2019).

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    to hold, to miss
    | 2017, 2' 50'', color, sound |
    - Lynn Marie Kirby

    The video is a document of a Venice Biennale intervention in 2017 of the same title. The public was invited to sit with me in the making of attempts to find the tender gesture from a stolen Giovanni Bellini painting. Bellini’s “Madonna and Child” painted in 1480 was stolen from the Madonna dell’Orto church in 1993.
    Bathed in a scent created for the project, dressed as the missing Madonna, I sat silently in one of two chairs in the square outside the church where the painting had been stolen, and held members of the public in attempts to find the missing tender gesture from the painting.
    No images of the performance were taken. As a document of the event, 16mm film was exposed, without a camera, to the light of the site.
    After processing the 16mm film, the film was transferred to video, and sounds and images taken from the time of the performance were embedded on top of the site exposure.
    Site performance in collaboration with Sarah Bird.

    Lynn Marie Kirby is occupied with questions of place, the residue of history, and liminal states. Her practice engages different sensory systems, depends on improvisation and collaboration, accidents that make her jump, and forms of contemplation. Kirby has shown at galleries, museums and film festivals around the world. Many generous institutions, foundations, and people have supported her projects. Kirby is Professor Emerita of Graduate Fine Arts and Film at California College of the Arts.

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    Currency
    | 2019, 2'53'', color, sound |
    - Crystal Z Campbell

    CURRENCY (2019) is a sound film of refusal––a woman wears bygone forms of currency on the tips of her hair while preserving the greatest currency for herself.

    Crystal Z Campbell , a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps––from the narrative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks' “immortal” cell line, and gentrification via a 35mm film relic salvaged from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn. Campbell’s most recent film, REVOLVER, is an archive of pareidolia (a situation in which someone sees a pattern or image of something that does not exist) narrated by a descendent of Exodusters. Campbell’s creative practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, film, writing, and site-specific installations.

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    Remains
    | 2011 ,4' 50 ,color, sound |
    - Louise BOURQUE

    "The mother figure revisited – a recurring theme in my work. A celluloid deterioration that addresses the ephemeral quality of the captured moment (the present) while revealing the insistent power of human presence in even the most deteriorated of states. The image of the mother is like a ghost that we won't let go. A lament for the inevitable loss of legibility." – Louise Bourque

    Louise Bourque is a French Canadian filmmaker who studied cinema at Concordia University in Montreal and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After living abroad for thirty years, in the United States and elsewhere, she has recently returned to her native Edmonton, New Brunswick. Her films have been shown in nearly fifty countries and broadcast by PBS and the Sundance Channel in the US, as well as on Télé-Québec in Canada and SBS in Australia. Her work has been presented in prestigious museums and galleries all over the world, including at the Museum of Civilization and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec in Quebec, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

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    Absent Objects
    | 2020, 7'41'', color, sound |
    - Janie Geiser

    Absent Objects Film by Janie Geiser
    Sound design: Janie Geiser
    Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
    Digital Mastering: Astra Price

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

    Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, film, installation, and visual art. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its investigation of memory, power, and loss. Geiser is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, and a Creative Capital awardee.
    “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,2004).
    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 BAMPFA. Her film The Red Book is part of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The Academy of Motion Pictures Archive has selected her work for preservation, and The Fourth Watch (2000) was selected by Film Comment as one of the top ten experimental films of the past decade.

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    Recycled
    | 2013, 5'40'', color, sound |
    - Lei Lei + Thomas Sauvin

    The following images come from negatives salvaged from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, where they had been sent to be filtered for their silver nitrate content. Over the years French collector Thomas Sauvin built this archive of more than half a million 35mm negatives, depicting the capital and the life of her inhabitants over the last thirty years. From 2011 to 2013, Chinese artist Lei Lei selected over 3000 photos to create the animation you are about to see, an almost epic portrait of anonymous humanity. The film is the winner of Grand Prix shorts - non-narrative at the 2013 Holland International animation film festival, Nenarativní animace at the 12th Anifest International animation festival, Special Mentions by the jury members in 12th Countryside Animafest Cyprus. and Official Selected by Annecy International Animation Festival 2013.

    Lei Lei (b. 1985 in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province) is an experimental animation artist also working with video art, painting, installation, music and VJ performance. He received a master's degree in animation from Tsinghua University (2009) and his film This is LOVE was awarded the Best Narrative Short at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2010. Recycled won the Winner Grand Prix shorts - non-narrative at Holland Animation Film Festival (HAFF, 2013). He has been on the jury of the Zagreb Animation Festival and HAFF. Honored by an Asian Cultural Council grant (2014) he was a faculty at CalArts Experimental Animation program in 2017. He was invited to be a New Academy Member for the Short Films and Feature Animation branch in 2018. His first feature film Breathless Animals was selected by Berlinale Forum in 2019.

    Thomas Sauvin is a French collector and artist who has bee salvaging discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, since 2009. His Beijing Silvermine archive, one of the largest archival projects in China, now encompassing over 850000 anonymous photographs spanning 1985-2005, thus allowing the reconstruction of a large part of the history of popular analogue photography. Sauvin has had exhibitions of his work, and published through Archive of Modern Conflict.

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    An Ecstatic Experience
    | 2015, 6'11'', color, sound | - Ja’tovia Gary
    By Marcel Beltran

    A meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration.

    Ja’Tovia M. Gary is an artist and filmmaker. Gary’s work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed while fleshing out a nuanced and multivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film, experimental video art, and installation Gary charts the ways structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence.

    In 2017 Gary was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking. Her award-winning films, An Ecstatic Experience and Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) have screened at festivals, cinemas, and institutions worldwide including Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Atlanta Film Festival, the Schomburg Center, MoMa PS1, MoCA Los Angeles, Harvard Film Archives, New Orleans Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and elsewhere. She has received generous support from Sundance Documentary fund, the Jerome Foundation, Doc Society, among others.

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    The Futorical Society
    | 2023, 17' , color, sound
    - Kim Munro

    The Futorical Society (and the woman who killed the weeds) weaves together precious and curious objects, local wildlife, built and natural landscapes and the story of the little-known agricultural hero, Vera Molnar, who saved the local grain industry in the Mallee region of rural Victoria. Through the interplay between history and future, and fixed and ephemeral, The Futorical Society presents a way to reimagine the past, present and future of settler-colonial Australia.

    Kim Munro has a background in photography and fine art and is a documentary researcher and practitioner who works across installation, film, audio and performance. Her work explores entangled histories of place, people and archives as well as ways of being together. Her work has been screened on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as well as at local and international galleries and festivals. She has participated in residencies in Iceland, regional Victoria and Adelaide. Kim’s current projects include The Art of Work is a Work of Art, a documentary theatre installation about the feminist and experimental performance company Vitalstatistix. She has also organised documentary events and symposia and run filmmaking workshops around climate change in the Solomon Islands with UN Habitat.
    Kim has written on a range of documentary styles, genres and forms and is the co-editor of Constructions of the Real: Intersections of documentary-based film practice and theory (2023, Intellect). Kim was the conference programmer for the Australian International Documentary Conferences (AIDC) and in 2023 founded the Adelaide-based Documentary Film Society which is dedicated to showing local and international nonfiction films to new audiences. Currently she is based at the University of South Australia in Adelaide as a lecturer in film and media.

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    pài-la̍k ē-poo 拜六下晡
    | 2020, 1'57, color, sound |
    - Erica Sheu

    A half-moon on the blue sky. A quiet offering connects the unreachable world with the physical earth. A Japanese childhood song comes in the wind. In Taiwanese, we promised Grandma that the next time we visit is Saturday afternoon. (pài-la̍k ē-poo means Saturday afternoon in Taiwanese Holouē.)

    Erica Sheu/徐璐 is a Taiwanese experimental filmmaker whose work reflects spontaneous playfulness, poignancy, and poetic interactions among diaries, cross-generational memories, tactilities, and celluloid film. Her experimental short films have been shown at TIFF Wavelengths, NYFF Currents, IFFR Bright Future, EXiS, TIDF, among others. She holds an MFA in Film/Video from CalArts and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Sheu is a founding member of the Taiwan-based experimental film collective, ReaRflex 後照鏡.

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    With the Tide, with the tide
    | 2022, 2'47, color, silent |
    - Anna Kipervaser

    I know, you're a seasonal beast
    Like the starfish that drift in with the tide
    With the tide
    So until your blood runs
    To meet the next full moon
    Your madness fits in nicely with my own
    With my own
    Your lunacy fits neatly with my own
    My very own
    - from Sea Song by Robert Wyatt

    Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism, and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and digital video.

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    Tuesday
    April 16th
    7PM
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    • Tuesday, April 16th, 7PM
      Colgate University
      Hamilton, NY

    TRANSFORMATIONS
    RPM: 10th Anniversary Screening Program Two



    RPM (Revolutions per Minute) is a Boston-based, artist-run festival devoted to experimental cinematic work in animation, documentary, essay film, installation, and audiovisual performance. This touring program features 16mm films by Dianna Barrie, Ryan Marino, Magical Approach (Brittany Gravely & Kenneth Linehan), Moviate (Josh Drake, James Hollenbaugh, Jeremy Moss, Caleb Smith), Tomonari Nishikawa, Kathryn Ramey, Kathleen Rugh, Richard Tuohy, Douglas Urbank, and Josh Weissbach. Exploring the formal and conceptual possibilities of the medium with distinctive approaches, their films showcase the diversity of works shown at RPM Festival in recent years. This program is organized by Benny Shaffer and Wenhua Shi.


    Winter’s First Moons - Kathleen Rugh
    2018, 3 mins, USA, color, sound, 16mm

    Radiant Forms - Ryan Marino
    2022, 7 mins, USA, color, sound, 16mm

    Bathers - Douglas Urbank
    2019, 3 mins 43 secs, USA, B/W, sound, 16mm

    Ill Composto - Moviate (Josh Drake, James Hollenbaugh, Jeremy Moss, Caleb Smith)
    2023, 3 mins 48 secs, USA, color, sound, 16mm

    LIMEN - Kathryn Ramey
    2019, USA, B/W, sound, 16mm

    Prologue to the Tarot: Glenna - Magical Approach (Brittany Gravely & Kenneth Linehan)
    2018, 6 mins 43 secs, USA, color, sound, 16mm

    Amusement Ride - Tomonari Nishikawa
    2019, 6 mins, Japan, color, sound, 16mm

    Water Mining (Eaton Canyon) - Kate Lain
    2021, 5mins10secs, USA, color, sound, 16mm to HD

    601 Revir Drive - Josh Weissbach
    2017, 5 mins 35 secs, USA, B/W, sound, 16mm

    In and Out a Window - Richard Tuohy
    2021, 12 mins, Australia, B/W, sound, 16mm

    Self Portrait with Bag - Dianna Barrie
    2022, 6 mins, Australia, Color, Sound, 16mm

    Total: 70mins

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    Winter’s First Moons - Kathleen Rugh
    2018, 3 mins, USA, color, sound, 16mm

    following the winter solstice, the longest nights of the year prevail. Through these darkest nights the moon reaches to its fullest. Filmed over numerous nights the moons of different phases are brought together in the black sky. Through multiple exposures on film and editing created in-camera, the moons move and bounce off one another in unpredictable ways. Official NASA sound recordings from space help activate their actions. The stoic moon breaks free and gravitates at will.

    Kathleen Rugh is a filmmaker and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her film and photographic work has been exhibited in screenings and galleries throughout the US and internationally, including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Images Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], EXiS Experimental Film Festival, and the Athens International Film and Video Festival. She has received funding for her films through the New York State Council on the Arts.

