AXW’s 2nd annual Festival will present 2 shows and a panel discussion on November 5, 2011 at MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP.

We have received a Manhattan Community Arts Fund from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

AMERICAN PAPER OPTICS has generously donated Chromadepth glasses to view the upcoming film, MY WINDOW, by Anabela Costa.

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PROGRAM NOTES & SCHEDULE
3 to 9 PM

YOU! THE LAST FOUR SECONDS; Angela Ferraiolo; computer and video
An interactive video installation that joins the present with the past by showing four seconds of whatever action is performed in front of the camera as still frames laid side by side.

4 PM SCREENING

THE MIRRORED CURTAIN; Lori Felker; USA; TRT: 10.50; Cinematography, Graphics, Music, Actor,
Co-cinematographer: Robert Todd; Digi
“Let’s See It” on this brand new episode of “Take Me There”. Experience the duality of a singular location anywhere and all over the world, where there’s always something to see and almost everything to imagine. This is a travel show, marking an adventure to a place, a non-space, an unnamed border.”

AXIOM; Sally Grizzell Larson; USA; TRT: 1.00; Digi
The rhythm of clapping hands, the repetition of images in equally timed segments: We are lulled and seduced. Like any other high-functioning receptor, the human brain is indiscriminate about what it picks up. How then do we resist the seemingly benign when we’re mesmerized by it in spite of our better judgment?

MIEDOS (FEARS); Mercedes Sader; Uruguay; TRT:2:06; Digi
I was a fearless woman until I had my first son. The fear of loosing, the fear of pain, enter in my life. Conscius and reason took other road than feelings and emotions. Flying in the middle of a storm, facing a brain tumor and still being here are fears that inspired this short film

PHOTOGRAPH OF WIND; Lynne Sachs; USA; TRT: 3.18; 16mm to Digi
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word “maya” means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.

THE BOROUGH; Kelly Oliver; USA; TRT: 1:34; Digi
“There are a lot of ugly things in this world. I wish I could protect you from them”.

MY FATHER WAS A GANGSTER; Noe Kidder with Tin Tay; USA; TRT: 2.26 ; Digi
Noe set out to make a portrait of herself as a missing person in New York City and ended up taking a portrait of her friend Tin, who tells a childhood story about her father in Singapore.

AND THIS FOREST WILL BE A DESERT; C & A Projects (Carolyn Radlo & Alanna Simone); Music by Wardruna; TRT: 2.33; Dig;
This stop-motion film about the state of the world (plastics, panic and paradise) presents a translucent landscape of sparkling trash inhabited by the polar bear (a cute, picturesque animal— actually a fearsome beast) who serves as the poster-animal for campaigns against global warming. Rapid text appears over the images, condensed versions of three different mythologies and three different fires: the battles of Ragnarök, the Nordic end of the world; an account of a recent forest fire caused by changing weather patterns; and Muhammad’s ascent to the highest fiery heaven. Each layer reiterates the background source of our worried fantasies and fears of destruction despite the beauty to be found right here, right now.

THE KITCHEN SINK; Lili White; USA; TRT: 11.24; Digi
Tangled voiceovers about food & its production reference war & famine; Monsanto; the Pleiades constallation; attributes of the Moon Goddess (gas flame and waterfall found in Duchamp’s installation); poppy crops in oil producing regions & homages to Chaplin’s table ballet & Melies’ Moon Voyage. The implications stretch between humor and horrific reality, joining Earth to Sky, desert to garden, sustenance to starvation.

DROP STILL; Courtney Krantz; USA; Starring: Jen Rosenblit; TRT 6:53; 16mm to digi
DROP STILL originates from a body of work focused on emergent elements from the female body that evaporate with time. This film is a study in light and the encounters that can arise between a proximal and perspectival camera and a moving body.

ONE MISSISSIPPI; Rebecca Louise Tiernan; UK/USA; D.O.P: Ben Jones; Hair & Make-up: Fiona Gallagher;Music: ‘Soon I Will be Done’ by Amigo Male Singers TRT: 5:05; 16MM to digital;
A psycho-narrative of four girls playing skipping rhymes in a barren field with a lonesome Scarecrow.

