April 5 – Hayoun Kwon: Films and Virtual Realities

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 30, 2018

Through a unique interplay of documentary techniques and animation technologies, the films and virtual reality projects of Paris-based South Korean artist Hayoun Kwon present new realms for history and memory. Biographical accounts of a Nigerian asylum seeker in Lack of Evidence (2011) and a South Korean soldier serving in the Korean Demilitarized Zone in 489 Years (2016) are mapped onto spectacular animated landscapes that undergo dramatic transformations in perspective. North Korea’s propaganda village Kijong-dong is replicated in Kwon’s Model Village (2014), which highlights the irony of an uninhabited utopia, while The Bird Lady (2017) immerses viewers into a Parisian apartment turned aviary. Kwon’s striking images reflect the shifting psychic and geopolitical realities of her subjects. The artist presents a selection of films, two recent virtual reality projects, and discusses the ideas and technologies that sustain her practice.

2011–2017, South Korea/France/USA, multiple formats, ca 75 min + discussion
Hayoun Kwon in person

Hayoun Kwon is a filmmaker and multimedia artist. Her work has been screened in museums, galleries, and film festivals around the world including at the Cinéma du Réel festival at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the San Sebastian International Film Festival, Spain; Doc Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Netherlands, among others. Kwon is the recipient of numerous awards in filmmaking and media art including the Prix de la Jeune Création (2012); the Arte Creative Newcomer Award from the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, Germany (2014); the Prix Découverte des Amis du Palais de Tokyo (2015); and first prize at the 62nd International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany (2016). She graduated in 2011 from Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing, France. She is based in France and South Korea.

On Thorsten Trimpop

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 29, 2018

This week, we are thrilled to present a screening of Furusato, the latest feature documentary by Chicago-based filmmaker and School of the Art Institute of Chicago faculty, Thorsten Trimpop.

Furusato, which translates to home or hometown, is human-scale portrait of Minamisōma, a small town in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. The film explores how the town’s inhabitants and surrounding landscape have been affected by the devastating Fukushima Daiichi Nuclean Power Plant meltdown. Furusato has had its successful theatrical release in 52 cities in Germany and Austria, with screenings in Europe continuing until fall of this year.

In the following director’s statement, Trimpop reflects on his time spent filming in Minamisōma and how he came to understand the concept of furusato through his experience of living alongside the town’s residents.

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Furusato: Director’s Statement

Thorsten Trimpop

At first glance, the Japanese town of Minamisoma felt to me like a ghost town, blanketed in snow, depopulated and dystopian. The town had already been divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into sectors deemed safe and unsafe for habitation. It was January 2012, nine months after a massive tsunami had struck Japan’s eastern coast, killing almost 20,000 people and triggering meltdowns at three of the five reactors at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

Out of nowhere, three young men with guitar cases slung over their shoulders and white safety masks on their faces appeared, walking down a street empty of cars, the stores all shuttered. When I stopped them to ask what they were up to, they hesitated. Finally, one of them shyly said that they had a band, and that they were going to a studio to rehearse. He invited us to join them. Once in the studio, I watched in astonishment as this shy boy, Kazuki, who would become one of the film’s protagonists, screamed out his primal fear, frustration and rage.

It was during this initial five-month trip that I began to see the elements that would later become Furusato, the film I shot over the course of the next four years.

Japan’s history of catastrophe movies seemed to eerily foreshadow the events of March 2011, after which two hundred thousand locals were forced to flee their homes, leaving everything—possessions and pets, the bodies of deceased loved ones, a sense of future–behind.

As the news cycle quickly moved on to other stories, I had wondered what happened to all of these people. Disaster narratives are relayed and consumed for entertainment in many ways. Around the catastrophe’s first anniversary, the town once again became a magnet for TV journalists from all over the world using the dystopian landscape as backdrops: Fukushima’s Ground Zero.

This was when I began to see the possibility of a film, an antidote to such superficial images—a deeper, sustained look at the relationship of the local people to the wounded landscape they called home—a tensionI could sense but did not yet understand. As I met people who decided to remain in highly contaminated areas, unwilling to give up their homes or conceive of themselves as refugees, I asked myself, why did they stay?