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    Radiant Forms - Ryan Marino
    2022, 7 mins, USA, color, sound, 16mm

    Luminous forms merging in time.

    Ryan Marino is an interdisciplinary artist working with film, sound, and collage. His 16mm films explore the ethereality of time, light, and space. In 2010 he founded Imminent Frequencies, an imprint for ​experimental music.



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    Bathers - Douglas Urbank
    2019, 3 mins 43 secs, USA, B/W, sound, 16mm

    Three friends, the beach, the waves, their brief time together.

    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, including nationally at Revolutions Per Minute Festival, Boston, Massachusetts; Microscope Gallery and Millennium Film Workshop in New York; San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Film Festival; Moviate Underground Film Festival, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Seattle, Washington; and internationally at Mire Lab’s PRISME festival, Nantes, France; and curated programs including, Zumzeig Cinema, Barcelona; Laboratorio Experimental de Cine program, Mexico City; Artist Film Workshop, Melbourne, Australia; and others. He was a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships Film & Video finalist in both 2017 and 2019.

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    Ill Composto - Moviate (Josh Drake, James Hollenbaugh, Jeremy Moss, Caleb Smith)
    2023, 3 mins 48 secs, USA, color, sound, 16mm

    A collaborative Dadaist/exquisite corpse film on the theme of waste by four members of the Harrisburg-based collective Moviate.

    Process: A found, expired 100’ roll of 16mm color negative film was split into four parts and photographed separately by each participant. Then each section was developed in a homemade b&w developer from the participant’s own compostable waste. The negative was then printed to 16mm color print stock on a makeshift DIY contact printer along with found optical sound. Lastly, it was assembled in the Dadaist poetry method by cutting the printed film into pieces, placing them into a large wooden box with holes, randomly pulling strips of film out through the holes one at a time and splicing them together in that order.

    Moviate is a filmmaker-run curatorial collective based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

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    LIMEN - Kathryn Ramey
    2019, USA, B/W, sound, 16mm

    threshold. between two states of being.
    the boundary of perception.
    long synopsis or whatever:
    I'm not a fan of over explaining lyrical films.

    Mostly because the reason I make films without words (which isn't very often) is because words fail me. This is a horror film. If I must say what it is about, it is trying to capture the feeling of slipping into a deep depression and the long road out. The title, LIMEN, comes from the word liminality and was inspired by the work on rites of passage by anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner who characterized the liminal phase as being "betwixt and between" neither what one was before, nor what was is to become after the transition is complete. This footage was shot while I was emerging from a very serious post-partum depression episode and was edited three years later after the suicide of a close friend and colleague. It is a primal scream. -- KR

    Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. She is a recent recipient of Guggenheim fellow, LEF Foundation fellow and Creative Capital grantee.

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    Prologue to the Tarot: Glenna - Magical Approach (Brittany Gravely & Kenneth Linehan)
    2018, 6 mins 43 secs, USA, color, sound, 16mm

    Described by the filmmakers as a “cinematic tarot card”, Brittany Gravely and Ken Linehan’s twice-exposed Prologue to the Tarot: Glenna is a shimmering portrait of the titular Glenna, accompanied by drapes and opulent crystals worthy of Kenneth Anger or Josef von Sternberg.

    Brittany Gravely is a multi-talented artist. She is a designer and a publicist for Harvard Film Archive, an artist organizer (AGX Film Collective), and a film festival programmer (the Sleeping Giant Film Festival).

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    Amusement Ride - Tomonari Nishikawa
    2019, 6 mins, Japan, color, sound, 16mm

    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’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.

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    Water Mining (Eaton Canyon) - Kate Lain
    2021, 5mins10secs, USA, color, sound, 16mm to HD

    Water Mining (Eaton Canyon) is a nature document(ary) made *with* a stream, rather than about it. Its images come from a combination of cyanotype, a blue-and-white photographic process dating back to the 1840s, and actual plant material adhered to physical film. I hand-coated clear 16mm leader with cyanotype chemicals, then used sunlight to make photogram-style, cameraless exposures of plant matter I had gathered in and around the stream in Eaton Canyon. Cyanotypes are processed using water, and for this film, I used stream water that I had also collected from the canyon. I approached the film as though the stream, what was in it, its surroundings, the film, the chemicals, and I were all extensions of one another.

    Kate Lain is a Los Angeles–area multidisciplinary artist working in film, video, clay, and other media. Her experimental film and video work verges on documentary and spans a wide range—from essay film to stopmotion collage to impressionist portraiture. Her works have screened at festivals, microcinemas, museums, and other spaces across North America and Europe.

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    601 Revir Drive - Josh Weissbach
    2017, 5 mins 35 secs, USA, B/W, sound, 16mm

    A series of spatial limits are defined while a maker imbibes. Interdependence is inherited after a substance cannot be shook. An animal carefully guards an outlined space as a river runs backwards.

    Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. He lives in a house next to an abandoned village with his wife, two daughters, and three cats. His films and videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Mono No Aware, 25 FPS Festival, and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. He has won jury prizes at Videoex, ICDOCS, $100 Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival. He is the recipient of the 2008 Cary Grant Film Award from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, a 2013 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Emerging Artists from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and a 2015 LEF Fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.

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    In and Out a Window - Richard Tuohy
    2021, 12 mins, Australia, B/W, sound, 16mm

    Our front window from inside and out.

    Richard Tuohy is one of the most active experimental film artists currently working on celluloid in Australia. His film ‘Iron-Wood’ won first prize (ex aequo) at ‘Abstracta 2009’ experimental film festival in Rome. He runs Nanolab in Australia – the specialist small gauge film processing laboratory. He actively encourages other artists to work with cine film through his Artist Film Workshop initiative (see artistfilmworkshop.org). He is also a founding director of the Australian International Experimental Film Festival.
    In 2006 he and Dianna Barrie started 'nanolab' as an artist run film laboratory offering super 8 processing. In 2009 he began submitting his films in international film festivals. Richard also helps to convene the Artist Film Workshop - a screening and educational forum in Melbourne for encouraging the use of film in art practice. He has run numerous AFW workshops both at nanolab and in Melbourne.

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    Self Portrait with Bag - Dianna Barrie
    2022, 6 mins, Australia, Color, Sound, 16mm

    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.

    Dianna Barrie found her way into filmmaking as a middle ground between abstract music and philosophy. She and her partner spend a significant amount of time each year touring their joint film programs and conducting workshops in hand-made film practice.

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    Tuesday
    Feb.13
    7PM
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    • Tuesday, Feb. 13th, 7PM
      Colgate University
      Hamilton
      NY



    Passages

    RPM: 10th Anniversary Screening Program One



    RPM (Revolutions per Minute) was founded in 2013. The exhibition RPM: Sound Art China, co-curated by Dajuin Yao and Wenhua Shi, featured 30 sound artists and was held at Colgate University and at Experimental Intermedia in NYC. The following year, the exhibition traveled to Shanghai and Hong Kong, and then expanded its scope to encompass a broader media art and experimental cinema landscape. In 2019, RPM relocated to Boston. Two touring programs celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the inaugural program at Colgate University. The first program, titled Passages, features works by Bill Brown, Janie Geiser, Ariana Gerstein, Laura Kraning, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, Bernd Lützeler, Sharon Mooney, Hiroya Sakurai, Kelly Sears, and Xiao Zhang. This program is organized by Benny Shaffer and Wenhua Shi.

    The annual festival features a series of ten screening programs along with other exhibitions that include audiovisual performance and installation works. RPM24 will screen 70 short pieces by artists and collectives from over fifteen countries. Each year, one or two programs are dedicated to pioneers in the field. Past festivals showcased the works of Saul Levine, Barbara Hammer, Luther Price, Peggy Ahwesh, and Janie Geiser. Last year a solo retrospective program featured Vincent Grenier’s lifelong cinematic practice at The Brattle Theatre. In 2023, RPM hosted a total of twenty screening programs and performances, as well as five touring programs.

    RPM24 will be held at UMass Boston, Goethe-Institut Boston, Boston City Hall, CAMLab (Harvard University), and the Brattle Theater..






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    XCTRY - Bill Brown
    2018, 6:18 mins, USA, color, sound, 16mm to HD

    A throwing forth - Xiao Zhang
    2023, 6mins, China/USA, color, 16mm to HD , Sound

    The Stream (XII-II) - Hiroya Sakurai
    2022, 7 mins, Japan, Color, Sound

    Absent Objects - Janie Geiser
    2020, 7:41 mins, color, sound

    _galore (Digital Version) - Bernd Lützeler
    2019, 9mins, color, sound

    Phase II - Kelly Sears
    2022, 6:30 minutes, Color, Sound

    I'm sorry I'm late - Sharon Mooney
    2023, 7:30 mins, Color, Sound

    de-composition - Laura Kraning
    2023, 2:40 mins, color, HD, Sound

    In Littleness - Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu
    2022, 8:15 mins, color, 8mm to HD, Sound

    Traces with Elikem - Ariana Gerstein
    2018, 7 mins, B/W, Desktop Scanner & Digital Video, Sound

    Total: 70mins

    Post-screening discussion:
    Wenhua Shi & Lindsey Lodhie

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    XCTRY
    2018, 6:18 mins, USA, color, sound, 16mm to HD
    By Bill Brown

    A pocket-sized travelogue about leaving one hometown and looking for the next one.

    Bill Brown has produced films on the United States–Mexico border, North Dakota missile silos, the Trans-Canada Highway, among other places. The films have been exhibited at numerous film festivals and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[4][5] He describes his films as postcards with a pretty picture but instead of words on the back, his films are narrated with voiceover[6][1]. Brown is also the author of a zine called Dream Whip[7] which currently has 15 issues, and the book Saugus to the Sea (ISBN 978-0968974407). In 2001 Brown received the Creative Capital Award in the Discipline of Moving Image.[8]

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    A throwing forth
    2023, 6mins, China/USA, color,
    16mm to HD , Sound
    By Xiao Zhang

    A time remnant inhabits a personal space with a secret, private, unspoken word of one's being. Sliding planes of window and time, throwing drifts of the inner and the outer self, the film seeks in the interval of memory for a transitory reunion with my family.

    Xiao Zhang is an artist-filmmaker from China living in Los Angeles. She received her BFA at Beijing Film Academy in 2020 and currently holds an MFA in Film/Video at CalArts. Her practice centers on personal poetics which derives from cross-generation memory and diaristic approaches. It continues by employing methods drawn from handcrafted celluloid film and expanded cinema. Her work often offers a complex fluctuation between material reality and subjective experience.

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    The Stream (XII-II)
    2022, 7 mins, Japan, Color, Sound
    By Hiroya Sakurai

    Human beings act on nature in order to keep their lives.
    From their activities, several streams are generated and landscapes are transformed.
    I focus on the beauty of transformation created through the relation between human activities and nature, and want to express the beauty as a kind of visual ballet.
    In this film, I shot a scene of burning of reeds fields.
    When the reeds fields are burned carbon dioxide is generated, but newly generated carbon dioxide is absorbed by the spring reeds sprouts in their process of growth. Whole processes are carbon neutralized. - HS

    Hiroya Sakurai
    Born in Yokohama, Japan.
    Professor, Seian University of Art and Design.
    Sakurai’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and J.Paul Getty Trust.
    Sakurai was awarded at “35th Asolo Art Film Festival (2016)", Italy, "39th Tokyo Video Festival", "18th FILE 2017 ", São Paulo (2017) and "56th Ann Arbor Film Festival" (2018). Exhibitions include "4th Sydney Biennale (1982),"62nd Melbourne International Film Festival"(2013),"58th San Francisco International Film Festival" (2015) and "24th Rhode Island International Film Festival"(2020)

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    Absent Objects
    2020, 7:41 mins, color, sound
    By Janie Geiser

    Absent Objects Film by Janie Geiser
    Sound design: Janie Geiser
    Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
    Digital Mastering: Astra Price

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

    Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, film, installation, and visual art. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its investigation of memory, power, and loss. Geiser is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, and a Creative Capital awardee.
    “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,2004).
    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 BAMPFA. Her film The Red Book is part of the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The Academy of Motion Pictures Archive has selected her work for preservation, and The Fourth Watch (2000) was selected by Film Comment as one of the top ten experimental films of the past decade.

