Thursday, March 11, 2004, 8:15pm This screening of shorts from the Video Data Bank investigates the thick blanket of experiences and social dynamics that share the rubric of depression – from invisible and privatized feelings to the collapse of the social safety net. In an era where drugs promise to manage all psychological ills and […]
Thursday, March 4, 2004, 8pm Ancient and contemporary arts of India are at the center of three startling video works by Indian makers, which blur reality and fiction with their experimental approach toward narrative. Presented by Monica Bhasin, graduate student in Film and Video at the School of the Art Institute. Oracles of Kerala state […]
Read More… from O Lover of Life: Experimental Narrative from India
Thursday, February 26, 2004, 8pm The road movie, home movie, and personal diary are combined spectacularly in this captivating, subtle work by leading independent filmmaker James Benning (11 X 14; Landscape Suicide; The California Trilogy). Benning took a meandering, cross-country motorcycle trip and kept a diary; he then revisited, a year later, the sites and […]
Thursday, February 18, 2004, 8pm Paul Sharits, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968). From the School of the Art Institute’s collection of landmark structuralist and materialist films, student Zachary Hall has selected six gems to tickle the eye and the imagination: In Passage a l’acte (1993), Martin Arnold transforms a clip from To Kill a Mockingbird into a museum of […]
Thursday, February 12, 2004, 8pm A magician dismembers a woman and tries to put her back together. Such is the plot of this unique feature-length animation, created with 19th-century engravings and compulsive single-mindedness by Harry Smith (1923-1991), beatnik musicologist and one of cinema’s greatest outsiders. As its cutout protagonists undertake mystical journeys of uncertain purpose, […]
Thursday, February 5, 2004, 8pm Jennifer Montgomery in person! Doctors and their schizophrenic patients live together at Layton House, the therapeutic community at the center of Jennifer Montgomery’s startling study of suffering and idealism. Based on the anti-psychiatry movement and the writings of R.D. Laing, Threads of Belonging is shot in a documentary style but […]
Thursday, December 11, 2003, 8pm Kathy High in person! Animal Attraction is a documentary about the relationship between people and animals, the way we project our hopes and desires onto our pets and ascribe human qualities and attributes to their gestures. Frustrated by the obnoxious behavior of her cat, Ernie, the video maker contacts Spring […]
Thursday, December 4, 2003, 8pm Curator Gregg Bordowitz in person! Introduced by SAIC faculty Gregg Bordowitz, who is himself a person with AIDS and leading figure within the AIDS activist media, this program will show a range of video works addressing the now twenty-year-old AIDS crisis. Following the screening, Bordowitz will lead a discussion about […]
Read More… from The Aids Crisis Is Still Beginning: Four Video Works
Thursday, November 20, 2003, 8pm Something funny is going on in the world of Duke and Battersby, the Canadian video artists who put themselves at the center of their collage-like explorations, which, nevertheless, are only marginally autobiographical. Speaking shifty aphorisms, singing doleful folksongs and mingling with psycho-babbling and straight-talking cartoon animals, this self-described “sexually compatible […]
Read More… from Bad Ideas for Paradise: Videos by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby
Thursday, November 13, 2003, 8pm Abigail Child in person! Among the most accomplished filmmakers of the contemporary American avant-garde, Abigail Child has created a body of films and video known as much for their formal rigor as for the challenging subjects she explores. Deeply committed to the continuing possibilities of the art of cine-montage, Child […]
Read More… from Hyperfictions: Film and Video Work by Abigail Child