Recent Work by Donigan Cumming
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | April 10, 2003
Thursday, April 10, 2003, 8pm
Donigan Cumming in person!
Essentially documentary in nature, Donigan Cumming’s work incorporates photography, sound, video and installation. His work is routinely unsettling and wrought with unexpected turns and complex characters. Cumming has succeeded in establishing a documentary method that breaks away from the illusion of objectivity. In the words of video scholar Edward Morose, “Cumming’s intent […] is to take reality wherever he finds it and rework, restage and then, through the language of documentary, present it as real. In readily threatening our values and perceptions, Cumming’s photography of engagement reflects the theater of Beckett and Ionesco, Brecht and Artaud.” Tonight, Cumming shares with us recent work, including the acclaimed My Dinner With Weegee (2001), a story of friendships which juxtaposes an old New York activist with Cumming as he enters his 54th year. Also included in the program are Voice:Off (2003), the autobiography of a forgotten man who uses a video camera as his prosthesis, and the romantic story of an old soldier’s regrets, Cold Harbor (2003). Co-presented with Video Data Bank. 1999—2003, Donigan Cumming, Canada, 91 min, video.
Tags: Canada > Monographic Shows > Non-Fiction > Portrait > Video Data Bank
The Creators of the Shopping Worlds (Die Schöpfer Der Einkaufswelten)
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | April 3, 2003
Thursday, April 3, 2003, 8pm
Harun Farocki in person!
Provocative, political and poignant, acclaimed German filmmaker Harun Farocki has made over 90 films since 1966, in addition to numerous writings, installations and teaching positions around the world. Conversations at the Edge is honored to present the Chicago premiere of Farocki’s latest feature. In this new video essay, Farocki shows how shopping malls are designed – commercially, architecturally and visually – in order to entice regular customers and influence their emotions. He systematically recorded discussions and brainstorming sessions with designers and financiers as they assessed plans for new construction. From the overall concept of the shopping space to the way a cake is positioned in a display, nothing is left to chance. Co-presented with the Goethe-Institut Chicago (Excerpts courtesy of the Walker Art Center). 2001, Harun Farocki, Germany, 72 min, video.
Programming Experimental Work at Festivals
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 27, 2003
Thursday, March 27, 2003, 8pm
Shari Frilot in person!
Shari Frilot joins us for a unique screening and an engaging discussion about the festival process and the challenges of the experimental film programmer. Frilot, who has been a Sundance Film Festival Programmer since 1998, pioneered experimental programming at Outfest: Los Angeles International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. She was also Director of the MIX: New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival and co-founder of the first queer festivals in Latin America: MIX Brasil and MIX México. Frilot is also a filmmaker and will talk about the challenges and nuances of juggling film programming and filmmaking. She will present a program touching on the history of experimental film within a wider festival context, including the Chicago premiere of Frilot’s Strange & Charmed (2003), a love story told from the point of view of two subatomic particles (KJ Mohr). 1990—2003, various directors, USA, ca. 75 min, various formats.
Jennet Thomas and Exploding Cinema Showcase
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 20, 2003
Thursday, March 20, 2003, 8:15 pm
Jennet Thomas in person!
Originating from the lively underground film scene of London in the early 1990’s, Jennet Thomas’s work has become renowned worldwide. Her films and videos come from an eclectic and multiply discursive history, as well as a curiosity about animating matter and images through time. Regardless of form, she strives for clarity and accessibility, with challenging content and a lot of dark humor. Thomas consistently plays with narrative and experiments with ways of imploding storytelling. An active founder member of The Exploding Cinema Collective, an anarchic non-profit film- and video-makers group that hosts unconventional screening events, Thomas brings us a program of Exploding Cinema work. The program includes 4 Ways He Tried To Tell You (1999), Thomas’s “video about the thing that won’t go away,” Andrew Kotting’s Kingdom Protista (1999), a fantastical puppet and computer animation nightmare, and Paul Tarragó’s Moving Back From the Beyond (2002), a tale of the dead considering the possibility of return. Co-presented with Women in the Director’s Chair & Video Data Bank (KJ Mohr). 1996—2003, various directors, UK, ca. 71 min, various formats.
Tags: Animation > Curators and Programmers > Europe > Group Programs > Video Data Bank
Films of Robert Beavers
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 13, 2003
Thursday, March 13, 2003, 8pm
Robert Beavers in person!
Imparting ‘the serenity of a thought without words’, Robert Beavers draws upon historical and architectural sources with an acute sensitivity to site. The filmmaker’s presence, though not always visually evident, is perceived in every composition, gesture and edit. Beavers’ films demand an openness and concentration, but despite their formal rigor they retain an inherent humanity. From the Notebook Of… (1971/1999), the longest film of Beavers’ career, examines the filmmaker’s cinematic ideas as opposed to his practice, through an 1895 Valéry essay on Da Vinci. The historical imagination of the contemporary filmmaker is examined again in the lyrical portrait of Florence, Work Done (1972/1999). The Ground (2001) asks “what lives in the space between the stones, in the space cupped between my hand and my chest?” (Description courtesy of Mark Webber, London Film Festival) 1971—2001, Robert Beavers, USA, ca. 95 min, 35mm.
Siddeshwari
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | March 6, 2003
Thursday, March 6, 2003, 8pm
Mani Kaul in person!