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    _galore (Digital Version)
    2019, 9mins, color, sound
    By Bernd Lützeler

    The streetscapes of contemporary Indian metros are largely dominated by products. The bazaar expands into all other parts of the city and claims a large percentage of the available public space. The vast majority of the local shops is lacking the facility of a shop window. Instead, their architecture can be described as a garage style, windowless, rectangular box, open to the front. Stepping into such a shop can be like entering a complete new world: Many of them are literally filled with products galore up to the ceiling. The product itself serves as the interior design. Every day hundreds of busses with thousands of shop owners and their family members come from the surrounding villages and small towns into the city. Especially during the rush hours the market gets overrun by an avalanche of customers who seem to enjoy their high-density shopping experience. Shopping galore. Products galore. Profits galore.

    Artist and filmmaker Bernd Lützeler lives and works between Berlin and Mumbai. In his works he explores techniques of moving image production and presentation in relation with their form and perception. Loops, found footage and jugaad (diy) technologies are an integral part of his films and expanded cinema works. His travels to Mumbai have a strong impact on his work that often looks into the aesthetics of popular Indian cinema and television within the urban context. His films have been shown at venues and festivals worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Berlinale International Film Festival, Rotterdam, San Francisco Cinematheque, Views from the Avant-Garde and many more. Bernd is an active member of the artist-run analogue filmlab LaborBerlin.

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    Phase II
    2022, 6:30 minutes, Color, Sound
    By Kelly Sears

    In the near future, real estate developers deploy sonic weapons used at protests to clear neighborhoods for high-end high rises. On the front lines are sound medics that tend to those injured by the assaults. As they respond, one member of the team documents the incidents to create a future archive for other sonic activists.
    For Phase II, the filmmaker walked around areas of rapid development in her city and took thousands of photographs. This animated, speculative fiction/non-fiction archive maps out more aggressive eviction and deployment tactics to come.

    Kelly Sears creates hybrid speculative fiction and nonfiction animations. She animates appropriated source imagery that suggests an official process, order, or account – ranging from instructional guides to chronicles of specific histories. Through cutting up, collaging, and untethering the images from their intended purpose, she shapes alternate narratives by transforming the histories, behaviors, and ideologies embedded in these frames. Through these animations, we glean bits of history that are recognizable but unsteady.
    Her award-winning films have screened at Sundance, Slamdance, South by Southwest, American Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Festival, MoMA, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Houston, and Union Docs. Sears has had solo programs of her work at the Pacific Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Portland Art Museum, and the San Francisco Cinematheque.

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    I'm sorry I'm late
    2023, 7:30 mins, Color, Sound
    By Sharon Mooney

    Psychological deteriorations caused by invisible labor and stress slowly build. What's left as her internal and external struggles to find solid ground?
    Moments taken from The Avengers that hint at disruption, mental dissolution, and violence slowly disintegrate to be replaced with another - another thought/another memory/another question. An ethereal soundscape with re-edited sound clips from Honey West gives voice to the tension of navigating the unnamed character's internal and external self.

    Sound design and mix by Rob Steel
    Re-Recording Mixing by Kevin Cagnolatti
    Music by Mike Puretz
    Dialog from Honey West and images from The Avengers manipulated and edited by Sharon Mooney

    Sharon Mooney I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. I earned my M.F.A. from The School of Visual Arts in Photo, Video and Related Media and my B.A from Xavier University in Electronic Media. As a filmmaker, I work in experimental, narrative and documentary portraiture all focused on investigating desire and the human condition. My short videos and installations have screened internationally in festivals and galleries.
    After working in various aspects of film and television, I settled into post-production. I am currently on the faculty in the School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. In graduate school, a professor called my sense of humor childish and that's true at least 2/3rds of the time.

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    de-composition
    2023, 2:40 mins, color, HD, Sound
    By Laura Kraning

    A textural macro collage of a rust belt landscape- scratched, splattered, dripping, cracking, and bursting to the surface. Photographed and meticulously edited over one year in Buffalo, NY, the reverberant tones of the New York Central rail line provide the rhythmic pulse to a rapid cascade of multi-hued material decay and metallic de-composition.

    Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology, and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals, such as New York, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Antimatter, Visions du Réel, and Festival du Nouveau Cinema, among others. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the 2016 Athens International Film and Video Festival for her film Irradiant Field. Her recent film, Meridian Plain, was nominated for a Tiger Shorts Award at the 2017 International Film Festival Rotterdam and received the Jury Award for Short Film at the Rencontres Internationales Sciences & Cinémas Film Festival in Marseiiles, France.

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    In Littleness
    2022, 8:15 mins, color, 8mm to HD, Sound
    By Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu

    The film was shot on a regular 8mm camera and is presented in unslit form as 16mm, a screening format commonly referred to as double 8mm. When I first came into contact with this medium, I was deeply attracted by its miniature size. Eight millimeters is a very small space on which to store images. It reminds me of all kinds of things from childhood: ephemeral, wonderful, changeable. Recalling that as a child I spent most of my time with my nanny, I decided to zoom in on daily life, especially trivial household chores. At the same time, the particles and dust of the childhood world are magnified. During the filming process, I remembered a question asked by Stan Brakhage: When a film is projected, how many frames does an image need in order to make an impression on human vision? In In Littleness, we are asked to watch four images at a time. Each screen only lasts for a moment. The waves of oncoming impressions submerge the viewer in an open and chaotic world, in which a noisy childhood experience is faintly drawn. The memories included in the film are not just from my childhood, but also from childhood memories of people close to me. In the end, what In Littleness treasures is the texture of childhoods, overlapping and collective.

    Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu (b. 1982, Kaohsiung, Taiwan) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s creative activity often starts from a life event or curiosity concerning 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.

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    Traces with Elikem
    2018, 7 mins, B/W, Desktop Scanner & Digital Video, Sound
    By Ariana Gerstein

    This film documents traces that were performed and captured by scanner and monitor surfaces. Other surfaces include paper and film. Light reflects and passes through; layers slide past, and sometimes they meet, punctuated by vibrating, percussive sounds. This film documents traces that were performed and captured by scanner and monitor surfaces. Other surfaces include paper and film. Light reflects and passes through; layers slide past, and sometimes they meet, punctuated by vibrating, percussive sounds.

    Ariana Gerstein works in experimental and experimental documentary forms both on her own and in collaboration with others. Feature documentaries include collaborations with husband Monteith McCollum Hybrid and Milk in the Land. Her short experimental documentary “Alice Sees the Light” showed on the PBS series P.O.V. Gerstein’s independent films have been screened and awarded prizes at festivals internationally. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Cinema Department at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

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    Tuesday
    Feb.27
    4PM
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    • Tuesday, Feb. 27th, 4PM
      The Campus Center (03-3540)
      University of Massachusetts Boston
      100 Morrissey Boulevard
      Boston, MA 02125

    Artist Lecture Series
    Su Friedrich

    How to Drag Your Private Life, Kicking and Screaming, Into the Public: Looking Back at Forty-Six Years of Filmmaking


    Su Friedrich will present a “clip talk” that surveys many of her twenty-five films, including Gently Down the Stream (1981), Sink or Swim (1990), Gut Renovation (2012), and I Cannot Tell You How I Feel (2016). For each work, she will give a brief summary of the motivations, ideas, and formal concerns involved in making the film and then show a three-to-five-minute excerpt.
    "Artist Lecture Series" is free and open to the public, and co-hosted by Art and Art History Department and Cinema Studies at UMass-Boston

    Su Friedrich photo by Alexander Tuma, 2013



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    Gently Down the Stream

    Su Friedrich | 1981 | 14 minutes | B&W | SILENT

    About Su Friedrich:

    Su Friedrich has directed twenty-five films and videos since 1978, which have been featured in twenty-three retrospectives at major museums and film festivals including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema and the National Film Theater in London and they have been widely screened and extensively written. Her work is the subject of two recent books: Su Friedrich: Interviews, edited by Sonia Misra and Rox Samer, Univ. of Mississippi Press (2022) and Su Friedrich by Barbara Mennel, Univ of Illinois Press (2023.) The films have won numerous awards, including Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival, Outstanding Documentary Award at Outfest and Best Narrative Film Award at the Athens International Film Festival. Fifteen of her films are available on DVD and VOD streaming from Outcast Films and her two most recent films are at Icarus Films.

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    Gently Down the Stream

    Su Friedrich | 1981 | 14 minutes |
    B&W | SILENT 16mm film, 18 fps

    Constructed from fourteen dreams taken from my journals. The text is scratched directly onto the film, so that you hear your own voice as you read. The "framed" images accompanying the words are of women, water, animals and saints, which were chosen for their indirect but potent correspondence to the text.

    "... her films (particularly the celebrated GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM) signalled an important change that was occurring within the evolution of experimental cinema ... [I]t demonstrates her considerable technical talents and formal creativity." - Bruce Jenkins, Millennium Film Journal "The film portrays a dreamscape where society's conflicts step on stage in muted, mysterious forms." - Kathleen Hulser, In These Times

    "What's so striking is her use of film to create a language which corresponds materially to the semi-conscious state between dreaming and waking." - Jo Comino, City Limits, London Exhibition: Osnabr?ck Media Arts Festival, 1983; Women's Film Festival, NY, 1983; Women's Film Festival, Montreal, 1985; Haifa Int'l Film Festival, Israel, 1985; Experimental Film Festival, Argentina, 1983.

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    Thursday
    March 7th
    7PM
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    • Thursday, March 7th, 7PM
      Boston City Hall Plaza

      Civic Pavilion
      5 Congress St.
      Boston
      MA 02203

    Affinity + Rhythm


    RPM Festival, in collaboration with Non-Event, Presents "Affinity + Rhythm": A Night of Expanded Cinema, Audiovisual Performance, and Noise Duo Live

    Boston, MA – RPM Festival, in partnership with Non-Event, is thrilled to announce the co-presentation of ""Affinity + Rhythm," an evening of immersive experiences featuring expanded cinema, audiovisual performances, and live noise duos. Proudly supported by the Boston Mayor's Office of Art and Culture, this event is scheduled to captivate audiences on March 7th from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the Boston City Hall Civic Pavilion.

    "Affinity + Rhythm" blends three distinct sonic and visual explosions. Witness the convergence of expanded cinema with noise performances, as electronic beats interweave seamlessly with abstract visual effects, creating a multisensory feast for attendees. This event marks the second installment of the RPM at Boston City Hall Civic Pavilion series, an initiative dedicated to promoting contemporary experimental cinema and fostering a dynamic creative dialogue between visual and auditory art forms.
    The collaboration has garnered crucial support from the Boston Mayor's Office of Art and Culture, underlining the city's commitment to nurturing and showcasing the arts.


    "Affinity + Rhythm" is free and open to the public.