5:30 PM PANEL DISCUSSION led by Lili White

Panelists: Noe Kidder, Alice Cohen, Courtney Krantz, Cinzia Sarto, Lili White,
Rachael Guma, Kelly Oliver, Rebecca Louise Tiernan, Angela Ferraiolo

8 PM SCREENING

REOPENING THE PAST; Liliana Resnick; Croatia; TRT: 11.20; digi
“What happens when the past walls the mind?” Although it has been 15 years since the war has ended a few women still await the return of their missing husbands. The feeling of destruction that war brings about is still very palpable in Croatian society, and it will remain so until there is a collective effort to recuperate and to forgive. REOPENING THE PAST is an experimental dance film using my dance performance footage to tell this story.

HANDMAID; Mo Hyun-shin; TRT: 4.00; digi;
Director, Scenario, Editing, Sound: Hyun-shin Mo; Director of Photography/ Executive Producer: Hyung-seok Lee; Art Director: Hyo-eun Cho
Hands, which used to mediate the value of sacred labor, now exist in myth only. The hands cutting out leather repeat the sacrificial cycle of being subjected to rational beings. A hand’s essence lies in making actions, more so than any other human organs such as face. Its nature resembles that of a natural-born maid.

18FPS, 45RPM, 3SPI; Rachael Guma ; USA; Super 8 performance with vinyl phonograph recording; seamstress: Rachael Abernathy- Guma TRT: 5 minutes or so…
Super 8 found-footage film of the needle of a sewing machine blown up to 16 mm, hand-sewn, re-photographed back to Super 8, and hand-processed. The image of a pulsating needle as the thread punctures through the surface of the film strip, while the sound of a stylus needle scratches the surface of a rotating record player.

TRANCE ACTIONS; Alice Cohen; USA; TRT: 6.54; digi; Animation/Music: Alice Cohen
Trance induced video meditation with home recorded sound collage.

HOW MATA HARI LOST HER HEAD AND FOUND HER BODY; Amy Ruhl; USA;
TRT: 21.39; digi
Writer, Director, Animation: Amy Ruhl;Director of Photography for Live Action: Atley Loughridge;Costumes: Vanessa Riegel; Original Score: Jedediah Smith; Original Songs for Dance Scenes: Julian Lynch; Starring: Andrew Maloney, Amy Ruhl, and Richard Saudek
An imaginary biography of a real historical figure, Mati Hari— exotic dancer, courtesan, and spy executed by firing squad for espionage in World War I. Adding elements of fantasy to an already implausible life story, the film blends both original moving collages with archival photographs of the Belle Époque and World War I experience in order to create an entirely new perspective on the archetypal “femme fatale.”

BODILY HEAVENS; Stephanie Wuertz; USA; TRT: 4.33; digi
A whirl of whorls, a dis-astral staccato that evokes a nostalgia for the intimate sublime. BODILY HEAVENS, is the first in a series of works created under a microscope using a single slide of microscopic imagery re-photographed at varying positions and levels of magnification that immerse the viewer in a world that seems both macro- and microcosmic, human and anti-human. The work is concerned with uncovering the repressed in vision and by authoritative discourse surrounding the body, working against the intended use, it luxuriates in the surface, texture, and tactile qualities of the material.

FORBIDDEN FRUIT; Cinzia Sarto; Italy; TRT: 6.00; digi
Hastening shadows obscure the wavering sky; traveling in a darkness lit by commercial harts and erotic toys until a body barges into an other and a fluorescent light shine on the image of “original sin”. The encounter of lovers is from the start a collision that will bring them to orbit around each other, bewildered and frustrated until the inevitable violence of a final rip. In daylight an other man and woman fall like fruits from a tree. They wonder a beaten path erased by the snow; trudging toward the possibility of an embrace.

STORY OF THE OCTOPUS WITH A HEART-SHAPED HEAD; Alessandra Cianelli; Italy;TRT: 11:44; digi
Photography: Alessandra Cianelli & Alessandro Abbate; Music: BK Bostik; production: Alessandra Cianelli, Cave Canem
Cianelli, is a native of Naples where the octopus plays a central role.
This is a sonorous fairy tale, a reading , a video projection, food ,music happening, ephemeral ice sculpture…“Once upon a time there was a Heart beating. He was inside a small living human being, For nine months, he had been inside a human being in which He had been lulled by the liquid movement of the dark water and nourished by the placenta (….) When they were born they stopped being lulled (….) The beating Heart, that is a pump, that is a plunge, that is an unceasing jump(….) couldn’t survive (….) in a fullmoon night of February He plunged himself into the only true water: the see The Heart, in quest of an identity and in order to survive, throws itself into the sea, the water that is the most similar to the liquid of the
placenta. There He couples himself with an octopus by substituting what we would call the “head” but that in reality is the stomach(….)

