Revolutions per Minute festival, an artist run festival, is dedicated to short-form poetic, personal, cinematic work in experiments, essay film, animation, documentary, video and audiovisual performance.
RPM23: We are looking for any work that experiments with the formal possibilities or hybrid form of film, audiovisual, animation and video under 12 minutes (and the medium length category will accept the work from 12 mins to 30 mins) .
Submit your work (produced after July 1st, 2021)
through FilmFreeway.
Selections by Sept.1, 2023.
Revolutions Per Minute Festival 2022 - 2023 was co-hosted by
Art and Art History Department and Cinema Studies at UMass-Boston, Brattle Theatre in Cambridge & Harvard FAS CAMLab.
RPM Festival 2022 presented with the support of a Festivals Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
For more info: contact@revolutionsperminutefest.org
Arnulf Rainer - Peter Kubelka
| 1960| 6’30”| 16mm | Austria
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G - Paul Sharits
| 1968| 12’| 16mm | USA
2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test - Kurt Kren
| 1960 | 4’5” | 16mm| Silent | Austria
X-TRACTS - Leslie Thornton
| 1975 | 8’30’| 16mm| USA
Ruby Skin - Eve Heller
| 2005 | 4’30" | 16mm | USA
Razzle Dazzle - Jodie Mack
| 2014 | 5’ | 16mm | Silent | USA
Untitled for William P. - Mike Piso
| 2016 | 6’46” | 16mm | Silent | USA
Portrait - Douglas Urbank
| 2014 | 5’16”| 16mm |Silent| USA
A Proposal to Project in 4:3
- Viktoria Schmid
| 2017| 2’| 16mm | Austria
The Invisible Cinema 3 - Philipp Fleischmann
| 2017 | 43" | 16mm | Silent | Austria
Untitled (Generali Foundation Vienna) - Philipp Fleischmann
|2015 | 34" | 16mm | Silent | Austria
Notes after Long Silence - Saul Levine
| 1989 | 15’| 8mm - Digital | USA
Answer Print - Mónica Savirón
| 2016 | 5’ | 16mm - Digital | Spain & USA
Navigator - Björn Kämmerer
| 2015 | 7’| Digital | Silent | Austria
Besenbahn - Dietmar Offenhuber
| 2001 | 10‘| Digital | Austria
Light Matter - Virgil Widrich
| 2018 | 5’ | Digital | Austria
runtime 97 mins 54 secs
A joint event between RPM Festival in Boston and Millennium Film Workshop in NYC is set to take place,
showcasing a special program titled "Notes after Long Silence: On Austrian and American Structural Film".
The first screening is scheduled for May 4th at 8PM, Thursday, at UMass-Boston's University Hall 2300, with the entire program subsequently
traveling to Millennium Film Workshop for a second showing on May 6th at 7PM. This program has been made possible thanks to the generous
support of various organizations, including the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture (BMKOES), Austrian Cultural Forum New York,
UMass Boston's Art and Art History and Cinema Studies, and Millennium Film Workshop.
Filmmakers:
Peter Kubelka
Paul Sharits
Kurt Kren
Leslie Thornton
Virgil Widrich
Philipp Fleischmann
Saul Levine
Eve Heller
Jodie Mack
Mónica Sávirón
Mike Piso
Douglas Urbank
Björn Kämmerer
Dietmar Offenhuber
Viktoria Schmid.
A curatorial project by
Nicole Prutsch, Mike Piso, and Wenhua Shi.
Presented by Revolutions Per Minute Festival and Millennium Film Workshop.
Supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture (BMKOES), Austrian Cultural Forum New York, UMass Boston (Art and Art History, cinema studies), and Millennium Film Workshop.
Special thanks to Genevieve Carmel, Stefan Grabowski, Joe Wakeman, Paul Echeverria, Ty Ueda, AgX Film Collective, sixpackfilm, Canyon Cinema, Filmmakers’ Coop, Millennium Film Workshop, Umass Boston, Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture (BMKOES), and Austrian Cultural Forum New York.