The second Conversations at the Edge offering from Indian experimental cinema pioneer Mani Kaul (Department of Film, Video & New Media Artist-in-Residence, Spring 2003) is Siddeshwari. Based on the life of legendary singer Siddeshwari Devi (1903-77), India’s leading exponent of the classical thumri tradition, Kaul’s biographic film brilliantly blends fiction with documentary and structures the singer’s life like a piece of thumri music itself. Key moments from her story are interwoven with evocations of the music’s mythic past and the compelling textures of life and death in Benares. As lyrics of the songs begin to redirect Kaul’s camera eye, extraordinary images are evoked and the film begins to poetically render the ways in which music transfigured the singer’s life. The film ends with footage from Siddeshwari’s only television appearance—a ghostly presence from a distant past accessed through a technology momentarily attuned to the world of her music (Description courtesy of Harvard Film Archive). 1989, Mani Kaul, India, 92 min, 35mm.
Sharon Couzin: New Work
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 27, 2003
Thursday, February 27, 2003, 8pm
Sharon Couzin in person!
Professor in the Department of Film, Video & New Media, Sharon Couzin presents premieres of three new works. Elusive Cha-Cha (2002) is a portrait of performance artist E.J. Sims, with a soundtrack featuring Robert Metrick’s bongo and voice chant punctuating and echoing quick jump cuts. A mock soap opera narrative frames the performances in a tactile, evocative and persistent “experience of a process.” A film of reflections, small insects, leaves, stones, light and paintings of large women, Her Other Self (2003) explores the interface and identity of inner and outer, body and object, real and remembered, through a fascination with fetish objects. Old Japan Now (2003) explores temple spaces, traditional Noh drama and modern Butoh dance to discover where ritual began and how it persists in modern practices. With footage from several important temples in Kyoto and Tokyo, as well as interviews with practitioners of Noh and Butoh, Old Japan Now seeks to explain some of the historical significance that descends from the Shinto religion and early animism. More poetic than clinical, the film is part diary and part haiku, considering the spiral path of ritual (KJ Mohr). 2002—2003, Sharon Couzin, USA, ca. 85 min, various formats.
Beyond and Shadowland
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 20, 2003
Thursday, February 20, 2003, 8pm
Zoe Beloff in person!
Investigating the relationship between imagination and moving image technology, internationally acclaimed media artist Zoe Beloff brings us two works. The CD-ROM Beyond operates in a playful spirit of philosophical inquiry exploring the paradoxes of technology, desire and the paranormal. An interactive work, it allows the viewer to explore a mental geography, in which the viewer travels through time and space encountering Beloff’s virtual alter-ego who, as a medium that “interfaces” between the living and the dead, transmits “movies” that record her impressions. Shadow Land, or Light From the Other Side is a stereoscopic 16mm film for which both the title and the narrative are taken from the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth d’Espérance, a materializing medium who could produce full body apparitions. The film shows how one might think of a medium as a kind of “mental projector” and the phantoms as representations of her psychic reality. Visually, it explores the origins of what we think of as virtual. Co-presented with Chicago Filmmakers and the University of Chicago (KJ Mohr). 1997—2000, Zoe Beloff, USA, ca. 75 min, CD-ROM & 16mm.
Uski Roti
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 13, 2003
Thursday, February 13, 2003, 8pm
Mani Kaul in person!
This spring, the Department of Film, Video & New Media is pleased to have Mani Kaul as an artist-in-residence. Mr. Kaul was at the forefront of the emergence of a new cinema in India in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. In the singular, visually arresting work he has produced over the past three decades, Kaul has pioneered the blending of documentary and fiction forms and has developed a distinctive cinematic style that remains open to the arts of painting, theater and music. His acclaimed first film, Uski Roti (a.k.a. A Day’s Bread), is considered the first formal experiment in Indian cinema. With a Bressonian vocabulary, Hindu philosophy and profound literary approach, Uski Roti is infused with a polemic that confronts traditional representations of women. Kaul will present two other films during the season, Siddeshwari (March 6) and The Servant’s Shirt (April 24) (KJ Mohr, excerpts courtesy of Harvard Film Archive). 1970, Mani Kaul, India, 95 min, 35mm.
Another Planet: Recent Australian Digital Video
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | February 6, 2003
Thursday, February 6, 2003, 8pm
Curator Keely Macarow in person!
Australian curator Keely Macarow presents a survey of recent Australian digital video that probes the interface between new and old media cultures. Among the works to be shown are: Martine Corompt’s Spell on You (2002), which features a boy who is either an unwilling child actor, or a malevolent eugenics progeny; March-Riever (1999), Vikki Wilson’s attempt to imagine a path to the past, using the possibilities of digital media in the service of the very early poetic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon poems like Beowulf; and Ian Haig & Philip Samartzis’s animated video of zombified human experiments gone wrong, Ectoplasmic Baby Fat Provider (2002). Another Planet maps the emergence of a digital aesthetic, which self-consciously hybridizes and references a broad sweep of media formats and technology, from infrared and computer animation to super-8 film. It revels in a bastardized, glitched, scratched, painterly, self-reflexive and neo-materialist digital practice, reflective of the current artistic, cultural and political situation in Australia. Co-presented with Video Data Bank (KJ Mohr). 1999—2002, various directors, Australia, ca. 84 min, video.
Tags: Animation > Australia > Curators & Programmers > Group Programs > Video Data Bank
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.