MY WINDOW; Anabela Costa; Italy; 8 minutes; digi;
Edition:Anabela Costa; 3D Animation: Luis Rocha da Silva; 3D Consultant Luis Lobato; Special Effects: Anabela Costa; Music/Sound design: Emidio Buchinho
MY WINDOW is a film about the personal take and how it can be translated through sight, lighting and colour giving exposure to an artistic universe that reflects time and its relation to movement— CHROMADEPTH GLASSES enhance this world.

CHROMADEPTH GLASSES donated by AMERICAN PAPER OPTICS.

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C+A PROJECTS comprises Carolyn Radlo and Alanna Simone, artists based in California. They collaborate on projects which deal with social and political situations communicated through sparse text and evocative imagery. They like to work with words, images, and meaning without necessarily relying on narrative or linearity. Many of their projects focus on the exchange of ideas between them, the differences and similarities that show up in their work made side by side, but always guided and supported by chance. Their life-long, multi-faceted collaboration has, in recent years, evolved from mother-daughter to artist-artist.

Concerning and this forest will be a desert (shown in this festival) and Rice Relief (screened by AXWFF this past summer) they have written: “The planet is in peril and humans have their heads filled with ideas and fantasies that are like strung-out dreams. When you hear people talk, it is astonishing sometimes to learn what fears motivate them, what greed. The unconscious incentives which move people to act — or not to act — in response to the needs of the world around them are fascinating, literally. They are projections and make-believe. We offer no solutions, but we try to unpack the stories, see the patterns, connect the dots.”
and this forest will be a desert was premiered in A Little Something Serious at Brooks Institute in Ventura, CA (Nov. 2010) and was included in the group show, GONE at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, CA (Dec. 2010). It was screened again this May as part of the No Dialogue show at the art fair, ArtPadSF, in San Francisco. It was also chosen for the Shorts program of the AND (Abandon Normal Devices) Festival in Liverpool UK http://thecarolynandalannashow.com

ALESSANDRA CIANELLI lives and works in Naples. Graduate: Fine Arts Accademy in Naples; Philosophy at I.U.O Naples. Her art practiceis relational — since 2004 she has utilized her background as set/stage designer and combined traditional expressive arts of sculpture and painting and drawing, incorporating them with current media technologies, photography, video and performance. She investigates contemporary society in terms of identity, memories, processes of construction/de-construction of myths and rites, with a focus on the loss of identity and social disintegration involving villages and rural areas as residual landscapes.

CARYN CLINE is a filmmaker and teacher, originally from the Ozarks in southwest Missouri. Her film festival screenings include the Crossroads Festival (San Francisco), the London International Animation Festival, Experiments in Cinema 6.3 (Albuquerque, NM), the Melbourne Animation Festival (Australia), the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (Czech Republic), the Madcat International Women’s Film and Video Festival, New Filmmakers (NYC), Women in the Director’s Chair, the Southwest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the Iowa City Documentary Film Festival, and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival. She lives and works in New York City and Seattle, Washington.

ALICE COHEN has been a long-time musician and composer, who has also worked with collage and other visual art, before getting into animation. When she began to animate her collages, she found new ways to experiment visually with rhythm, to play with the interaction of music and image, and to make unconscious dream worlds visible. Obsessed with hunting for old books, magazines, and anything containing forgotten imagery…sometimes even discarded things found in the street…the act of taking these cast-off and random images, and re-combining them to create new imaginary environments, is a driving force. Fueled by the element of chance in the randomness of what is found, combined with the freedom to experiment with an endless variety of re-combining, Cohen finds the process analogous to alchemy….scavenged images from different eras and sources, sometimes as humble as an old magazine picked from the trash, can be transformed into something beautiful and magical. Favorite themes: forgotten beauty of the past such as vintage actresses/models from the 20s and 30s…the hairdos, make-up, clothes and glamour of lost eras…Playful aspects of femininity, played out through inner journeys, not unlike Alice’s adventures through the looking glass.