Notes after Long Silence.
On Austrian and American Structural Film.
In the early 1960s, a number of filmmakers emerged in the United States and Europe to produce remarkable films that challenged any previous formal tendency
in avant-garde filmmaking. The Structuralist filmmakers—including Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits
, and Kurt Kren––arranged their shots according to mathematical principles, attempting to produce non-narrative and non-illusionist films
to oppose the cinematic apparatus. Similar to the advent of Minimalism in painting and sculpture, structural films insisted on shape, and their content was
minimal and subsidiary to the outline. For instance, in his film 2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test (1960), Kurt Kren employed a strictly
serial sequence technique to present 48 portraits from the Szondi Test for "experimental diagnosis of human impulses" in various frame sizes and
pre-specified lengths. Meanwhile, Peter Kubelka used the most radical version of Structural arrangements to produce the first Flicker
Film, Arnulf Rainer (1960), which consisted solely of black or white frames coupled with either silence or white noise on the soundtrack.
The Flicker(1966) by Tony Conrad, another landmark in Structural filmmaking, gradually increased the frequency and pattern
complexity of black and white frames to create stroboscopic effects that could cause visual hallucinations and even epileptic seizures.
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) by Paul Sharits further complicated the frame-by-frame approach with chromatically-varied frames
and combinations of visual and auditory repetition.
The Structural Film movement and its aesthetic principles—including serial cuts, static frames, and flicker effects—influenced several filmmakers of the next generation.
Leslie Thornton, for instance, a student of both Kubelka and Sharits, further developed the Structuralist approach in her debut experimental film X-TRACTS (1975),
which features cut-up readings of her high school diary paired with images of herself, once again exploring the territories of rhetoric, linguistics, and narrative structures.
Kubelka's co-founded institutions, the Anthology Film Archives in New York and the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna,
along with filmmakers like Saul Levine, continued to pass on the strategies of Structural Film to inspire younger generations of filmmakers to continue pushing
the boundaries of structure and materiality of film. The upcoming screening program, Notes After Long Silence, which takes its title from one of Levine's films,
traces the historical conversation of Austrian and American experimental film to the present day and explores the aesthetic and cultural limits pushed by filmmakers from both countries.
The program features works from members of the AgX Film Collective in Boston and the Schule Friedl Kubelka in Vienna, with films distributed by sixpackfilm, Canyon Cinema, and Filmmakers' Coop.
Arnulf Rainer
Peter Kubelka
| 1960| 6’30”| 16mm | Austria
This is a film composed entirely of frames of solid black and solid white, which Kubelka strings together in lengths as long as 24 frames and as short as a single frame. When he alternates between single black and white frames, a rapid flicker of motion-pictures projection; during the longer sections of darkness one waits in nervous anticipation for the flicker to return, without knowing precisely what form it will take. (Fred Camper) Arnulf Rainer, an architecture built in time by cinema uses only the four essential elements of the medium: light, darkness, sound and silence. (Peter Kubelka) With Arnulf Rainer, his third metrical film, Kubelka arrived at the most elemental components of cinematography – namely light, absence of light, sound, silence. These are the four poles from which all of cinema, all of film is suspended. Stretched to their utmost limits, all illusionism is driven out. The last trace of a spatial reproduction is extinguished. And the illusion of movement based on visual similarities of sequential frames (whose minor differences disappear upon projection and thanks to the sluggishness of perception are
transformed into an illusion of continuity) is also obliterated.
-- Peter Tscherkassky
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G
Paul Sharits
| 1968| 12’| 16mm | USA
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G uses flickering frames of solid color juxtaposed with positive and negative still images of the poet David Franks—sometimes cutting off his own tongue with glitter-covered scissors, sometimes suffering a series of glitter-stained fingernail scratches across the face. Other rapidly alternating still images of eye surgery and a couple in the midst of intercourse. The soundtrack is a continuous looped recording of the word “destroy” over the entire length of the film.