There were immediate and obvious challenges: how, as an outsider, could I approach these people, many of whom were shell-shocked, angry, and understandably wary? How could I convey, on film, the unseen danger they were contending with? Those questions would soon feed into a larger, more universal inquiry about how we create home, the need for security, even if illusory, and the overlooked human cost of our way of life.

I kept returning, sleeping on the floor of a local shrine, and this inquiry acquired texture and complexity. Protective gear disappeared, replaced by a pretense of normalcy best conveyed in images, like the sight of a samurai in full regalia on horseback passing a fleet of uniformed workers decontaminating a cemetery. What was initially a visual absence became a monolithic presence, represented by millions of 1-ton bags of radioactive topsoil scarring the bewilderingly lush green landscape.

My outsider status became an unexpected asset as the universal need to air grievance asserted itself with time and trust. I was humbled by my protagonists’ generosity with their stories, which often surprised me: a daughter sacrificing her career in the city—and her health–to help her horse breeder father; the ambiguous motives of a glamorous activist on a messiah-like mission; the unsettling movement from guilt to denial of the Stanford-educated TEPCO nuclear safety engineer.

Furusato is the first film I shot myself without a crew, working only with a translator. Because I don’t speak Japanese, my instinct directed the camera. This hardwon intimacy, I hope, translates on film into moments of unexpected lyricism and grace.

Few concepts in Japanese culture carry as much weight as furusato, which translates as home or hometown, but is also wrapped up in the dramatic changes that resulted from Japan’s modernization. Furusato describes the lost landscape of childhood that you can’t return to, as well as the final landscape you see before you die. It reminds us of our connection to the earth, to the past and the future, and the ease with which profit models and Insta-culture imperil and disconnect us.

We are living in an era of man-made catastrophes, from climate change to corporation-enriching wars. Fukushima will become a cautionary symbol of our insatiable thirst for cheap energy and our willingness to sacrifice those things that make us human–including our responsibility to future generations. It is my hope that this film will grant the space to observe just how fragile those things are.

March 29 – Thorsten Trimpop: Furusato 古里

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 23, 2018

Our Thursday March 29 screening is now SOLD OUT. We’ve added a second screening, with Thorsten Trimpop in person, on Sunday April 8 at 12:00 p.m.

Thorsten Trimpop’s films explore the many ways cultural, political, and ecological histories are borne by individuals in their daily lives. His most recent feature, Furusato, exposes the devastating effects of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown on the surrounding landscape and its inhabitants. Shot over the course of four years, the film follows a media-savvy activist, a horse breeder, a teen-rocker, and a nuclear engineer for the Tokyo Electric Power Company as they struggle to cope with the fallout of the ongoing disaster. The land that had once been a source of profound physical and cultural sustenance for Japan’s eastern coast is now tainted with the invisible danger of radiation. Culminating in a traditional horse race, one that has taken place since the eighth century, but now provokes intense anxiety among inhabitants, Furusato meditates on the unfathomable sacrifices wrought in the name of progress.

2016, Japan, DCP, 90 min + discussion
Thorsten Trimpop in person

Thorsten Trimpop is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Chicago. His current film, Furusato, is a human-scale portrait of a small town in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. It premiered at DOK Leipzig, Germany, where it won the grand prize, the Golden Dove. His film and theater works have been presented at venues such as the Locarno Festival, Switzerland; the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Netherlands; at the Viennale, Austria; Marseille Festival of Documentary Film, France; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan; Busan International Film Festival, South Korea; among others. Trimpop has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, and Boston University. From 2014 to 2017, he was a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. He is currently Assistant Professor at SAIC in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department, where he is working on a new feature film about the destructive human obsession with beauty.

On Edward Owens

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 22, 2018

This week, we are thrilled to present a screening of rare films by the late Chicago-based artist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum, Edward Owens (SAIC 1966-67).
Owens, who was a native of South Side Chicago, made headway the 1960s New York City underground artistic scene with his beautifully crafted films that poetically explore heartbreak, queer desire, and his own family.

In the following excerpt, critic Ed Halter shares his insight on Owens’ work, reflecting on the filmmaker’s time in New York and his final years in Chicago.

