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My Body is A Lightning Rod
Mike Plante<p>Barry goes to a competition. Human form vs film.</p>
Playlist
<p>Barry goes to a competition. Human form vs film.</p>
<p>This film knows nothing about the world. It looks at structures in the photographic material and treats the tactile surface instead of its representations of reality. The high frequency of images – eight per second – challenges our capacity to recognize patterns, our brains begin to blend the images together. The flowery bouquets of fireworks blends in with the curvy lines of leaves, the forest looks as if painted, and the impressionist method of mixing all the colors of the rainbow mirrors itself in the neon hues of exploding firework. ‘Flora’ compares the digital archives of the internet with the memory of the viewer, and favors association over analysis, pictorial qualities over contextual meaning.</p>
<p>Every time you watch this film, it may very well appear to move faster.</p>
<p>LOOK AND LEARN excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct our daily world. Look and Learn investigates a range of material image forms: elementary school books, visual instructions (furniture assembly diagrams, how-to manuals, safety instructions, maps) and photographs—with a focus on 1950’s era school class photographs, images from photography manuals, and others.</p>
<p>COME WISHES BE HORSES weaves audio from a birdwatching walk with images inspired by W.H. Auden’s sentiment that it seems “only proper that words/Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.”</p>
<p>An apocalyptic narrative unfolds through the words of “The Sun”, a British tabloid created by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. 4000 single frames were exposed and accompanied with the pulsing rhythms of the sun collected by NASA, resembling the Buddhist “Om”, the sound of our universe.</p>
<p>In this experimental travelogue, efforts to sound human and look natural instead become artificial. The scenery is provided through photo-chromed vintage postcards, displaying not only scenic North American landscapes but also the rise of infrastructure and industry. Aspiring to look more realistic by adding color to a black and white image, the postcards (already a vulnerable method of correspondence caught between private and public) are instead documents of the fantastic. The road trip is narrated by an automated correspondent (all dialogue is taken from spam emails) who is both seductive and mercurial, his entreaties becoming increasingly foreboding and obtuse, in a relentless effort to capture our attentions.</p>
<p>A series of moments captured in room 139. Intimate spaces of time spent with my 95 year old grandmother, Margaret during a month long recovery in a rehabilitation center in Baltimore, Maryland.</p>
<p>Body without bone Sloppy and improper Body seepage Naked sewer rats Hairless aristocratic cats Slime The body of the future, fluid and flexible and folding into itself body negotiations 3D software as a lab for new subjectivities/monstrosities. I dub all the voices. unfortunately, the mischievous flubber seems to have a mind of its own.</p>
<p>“Simultaneously strange and familiar, distant and near, disquieting and seductive, outsider and cosmopolitan, gypsies are shrouded in an aura of ambiguity. They cannot be said to be invisible, as they hardly go unnoticed.” (Daniel Seabra Lopes) Like the gypsies, the frogs, made of china, don’t go unnoticed to a careful observer. “Batrachian’s Ballad” comes about in a context of ambiguity. A film that immerses itself in the reality of Portuguese everyday life, as a form of fabling about a xenophobic behaviour.</p>
<p>Rose Kallal will present a live multiple 16mm film loop and sound performance. Incorporating a wide range of technical processes, such as traditional animation techniques, video synthesis/feedback and computer animation, the 16mm film loops cycle at varying speeds to create a hypnotic nonlinear flow of repeating patterns and motifs. Accompanying the film, Kallal with perform a live electronic sound score using modular synthesis. The heavy use of repetition both visually and sonically, as well as the merging of both antiquated and modern technologies invoke an expansive and collapsing sense of space and time.</p>
<p>JoAnn Elam’s Lie Back & Enjoy It is an absorbing eight-minute dialectical film about the politics of representation. More specifically, it examines the politics of filmic representation of women under patriarchy…The film is endowed with remarkable structural and rhetorical lucidity…Everyone who watches movies with women in them ought to see it.</p>
<p>Taking off where Brooke Shields left us in her Calvins, this film takes a hard, humorous look at the pressures and frustrations young people (women) (girls) feel as they rush out to explore their sexuality with all the taboos and fears that entails.</p>
<p>Using a piece of 1970’s porn film, nail polish and bleach, the filmmaker has created a new pornography, one in which the woman exists only as a hole – an empty, animated space.</p>
<p>Ciao Bella is a summer-in-the-city travelogue that mixes verité of Lower East Side Bikers, Times Square topless dancers, and Coney Island crowds to achieve a highly charged atmosphere of manic exhibitionism and sexual raunch.</p>
<p>A kind of heretic fantasy film. An expressionistic, surrealistic portrait of a Latin American woman. Not a personal portrait so much as an evocation of the consciousness of women in rural parts of such countries as Spain, Greece and Mexico; women who wear black from the age 15 and spend their entire lives giving birth, preparing food and tending to household and farm responsibilities. Mujer de Milfuegos depicts in poetic, almost abstract terms, their daily repetitive tasks as a form of obsessive ritual.</p>
<p>A popular lesbian “commercial,” 110 images of sensual touching montages in A, B, C, D rolls of “kinaesthetic” editing.</p>
<p>My Name is Oona captures in haunting, intensely lyrical images fragments of the coming to consciousness of a child girl. A series of extremely brief flashes of her moving through night-lit space or woods in sensuous negative, separated by rapid fades into blackness, burst upon us like a fairy-tale princess, with a late sun only partially outlining her and the animal in silvery filigree against the encroaching darkness; one of the most perfect recent examples of poetic cinema. Throughout the entire film, the girl, compulsively and as if in awe, repeats her name, until it becomes a magic incantation of self-realization.</p>