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    The lineup for "Affinity + Rhythm" includes:

    1. Sheer Anxiety (Chris Strunk and Andrea Pensado):
    Chris Strunk - Boston-based percussionist and drummer, focusing on cymbal overtones, friction, and non-traditional objects used as percussion instruments in his solo work.
    Andrea Pensado - Experimental musician, composer, and concert organizer based in Salem, Massachusetts. She creates a highly personal sonic language using harsh, dense layers of sounds, often interwoven with her voice.

    2. Tomonari Nishikawa:
    Utilizing a 16mm film projector since 2013, Nishikawa scratches the film emulsion to produce visual and sound effects. He will present his ongoing 16mm film projection performance project, "Six Seventy-Two Variations," as part of the Expanded Cinema Performance.

    3. Feng Jiangzhou:
    Concluding the evening is Feng Jiangzhou, a solo electronic artist with a diverse background in new media art, sound art, installation art, film and television scores, and stage design. Formerly the lead singer of the Fly Band, Feng Jiangzhou is recognized as an early electronic musician in China.

    "Affinity + Rhythm" is a free and open-to-the-public event, inviting all art enthusiasts and curious minds to experience the cutting-edge convergence of audiovisual creativity. Join us on March 7th at the Boston City Hall Civic Pavilion for an experimental exploration.

    Sheer Anxiety (Noise Duo)
    Chris Strunk + Andrea Pensado

    Six Seventy-Two Variations
    Tomonari Nishikawa

    Feng Jiangzhou

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    Sheer Anxiety


    Chris Strunk + Andrea Pensado

    CHRIS STRUNK is a Boston based percussionist and drummer. His solo work focuses on cymbal overtones, friction, and the vibration and rattle of non traditional objects used as percussion instruments. He has been an active show promoter and musician in the Boston area for the past twenty years. He has been active in many groups such as Los Condenados, Avoidance, Taps, Phantom Rides, Sheer Anxiety, Conversions, Baja Blatz, Sleeper Cell, and many more. His released a solo CD called No Chart Could Map My Constellations on the Philadelphia based label Killing Time Between the Ice Ages in 2017, and recently authored a zine about the history of DIY punk spaces in Boston that was published by Free the Future Press and was nominated for a Broken Pencil Zine Award.

    ANDREA PENSADO is an experimental musician, composer, and concert organizer, based in Salem, Massachusetts. While she initially composed mainly for acoustic instruments, she was gradually more attracted to working in a different, far more abrasive sound world. In her current work, she creates a highly personal sonic language using harsh, dense layers of sounds, often interwoven with her voice. Her live, interactive musical systems and use of invented language combine into inherently unstable performances full of ecstatic energy. She also curates the Sonorium concert series in Salem.

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    Six Seventy-Two Variations
    Tomonari 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. Nishikawa started using a 16mm film projector for his performance projects in 2013, scratching the film emulsion to produce the visual and sound. His on-going 16mm film projection performance project, “Six Seventy-Two Variations,” have been performed at Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Exploratorium in San Francisco, FRACTO in Berlin, New York Film Festival, Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, among others. He also uses slide projectors in his performance or collaborative work with sound artists, and one of such works, “Chiratsuki,” was performed with SONTAG SHOGUN at Mono no Aware VIII in New York.

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    Feng Jiangzhou



    Renowned as the frontman for the Fly Band and hailed as a trailblazer in the realm of electronic music in China, Feng Jiangzhou has left an indelible mark on the Chinese scene. In 1998, he embarked on a groundbreaking collaboration with the Taiwanese electronic group 3rdNova, resulting in the release of his inaugural electronic music album, "Love in the Time of Flies." This marked a significant milestone in Feng Jiangzhou's career, showcasing his versatility and innovation.

    Beyond his achievements in music, Feng Jiangzhou's artistic pursuits extend across a diverse spectrum. His influence resonates in new media art, sound art, installation art, film and television scores, and stage design, reflecting a multifaceted creative spirit.

    In 2006, Feng Jiangzhou co-founded the "Deaf Mute Blind School Club" label alongside Wu Ershan, contributing to the release of three albums before taking a hiatus from his musical endeavors. The year 2019 witnessed his triumphant return as he graced the stage at the Tomorrow Music Festival in Shenzhen, reigniting his passion for performance. Fast forward to 2023, Feng Jiangzhou embarked on an extensive series of tours with the Fly Band, making waves at prestigious events such as the West Lake Music Festival, Strawberry Music Festival, and the Hong Kong Clockenflap Music Festival. With an enduring commitment to pushing boundaries and exploring new sonic landscapes, Feng Jiangzhou continues to captivate audiences worldwide.



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    Sunday
    Jan.28
    2PM
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    • Sunday, Jan. 28, 2PM, 2024
      Brattle Theatre
      40 Brattle Street
      Cambridge, MA


    We were given these instructions

    Kelly Sears


    New Year's First Screening featuring 10 Shorts by Kelly Sears

    Join us for an extraordinary cinematic experience as we kick off the new year with the first RPM24 screening of 2024!
    This event, co-hosted at The Brattle Theatre in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts, will showcase the unconventional works of experimental animator Kelly Sears.

    Kelly Sears' collection of 10 shorts, spanning from 2007 to 2023, offers a mesmerizing journey through time and imagination. Notably, her most recent creation, "The Last Season," is set to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2024.

    Sears, known for her idiosyncratic approach to animation, skillfully reinterprets American archetypes and institutions, providing a fresh perspective on our social and political legacy.

    Post Screening Q&A Kelly Sears & Shira Segal




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    Maximum Umbra
    (RT 3:09, 2022)

    The Drift
    (RT 8:10, 2007)

    Voice on the Line 
    (RT 6:45, 2009)

    The Body Besieged
    (RT 4:40, 2009)

    Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise
    (RT 7:30, 2011)

    The Rancher
    (RT 7:09, 2012)

    Pattern for Survival
    (RT 6:27, 2015)

    Applied Pressure
    (RT 6:22, 2018)

    Phase II
    (RT 6:30, 2022)

    The Lost Season
    (RT 6:09, 2023)

    total: 63mins

    Further More: Sleater-Kenny - High in the Grass


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    Kelly Sears is more than an animator; she is a visionary who employs animation as a critical practice. Through cutting, collaging, and merging animated photographic and film documents with speculative storytelling, Sears creates films that challenge and expand our understanding of cultural narratives. Her work becomes a canvas where history converges with myth, resulting in uncanny and fantastical tales.

    Sears' award-winning films have graced esteemed festivals worldwide, including Sundance, South by Southwest, and the American Film Institute. Her shorts have been showcased at renowned institutions such as the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Awards from festivals like Ann Arbor, Black Maria, Chicago Underground, and Oak Cliff underscore the impact of Sears' unique cinematic vision.

    A graduate of Hampshire College and the University of California, San Diego, Kelly Sears has left an indelible mark on experimental animation. Her journey includes teaching at esteemed institutions such as Pitzer College, Scripps College, Rice University, and the University of Houston. Currently serving as the Associate Faculty Director for Undergraduate Studio Arts in Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado, Sears continues to inspire and shape the next generation of filmmakers.

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    Maximum Umbra
    (RT 3:09, 2022)

    Maximum Umbra is an alternate account of the solar eclipse in 2017. Images and sounds recorded at this event conjure an unexpected celestial disaster.

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    The Drift
    (RT 8:10, 2007)

    A mysterious disappearance on a 1960s space journey launches the counter-culture revolution, the government blocks contraband radio broadcasts, and American fervor for conquering space finally goes too far.

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    Voice on the Line 
    (RT 6:45, 2009)

    Figures from archived industrial films from the 1950s are recast in a large-scale speculative operation, reflecting on troubled relationships between the areas of national security, civil liberties, and communication corporations. The surveillance operation in this film veers off course, turning the operation into an exploration of liberation.

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    The Body Besieged
    (RT 4:40, 2009)

    Animated instructional photographs from yoga and exercise books reveal bewitched and frenzied bodies and maneuvers. Exercising women move through a possessed psychic space that distorts and mirrors some of our daily routines. Their bodies point to haunted forces may lay behind a fevered sense of unwellness.

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    Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise
    (RT 7:30, 2011)

    Created in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, animated figures from discarded mid- 1970s high school yearbooks are situated in recently photographed backgrounds taken at a local high school. In this minimalist horror story, a malevolent force seeps into the high school walls, and the student body breaks down one extra-curricular activity at a time.

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    The Rancher (RT 7:09, 2012)
    (RT 7:09, 2012)

    A series of terrible dreams unhinge a man in power. The Rancher is a parafictional newsreel film featuring an anonymous president during wartime. The reworked footage, sampled from newsreels about Lyndon Baines Johnson, presents a more fraught portrait of the daily life of this archetypical president. As he escalates military involvement, the president is plagued by terrible dreams that result in the unraveling of public opinion about the war. The narrative of The Rancher largely parallels LBJ’s administration as well as ones from more recent history.

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    Pattern for Survival
    (RT 6:27, 2015)

    Pattern for Survival channels the frenetic energy and aggression of security and preparedness. Speculative threats are rendered as routine directives. As you read the rest of this manual, keep in mind the need for a survival strategy. There are a lot of rapid image changes in this film, please let the file load before watching.

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    Applied Pressure
    (RT 6:22, 2018)

    Sequential images sourced from dozens of massage books are altered and reordered to shift the emphasis from the actions on the body to the reception of the touch. This rising anxiety and ultimate realization that the subjects are in an abusive situation occurs as multiple bodies emerge, stuttering and struggling. The sound design is an extension of the psychic space of the bodies in the frame, with relaxing water sounds transitioning into rushing currents. This animation channels recent public conversations and accusations surrounding bodies, massage, and trauma. The body remembers. Aches may linger.

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    Phase II
    (RT 6:30, 2022)

    In the near future, real estate developers deploy sonic weapons used at protests to clear neighborhoods for high-end high rises. On the front lines are sound medics that tend to those injured by the assaults. As they respond, one team member documents the incidents to create a future archive for other sonic activists.

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    The Lost Season (RT 6:09, 2023)
    (RT 6:09, 2023)

    As the world experiences its final winter, desperate measures to hold onto the season awaken a radical labor consciousness.

    Post Screening Q&A
    Kelly Sears & Shira Segal

    Dr. Shira Segal has taught a wide range of film courses and is an active researcher in autobiographical cinema across avant-garde and documentary cinema. She received her PhD in Film and Media Studies from Indiana University’s Dept. of Communication and Culture, where her dissertation Home Movies and Home Birth: The Avant-garde Childbirth Film and Pregnancy in New Media provides an aesthetic and cultural history of alternative film and media practices surrounding the maternal body over the past fifty years. This project includes interviews with filmmakers and original archival research with the James Stanley Brakhage Collection, housed by the Archives at the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries. For her MA in Cultural Memory from the University of London’s Institute of Romance Studies, Segal’s thesis examines the transmission of private and public memory in photography and experimental film; selections of this thesis on Hollis Frampton’s film (nostalgia) have been published by the University of Texas at Austin’s Text, Practice and Performancejournal. Segal is also an undergraduate alumni from the University of Colorado’s Film Studies Program. Research interests include The Embodied Camera: Visual Strategies of the Self in Avant-garde Cinema. Her book chapter “Stories of the Self in Cinema: Autobiography and the Documentary Image” appears in American Creative Nonfiction (Salem Press, 2015). Further publications include articles in MP: An Online Feminist Journal, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, and Wig: Journal of Experimental Scholarship. She has given public lectures on Stan Brakhage and First Person Cinema at Ohio State University and the University of Washington.

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    Navigating the Creative Cosmos:
    Kelly Sears & Aiah Zhang

    Artistic beginning and inspiration

    Aiah(A): To start with, I guess you might have a lot of questions already before about why collage, why film, why animation?