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Edward Owens: Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts
Ed Halter

In the mid 1960s, Edward Owens was an African-American teenager attending the Art Institute of Chicago when Gregory Markopoulos arrived to found the school’s film program. Owens, who was then studying painting and sculpture, had already been making 8mm movies for a few years; impressed by the maturity of his work, Markopoulos encouraged him to move to New York. Owens arrived in Manhattan in 1966 with Markopoulos, who quickly ushered him into the world of the city’s cultured demimonde, introducing him to figures like Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, Marie Menken, Gregory Battcock, and filmmaker-poet Charles Boultenhouse. Soon, Owens became romantically involved with Boultenhouse, and moved into the West Village apartment where Boultenhouse already lived with his lover of many decades, the legendary critic Parker Tyler, who accepted the arrangement.

Over the next four years, Owens created a cluster of films that display an increasing mastery of form, inspired by Markopoulos’s style but transformed into something purely his own. ‘With each subsequent struggle to complete a film he will leave us breathless with anticipation for his next work,’ Markopoulos remarked around this time. Owens’s featurette Tomorrow’s Promise shows the particular influence of his mentor’s Twice a Man, telling the elliptical tale of a broken romance between a man and a woman through strobing edits, layered images, and dramatically lit nudes. The sophistication of the film is all the more impressive when one considers that Owens was only eighteen years old when he made it. The extant reel of Tomorrow’s Promise still bears the filmmaker’s editing marks, as if a work in progress, though this is the version placed in distribution by Owens, and likely screened at the Fourth International Film Exhibition at Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium in 1968. Even Tyler, who by the 1960s was highly critical of many new filmmakers, granted Owens curmudgeonly praise for the film, writing that Tomorrow’s Promise bore “a quality so pictorially exciting that the next thing he must do is listen to my advice.”

Read the full piece here.

March 22 – Edward Owens: A Portrait Study

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 16, 2018

In the mid 1960s, Edward Owens (SAIC 1966–67), a young African American artist from the South Side of Chicago, burst onto New York’s artistic underground scene with a series of strikingly beautiful films of heartbreak, queer desire, and his own family. With their layered images and flickering edits, the films show the influence of Owens’ mentor, filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, with whom he had studied as one of the first film students at SAIC. Yet, Owens developed a distinct style, particularly in his painterly approach to portraiture and allegory. These films were lauded by his contemporaries; for example, the critic Parker Tyler included Owens’ 1967 film Remembrance: A Portrait Study as one of the avant-garde’s key works in his landmark study Underground Film: A Critical History. Despite these achievements, Owens’ works have been largely overlooked until recent efforts by the critic Ed Halter and New York’s Film-Makers’ Cooperative to bring them to new light. Rarely screened in his own home town, this evening’s program is a unique opportunity to reassess Owens’ singular body of work.

1966–68, USA, 16mm to 2K digital file, ca 57 min + discussion
Introduced by critic Ed Halter

Edward Owens was an African American artist and filmmaker. He studied painting and sculpture at SAIC, in addition to making 8mm movies. Encouraged by his mentor, filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, Owens moved to New York City. There he met filmmaker-poet Charles Boultenhouse, with whom Owens became romantically involved. Owens returned to Chicago for personal reasons in 1971, finishing his college degree but never completing another film. The time Owens spent in New York resulted in several films that showcase a unique approach to imagery, lighting, editing, and narrative that defines his brief yet meaningful career.

On Laura Huertas Millán

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 8, 2018

We look forward to this week’s Conversations at the Edge screening of Sol Negro (2016) and La Libertad (2017) by French-Colombian filmmaker, Laura Huertas Millán. By combining an exploration of political history with personal narrative, Huertas Millán’s films culminate into what she calls “ethnographic fictions”.

For additional context and insight into Huertas Millán’s work, below is an excerpt of her essay Fictions Ethnographiques.

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Fictions Ethnographiques
Laura Huertas Millán

Shards and disappearances. Ethnographic Fictions develops a survey around ethnographic representation, giving birth to a series of films in which anthropology and fiction intertwine.