2/60: 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test
Kurt Kren
| 1960 | 4’5” | 16mm| Silent | Austria
Kren´s second film and the first he cut according to a strictly serial, sequence technique: in various framesizes, the 48 portraits from the Szondi Test for "experimental diagnosis of human impulses" are shown in pre-specified lengths (between one and eight frames).
-- Peter Tscherkassky
Kren´s 48 heads refer to a psychological procedure known as the Szondi Test. Running four minutes and shot at various speeds, Kren´s film fragments faces in extreme close-up: eyes, chins, hairlines, foreheads, with an occasional block of images using full-face. The film ends on mouths, viewed so closely as to be nearly abstracted. In 48 Köpfe body parts lose their original identification and become the subject of formal concerns.
-- Regina Cornwell (The Other Side: European Avant-Garde Cinema 1960-1980)
X-TRACTS
Leslie Thornton
| 1975 | 8’30’| 16mm | USA
Thornton's first 16mm film, X-Tracts was made in collaboration with cinematographer Desmond Horsfield.
The film consists of complex and rapid patterning of sound/image segments that are structured by a
formal mathematical schema that determines duration, interaction, and progression. Moving beyond the
critiques of the cinematic apparatus and its analogy to language that were central to that time
(Hollis Frampton's Hapax Legomena or Paul Sharit's T:O:U:C:H:I:N:G, for example), Thornton expands
into the territories of rhetoric, cognition, and linguistics. Composed of a cut-up reading of Thornton's
high school diary paired with images of the filmmaker, fragments of the body in motion or at rest, and
just-occupied spaces, X-Tracts seems both to defy and propose an autobiographical narrative.
The film has been described by Chrissie Iles, curator at The Whitney Museum of American Art,
as the "missing link" between the structuralists and the introduction of a more narratological tendency
in experimental film practice.
Ruby Skin
Eve Heller
| 2005 | 4’30" | 16mm | USA
A found footage film that taps into the poetic tradition of the language cut-up,
while taking filmic advantage of the 26 frame displacement between sound and image inherent
to 16 mm film’s optical soundtrack system. The magenta-shifted fragments of an educational movie on
"Reaching Your Reader" reveal their chemistry where the splicing tape pulled away a “ruby skin” of the emulsion,
leaving a green tear at the edit points. Ruby Skin is a material homage to the disappearing medium of 16 mm film
and some of its idiosyncrasies.
-- Eve Heller
Razzle Dazzle
Jodie Mack
| 2014 | 5’ | 16mm | Silent | USA
Tacky threads luminesce at a firefly’s pace, twinkling through remnants of chintzy opulence and gaudy glamour
prestissimo brilliante. Razzle Dazzle is an iridescent animated flicker film about textiles which lend a new and
dizzying dimension to the illusion of glamour. In her usual psychedelic style,
Jodie Mack takes a look at the material production of desire.
Untitled for William P.
Mike Piso
| 2016 | 6’46” | 16mm | Silent | USA
For nine years Mike Piso worked in various roles at a day program for artists with intellectual disabilities in the Boston area. This short film is a black-and-white study of many colorful drawings and paintings by William, an outsider artist who attended the program for about ten years before he died at home. He was an artist of few words but created a fascinating and haunting body of work.
Portrait
Douglas Urbank
| 2014 | 5’16”| 16mm |Silent| USA
An imagined portrait, a handmade, stream-of-consciousness improvisation.