    Kelly Sears(KS): Great question. Thank you. I got involved in filmmaking when I was in college, at Hampshire College. And their film curriculum was so expansive and skewed into works that really embraced an individual aesthetic. And so early on, when I was exposed to film, it was really being an opportunity to be exposed to how individuals created their own vision, that it was not just the lens, but it was layering images, collaging images, making just very personal images. And at college, I started working with equipment like the optical printer and the animation stand. And it really developed as a way to, how do I want to build what each frame looks like in a film. And it was a very hands on approach to it. And when I went to graduate school, I really dug more into just building my frames and figuring out what that meant. I worked very much with analog equipment in college, but when I went to grad school, I didn't have the same access to all those different film apparatus. And I started working digitally. So I was just taking photos with DSLRs. They had after effects on the computer. So I taught myself really basic after effects. And with my brain, I was just starting to think about how I could use after effects, like an optical printer or an animation stand. And that was my way into kind of like building this very vertical frame across all the works. And so collage, for me, is more than just a visual practice. It really just becomes a way of moving through the world. It becomes part of my artistic practice or developing a visual style. And I feel like I cook that way, too. I'll look at three different recipes and be like, oh, that part sounds good here, and this part sounds good here. And it's a way of trying to bring together very disparate elements, but also finding a harmony in how they come together.


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    A: Well, speak of the school times, how was the film scene then? How is the atmosphere there?

    KS: Right. I don't want to date myself, but undergrad was definitely before we lived on the Internet. You really had to work to see things. And so whenever a visiting artist would come, whenever there be some sort of extra screening, I just knew it was a way to access something I wouldn't have any way of seeing. And I think for me, there was so many forms of collage that I saw in undergrad, and it could just be the way a film was structured, or splice or taping blades of grass and moth wings onto a frame, or it could be a story that was both historical but also fictional at the same time. And I think just really being interested in seeing so many kinds of works, they all kind of started to tie together after that. In grad school, I went to not necessarily a film program, but I went to a visual arts program. And that was a whole new opening, because it wasn't just this time based practice I was situated in. It was people who were sculptors. It was people who were photographers. It was people who were doing all kinds of different performance, all these different kinds of practices. And it became a way to maybe think through a film practice in different dimensions when I started thinking a lot about just kind of sculptural space in the frame when I was collaging together. Now I feel like we're in this era right now where everything is just so much more. You're able to be aware of other practitioners who are asking maybe similar questions or making some kind of films that are exciting to you. That aren't coming through exactly where you are, but through, I think, the proliferation of film festivals, I feel like that is so much more commonplace than it was when I was growing up, having opportunities to see me work. And with collage, there's right now, I think this is kind of very interesting moment where this curator, who is the kind of creative director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, just put together a big collage animation retrospective in Slovenia and has written a book called earmarked for collision that he invited myself and many other collage animators just to talk about. Our practice in there. And things like that becomes a catalyst for putting people in conversation together is a way to really think about how different people are. Asking questions through a form that in some ways originates in just something so simple and cutting something out and moving it to a new place.



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    A: Yeah, I totally feel the vibes there back then. It's more digital nowadays, but back then I would say you need to move your body and physically move to the place to find out and search for new inspirations and new works. And I can see the progress of the collage and animation and film that you just accumulate to each other and then have this amazing breakthroughs nowadays.

    KS: And it's also after going through COVID, right, when everything was just like, yes, you actually had an access to so many things, all these online screenings, but it's wonderful to be back when you get to go to a place. I'm so excited to come to Boston. And it's so much about having this very singular experience about how does this program of films work and what kind of conversations can grow out.

    A: There are various things on Internet, but you're coming out and physically doing things like searching for the things and seeing touching and having all of the interactions. Truly amazing. And also, speak of the background, academic background. And now you're a mentor at the University of Colorado. And I'm just wondering how was the teaching influenced your work and do your students inspired new ideas to you?

    KS: That's a great question. I've been at Colorado for almost ten years now, and I had done teaching before that and I think right now I'm in a place where I try to bring as much of my creative brain to my students. I don't want to present that there's just one way to think through something, but I like to kind of open up my brain and talk about how I build connections. When I'm really in my studio and really excited about the work, all of that energy comes through me to my students. And I teach a combination of core production classes, but also electives. So, like, I'll teach the introduction to moving image or the BFA capstone class, but I have electives where I get to teach experimental digital animation or experimental narrative. And that's the place where know the things that I'm really ingesting and thinking about and experimenting with comes through into the classroom, into these bigger questions that we ask. And I really always try to build a question around some sort of thing we're going to explore through animation, some readings we're doing, some screenings we're doing, and try to build these little clusters about how we think through producing an image or a landscape or a body and what we want any of those to contain going forward. In terms of my students being inspiring, there's so many I'm in great connection with, and there's some students who come back to visit their parents in this area, and they'll come over for a coffee. There's one student who is a former student in my animation class, Dana Crawford, who ran with collage animation, and she made the most incredible collage animation music video. So I actually bring her as a guest to my mental digital animation class. And the students just think it's so wild. The videos is great, and they're so inspired. Like, oh, you took this class and then you made this video. And so it's a really great way to think about not me and that class is once one moment in time, but how that can evolve in time. And so I'm teaching that class next semester, and I will definitely be inviting Dana Crawford back to present her work.

    A: Sounds amazing, because in the portfolio, I saw the film study videos from 2015 to 2019. As I can assess those videos that you uploaded to the website, it was a quite raw and newness and that kind of complexity inside of the video, it is such a fresh air for me. And I wonder if you have a key advice for the aspiring new students that is following you or following the animation or experimental film process.


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    KS: I think when I work with students, especially over multiple years, I'm teaching our first production class now, and I'm also teaching our BFA capstone class. And I'm really interested in students finding their own individual filmmaking form, their own individual questions that they're asking. And kind of when you see a piece, you can see them in it. And I really try to encourage them to find a practice that really comes from them. And at the end of my moving Image foundations class this semester, it was so great because I could see, Ori, that film is such an ori film. Or, hey, Finn, that is, know all these things, like the way you work with camera, the way your frame looks, or the way you work with questions about genders and home movies and memoirs. I see that in your work. And so I really try to create a space where students can realize what their own vision is. And especially when they're coming in new, their exposure has been kind of like, what are your kind of commodity media products, like what's on Netflix, and where things actually feel really homogeneous in a lot of ways, in terms of storytelling, in terms of aesthetics. And so I think in all my classes, I really want them to understand that there's no one way that their work needs to look. And for them to really ask questions like, well, what does my work need to look like? And what is really inspiring to me to create a practice that's going to always be playful and curious and inquisitive, and having me seek more and dig.

    Thematic Evolution and Societal Commentary

    A: Looking through your work, I think the theme or the style of your work is really a kaleidoscope. Are there any unique rituals or serendipitous moments that you have behind the creative process? For example, in the tropical depression, the Miss Universe contest, and then the hurricane. How are those coming together?


    KS: That's a great question as well. And I think that's kind of one of the collage impulses is not just how the frame is built, but some of the histories or stories that are going into the frame and the film that you referenced. Tropical depression. I was living on the island of Galveston, and I was at an artist residency called the Galveston Artist residency. And there was a final show for the residency. And while I was living in Texas, and I'd moved there before for a fellowship called the Corps program at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. At that point, I was invited to make a film from the Texas archive of the moving image for a show at the contemporary art museum. And I had made a film called the Rancher with materials of Johnson, who I just looked through the archive and just saw three newsreels and took those and made kind of like an alternate subconscious, nightmare dream reel of an unnamed president. And then I made that while I was living in Galveston. But then for the show in Galveston, I thought I'd like to work with other images of Texas. And so I went back to the Texas archive of the moving image. And it's always know, I think in that body of work I was looking for, I'm like, what film's going to grab my attention? And how can I recast the figure in know? And I think there's, like, a long trend of me recasting figures to perform other narratives in my work. And I came across a newsreel from the pageant of pulchritude, which is an earlier name for the Miss Universe contest that used to be held in Galveston. And I just found this image of the woman who won it, who was 17 years old, and she had taken a boat over from Belgium. And it was like this moment of she wins this huge contest, but she doesn't speak English. She's been on a boat for so long, and she's kind of really disoriented and exhausted. And I felt like there was something really vulnerable about that. And the artist residency that I was doing came about as a response to Hurricane Ike, which had, like, wiped out a ton of the island. And, like, Galveston, history of hurricanes, and one of the most deadly hurricanes in American history happened in Galveston, like, 1899. And this residency, after disasters, there's always, in some form, some predatory environment of people coming in and profiting off of a place that's been destroyed that's very vulnerable. And so I started thinking about this layers of Galveston and thinking about this early Miss Universe pageant and this more recent hurricane kind of being these layers of vulnerability and precariousness that had happened there. And so I worked with this newsreel and then found imagery of Hurricane Ike coming in and kind of thinking about this as building those two together and this kind of abstract portrait that's like part newsreel but maybe part landscape as.



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    A: I think it's a new experience but a new way to attract people to look back into the histories. And that's really amazing for me. And then also in the pattern for survival or buddy besieged and maybe the applied pleasure there is a captivating interplay between, for example, motion and stillness or like rhythmic repetition or sometimes chaotic. How do you strike that balance? And is there any underlying messages that if there is any. Can you expose those kind of processes behind the choices that you have?

    KS: Yeah. So that was the body besieged pattern for survival and applied pressure. I love talking about time as something that you get to build in each piece. And what is a rhythm of time that you're building? And what pulse does it have? Is the time space one that's like a fluttering pulse that's produced from anxiety or fear? Is it something that is a little more watchful and waiting? And I think just in terms of thinking about how many frames you hold in a cycle, you can create these rhythms in cycles that you can hopefully connect with the people who are watching the film. And I think so much about watching something that moves through space and time is about a somatic connection. And where can I, as I'm animating a person who's watching it or even myself, like I have a heartbeat, I have a heart rate. And it's not always the same thing. So those three works have different intentions, I believe, where body besieged is created from exercise books and wellness books. And I was thinking about what if there was a darker force behind the wellness? And the way that I. And it came about this way is that it was one of the earliest kind of Muybridge-esque animations I made where these workout books, they're instructional books right. And they have sequential imagery in them to show you how to do a move. And I scanned in all these sequential images and then just animated them. And they didn't have as many representative gestures in the sequence. So when I animated them, I thought about, well, what does it look like when the body's moving using these four frames that I'm looping? And I thought, oh, they look possessed. And so I went about to think about these kind of. And they all have smiles on their face, every frame. And so it's like, kind of these frenetic, overly positive images that red is like these women's bodies that have been possessed by this wellness drive. And so that was like, how can I work with animation to have them kind of carry that feeling? And I'll contrast that with a piece applied pressure, which also uses sequential images, but this time from body workbooks, i n massage books, and that film kind of took a while to come about. And whenever, if I'm out in a used bookstore or a thrift store or a yard sale and I look through books, I love a sequential image book because I'm like, there's an animation in there somewhere. And I remember finding a massage book and purchasing it and then having it be on the bookshelf in my studio, but it wasn't ready for it to be activated. And then during the wave of accusations that were coming against Harvey Weinstein about women, that he asked to come to his hotel room and then under the guise of massage, would sexually assault them. All of a sudden, I thought, oh, this book has a new lens on it. And thinking about massage not as something that's therapeutic, but something that can be traumatic. And not long after that, all the kind of assault allegations against Larry Nasser, the US gymnast team, came about, too. And so it was a way of not only just talking about those two moments, but kind of thinking about how a larger cultural discourse of sexual assault was playing out, and also women's experiences of sexual assault, where it's not always clear, it can kind of be a slow move across something that seems innocent to something that's assault. And I think a lot of women are, like, in that space, don't know what's really happening and aren't sure what's happening until it's already happened. And so with that, I was like, I wanted to bring that all out and applied pressure and working very much with how the hands on the women's bodies can go into a space that reads as innocuous, but then starts to veer into a gray zone into this touch feels dangerous. And so it was all about finding specific gestures of hands on women's bodies holding too long and really sculpting the time of. What does that space before an assault actually happens feel like? And how does time feel like in that moment?