<p>Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin deals primarily with monumentality, narcissism and the ways in which our heroes are embedded into our identities, and manifested through the body. Through a variety of gestures, the pervasiveness of this practice is highlighted alongside its ultimate, inevitable failure. The viewer moves through various stages of anxiety, idolization and actual touchdown with 70s gay sex icon Peter Berlin himself, capturing both the apparent and the hidden. The film guides the viewer through the process of making contact with a figure who exists only in his own photographs. The film is structured in three parts, which were made chronologically. In the first part the filmmaker appropriates Peter Berlin’s outfits and poses, playfully attempting to embody Peter Berlin’s artistic persona. Each frame of the original 16mm film was then hand-painted to distort the image, producing an animated effect that prevents the viewer from seeing the full performing body. In the second part, a voice over relates a story riddled with anxiety about a potential meeting with Peter Berlin that is paired with images of mansions and window displays. The third and final section is an interview with Peter Berlin in his apartment, describing a moment of exchange that crosses lines of gender and generation, a moment where the identities of two filmmakers briefly coalesce.</p>
<p>Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) is less a depiction of “reality” than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabricates a personal history of her emergence as an artist from white-male dominated American history (and American film history).</p>
<p>from: film (theater) to > youtube (home) > to film (theater) // torrented/pirated (digital) images as found footage // printed from a household printer onto 16mm clear film // // Such as the loading dial, REGAL aims to circulate and find its way back to the screen. Take this proxy and see that the ghost has become tangible.</p>
<p>“What Happens to the Mountain” draws upon literary sources, late night radio, and ancient legends to conjure the experience of an afterlife in the sacred landscape of Devil’s Tower. A long-distance driver, a drifter, journeys from his tenuous reality into a vision of the afterlife, called forth by the spirit of the mountain.</p>
<p>He knew that the woods are full of forest demons who graze deer and hares like cattle, that the Chuhaistyr - who rends wood nymphs from limb to limb - roams about, inviting passers-by to join him in dance, and that the sound of the ax lives in the forest. He also knew about the Rusalky who emerge from the rivers on clear days to sing songs, to invent tales and prayers, and about the drowned men who dry their pale bodies on river boulders after sunset.</p>
<p>Self-defense techniques demonstrated and repeated to the creeping pace of Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Self-aware performers remix violence into complementarity, inspiring movement into the promise of a dance. A pink print inspires informed movement, now as it was then.</p>
<p>‘Pattern Language’ is a term coined by architect Christopher Alexander to quantify the aliveness of certain human ambitions through an index of structural patterns. Some advocates of this design approach claim that ordinary people can use it to successfully solve very large, complex design problems. In this piece, Alexander’s design theories are applied towards the construction of a generative video game labyrinth resulting in a rhythmic animation made of rippling, skipping, and strobing arrays of light. The whole environment is infused with a procedural vitality brought forth through cellular automata and crowd simulation algorithms.</p>
<p>PRINCIPLE MERIDIAN is an experimental 16mm short exploring the landscape of Harney and Lake county of Southeastern Oregon. These lands were the backdrop of the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in early 2016. Invisible divisions of State, Federal and Tribal lands are imagined in reconfigured collaged landscapes.</p>
<p>Four pieces of fruit find themselves in a tropical theatre of war.</p>
<p>CONTACT viscerally immerses the viewer in the duality between digital and physical worlds – how these worlds come into contact with each other and with us. Produced using an array of out-of-camera techniques, the film plays with its status as a physical object which only becomes a “film” through its original collision with printer ink, found natural objects, light, and chemistry and its subsequent collision with the projector.</p>
<p>Ghostly apparitions are seen walking the banks of the Bayou. Caught in a cyclonic tidal force, these specters are seized by the chemical and physical interaction between the emulsion, the body and the seawater.</p>
<p>A surreal montage of selfdom in a lensed world. We start in transit and end in the boudoir. Tea and light snacks will be served.</p>
<p>An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.</p>
<p>From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.</p>
<p>Up-cycled cycles. From super 8 to 16, 35mm, back to 16. Recently re-thought with a digital still camera and jk. Re- edited in final cut with sound. B/w, about 7 minutes. 2016</p>
<p>Draw down the sun, boil up the gold. The impulse to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find precious metal in alluvial gravel are part of a long history of desire and extraction in the northern Canadian landscape. Cancan dancers, curlers, smelters, ex city officials and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a Yukon town portrait.</p>
<p>Small pieces of information can be stored separately within a shared container. The most efficient containers can house multiple pieces of information in the same location, intersecting from different angles.</p>
<p>Ancient flowers and animal desire. The past rises up – a mirage, but I can’t bury it deep enough. Fever season of magic, madness: adolescence. It’s their turn now, our willing sacrifice. “dragons & seraphim” fuses original film footage of three generations of family shot on a handcranked Bolex camera, with 16mm nature films and the home movies of strangers that optically reprinted frame by frame. Sound design by Stephen Vitiello; poem “Childless” by Michael Morse.</p>
<p>Walking Cycle an abstract audiovisual piece that celebrates the line, its quality, and its movements. This piece is a tribute to early abstract animation masters Len Lye and Hans Richter.</p>
<p>Archival images of women and nature are intercut with recent footage of my sisters. This mixture is simultaneously intimate and unfamiliar. A Path Seems like a Place plays with the line between performance and documentary.</p>