ANABELA COSTA 1958 b. Lisbon, Portugal. Lives in Paris. Visual Artist, studies Fine Arts at Lisbon Fine Arts University (1980) Independent filmmaker working with moving image in experimental animation, has the esthetic of movement, the creation of movement as main goals and mixing it with projects that problematise concepts, relations, between art and science. Her paper on wwwanabelacosta.blogspot.com reflects on virtual reality ability to to turn an artist’s “imaginary vision” turn into “reality”. http://mywindowanabelacosta.blogspot.com

LORI FELKER chose Filmmaking as her official second language in 2003-ish, bumping German into third place. Eventual fluency is important to her, so she employs many forms/formats, practices frequently with others, and tries hard not to shy away from expressing her thoughts on human behavior, travel, inter-activity, frustration, failure and political irritants. Lori has many lives to live simultaneously. They currently live, make films/videos, teach, project, curate, and compulsively collaborate in Chicago.
Currently faculty and staff at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA 2007) and the Festival Coordinator for the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Her work has screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival; NYFF: Views from the Avant-Garde; VideoEx, Zurich; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Curtas Vila do Conde Film Festival, Portugal; Wexner Center for the Arts; MassArt Film Society; MuHKA_media, Belgium; Boston Underground Film Festival;  Video Fest, Dallas; Florida Experimental Film Festival; Space Gallery, Pittsburgh. She is an Illinois Arts Council Artists Grant recipient, a Wexner Center Artist in Residence, and a Fulbright Fellow (Berlin)www.FelkerCommaLori.com

ANGELA FERRAIOLO is a writer and filmmaker who is exploring how computational and procedural practices might affect the traditions of literature and art cinema. Her work has screened at the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant Garde, the Australian International Experimental Film Festival, and at the International Conference of Generative Art in Rome. Professionally she has worked at H20 Productions, Westwood Studios, and Electronic Arts. Her plays have been produced at Expanded Arts and La Mama Galleria in New York, and at the Brick Playhouse in Philadelphia. She has an MFA in Media Arts from Hunter College. She is currently the Electronic Writing Fellow at Brown University, and a guest faculty member in Visual Arts at Sarah Lawrence College.

MATOULS EOLOU GEKKO is Daphné Hérétakis’s alter ego.
She lives in Paris and Athens and has been making documentaries and experimental short and medium length films since 2008.

RACHAEL GUMA is a filmmaker and sound artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Through her experiments with Super 8 film and analog sound, Rachael strives to create an engaging live viewing experience that embraces the idiosyncratic qualities of technology, while maintaining a hand-crafted approach to her output. Ever since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, her films have screened at the San Francisco Cinematheque, RX Gallery, Mono No Aware, Northern Flickers, and Microscope Gallery. As a member of  Optipus Film Collective, she has performed live foley sound at Participant Gallery, Dense Mesh IV, and the 2011 Index Festival. STATEMENT: When I think of foley, I automatically picture someone watching a film with shoes on their hands, following the footsteps of the actor on the screen.  Foley is an integral part of the post sound process in traditional filmmaking, covering up mistakes and/or enhancing those sounds that were not caught on set. What initially sparked my interest in this process is when I found out that many times foley artists use crumpling paper to re-create the sound of fire. It seemed so artificial …in the best possible way. In a live sound space this creates many challenges, but infinite possibilities. Learning about mic and feedback patterns is a large part of it, as well as determining the image/sound relationships. It’s that one plus one equals ONE equation.

MO HYUN-SHIN, Birth 1980 Undergraduate degree was French literature. Now, is studying Filmmaking (MFA) at Yon-sei Graduate School of Communication & Arts. “Handmaid” is the first experiment film.

NOE KIDDER directs films from her sense of place and history. In “My Father Was a Gangster,” Noe set out to make a portrait of herself as a missing person in New York City and ended up taking a portrait of her friend Tin, who tells a childhood story about her father in Singapore.She is inspired by Nature itself, and the mirror that art makes with it. She directs films from a sense of place and history, with much work generated in the presence of others.

COURTNEY KRANTZ is based in Brooklyn, NY. She makes work within the realms of the still and moving image as well as installation and performance-based pieces.  Her filmic inquiries are influenced by her considerations of the body, which originate from her exploratory investigations of dance and improvisational movement practices.  She sees the choreographic potentialities between the moving body and the moving cinematic frame as an evolving source of inspiration and challenge.