A Proposal to Project in 4:3
Viktoria Schmid
| 2017| 2’| 16mm | Austria
Schmid builds her own projection screens ranging from aspect ratios currently in use (in this case 4:3, the format she uses the most often, 16mm being her primary medium) to entirely fictitious ones (the 4:1 Viktoriascope) and if possible she then films them in the exact same aspect ratio. While at the Djerassi Artist in Residency Program in California, the artist constructed a screen with wood and canvas and installed it in the program’s sculpture park. Still standing there, it is an unexpected object on the way to a scenic view of the rolling hills on the Djerassi property. In A proposal to project in 4:3, Schmid shot this site-specific installation over the course of a single day when the screen became projection surface for the subtle interplay of shadow and light from the surrounding trees and shrubs. Cinema without film.
-- Claudia Slanar
The Invisible Cinema 3
Philipp Fleischmann
| 2017 | 43" | 16mm | Silent | Austria
Conceived by filmmaker Peter Kubelka as a ´viewing machine` not
supposed to distract, in which only the film being projected should
“completely dictate the sensation of space”, the history of the
Invisible Cinema went through several locations and appearances (with
more and less ambitious setups, it was built in 1970 in New York City,
then in Vienna in 1989 and later remodeled in that same spot in 2003)
always according to the minimalistic maxim of being a completely black
box, with no reflective surfaces except the screen. That same sense of
visionary austerity, in which the respect for an art of lights and
shadows gives way to an experience of unparalleled vision, is what
Fleischmann seems to have channeled as a sort of filmmaker-medium.
Half phantasmagory, half blueprint in motion, The Invisible Cinema 3
is a 43-second blitzkrieg immersion into the total blackness of the
building whose only diversion is marked by a series of oscillating
white dots (the room lights) that parade through the frame upwards and
sidewards. The result is a cold and hypnotic miniature, a tiny slice
of unmediated reality that throws upon its viewer a barrage of
questions about the nature of the film medium too powerful to leave
the theater unharmed.
High on concept, the fact that Fleischmann’s whole creative endeavor
materializes into less than a minute of silent film (with barely any
image to see) ultimately speaks of an unbreakable pact with the
process rather than of a certain disappointment from the perspective
of the audience.
-- Pablo Marin (filmmaker and theorist)
Untitled (Generali Foundation Vienna)
Philipp Fleischmann
|2015 | 34" | 16mm | Silent | Austria
Philipp Fleischmann builds camera objects for his films. This process results in films that are difficult to assign to existing categories of a film or art theoretical consideration, so that they in turn have the challenge of stepping out of the box and, as it were, of building the terms for what is perceived and its language depending on the situation . All these steps are integral elements of a work and an artistic-methodical sensitization for institutional norms of longing, which perhaps based on Keller Easterling‘s considerations on a living space in infrastructures and Karen Barad‘s concept of intra-action for subject-object relationships as (intra- ) can be described institutionally. In this respect, or consequently, in the case of Untitled (Generali Foundation Vienna), in addition to the film material, there are also photographic recordings from the cinematic-photographic recording instruments. The installation views were taken exactly at the time the exhibition space, which is now history, was closed. The artistic work was not commissioned, instead it seems to be precisely the insistence on reciprocal addressing that unfolds in the films.
-- Rike Frank (art historian)
Notes after Long Silence
Saul Levine
| 1989 | 15’| 8mm - Digital | USA
In title and content NOTES AFTER LONG SILENCE directly alludes to Levine's '60s protest film,
NEW LEFT NOTES, as well as to the SDS newspaper of the same name he once edited. It's also a startling
companion piece to Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July. If Stone is ultimately ambivalent about Vietnam,
Levine is not. A nameless vet in Fourth of July greets Tom Cruise's paraplegic Ron Kovic with 'Just what we need,
another limp dick.' In NOTES AFTER LONG SILENCE, ugly, ruddy close-ups of a flaccid penis begin to dominate the
blitzkrieg montage; the limp dick isn't innocent bystander to America's Fall, but guilty witness. Yet the final
images are of bouncy shtupping, a make-love-not-war, antiheroic corrective to Stone's mythic posturing.
– Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice
Answer Print
Mónica Savirón
| 2016 | 5’ | 16mm - Digital | Spain & USA
The fading that devastates color films occurs in the dark. It is accelerated by high temperatures and, to a lesser extent, relative humidity. Dye fading is irreversible. Once the dye images have faded, the information lost cannot be recovered.
An answer print is the first film after the original has been timed for every shot with fades and dissolves if any. The question that it answers is ‘what is this going to look like’, and ‘what corrections, if any, are needed’
-— Bill Brand
Answer Print is made with deteriorated 16mm color stock, and it is meant to disappear over time. Neither hue nor sound has been manipulated in its analog reassembling. The soundtrack combines audio generated by silent double perforated celluloid, the optical tracks from sound films, and the tones produced by each of the filmmaker’s cuts when read by the projector. The shots are based on a 26-frame length: the distance in 16mm films with optical tracks between an image and its sound.
Navigator
Björn Kämmerer
| 2015 | 7’| Digital | Silent | Austria
Normally a navigational device or navigator serves to provide orientation in unfamiliar territory,
to establish paths in the middle of nowhere by means of geometric aids. But what happens when space and its record,
region and map, merge and begin to intertwine? In NAVIGATOR Björn Kämmerer creates a kind of seeing machine that
executes exactly such a convolution.
Besenbahn
Dietmar Offenhuber
| 2001 | 10‘| Digital | Austria
Perceiving perception: Through media, this is simultaneously possible and impossible. The important thing about moving images is what is moving rather than what is causing the movement.
But the fact sometimes tends to be forgotten that the animated image could not exist without the viewer´s illusionary assumption that he or she is not seeing individual frames but continuous motion.
As a result, it should not surprise when film or videographic experiments are at their core reflections on forms of perception conveyed through various media, their purpose to make accessible the
circumstances under which sensuous experience takes place, which are dictated by the media. This all applies to besenbahn, though the problem is made more complex by the reference to perception which
itself requires the use of technical apparatus. Its subject is not "natural" perception, but perception put in motion by modern means of transportation, and therefore implicitly the history of an epochal
transformation of the way in which time and space is experienced. It has come to a preliminary end in suitable contexts - for example cities such as Los Angeles, which has been shaped by the history of motorization -
where moving perception now seems to be regarded as integral to natural perception.
The thesis presented by besenbahn in this regard would therefore be that the specifically aesthetic quality of such animated perception is absent from the forms of audiovisual representation which are already considered natural
(such as indicating movement by means of a tracking shot): In its fragmentation of the continuum of perception, the "subjective geometry which defines space through intervals of time" (Dietmar Offenhuber) illustrates a manner
of experience which could remain submerged because it is already so familiar.
-- Vrääth Öhner
Light Matter
Virgil Widrich
| 2018 | 5’ | Digital | Austria
Five minutes of pure irritation of the retina in the human eye. It all starts with dim flashes of light slowly intensifying into a staccato of dark and light, with extreme contrasts. Stimulating the eye´s photo-receptors, the impulses work their way to the brain, creating an illusion of color where there is nothing but an inferno of black and white. Virgil Widrich refers to a phenomenon first described by two scientists in the 19th century. The effect is perceived differently by every viewer. You may glimpse some distant colors in the depths of the strobe, or you may be reminded of 1980s´ gaming aesthetics with visuals flashing in red and green.
-- Gunnar Landsgesell (Viennale 2018)
Please note that some parts of the programme are not adapted to people with PSE (Photosensitive epilepsy).
