Revolutions per Minute festival, an artist run festival, is dedicated to short-form poetic, personal, cinematic work in experiments, essay film, animation, documentary, video and audiovisual performance.
RPM23: We are looking for any work that experiments with the formal possibilities or hybrid form of film, audiovisual, animation and video under 12 minutes (and the medium length category will accept the work from 12 mins to 30 mins) .
Submit your work (produced after July 1st, 2021)
through FilmFreeway.
Selections by Sept.1, 2023.
Revolutions Per Minute Festival 2022 was co-hosted by
Art and Art History Department and Cinema Studies at UMass-Boston, Brattle Theatre in Cambridge & Harvard FAS CAMLab.
For more info: contact@revolutionsperminutefest.org
Sound Over Water,
4 mins, 16mm, color/sound, 2009
Orpheus (outtakes),
6 mins, 16mm, col/BW/sd. 2012
The Dragon is the Frame,
14 mins, 16mm, color/sound, 2014
The Glass Note,
9 mins, Digital, col/bw, 2018
Figure Minus Fact,
13 mins, Digital, col/bw, 2020
Exhibition,
19 mins, Digital, col/bw, 2022
Post Screening Q&A
Mary Helena Clark & Malic Amalya
RPM and The Brattle Theatre are thrilled to co-present a program of experimental short pieces by artist Mary Helena Clark. The screening will take place on on April 12, Wednesday 7PM at The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA., titled Figure Minus Fact
Mary Helena Clark is a multi-faceted artist working in film, video, and installation based in Queens, New York. A collection of six short films is classified as trance-like, transparent films, where she explores narrative figures of speech, the materiality of film, and the artifacts from the painting technique trompe l'oeil to CGI models. Using the language of collage, her work investigates dissociative states through cinema, bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code. Her films blend conventions of narrative, language, and genre to shift subjectivities and push the limits of the embodied camera.
Her work has been exhibited at a variety of prestigious venues, including Sundance Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Viennale, Anthology Film Archives, Wexner Art Center, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and MIT List Visual Arts Center. In 2017, her work was featured in the Whitney Biennial.
Post Screening Q&A
with Mary Helena Clark & Malic Amalya
Malic Amalya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual & Media Arts at Emerson College and is a filmmaker who creates films exploring themes related to attachment, identity, and relationships. He also curates INFRARED, a program of experimental films from underrepresented queer and trans voices.
Sound Over Water
2009, 4 minutes (16mm)
Blue sky and blue sea meet on emulsion.
Orpheus (outtakes)
2012, 6 minutes (16mm)
Using footage from Cocteau's Orphée, Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames. (Andrea Picard)
The Dragon is the Frame
2014, 14 minutes (16mm)
An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history, and the puzzle of depression. (MHC)
The Glass Note
2018, 9.5 minutes (digital)
In The Glass Note, a collage of sound, image, and text explore cinema’s inherent ventriloquism. Across surface and form, the video reflects on voice, embodiment, and fetish through the commingling of sound and image. (MHC)
Figure Minus Fact
2020, 13 minutes (digital)
Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects.
Figure Minus Fact draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subjectless portrait of loss. (MHC)
Exhibition
2022, 19 minutes (digital)
Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—a Swedish woman’s marriage to the Berlin Wall,
and a suffragette’s hatcheting of Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus—Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition is a maze-like tour through
images and artifacts, a dense cryptography of the forms and objects that hold us in. (Leo Goldsmith)
Attitudes Passionelles, 13 mins, HD, color/sound, 2015
House, 16 mins, HD, col/sd. 2015
Evangelia C’est Moi, 11 mins, 16mm to HD, color/sound, 2017
Keeping Together in Time, 9 mins, 16mm to HD, col/bw, 2020
Are You My Mother?, 5 mins, 16mm to HD, col/bw, WIP 2023
Post Screening Q&A
Alison Folland & Jennifer Montgomery
RPM and The Brattle Theatre are thrilled to co-present a program of experimental short films by filmmaker and performer Alison Folland. The screening will take place on Sunday, March 19 (2PM) at The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA., titled Some Problems of Domestication
Alison Folland is a filmmaker and performer based in Somerville, MA. Her short hybrid films engage questions of affect and truth-value and are directly informed by her work as an actor in the commercial film industry.