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    A: Truly, the implication in the movies, it just make me think further, but at the same time, the kinesthetic resonance, in a way, when the repetition happens, it’s physical connections for me to have. And I don't know if you have the same experience producing it, I believe you might have to watch it or staring at it hundreds of times before you finish the work. And how was the experience for you?

    KS: It's funny. Specifically, with applied pressure, I never had this feeling before. But when I was animating, I could feel myself, like, digging my feet into the ground. And I was just aware of my feet and toes just, like, tensing, making it. And for me, I thought that that was really successful because I'm like, this piece is about your body holding on to anxiety and trauma, and my body is having a physical response to watching this. And for me, I thought that was very successful to me. But I also think about when I'm watching films, when do I feel like I get taken along with them? And sometimes it just could be like, shots could be a couple of frames off, and I'm like, that's just not taking me. And I think it's about how do I sync up what's happening in the film with my body? So I feel something with hopes that when another body is watching it, they can feel something in there. And it's so much experimentation because there's so many things I'll try out. And I'm like, that's just falling. I don't respond to that. I don't react to that. And then I'll change things just a little bit. There's always, like, drafts and drafts and drafts and drafts of shots. I do put something together and watch it. No, that's not happening quite yet. And kind of really just massage things to a point where I'm like, oh, actually, something in there is registering with me. There's some sort of kinetic energy in the frame that is like doing something, responding to something, or I'm responding to it, and I feel a connection with it.

    A: Is the applied pleasure the first time for you to have those kind of connections, I mean, physical connections, with the work that you had?

    KS: No. Maybe as pointed as a physical one. And I think there's so many different time periods or time measures that I respond to. And I feel like earlier in my film, there's a film called. I would say maybe once it started, it could not end otherwise, in the drip, those two films are really slow, except for towards the end of once it started, it's not slow, but for a while, it was really connecting with slowness at the time and really being against things that were moving fast. I wanted things almost to hardly move as a way of. So in the drift, it was just like, I remember getting into collage animation, and it was kind of early times, like, looking around at works that other people made. And so a very obvious place to look in terms of someone who's worked with collage animation is Terry Gilliam and his work with Monty Python. And I was watching it, and I'm like, this is too fast, and it's too obviously don't. It feels like that's not what I want this to feel like. And then I was like, well, what happens if I make it slow? And I said, what happens if I make it slower? And what happens if I even make it slower? And so the idea of a low decibel and just slow movements really was interesting to me at that point, in terms of a way, I think there's. Even though I'm talking about pulses and beats, I also feel like I have a low frequency that's just like, where I'm tuned into kind of like a drone. And then I thought about working with slowness again in the film. Once it started, it could not end otherwise. That featured cutouts from high school yearbooks. But the bodies moved so slow. But I animated these textures that I embedded into the walls of the high school. That actually moved quite fast. And then that piece I was really interested in this push and pull between something moving so slow and then something moving fast at the same time and having almost this visual arrhythmia in the frame.


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    A: Well, I think you're so successful in the techniques of doing that because I was watching. Once it started, it could never end otherwise. I totally don't know what happened in this background, but I can feel my heartbeat start to beating up a little bit and it just get to an end. And I was like, what happened? I'm so drawn into the story.

    KS: Thank you. Yeah, I had made a film before that called voice in the line. And afterwards I was like, I told the audience exactly where to go in that film. And so on the next one, I was like, I actually want not to tell the audience what happened, but for them to project or imagine, have their own version of what happened. Because in some ways, that's more terrifying than me.Naming something. Right. Like the unseen, the unnamed, the unknown. There's so much more potential for that to be so outrageously terrifying than once something is brought into the light a little bit.

    A: I realize your films frequently explore the societal transformation and speculative futures. But with the time goes on, I do feel like it's a personal thing. But in more recent works, the topic and theme shift a bit to personal territory rather than the purely imaginative, the cosmic topic, the astronauts and the far away things, or like the mass political things. And whether it's the COVID that high in the grass that we're going to talk in the coming questions and then the gentrification phase two, reflecting on those careers. In your career progress and how do you perceive the evolution that happened in your career over the time?

    KS: That's very observant because it's actually something I only put into perspective recently. And, yeah, you're right. I was like writing a grant and I had to write about all of my work together. And all of a sudden I realized it started out here and it's just like more and more coming know, like, you think about these larger kind of ideas of American iconography and progress that got more and more specific. And I think when I lived in Texas, I made. Once it started where I photographed a local high school, I made this piece called the Rancher about a Texas president. Like, as we had recently had another Texas president. And reflecting on kind of like that place and that connection to power and then living on Galveston, making work about Galveston and then moving into works like applied pressure, where actually we're talking about a. Like, my body can relate to that film for sure. And then moving into work that grew out of the pandemic with the Sleater-Kinney music video. And then phase two, which was like a piece that took a while to come around because it was such a shift of not working against a narrative that's contained in a found image that I'm making perform in a different way. And I started thinking about landscapes that my body is moving through and the ways that. How my body's moving through a landscape and how I'm seeing kind of this. Like Denver has, like many other American cities, right? Like these huge high rises that are going up at the same time as having a housing crisis. There's more housing being built every day, and yet there's like a housing crisis here. And I think multi residential units make so much sense, but yet it's not about addressing we need more housing. It's really about a lot of profit that's brought in and also addressing who do we want to move here to live in these buildings. And so I started that piece during COVID and I was just like, leaving the house, just like put a mask on and take photos, like taking walks. And I was like, I have to get out of the house. I'm just in the house all the time. And so I started that really in the moment when you would still just mask up out in public, even if you're 20ft from people. And then it was a way for me to put myself out in the world and just to kind of like, have a space to, like, think about something creatively instead of catastrophically, just like watching Covid numbers and. And it took me a while to figure out how to make that piece, but after I made it, I was like, right. In a way, I think the maybe anxieties or dread in the work have gotten much more like personal as opposed to general. And so it became a way of, what spaces can I move through and using?


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    When I've worked with bodies in the frames, I always think about recasting them and having them perform in different ways, like the astronauts in the drift, like telephone operators in voice in the line, like the high school students. And once it started, but then I thought, what if landscapes can perform differently? And what if landscapes can be recast? And so that finally, when I started thinking about that, like, oh, I see a whole other way of telling stories about places that I'm in, and there's images of contemporary landscapes, and I'll go someplace over weeks and weeks and weeks in multiple trips and film, and then think about, like, well, what stories are actually here and what can I graft onto them?
    And building a new genre that's kind of a science nonfiction, where we recognize these places and we understand our relationship to them, and yet we can also put them in these kind of more fantastic frameworks and also see that world at the same time.

    A: You said it's very personal things because it happened around you, too. I think it’s both personal and general in a way, for me. And then, like you said, there is some of the commentary that you put in the film that you made, and how do you blend the artistry with commentary? How do you manage to make your message resonate while retaining the film's artistic integrity?

    KS: Oh, gosh. Well, I hope it resonates. I mean, that's always my intention. But I enjoy writing, even though it's not the first way. I don't know if I'm a good writer, but it becomes a way of telling a story. And I think about who's narrating and what versions. How can they create a world? And I hope subtly, you kind of see these other plays of power in there, and how can that be embedded in the collage? So much of phase two, with all the housing is about this rapid vertical accumulation. So how can that idea both be in the story but also be in the visuals of the film as well. And sometimes some of the ways that something is made, like having a voice over, having this observational photography lens on there, evokes bits of documentary, but at the same time, I want to introduce some more poetics and more, taking some of those documentary impulses and putting them into this poetic, speculative wash to move through the work.

    A: And as we briefly touched the point, there are a lot of advancement in technology these days, whether it's the media production, or in other ways, AI these days are skyrocketing into the topic ranking. And are you facing any challenges with the advancement of technology when it comes to the filmmaking and production process?

    KS: Feel like in some ways, it makes me want to go scrappier, even in the work. It makes me want to make work that's less cohesive, that's less smooth. And I feel like I've always had a lo-fi filmmaking practice anyway, but it makes me want to show the edges more, and it makes me want to get more personal because, yeah, you could type in, I've seen people make AI that's reminiscent about different artists work, and it's also smooth. And with collage, I love. Just like, even in very subtle ways, you're aware that something is cut out and put in a different place, at least when I'm making it, where you see these images made by AI and it just feels like it's all generated homogeneously. And for me, it's like the tension between putting something in a place it doesn't belong and it not feeling like a diegetic space that that is pleasurable to me. And so if anything, it makes me want to get scrappier and have more edges and have more seams in my work.


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    A: that's unexpected. It’s interesting that pushed you towards more to a more original tools. And recently I saw The lost season, nominated again in the Sundance 2024, Congratulation! And other than the Sundance, you're nominated or screening your films in a lot of film festivals and exhibitions, and how do you perceive the audience engagement with your work, any reactions or interpretations that is memorable or stood out at that time?

    KS:Yeah. Sometimes for me, I think there's a lot of. When I mentioned edges and seams, I think there's edges and seams in all the stories, too, where part of you is like, I recognize this history. And also the story went in these impossible ways, but made me think about new ways of seeing that history or that image that I already had an association with and maybe opening up other ways of seeing that and opening up other ways of looking at history. And sometimes after I screened the drift a long time ago, someone asked me if they'd ever found those astronauts out in space. And so that's this thing where I'm like, oh, the intention is never to fool anyone. But the fact that it became such a lullaby to you that this fantastic maybe astronauts did choose to flood off into space. Or questions about what happened with those recordings from the telephone operators, from voice in the line, it's like, oh, gosh, these are such lo-fi stories. And yet they have this sincerity, I think, that other people pick up on. And I think most recently, I was doing a class visit and a student was talking about phase two, and it was just like they were commenting that it felt like such a story they saw everywhere around them. And yet it also was just the fictional interventions felt so out there, yet also so possible. And I think there's a lot of times I lean into a genre like science fiction or horror because I think just what happens around us in this world is horrifying in these ways, but it's so quiet in its horror. And I mean, sometimes, obviously, it's not quiet at all, but some sort of day to day, more quotidian ways that history unfolds, that working a little bit with these genres is a way to hold a magnifying glass to that.

    A: I totally agree with the part. I do feel like because the news is disease and unexpected happening around us is getting more and more frequent at a point, I feel a little bit numb about the new thing happening around me. How do you think the audience's interpretation of your work have evolved in a way, whether it's because of the COVID or the thing happening around us is so radical these days. And do you think those evolution happened to the audience interpretations too?

    KS:I think that's a good question, but I think it also is about as work becomes much more like localized, it being about space missions, it's being about housing being built for profits. That's actually not always helping the people who need housing. I think the issues are becoming a lot more like ones people can relate to. And the lost seasons about Earth's final winter and kind of a last ditch effort to hold on to. It ends up becoming a huge failure. And I think that there are these ideas about housing insecurity, about climate collapse that are so close in, just getting closer to so many people, that I think some of the work touch is about a life that's more recognizable to many of the viewers.


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    A: Just shift gears to a little bit brighter one. And for example, the projects like the drift, Jupiter, Elysis, or in those things you collaborated with, Anthony Kan, I would call it cosmic voice because it's all related to that topic and the voice on the line and the drift with know, like, I think collaboration has been a key for you and how do you approach these partnerships?