Sound Over Water,
4 mins, 16mm, color/sound, 2009
Orpheus (outtakes),
6 mins, 16mm, col/BW/sd. 2012
The Dragon is the Frame,
14 mins, 16mm, color/sound, 2014
The Glass Note,
9 mins, Digital, col/bw, 2018
Figure Minus Fact,
13 mins, Digital, col/bw, 2020
Exhibition,
19 mins, Digital, col/bw, 2022
Post Screening Q&A
Mary Helena Clark & Malic Amalya
RPM and The Brattle Theatre are thrilled to co-present a program of experimental short pieces by artist Mary Helena Clark. The screening will take place on on April 12, Wednesday 7PM at The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA., titled Figure Minus Fact
Mary Helena Clark is a multi-faceted artist working in film, video, and installation based in Queens, New York. A collection of six short films is classified as trance-like, transparent films, where she explores narrative figures of speech, the materiality of film, and the artifacts from the painting technique trompe l'oeil to CGI models. Using the language of collage, her work investigates dissociative states through cinema, bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code. Her films blend conventions of narrative, language, and genre to shift subjectivities and push the limits of the embodied camera.
Her work has been exhibited at a variety of prestigious venues, including Sundance Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Viennale, Anthology Film Archives, Wexner Art Center, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and MIT List Visual Arts Center. In 2017, her work was featured in the Whitney Biennial.
Post Screening Q&A
with Mary Helena Clark & Malic Amalya
Malic Amalya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual & Media Arts
at Emerson College and is a filmmaker who creates films exploring themes related to attachment, identity, and relationships.
He also curates INFRARED, a program of experimental films from underrepresented queer and trans voices.
Sound Over Water
2009, 4 minutes (16mm)
Blue sky and blue sea meet on emulsion.
Orpheus (outtakes)
2012, 6 minutes (16mm)
Using footage from Cocteau's Orphée, Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames. (Andrea Picard)
The Dragon is the Frame
2014, 14 minutes (16mm)
An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history, and the puzzle of depression. (MHC)
The Glass Note
2018, 9.5 minutes (digital)
In The Glass Note, a collage of sound, image, and text explore cinema’s inherent ventriloquism. Across surface and form, the video reflects on voice, embodiment, and fetish through the commingling of sound and image. (MHC)
Figure Minus Fact
2020, 13 minutes (digital)
Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects.
Figure Minus Fact draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subjectless portrait of loss. (MHC)
Exhibition
2022, 19 minutes (digital)
Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—a Swedish woman’s marriage to the Berlin Wall,
and a suffragette’s hatcheting of Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus—Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition is a maze-like tour through
images and artifacts, a dense cryptography of the forms and objects that hold us in. (Leo Goldsmith)
RPM Festival Solo Artist Program presented with the support of a Festivals Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Attitudes Passionelles, 13 mins, HD, color/sound, 2015
House, 16 mins, HD, col/sd. 2015
Evangelia C’est Moi, 11 mins, 16mm to HD, color/sound, 2017
Keeping Together in Time, 9 mins, 16mm to HD, col/bw, 2020
Are You My Mother?, 5 mins, 16mm to HD, col/bw, WIP 2023
Post Screening Q&A
Alison Folland & Jennifer Montgomery
RPM and The Brattle Theatre are thrilled to co-present a program of experimental short films by filmmaker and performer Alison Folland. The screening will take place on Sunday, March 19 (2PM) at The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA., titled Some Problems of Domestication
Alison Folland is a filmmaker and performer based in Somerville, MA. Her short hybrid films engage questions of affect and truth-value and are directly informed by her work as an actor in the commercial film industry.
Alison studied physical theater at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU/Tisch and film/video art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Her films have been screened at festivals such as Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio), Athens International Film Festival (Greece), Antimatter (Victoria, BC), and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival.
As a performer, Alison has worked with directors such as Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Barbet Schroeder, and David O. Russell.
She is a member of Agx Film Collective and teaches 16mm filmmaking at Emerson College.
Post Screening Q&A with Jennifer Montgomery and Alison Folland
Jennifer Montgomery is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
Her work has been screened internationally at festivals such as Toronto, New Directors New Films (MoMA), San Francisco, Rotterdam, Thessaloniki, Rimini, Edinburgh, and Melbourne.
It has also screened at museums such as the Whitney (NYC), the ICA (London), the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis), and the Pasadena Arts Center, and has had theatrical distribution in American and European repertory theaters.