Alison studied physical theater at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU/Tisch and film/video art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Her films have been screened at festivals such as Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio), Athens International Film Festival (Greece), Antimatter (Victoria, BC), and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival.
As a performer, Alison has worked with directors such as Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Barbet Schroeder, and David O. Russell.
She is a member of Agx Film Collective and teaches 16mm filmmaking at Emerson College.
Post Screening Q&A with Jennifer Montgomery and Alison Folland
Jennifer Montgomery is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
Her work has been screened internationally at festivals such as Toronto, New Directors New Films (MoMA), San Francisco, Rotterdam, Thessaloniki, Rimini, Edinburgh, and Melbourne.
It has also screened at museums such as the Whitney (NYC), the ICA (London), the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis), and the Pasadena Arts Center, and has had theatrical distribution in American and European repertory theaters.
She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Art Matters, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and received a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.
Attitudes Passionelles
2015 • HD • 13 min
A hybrid video essay exploring topics of romantic ballet, madness, and the relationship between physical gesture and inner state.
House
2015 • HD • 16 min
An adaptation of the “Full House” pilot, set on a half-built house outside Athens, Greece.
Evangelia C’est Moi
2017 • 16mm to HD • 11 min
The joys and heartaches of largesse. A real-life Madame Bovary reflects on her past excesses from her kitchen in austerity-era Greece.
Keeping Together in Time
2020 • 16mm to HD • 9 min
This film is an attempt to define the word, “teleomeric”. It is an imaginary word, taught to me by my husband. He later had a stroke and lost his language, leaving me with the memory of a word that I cannot find in the dictionary.
--AF--
Are You My Mother?
WIP • 16mm to HD • 3 min
Can we have both love and freedom? A child ponders the situation in an animal simulator game.
Alison Folland
Tufts University
Barnum Hall 08
Dana Laboratory, Packard Ave,
Medford, MA 02155
Admission is free
RPM along with Non-Event, Tufts FMS, Tufts Music, and SMFA at Tufts Media Arts, presents the film Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, a film by Daniel Weintraub, which tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator and humanitarian.
Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros. She was one of the world’s original electronic musicians, one of the few women amongst notable post-war American composers, a master accordion player, a teacher and mentor to musicians,
a gateway to music and sound for non- musicians and a technical innovator who helped develop everything from tools that allow musicians to play together while in different countries to software that enables those with physical limitations to create beautiful music.
On the vanguard of contemporary American music for six decades, her story illuminates the pathway to how we got where we are and where the future will take us in the worlds of music, the philosophy of sound, and the art of listening.
Produced in collaboration with executive producer Ione, Oliveros’ partner in life and work, and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc., the film combines rare archival footage, live performances, and unreleased music with appearances by Terry Riley, Anna Halprin, Ione, Linda Montano, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore, Alvin Lucier, Claire Chase, Miya Masaoka, Morton Subotnick, Tony Martin, Ramon Sender and many more ground- breaking artists.
Post Screening Q&A the director Daniel Weintraub.
A Return to the Return to Reason | 2014, 3 minutes , 35mm to HD|
by Sabine Gruffat
Framelines | 2017,10:14 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat
Take It Down | 2018, 12:30 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat
Moving or Being Moved | 2020, 11 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat
XCTRY | 2018, 6:18 minutes |
by Bill Brown
Life On The Mississippi | 2018, 28:13 minutes|
by Bill Brown
Amarillo Ramp | 2017, 24:10 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown
Post Screening Q&A
Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown & Brittany Gravely
Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA 02138
8pm
Advanced Tickets available
RPM Festival & Brattle theatre Co-present a program of experimental short films by dynamic artist-filmmaker duo Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown.
They have been making experimental films, documentaries and essay films and performing live electronic improvise for over two decades.
Sabine Gruffat explores different methods to generate content and images, from laser cutting/etching on 35mm film strips to 3D animation. Bill Brown is known for his nomadic filmmaking and transporting us to various destinations.
Seven shorts in this program titled Moving or Being Moved, highlight their praxis in recent 10 years.
Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. In this work, machines, interfaces, and systems constitute the language by which she codes the world. The creation of new ideas means inventing new ways of using existing tools, crossing signals, or repurposing old hardware. By actively disrupting both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat questions the standardized and mediatized world around us. She has produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York.
