SHOW 2: 9th SEASON — WEDNESDAY APRIL, 17, 2019 — 6:00 PM

ENTITLED
curated by Lili White

TRT: 57.00 minutes

Featuring a live participatory performance
between the audience and Emily Packer
and
also present: filmmaker M M Serra 

Click Here for the Video of the Discussion

FEATURED FILMS:

HORIZON OF MEANING; Rrose Present; SPAIN; 4:36
Horizon of Meaning is a reinterpretation of the film “Science Without Substance” by Daniel Barnett, also author of the book “Movement in Meaning in Experimental Cinema”. Looking for a linguistic / experimental relationship between-his-images. In this I worked with the idea of interpreting works of art — not to gain access to their literal meaning, but to create an intuitive “horizon of meaning.” Working in illuminated time allowed me to understand something that it escapes to the words. And my intuition thus illuminates Barnett’s work: the images were re-shot and compressed from his films “Science Without Substance”; and the sound was direct sound from “horzonte de sentido” compressed.
“Rrose Present managed to distill and capture the very essence of my hour and a half long film in 4 minutes! That astounded me. A part of my life’s been given over to the development of cinema as a set of new language forms. Dialogue is how this happens. Ways to facilitate dialogue of this sort are tools to build our common future. Many thanks are owed to Rrose for launching this international dialogue.”- Daniel Barnett

AS SWEET (film with audience participation performance); Emily Packer; Director of Photography: John Marty, Camera: Katharine Dimitruk, Maribel Moses; Production Assistance: Hannah Lennon, Ryan Rogers; Madeline Packer played by Sara Packer & Nina Levison; also with Kelsey Packer, Margot Packer, Gail Packer; archival footage: Cathleen Sabbath; USA; 12.00
A live, audience participatory event with documentary film about intergenerational assimilation, and a Rose by any other name….

THE LEISURE CLASS; Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; USA; 2.47
A punk queer feminist détournement of a wedding template: a critique of cis privilege, class privilege, white privilege, bridal fantasies, enforced hetero-normativity, the wedding industry, excess consumption, and coerced gender ‘norms.’

BATUM; Kamila Kuc; Cast: Genie Kaminski; Second camera: Nina Zabicka; Sound: Rob Godman; Voice: Genie Kaminski; Still photography: Kamila Kuc, Daisy Rickman; UK/GEORGIA; 8.13
Batum takes as its starting point the experience of near drowning in the Black Sea of Batumi, Georgia. As such, the film is induced with a desire for an auto-ethnographical self-interrogation. Images that feature in the film are a constellation of personal and prosthetic memories, acquired through historical and cultural knowledge as exemplified by the poems of Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Stalin, among other cultural tropes. While making BATUM I was set to explore a certain displacement of identity that emerges when we encounter past experiences. I sought to experience how memories become fiction once recorded and how in this process of recording, the camera itself held a mysterious agency. I am, above all, always interested in ways in which film, as one of the technologies of memory, can be seen as an innovative creator of memories themselves. The film also investigates how the complex relationship between personal and collective memories often subverts the social and political identity constructions.

NOTHING REMAINS; Hong Yane Wang & Hua Wang; UK/China; 1.14
A calligrapher writes with ice instead of ink. Her ephemeral calligraphy reads ‘ice melts, tiles crumble – nothing remains’, a Chinese quote from 2000 years ago, which carries new significance in the age of global warming and climate change, with the polar ice melting faster than ever.

MY GOSSIP; Kelly Gallagher; USA; 14.49
Incorporating live-action stop-motion and digital animation, this personal documentary explores the radical importance of women’s close friendships by examining the filmmaker’s relationship with her own best friend, and how women’s close friendships were historically weaponized against them. The visual sources include 8mm movies shot by my father in Wisconsin, a flock of Brooklyn pigeons, various processed textured including writing, ‘found’ footage including Muybridge’s running buffalo, buffalo on the Western plains and some 16 mm movies from a family in Ohio. There are also textural snippets of Gerry’s performance at Roulette.

YOU ARE NOT MINE; Cinzia Sarto; Italy; TRT: 3.36
You Are Not Mine is the third video of a series called “Roving With a Glass of Water.” It is an attempt to observe how our own personal freedom can reflect itself on the other.

MARY MAGDALENE; M.M. Serra; USA; 3.43
Mary Magdalene is a construct of personal, mythological and political projections of the fluid identity of the individual. This digital representation fragments, and layers the profile that is representative of multiple gender identities. These fragments and layers use the reflections of the elements through which gender is culturally established; the flowing hair, close ups of the flesh, the legs, the voluptuous torso and lips. In the religious community, the name “Mary Magdalene” is the woman as flesh, the wanton woman. This film emphasizes the camera as a weapon for the filmmaker to create her own visual projection. The sound was recorded during the filmmaker’s interaction with The Bean Garden, an installation by the Fluxus sound artist Alison Knowles. It is digitally manipulated to present the haunting of memories of both the location, a gutted morgue and the possibilities of a more transformative future.

UNIVERSAL LEADER 1; Orit Ben-Shitrit; USA/ Israel; 2.24
Universal leader refers to the countdown on analogue film stock, while simultaneously referencing the current state of leaders in the world. Using poetry-like film semantics, the non-linear narrative travels a sociopolitical path between gun violence, leader figures, war images and subsequent refugees, to a post-diasporic non-belonging. The film is composed of physically manipulated 24 frames per second, using bleach etching, watercolors, oil pastels, markers and cuts using sharp objects. At times, the film which is fed through a projector is manually slowed down until it burns. The suggested impact of the leader figure initiates a physical cataclysm to the the body of the film. UNIVERSAL LEADER is at once a performance for the camera, a moving drawing composition and a sequence of still photographs.