A first series of films created between 2009 and 2012 around the notion of exoticism constitutes the theoretical and iconographic beginnings of this research. On the one hand, this first movement analyses the construction of the “native” in the “New World”, paying special attention to the moments of the “first contact” between travelers and indigenous people. This moment of mutual discovery is referred by the term “flashes” – moments of light, fulgurant traces of a possible encounter which turn out to be the preamble of a conquest through violence. This first series features in vivo and in vitro “jungles” in Europe and America, linking botanical gardens and tropical greenhouses with the archives of colonisation. In the films Journey to a land otherwise known (2009) and Aequador (2012), part of this series, fiction gradually emerges as a narrative strategy to counteract a story mostly told from the point of view of the conquerors.

A second series of films develops between 2012 and 2017: the “ethnographic fictions”. This series establishes a dialogue with visual anthropology: it involves a displacement in Jean Rouch´s “ethnofiction”, while including the practices preceding and those subsequent to him, with an intrinsic ambiguity between ethnographic immersion and fiction. A constellation of practices emerges, from Edward Curtis to Chick Strandt, from Mapa Teatro to Juan Downey, including Aby Warburg, Robert Flaherty and Maya Deren. This constellation gives rise to an abundant cartography of authors who, in the succession of their travels, put into perspective the fusions and the frictions proper to an encounter. This series is also enriched by one year passed at Harvard University´s the Sensory Ethnography Lab, where modes of expression other than discursive language are experimented to address intercultural relations.

Read the full essay here.

March 8 – Laura Huertas Millán: Ethnographic Fictions

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 2, 2018

On Lee Anne Schmitt

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | March 1, 2018

This week, we are excited to welcome Los Angeles-based filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt for a screening of her latest film Purge This Land (2017), made in collaboration with her partner, experimental jazz and rock musician, Jeff Parker.

Through the life and legacy of the radical abolitionist John Brown, Purge This Land reflects on how the shadows of slavery and systemic, violent racism continue to shape the United States’ psychic and physical landscape.

View the following excerpt of Schmitt’s film below to see how site and landscape intertwine with the lingering vestiges of a country’s problematic, violent history.

 

March 1 – Lee Anne Schmitt: Purge This Land

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | February 23, 2018

Just before his execution, abolitionist John Brown wrote, “I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Brown was hung on December 2, 1859, less than two months after he led a raid on a federal armory in an attempt to incite an armed rebellion against slavery. In her new film, Purge This Land, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt uses Brown’s legacy to consider the long shadows of slavery and systemic, violent racism on the United States’ psychic and physical landscape. She interweaves shots of rural back roads and urban centers throughout the country, memorializing the sites of Brown’s radicalization alongside those of race riots, police shootings, and other forms of White racial violence and Black disenfranchisement throughout the last 150 years. Set to a score by Jeff Parker that references histories of Black music, the film resists easy resolution, modeling resistance instead.

2017, USA, DCP, 80 min + discussion
Lee Anne Schmitt and Jeff Parker in person

Lee Anne Schmitt’s films and related projects have addressed American exceptionalism, the logic of utility and labor, gestures of kindness and refusal, racial violence, “cowboyism,” trauma and narrative, and the efficacy of solitude. She has exhibited widely at venues that include MoMA, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and festivals such as Viennale, Austria; Copenhagen International Documentary Festival, Denmark; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany; International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Argentina; and Marseille Festival of Documentary Film, France. Schmitt is a recent recipient of both a Graham Foundation Grant and a Creative Capital Award.

Jeff Parker is an American jazz and rock guitarist based in Los Angeles. Parker is best known as an experimental musician, working with avant-garde electronic, rock, and improvisational groups. Parker plays guitar in the post-rock group Tortoise and was a founding member of Isotope 217 and the Chicago Underground Trio in the 1990s and early 2000s. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and has worked with George Lewis, Ernest Dawkins, Brian Blade, Joshua Redman, Fred Anderson, and Jason Moran, among many others.

On Ephraim Asili

Posted by | Paris Jomadiao | Posted on | February 22, 2018

We are delighted to welcome Zach Vanes of the Video Data Bank to write for us. In this essay, Vanes discusses The Diaspora Suite, a series of films on the African diaspora by Video Data Bank artist Ephraim Asili. Screening this week at Conversations at the Edge, these films bring together archival research and Asili’s travels to chart cultural connections across time and space.