She is also a filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. These films seek to empower people, encourage social participation, and inspire political engagement. Sabine's films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, and Migrating Forms in New York, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, 25FPS in Croatia, Transmediale in Berlin, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. Her recent video works are distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago, IL.
Bill Brown is a media artist interested in ways landscape is interpreted, appropriated, and reconfigured according to human desires, memories, and dreams. His films have screened at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In addition to his filmmaking, Brown is the co-founder of the Zine Machine: Durham Printed Matter Festival, and the Cosmic Rays Film Festival, an annual showcase of experimental and first-person films.
Amarillo Ramp (Brown + Gruffat, 2017, 24:10)
A portrait of sculptor Robert Smithson's final earthwork. Employing filmmaking strategies that are both responsive to the artwork's environmental context and informed by Smithson's own art-making strategies, the filmmakers encounter the Ramp as an observatory where human scales of space and time are set against geological and cosmic scales.
A tribute to Man Ray's 1923 film, the first film to use his 'Rayograph' technique in which Man Ray exposed found objects onto film negative. The “original” film was digitized with all its aged emulsions, scratches, and splices, then compiled into digital filmstrips. These filmstrips are used to output a dithered and inverted image that a laser engraver etched onto black 35mm film leader.
An abstract scratch film made by laser etching preset patterns onto the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms. The soundtrack is created by filtering and layering the noise made by the laser etched 35mm optical track.
Employing solarized color positive 35mm film and animation of old postcard images of Confederate monuments in North Carolina, Take It Down documents how Southern identity continues to be bound up in the legacy of the Civil War and the Jim Crow Era. The film considers how these old memorials continue to be sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives.
Post-modern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers. In this gaming/ special effects world, movement has become a data set removed from the human body.
Brown re-works 16mm footage that he shot years ago during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Las Vegas. The spatial discontinuities of the road trip are rendered as visual continuities across three frames as Brown goes in search of the next town to fall in and out of love with.
A short essay film about a river and the limits of knowing it. Using Mark Twain’s Life On The Mississippi as a road map, Brown travels from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans and considers ways that river pilots, paddlers, historical reenactors, and civil engineers attempt to know the river through modeling, measurement, and simulation.
Quiet motors | 2017, 1’24 |
Music by Pierre Bastien
Babylone | 2018, 1’13 |
Music by Kraus
Three motors | 2018, 1’55 |
Sound recording by Ève Couturier and Jean-Jacques Palix
Transports | 2018, 15’50 |
Music by Pierre Bastien, Narassa, Gamelan Voices, Lawrence, mix by Waltraud Blischke.
Volatile | 2019, 9’47 |
Music by Stine Janvin
Korridor | 2020, 1’16 |
Music by Marie-Pierre Bonniol and Walter Duncan (co-director)
Wasser | 2021, 22'35 |
Music by Andreas O. Hirsch, Khaki Blazer, Raymonde, Richard Pinhas, The Dead Mauriacs
RPM Festival & Non-Event Co-present a program of experimental short films by the filmmaker Marie-Pierre Bonniol.
These seven short films are all related to music, with soundtracks by musicians such as Pierre Bastien, Gamelan Voices, and Stine Janvin. The longest of these films is Wasser (2021, 22'35), a powerful abstract essay on water and its transformation into energy, features a soundtrack by Andreas O. Hirsch, Raymonde, Khaki Blazer, Richard Pinhas, and The Dead Mauriacs.
Obsessed by the idea of Imaginary music, Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the “bachelor machine,” and the power of mysteries, Marie-Pierre Bonniol's films –
all recorded on her smartphone – have been presented at Cafe OTO in London, ZKM in Karlsruhe, the National Library of Argentina, Anthology Film Archive in New York, the Alchemy Arts & Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival.
Please note that some parts of the programme are not adapted to people with PSE (Photosensitive epilepsy).
This program is co-presented with
the Goethe-Institut Boston and Non-Event
Post Screening Q&A
Marie-Pierre Bonniol & Wenhua Shi
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street, Boston
Doors: 7:30pm Performance begins promptly at 8pm
Tickets: $10 / $5 for members and students
Advanced Tickets available