    Since we are already talking about the high in the grass too, that's a really interesting shift for me to see And I do feel like it is such a unique one that you had based on the environmental or the situational context. how did you transition from a horror vibe to an ecstatic one? Was it like weaving a narrative at a carnival?

    KS: , that's a great question. And I feel like it's interesting because Adam Wade did the sound design on some earlier works and for the last season we collaborated again and it was like a really great collaboration and I think we're going to keep working on that. But a lot of it was, I feel like my more recent interesting collaboration was like, I want to connect with people more while I'm creating as opposed to sitting home and writing and animating for a year. And I had this fantastic opportunity to change a little bit of production when the band Sleater-Kinney asked me to make a video for their song high in the grass.

    And I had just such a fast turnaround on that where it just had to be like, here's the idea and can we have the video in three weeks? And as someone who can take a year to make a film, it was like really thinking about how I could make a. I wanted to work with bodies, especially in COVID. There was so much attention to the body, and it was in a moment where everyone had just gotten and. But also it was something about, I knew I wanted to shoot this and I thought that would be really exciting to do. And another collaborator that I work with is a filmmaker named Laura Conway, and this is our first collaboration, and she was the cinematographer and the producer for the video. And it was great to like, yeah, let's bring in this choreographer. Yeah, here's all the dancers we can bring in. And have someone who's really good at that stuff in there. And it was just like, the video itself is about something that seemed horrific, that then you realize this new, radical form of healing and coming together at this moment and putting on this wild production and having one day to shoot that and being really safe with everyone, having a lot of conversations about consent, because people were unmasked there and was just like, do you feel safe unmasking? It's fine if you don't feel safe unmasking. Yes, I feel unsafe unmasking. Great. We'll all be masked and we'll all be 12ft from you. Does that feel safe for you? Yes, that feels safe for me. And it was just, like, wild to have all these people come together and then not sleeping for two weeks and animating it. But it made me realize that was so fun to work that way and to have feedback from people. I had Laura cut to the video and it just had to be done really fast. And it was a way of, like, I think one way we can connect while we're making work is like showing the work with people, but it was really inspiring to connect with people in the production of the work there. And so there's going to be some future work between Laura and I going forward. And actually, ideas from that Sleater-Kenny video are going to be coming into.


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    A: Since we are already talking about the high in the grass too, that's a really interesting shift for me to see And I do feel like it is such a unique one that you had based on the environmental or the situational context. how did you transition from a horror vibe to an ecstatic one? Was it like weaving a narrative at a carnival?

    KS: We had very little time, and it was a time where I was like, I have to think of a new way to make stuff. And then it was ecstatic to be with people and create with people. It felt so wild just to get everyone together and have them move. And I was working with the choreographer and what do we want bodies to do? And we just went to the dance studio on campus. She was a grad student at CU Boulder, and everyone in the video is affiliated with CU Boulder. And just like us moving around and how does it tell a story and how does know? It was something that was like one of these great things where it's like there's not much time and we got to wing it, make something. What can we pull out in a really short amount of time? And how much coffee can I have when I make it.

    A: I believe they must listen to the songs first and then choreograph in their own ways and then to film it later. How was their reaction to this project?

    KS: They thought it was great because a lot of them were Sleater-Kinny video, but it was a know Laura Conway, who shot and produced it. And then Maddie, who was the know, knew everyone there and was friends with everyone. So it had this kind of really friendly energy on the Maddie. I gave Maddie the song, and we just talked about the idea of new forms of care. And so Maddie made these dances up that were based on CPR maneuvers and checking pulses. And it was just like a way for these bodies and these bodies in a field to connect. And I always like to mediate bodies in some ways and play with different textures. And it was at the end of the semester, and I was also teaching the moving Image foundations class. And we were doing a hand painted film workshop one day, and I was like, oh, my gosh, I have to make this video. And so I set everyone up, and then I was just on a different table, like painting all this clear 16 millimeter and then transferring it so I could use something to layer into the bodies that were in the video. And so in some ways, it feels so different, but there's different ways of like, well, how can I interrupt or have the body express something like, be less figurative? And so that was one way to kind of bring some of the ways I've traditionally worked with bodies or have made animations into this film.

    A: do you feel like you would put more of dancers or those live performances into your work in the future?

    KS: I do hope. I've always wanted to make a film, and I'm working on it now that at some point has a choreographed dance scene in the middle of it. So that was like, yeah, I know some amazing dancers now and choreographers. This could be great.


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    A: Looking forward to that. And then there comes a question after that. If you could collaborate with any artist, past or present, who would it be and what kind of project would you envision?

    KS: my goodness. It would be a collage film with John Stezaker and Chris Marker. It would another time a science fiction story that I'd collaborate on the story with, with Chris Marker and with John Stezaker make, you know, all the different kind of bodies out of different kind of photos that we recognize, but into these new forms.

    A: Amazing. Maybe that could happen in the future with the technology advancement we have. Is there any new techniques? I know you already mentioned you went for more scrappier or more retro ways. But I just want to ask, is there any part technology or themes that excites you or that you want to explore in the future projects?

    KS:Well, I don't know if it's new technology, but there's just, like, different ways, different image architectures that I'm thinking about right now and kind of revisiting moments in past videos and thinking about how to expand on them. And I think that's something that I tell my students a lot, is like, if there's something that was exciting that you did, take that and build it up more. And so there's, like, moments from past videos I would love for there to be. In this bigger film, I'm working on a choreographed scene where it's a scene that starts off with this practice of body swapping, of people taking off, like, limbs and giving them to each other, and it turning into a choreographed big dance party. But also in films like Jupiter Elisius, I think about having this character who is collaged in with technology and having her real body interact with collage elements and pushing buttons and working on there's this kind of missile control sensor that I see her at that she's hitting different buttons. And in that film, it was like a very early version of collaging human body with collage architecture in the frame. Like, kind of almost it being an after the fact set that that person was situated in. And I'm interested in exploring filming people and putting them in collage sets that I design and having them interact with them and also just really expanding visual languages. I feel like some films have a very consistent tone across them and building bigger works that really shift in terms of different aesthetics throughout.

    A: because in one of the previous, earlier works that I see, there is a project named aerial viewing that is more interactive. I'm just curious, would you bring that kind of interactive installations or those kind of interactivity in your work again?

    KS: I think the answer is, why not? But I don't know why yet. It hasn't been the shift around me that's making me want to work that way quite yet. But I feel like as we move through the world, it changes. And then the way that we want to interact with it changes. That. Interactive work was funny because it was like a one off thing that was fun to do, but it hasn't called to me again to do it. We're not done yet.


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    A: I heard that visuals are the most important things for you to create new things. And then the sound or the other elements come after that to support the visual satisfaction that you have in your films. And then how is that? Is it still the way that you create the new works, or did that change in any ways?

    KS: I now make sound along with the visual, and because I feel like the visual is just like one form of the idea moving through space and time, and I'll make a shot and I'm like, what does that world sound like? What does that feel like in there? And I had to start experimenting with the sound as I go along. So now they kind of start evolving. And it was great because on the last film, the last season that Adam Wade did the sound, I built out the entire. Then is it by live recording? What's that?

    A: Is it by live recording that you made on the spot?

    KS: No, it was like finding everything from wind sounds to mechanical rewind sounds to a song I wanted in there. And I built out the whole soundtrack, and I brought it to Adam, and I'm like, I don't know what our collaboration is going to look like, because before, I just went with a piece that had voice and image, and Adam built the sound, but this time I'm like, I think with the sound to help me figure out the piece at this point. And I brought the soundtrack, and he rebuilt it so much better than I imagined it. He's like, okay, it's really helpful to see what you're thinking about here, but let's actually build this out. And so was so happy working with him, and it was funny because he would make a sound, and I'm like, that's not what it sounds like. He's like, well, what does it sound like? And we'd have to, like, he had me write out emotionally what you wanted someone to feel at every single point in every single shot in the film. And some of the shots are just, like 2 seconds long. So it was just like, I really had to think about what needed to happen in there. And Adam was amazing translating that and making it happen and taking the soundtrack with, like, 20 tracks of sound and then building a new soundtrack. 20 tracks of sound. And it was great.

    A: I think, as we get closer to the end of our conversation, in a way, I see a lot of your works has the implication, or those really opposed, official kind of rebellion in your work. RPM film festival stands for revolution per minute. And then is there the final message would you like to share with RPM festival and as an experimental film artist, what revolution mean to you?

    Wow, that's a great question. The work is questioning procedure, official narratives, kind of authoritarian positions. And I think so much of that is so coded into how we see how the world is imaged, what images circulate, how we circulate, and taking a deeper look at something that could be images of the space race and tying that to larger kind of imperial and nationalistic gestures, or thinking about how gender power dynamics are coded and looking at that through kind of massage books and these examples of touch, I think it's important for us to look at moments that open up into larger gestures of resistance and larger ways of speaking back to what is the official word? Because that's not always these ideas of what's official. What is the idea of progress. It's not universal, and it's always usually to the advantage of some people. So what are the spaces? If you kind of roll back that claim of the official, the authoritative, and then you start to leave room for other stories that push back against those narratives, I think that's something I try to do across all the work.


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    Sunday
    Feb.11
    2PM
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    • Sunday, Feb. 11, 2PM, 2024
      Brattle Theatre
      40 Brattle Street
      Cambridge, MA

    Hymn To Her

    Films by Stan Brakhage & Barbara Hammer


    Hymn To Her: Stan Brakhage & Barbara Hammer

    [Cambridge, Feb.11] – RPM and the Brattle Theatre are thrilled to announce a presentation featuring a collection of six films by avant-garde filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Barbara Hammer. Born as Mary Jane Collom, Jane Wodening (1936 - 2023), a pivotal figure, is featured in numerous films within this series.

    Jane Wodening, an American Writer and Naturalist, authored an impressive 14 books and played a pivotal role as a collaborator alongside Experimental Filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The duo, who married in 1957 and later separated in 1987, left an indelible mark on the world of experimental cinema.

    Stan Brakhage, known for his lyrical films exploring themes of family, childhood, personal experiences, and mortality, often featured himself and his family as central subjects. The 1959 experimental short film "Window Water Baby Moving" chronicles the birth of their first child. All films will be presented in their original 16mm prints. The first three silent pieces, "Hymn to Her" (1974), "Jane" (1985), and "Window Water Baby Moving" (1959), showcase Brakhage's early exploration of intimate and familial themes. The program then transitions to two rare sound films by Stan Brakhage, "The Stars are Beautiful" (1974) and "I...Dreaming" (1988).

    The screening culminates with Barbara Hammer's powerful piece, "Jane Brakhage" (1974)[1], which provides a feminist perspective on Jane, absent in Stan's own work.


    Post-screening discussion: Sarah Keller & Shira Segal
    [1] 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.

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    Hymn to Her
    Stan Brakhage | 1974 | 2.5 minutes | COLOR | SILENT

    Jane
    Stan Brakhage | 1985 | 13 minutes | COLOR | SILENT

    Window Water Baby Moving
    Stan Brakhage | 1959 | 12 minutes | COLOR | SILENT

    The Stars Are Beautiful
    Stan Brakhage | 1974 | 19 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

    I...Dreaming
    Stan Brakhage | 1988 | 8 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

    Jane Brakhage
    Barbara Hammer | 1974 | 10 minutes | B&W | SOUND

    Stan Brakhage "Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1933, Brakhage moved to Denver, Colorado at the age of six. He sang as a boy soprano soloist, dreamed of being a poet, and graduated from South High School in 1951 with a scholarship to Dartmouth. After one semester, he left to pursue a life in the Arts, returning to Denver to make his first film in 1952.
    "As a young man, Brakhage lived in San Francisco and New York associating with many other poets, musicians, painters and filmmakers, including Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, John Cage, Edgard Varese, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren and Marie Menken. A youthful "poet-with-a-camera," Brakhage soon emerged as a significant film artist, evolving an entirely new form of first person, lyrical cinema.