Ephraim Asili’s five-part Diaspora Suite was created over the course of seven years.  While every film in the series has a unique rhythm, each is built around a specific amalgam of footage shot in American and international locations–each site an important within the African diaspora. In Forged Ways (2011) it’s Harlem and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; in American Hunger (2013), it’s Philadelphia, Ocean City,  and Cape Coast, Ghana; in Many Thousands Gone (2014), it’s Harlem again and Salvador, Brazil; in Kindah (2016), it’s Hudson, New York, and Jamaica; and in Fluid Frontiers (2017), it’s Detroit and Windsor, Canada.

Asili edits his 16mm films by mixing and matching footage from the two locations. Often, he shuttles the viewer thousands of miles with his cuts. One trip fragments into dozens, each with differing emotional textures and tenors. Sometimes, as in the self-deprecating end of American Hunger, the effect can be humorous. Here, Asili cuts between a foam-headed Mr. Frosty mascot in Philadelphia and a group of Ghanaian school kids. Both wave to the camera with big smiles–only in America the grin is painted on. At other points, the change of location communicates an bemusement toward the isolation of American life. For example, in Kindah, an empty apartment and looming brick walls in Hudson provide a somber note of impasse in comparison to a constantly moving Jamaican parade. More often than not, transitions between the American locations and their international counterparts happen so smoothly that the differences are registered only through Asili’s subtle inclusions of national markers–an American flag in the distance or a Yankees hat in the crowd. Through the disidentification brought on by the incessant cutting between “here” and “there,” Asili encourages the viewer to recognize difference as a projection of lingering colonial fantasy and disrupts geopolitical borders and the visual regime that supports them.

The most recent work in the collection, Fluid Frontiers, provides both a fitting end to the cycle and a marvelous leap forward.  Asili reaches for more than cinematic hybrid cities and countries. Against the two geographic locations that anchor the film (Detroit and Windsor), Asili creates a third, cinematic, space– the black screen. In an essay on the films of Kevin Everson, Emmanuel Burdeau suggests: “The black screen is the abyss where…cinema catches its breath: an annihilation, but also a reservoir of images, the neutral gear through which every film passes before starting up again.”

Throughout the Diaspora Suite the black screen is at once a cinematic wellspring and bearer of the inscriptions of history and theory. Starting with American Hunger, Asili fills the black screen with the theoretical writings of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Hollis Frampton. In Many Thousands Gone, Asili presents a homily by the fictitious Saint Tula, patron saint of cinema; in Kindah, the beat poetry of Bob Kaufman.  He juxtaposes these free-wheeling textual intervals with  ruminative scores. Experimental jazz musician Joe McPhee contributes a rasping, strangled live score to Many Thousands Gone, and Kindah features a similarly breathy woodwind and percussion track. The combination of increasingly poetic texts and breathless music communicate a struggle to speak. It also expresses the desire to project a voice rather than merely bear the inscriptions upon the black screen.

Asili seizes this voice Fluid Frontiers. Text completely disappears. Instead, it is translated into speech and infused into nearly every moment of the film.  Unlike previous works, Asili intervenes within the space by enlisting Detroit and Windsor citizens to read the poetry of Margaret Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Haki R. Madhubuti, Dudley Randall and others published by the Detroit-based Broadside Press. In an interview with Ekrem Serdar, Asili stated, “I told them that I don’t care how long it takes you to read the poem, just that you don’t stop no matter what. Even if you get a word wrong. [It’s about] this idea of people struggling or not struggling with language on camera.” Parallel to locating a shared geographical and historical lineage, the Diaspora Suite charts a movement from decoding to encoding, writing for oneself to speaking aloud, documenting difference to creating within the landscape.  Another way of saying this might be through the words of poet Haki R. Madhubuti, read by Teajai Travis, and recorded by Ephraim Asili: “not quiet now- trying to speak,/ What did he say?/ ‘Back again,/ BLACK AGAIN,/ Home.”

Zach Vanes is the Distribution Manager at Video Data Bank. While at VDB, he has presented video art programs at the Cairo Video Festival and Oberhausen Short Film Festival. He’s also a volunteer projectionist at Doc Films and an MAVCS candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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About

Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.

 

CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.

 

Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.






 

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