Millennium Film
Journal No. 56:
"Material
Practice: From Sprockets to Binaries"
Screening November 9th 2012
119 West 22nd Street
New York City
Along with the commitment
to personal expression, there has always been a powerful current of subversion
in the sea of experimental cinema. [Editors'
Introduction]
PROGRAM: works featured and descriptions in the pages of
MFJ 56.
Bradley Eros: Arcane
Arctic w/ erosion rite (2012 version 10 min)
ThereÕs a
material aspect of cinema, celluloid film, that makes it resonate as an
experience of live media, ephemeral, parallel to the
physical theater, oral poetry & musical vibration of acoustic instruments.
Light passing through translucent plastic threaded through a lubricated device
of sprockets and gears with its moment by moment flickering, imperfections,
tension & the supreme possibility of failure. [Bradley Eros Ômore captivating
than phosphorusÕ]
Katherine Bauer:
39.8280,
76.0121 (2012 about 2 1/2 min 100' silent)
ÒFilm is able
to free itself to become something
new now that the entertainment industry is abandoning it. ItÕs like what
happened to painting when photography came around É it freed up the medium to
explore the true nature of its materialism.Ó (Katherine Bauer, personal
communication). [Editors'
Introduction]
Gregg Biermann: Labyrinthine (2010 15 min)
Here,
the tidal relentlessness of endlessly advancing frames of appropriated images, jump cuts and fluid
transformations lend the aural and visual qualities of a seascape to an urban
landscape where space and time are distorted from linearity toward parallel
infinities. Such a place, as a prison officer in Chicago once told me, is
easier to get into than out of.
[Martin
Rumsby Photographic
Memory: Diary of a Viewer]
Janis Crystal Lipzin DE LUCE 1: Vegetare (2009 5 min)
Micro-Celluloid Incidents in 3 Santas (2012 10 min)
De
Luce 1: Vegetare blends
my enduring interest in natureÕs volatile events with my sympathy with filmÕs
unpredictable response to light. I learned that exposing the film to quick
bursts of light, during the first developer sequence, unleashed volatile color
shifts, that, while still grounded in the real world, vastly expanded the Kodak
palette of color.
[Janis Crystal Lipzin
A Materialist Film Practice in the Digital Age]
Evan Meaney: Ceibas
- Epilogue - The Well of Representation (2011 7 min)
The glitch,
as Meaney has described in artist statements, is a way to make visible the underlying
code of
digital technology
– the zeros and ones that create an image or a sound. The glitches Meaney
incorporates into his work share the reflexive nature of past materialist
practices, this time working on computational processes rather than the physical
properties of chemistry and light.
[Chris Kennedy Evan
Meaney: the well of representation]
Laure Prouvost The Artist (2010 10 min)
The
purpose of ProuvostÕs tour here, as with many of her films, is revealed as a form of
solicitous disorientation. Like a lost tourist being given the wrong directions
by a helpful local, her fragmented directions and explanations send us off up
other unsuspected avenues and lines of thought, diverting us from her central
role in creating this confusion, while at the same time opening up unexpected
adventures. [Lucy Reynolds Laure
Prouvost: Incorrect Syntax]
Richard Tuohy Centre Spot (2008 7 min)
In
the act of filming, TuohyÕs perception is focused into an experience that is somehow
more real than an unmediated vision. His is the simple joy of encountering a
landscape that he loves and heightening that experience by concentrating it
through a lens and photochemical process. Although the intensity that Tuohy
evokes is more akin to documentary than Brakhagian lyricism, it is still
visionary and intensely personal.
[Martin
Rumsby Photographic Memory:
Diary of a Viewer]
Steven Woloshen
The Homestead Act (2009 8 min)
The
title is based on a nineteenth century American
law that gave homesteaders freehold
title to 160 acres of undeveloped
land. Their zeal and inexperience, however, lead to unsound farming practices,
which resulted in erosion. Woloshen believes the history of film is now
similarly eroding before our eyes as poorly stored prints and negatives
deteriorate. Ironically, in the process of its own organic decay the film gives
rise to startling biomorphic abstractions — shrouding images in living
matter and chemical imbalance.
[Martin Rumsby Photographic Memory: Diary of a Viewer]
All works courtesy the artists, except The Artist by Laure Prouvost courtesy the artist and MOTInternational.