She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Art Matters, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and received a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.
Attitudes Passionelles
2015 • HD • 13 min
A hybrid video essay exploring topics of romantic ballet, madness, and the relationship between physical gesture and inner state.
House
2015 • HD • 16 min
An adaptation of the “Full House” pilot, set on a half-built house outside Athens, Greece.
Evangelia C’est Moi
2017 • 16mm to HD • 11 min
The joys and heartaches of largesse. A real-life Madame Bovary reflects on her past excesses from her kitchen in austerity-era Greece.
Keeping Together in Time
2020 • 16mm to HD • 9 min
This film is an attempt to define the word, “teleomeric”. It is an imaginary word, taught to me by my husband. He later had a stroke and lost his language, leaving me with the memory of a word that I cannot find in the dictionary.
--AF--
Are You My Mother?
WIP • 16mm to HD • 3 min
Can we have both love and freedom? A child ponders the situation in an animal simulator game.
Alison Folland
Tufts University
Barnum Hall 08
Dana Laboratory, Packard Ave,
Medford, MA 02155
Admission is free
RPM along with Non-Event, Tufts FMS, Tufts Music, and SMFA at Tufts Media Arts, presents the film Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, a film by Daniel Weintraub, which tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator and humanitarian.
Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros. She was one of the world’s original electronic musicians, one of the few women amongst notable post-war American composers, a master accordion player, a teacher and mentor to musicians,
a gateway to music and sound for non- musicians and a technical innovator who helped develop everything from tools that allow musicians to play together while in different countries to software that enables those with physical limitations to create beautiful music.
On the vanguard of contemporary American music for six decades, her story illuminates the pathway to how we got where we are and where the future will take us in the worlds of music, the philosophy of sound, and the art of listening.
Produced in collaboration with executive producer Ione, Oliveros’ partner in life and work, and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc., the film combines rare archival footage, live performances, and unreleased music with appearances by Terry Riley, Anna Halprin, Ione, Linda Montano, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore, Alvin Lucier, Claire Chase, Miya Masaoka, Morton Subotnick, Tony Martin, Ramon Sender and many more ground- breaking artists.
Post Screening Q&A the director Daniel Weintraub.
A Return to the Return to Reason | 2014, 3 minutes , 35mm to HD|
by Sabine Gruffat
Framelines | 2017,10:14 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat
Take It Down | 2018, 12:30 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat
Moving or Being Moved | 2020, 11 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat
XCTRY | 2018, 6:18 minutes |
by Bill Brown
Life On The Mississippi | 2018, 28:13 minutes|
by Bill Brown
Amarillo Ramp | 2017, 24:10 minutes |
by Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown
Post Screening Q&A
Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown & Brittany Gravely
Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA 02138
8pm
RPM Festival & Brattle theatre Co-present a program of experimental short films by dynamic artist-filmmaker duo Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown.
They have been making experimental films, documentaries and essay films and performing live electronic improvise for over two decades.
Sabine Gruffat explores different methods to generate content and images, from laser cutting/etching on 35mm film strips to 3D animation. Bill Brown is known for his nomadic filmmaking and transporting us to various destinations.
Seven shorts in this program titled Moving or Being Moved, highlight their praxis in recent 10 years.
Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist born in Bangkok, Thailand. She works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. In this work, machines, interfaces, and systems constitute the language by which she codes the world. The creation of new ideas means inventing new ways of using existing tools, crossing signals, or repurposing old hardware. By actively disrupting both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat questions the standardized and mediatized world around us. She has produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York.
She is also a filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. These films seek to empower people, encourage social participation, and inspire political engagement. Sabine's films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan, and Migrating Forms in New York, the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, 25FPS in Croatia, Transmediale in Berlin, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. Her recent video works are distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago, IL.