    "Brakhage married Jane Collom in 1957, and from the early 60s they lived in Rollinsville, Colorado, making films and raising their five children. Brakhage also continued to travel around the country and abroad becoming a leading figure of the American avant-garde film movement. He lived in Boulder from1986, and in 2002 moved to Canada with his second wife, Marilyn, and their two children.

    "Before his death in March, 2003, Brakhage had completed more than 350 films, ranging from the psycho-dramatic works of the early 1950s to autobiographical lyrics, mythological epics, "documents," and metaphorical film 'poems' -- variously employing his uniquely developed hand-held camera and rapid editing techniques, multiple superimpositions, collages, photographic abstractions, and elaborate hand-painting applied directly to the surface of the film. A deeply personal filmmaker, Brakhage's great project was to explore the nature of light and all forms of vision - while encompassing a vast range of subject matter. He frequently referred to his works as "visual music," or as documents of "moving visual thinking." The majority of his films are intentionally silent.

    "Brakhage taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The recipient of three Honorary Degrees and numerous prestigious awards, he lectured extensively on filmmaking and the Arts, and is the author of 11 books - including his seminal 1963 work, Metaphors On Vision, and his more recent series of essays, Telling Time."

    Marilyn Brakhage
    Victoria, BC Canada

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    Barbara Hammer

    Barbara Hammer is a visual artist primarily working in film and video. Her work reveals and celebrates marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages an audience viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. She has been honored with 5 retrospectives in the last 3 years: The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Toronto International Film Festival and Kunsthalle Oslo in Norway. Her book Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life was published in 2010 by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.

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    Hymn to Her
    Stan Brakhage | 1974 | 2.5 minutes | COLOR | SILENT | 16mm

    "HER" to me is always Jane, in the first place, but also Hera: "goddess of women and marriage," naturally enough. Then, too, as it is a hymn of light, and as he/me feels the self that way, it sings of and to itself. -- SB

    Pages from Jane Wodening’s scrapbook including a photograph of her and Stan Brakhage, 1958-1967

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    Jane
    Stan Brakhage | 1985 | 13 minutes | COLOR | SILENT | 16mm

    Someone said to me, of this film, that it was really about light; but Jane (who takes it as a portrait - i.e., sees herself in it) said: "you gave me the moon and seven stars." -- SB

    Film still: Window Water Baby Moving

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    Window Water Baby Moving
    Stan Brakhage | 1959 | 12 minutes | COLOR | SILENT | 16mm

    "... Brakhage's treatment of the birth of his daughter. Here he unleashes the full power of his technique, so apt to become abstractly unintelligible when left to his own devices, on a specific subject. The result is a picture so forthright, so full of primitive wonder and love, so far beyond civilization in its acceptance that it becomes an experience like few in the history of the movies." - Arthur Winsten, The New York Post

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    The Stars Are Beautiful
    Stan Brakhage | 1974 | 19 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm

    The film is dedicated to James Broughton.
    This is the first sound film I've completed since 1962 - the first sync-sound ever. It is a philosophical film ... extending the realm of BLUE MOSES. Its finest viewer, so far, has written:
    "The sun, - moon - and stars, really are the footprints of God.
    / "- and the broken fragments of the mirror that reflects reality. -
    / "- and they are quite beautiful. I had not seen them before. -" - John Newell
    -- SB

    This project was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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    I...Dreaming
    Stan Brakhage | 1988 | 8 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm

    This is a setting-to-film of a "collage" of Stephen Foster phrases by composer Joel Haertling. The recurring musical themes and melancholia of Foster refer to "loss of love" in the popular "torch song" mode; but the film envisions a re-awakening of such senses-of-love as children know, and it posits (along a line of words scratched over picture) the psychology of waiting.

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    Jane Brakhage
    Barbara Hammer | 1974 | 10 minutes | B&W | SOUND | 16mm

    "I picked up Stan and Jane Brakhage at the airport and drove them to San Francisco State College where Stan spoke about his films to the student body. I was fascinated with Jane. She was so interested in the world around her while Stan seemed caught up only in his ideas. She picked seed pods from trees and plants and told me she had written a lexicon of dog language. She was so much more complex than Stan's portrayal of her in Window Water Baby Moving (1958) that I decided to make a documentary about her for my graduate project." — Barbara Hammer

    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.



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    Tuesday
    Feb.20
    7PM
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    • Tuesday, Feb. 20th, 7PM
      Boston City Hall Plaza

      Civic Pavilion
      5 Congress St.
      Boston
      MA 02203

    To Weave and Sing


    RPM Festival, in collaboration with Non-Event, proudly announces the co-presentation of "To Weave and Sing," an immersive evening of experimental film and new music performance, supported by the Boston Mayor's Office of Art and Culture. The event is scheduled to take place on February 20th from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the Boston City Hall Civic Pavilion.
    "To Weave and Sing" promises to be a captivating experience, featuring a curated selection of three exceptional short films and a solo set by the guitarist, improviser, and composer Lautaro Mantilla. The event aims to showcase the intersection of contemporary experimental cinema and the cross-pollination of new music performances.
    The title "To Weave and Sing" is borrowed from anthropologist David Guss's eponymous book, the first in-depth analysis of the rich spiritual and artistic traditions of the Carib-speaking Yekuana Indians of Venezuela. Drawing inspiration from this title, the event hopes to continue the practice of exploring and celebrating cultural richness through artistic expression.

    "To Weave and Sing" is part of the RPM at Boston City Hall Civic Pavilion series, an initiative aimed at promoting contemporary experimental cinema and fostering a creative dialogue between visual and auditory art forms.

    The collaboration has received support from the Boston Mayor's Office of Art and Culture, emphasizing the city's commitment to nurturing and showcasing the arts.

    The film lineup includes:
    Watunna by Stacey Steers - A mesmerizing hand-painted animation.
    Here where everything ends
    by Cláudia Cárdenas and Juce Filho - A lyrical exploration of film.
    Panorama
    by Djuly Gava and Daniel Leão - An insightful essay film.

    The evening will conclude with a spellbinding solo guitar set by experimental musician Lautaro Mantilla.
    "To Weave and Sing" is free and open to the public.

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    Watunna
    Stacey Steers
    1989 | 24mins | USA | 16mm to HD | Color | Sound

    Here where everything ends
    Cláudia CÁRDENAS & JUCE FILHO
    2023 | 19mins | Brazil | 16mm to HD | color | Sound

    Panorama
    Djuly Gava & Daniel Leão
    2023 | 17mins | Brazil | 4K | Color | Sound

    Guitar Improvisation
    Lautaro Mantilla
    30mins

    program thumb About Non-event:

    [Non-Event is a Boston-based concert series devoted to the presentation of experimental, abstract, improvised, and adventurous music from New England and around the world.]

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    Lautaro Mantilla

    Solo Guitar Set
    30mins

    LAUTARO MANTILLA, DMA is a guitarist, composer, and improviser from Bogotá, Colombia. In his performances, he typically combines guitar, extended vocalization techniques, and homebuilt electronics to create music that is both viscerally affecting and conceptually rigorous. Based in Boston, Lautaro is active in the NY and Boston music scenes and is a faculty member of the Contemporary Musical Arts department at New England Conservatory (Boston). Lautaro holds a Bachelor’s degree in Classical guitar from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá (Colombia), a Master’s in guitar and improvisation and a Doctorate in composition, both from New England Conservatory (Boston/USA)

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    Watunna
    Stacey Steers

    1989 | 24mins | USA | 16mm to HD | Color | Sound

    The creation myths of the Yekuana Indians of the Orinoco region of Venezuela provide a transparent look at the poetic process by which human beings construct meaning from their experience. Narrated by Stan Brakhage. Music and sound by Bruce Odland.

    Stacey Steers is known internationally for her process-driven, labor-intensive films comprising thousands of handmade works on paper. Her work employs images appropriated from early cinematic sources, from which she constructs original, lyrical narratives.
    Stacey’s animated short films have been screened throughout the U.S. and abroad and have received numerous awards. Her work has been featured at the Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New Directors New Films, New York, MoMA, The Lincoln Center, New York City, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
    Stacey is a recipient of major grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, and the American Film Institute. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.

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    Here where everything ends
    Cláudia CÁRDENAS & JUCE FILHO

    2023 | 19mins | Brazil | 16mm to HD | color | Sound

    Here where everything ends is a poetic and experimental short-film that travels in between documentary and fiction to approach a culture faced with extinction: the indigenous peoples of Brazil. It is particularly about the sharing of knowledge of the Bugio village, and made in a collective way in every stage of 16mm footage, botanical revelation and sound caption. It tries to reactivate the memories of the origins of the Laklãnõ/Xokleng people, while observing what is lost with the alienation of their knowledge and culture practiced by colonialism.

    Cláudia Cárdenas (Rio de Janeiro, 1961) is an experimental audiovisual artist. Cláudia develops research work in video, film and experimental audio, as well as in the creation of experimental audiovisual works at Duo Strangloscope. She is also the creator and curator of Strangloscope – International Conference on Audio, Video / Film and Experimental Performance, which this year was in its 14th edition. Cláudia and Rafael, as Duo Strangloscope, started to carry out workshops and tutorials in experimental residencies in video both in Brazil and abroad for festivals around the world. Their research has currently focused on experimental works with video art, expanded cinema and installation performances of different natures and in different supports.

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    Panorama
    Djuly Gava & Daniel Leão

    2023 | 17mins | Brazil | 4K | Color | Sound

    Panorama is a marginal film like Panorama, one of the largest housing projects in southern Brazil. Located on the side of a highway on the outskirts of Florianópolis, the Panorama Housing Project was built in 1989, the year of the first Brazilian presidential election after the end of the military dictatorship. Through the appropriation of archival footage of the residents, the film narrates the passage of time in community life. Directed and edited by residents of the complex, Panorama is both an ode to possible joys of everyday life and a subtle reflection about what leads us to photograph, the ways of permanence of the past and the migration of images from familiar contexts to the public and common territory of the cinematic space.

    Djuly Gava (Florianópolis, 1995) holds a master's degree in Contemporary Artistic Processes and graduated in Visual Arts by the State University of Santa Catarina. She participates in exhibitions and art fairs since 2013, such as: 11th National Salon Victor Meirelles, 2022; 15th National Salon of Itajaí, 2021; Tijuana Printed Art Fair, Casa do Povo, São Paulo/SP, 2019; Microutopias - Feria de Arte Impreso de Montevideo, Centro Cultural España, Montevideo/Uruguay, 2019. Her photographic work is part of the collection of Santa Catarina Art Museum. She has been working with cinema since 2015.

    Daniel Leão (Rio de Janeiro, 1984) is a documentary filmmaker, visual artist, professor and book editor. Graduated in cinema from Fluminense Federal University (2010), Master in Image and Sound Analysis from the same institution, Doctor in Visual Arts from State University of Santa Catarina with a sandwich period at New York University (2020) and is currently carrying out post-doctoral research in the area of Literature about the Brazilian documentaries about the coup d’état against former president Dilma Rousseff. Daniel has been working as documentarist and visual artist since 2013, works that have been exhibited in several Brazilian and international institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA).



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    RPM23 CAMLab Coordinators