Bill Brown is a media artist interested in ways landscape is interpreted, appropriated, and reconfigured according to human desires, memories, and dreams. His films have screened at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In addition to his filmmaking, Brown is the co-founder of the Zine Machine: Durham Printed Matter Festival, and the Cosmic Rays Film Festival, an annual showcase of experimental and first-person films.
A tribute to Man Ray's 1923 film, the first film to use his 'Rayograph' technique in which Man Ray exposed found objects onto film negative. The “original” film was digitized with all its aged emulsions, scratches, and splices, then compiled into digital filmstrips. These filmstrips are used to output a dithered and inverted image that a laser engraver etched onto black 35mm film leader.
An abstract scratch film made by laser etching preset patterns onto the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms. The soundtrack is created by filtering and layering the noise made by the laser etched 35mm optical track.
Employing solarized color positive 35mm film and animation of old postcard images of Confederate monuments in North Carolina, Take It Down documents how Southern identity continues to be bound up in the legacy of the Civil War and the Jim Crow Era. The film considers how these old memorials continue to be sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives.
Post-modern dance theory by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer is put to work while a woman cleans the house in a motion capture suit. The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers. In this gaming/ special effects world, movement has become a data set removed from the human body.
Brown re-works 16mm footage that he shot years ago during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Las Vegas. The spatial discontinuities of the road trip are rendered as visual continuities across three frames as Brown goes in search of the next town to fall in and out of love with.
A short essay film about a river and the limits of knowing it. Using Mark Twain’s Life On The Mississippi as a road map, Brown travels from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans and considers ways that river pilots, paddlers, historical reenactors, and civil engineers attempt to know the river through modeling, measurement, and simulation.
Amarillo Ramp
(Brown + Gruffat, 2017, 24:10)
A portrait of sculptor Robert Smithson's final earthwork. Employing filmmaking strategies that are both responsive to the artwork's environmental context and informed by Smithson's own art-making strategies, the filmmakers encounter the Ramp as an observatory where human scales of space and time are set against geological and cosmic scales.
Quiet motors | 2017, 1’24 |
Music by Pierre Bastien
Babylone | 2018, 1’13 |
Music by Kraus
Three motors | 2018, 1’55 |
Sound recording by Ève Couturier and Jean-Jacques Palix
Transports | 2018, 15’50 |
Music by Pierre Bastien, Narassa, Gamelan Voices, Lawrence, mix by Waltraud Blischke.
Volatile | 2019, 9’47 |
Music by Stine Janvin
Korridor | 2020, 1’16 |
Music by Marie-Pierre Bonniol and Walter Duncan (co-director)
Wasser | 2021, 22'35 |
Music by Andreas O. Hirsch, Khaki Blazer, Raymonde, Richard Pinhas, The Dead Mauriacs
RPM Festival & Non-Event Co-present a program of experimental short films by the filmmaker Marie-Pierre Bonniol.
These seven short films are all related to music, with soundtracks by musicians such as Pierre Bastien, Gamelan Voices, and Stine Janvin. The longest of these films is Wasser (2021, 22'35), a powerful abstract essay on water and its transformation into energy, features a soundtrack by Andreas O. Hirsch, Raymonde, Khaki Blazer, Richard Pinhas, and The Dead Mauriacs.
Obsessed by the idea of Imaginary music, Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the “bachelor machine,” and the power of mysteries, Marie-Pierre Bonniol's films –
all recorded on her smartphone – have been presented at Cafe OTO in London, ZKM in Karlsruhe, the National Library of Argentina, Anthology Film Archive in New York, the Alchemy Arts & Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival.
Please note that some parts of the programme are not adapted to people with PSE (Photosensitive epilepsy).
This program is co-presented with
the Goethe-Institut Boston and Non-Event
Post Screening Q&A
Marie-Pierre Bonniol & Wenhua Shi
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street, Boston
Doors: 7:30pm Performance begins promptly at 8pm
Tickets: $10 / $5 for members and students
Advanced Tickets available