KYJA KRISTJANSSON-NELSON has screened her films in Asia, Europe, North America and Australia, at venues such as the Walker Art Center, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the European Media Arts Festival, and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.  Her work has received awards, including the Kodak Vision Award for Best Cinematography, the Ann Arbor Griot Best Editing Award, and the Moondance Calypso Award. Kyja has received fellowships from the Fulbright Association, the Bush Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.  Kyja is an Associate Professor of Cinema Arts at Minnesota State University Moorhead

NANDITA KUMAR is a multi-faceted, award winning filmaker, multi media artist, painter and performer. She has completed her Masters Degree in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts, in Los Angeles. Nandita’s artistic expressions have shown in various festivals and exhibitions throughout the world including Los Angeles county Museum(LACMA) along with the Salvador Dali Exhibit, REDCAT, The New Zealand International Film Festival, Film Anthology Archive NY, Indian Art Summit, The Rome International Film festival, Stuttgart Animation Festival, The Academy of Television Art and Sciences in Los Angeles and the Best of Sydney Underground Festival DVD.In her work she explores the elemental process by which human beings construct meaning from their experience. It is the dynamic process of interplay between events, self and culture. Her art metaphorically circumnavigates this experience and is a personal meditation on her own process of reflection and interpretation. She predominantly works as an artist trying to collage the timeless world and poetically draw inherent correlations between the self and the various dimensions of the cultural diaphragm. Her current films include The Linear of Nightmare, Studies on Dualism, The Birth of BrainFly and Tentacles of Dimensions.

SALLY GRIZZELL LARSON is an independent visual artist. Screenings of her video works include 11° FILE (Electronic Language International Festival), São Paulo; Berlin International Directors Lounge; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid; Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade; Big Screen Project, New York;NewFilmmakers NY, Anthology Film Archives; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Festival of Film and Media Arts. Her video CERTAIN WOMENwas awarded “Best of Festival–Experimental” at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival in 2006. AXIOM was awarded “Best in Category: The Medium is the Message” and Third Place overall at the Toronto Urban Film Festival in 2010. http://www.rhizome.org/profiles/sallygrizzelllarson/

MURIEL MONTINI studies cinema. Lives and works in Paris.

MARIA NIRO works with video, installation, photographyand sound. Her current body of work explores the poetics of memory and dreams analyzing their connections to the textures and rhythms of water, light, time and space. She creates original soundscapes usingfield recordings, found sound, and her own voice manipulated with software instruments. Niro’s latest web videos were commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and featured at www. WhiteLightFestival.com. Her work has screened in galleries and festivals throughout the world including the 10th Annual River to River Festival in New York, The 7th Berlin International Directors Lounge, European Media Arts Festival Germany, NOT A CAR at Los Angeles Art Organization, Festival of the New Latin American Cinema, CUBA, Video Dumbo New York, Counter Cultures, Counter Cinema at Exit Art Gallery  New York, WNDX Winnipeg’s Film & Video Art Festival, CANADA, Whitechapel Gallery, UK and Millennium Film Workshop New York, among others. Some of Niro’s work is distributed by the New American Cinema Group/Filmmakers’ Cooperative. She is based in New York City.

KELLY OLIVER is a video artist who has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally in venues such as The New York Underground Film Festival, The Liverpool Biennial, Off-Loop Barcelona Video Art Festival, GloguaAIR Berlin, Carnegie Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She has collaborated with artist Keary Rosen on a number of video works exploring the conjunction of language and imagery.

CHARMAINE ORTIZ. Born and raised in North Carolina. In 2003 she attended the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where she earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in Painting and in Art History. Prior to her graduate studies she assisted illustrator and sculpting artist, Virgina Wright-Frierson, in building the Airlie Gardens Minnie Evans Bottle Chapel.  Savannah College of Art and Design has recognized her creative passion by awarding her the Combined Honors Fellowship to facilitate her completion of dual graduate degrees in Art History (MA) and Painting (MFA).

LILIANA RESNICK explores tensions between the inner world of human beings and the exterior world that encloses them. She works in narrative, documentary and experimental style and often mixes them all. She studied film in San Francisco and she holds a Master of Fine Arts in Cinema from San Francisco State University (she completed the program in December 2004.) Prior to that, Liliana studied gymnastics until age 14. She entered the dance world in order to improve her mime movement while at the same time studying philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Zagreb in Croatia. After graduating, she started to work as a choreographer which brought her a research scholarship upon which she spent two years in Beijing, studying movement in Peking Opera performances at the Academy of Chinese Traditional Theater, and Taijiquan. Beside choreographing and filmmaking, Liliana also writes on the topics of film, dance and art. Her writings have been published by many magazines and newspapers including Croatia’s Vijenac and Arkzin, and Germany’s Ballet/Tanz.. Liliana’s film work has become central in her search through different forms of expression. The short form gives her a freedom and convenience to explore many different styles while experimenting with themes and visuals. A feature length form gives her a possibility to reveal the complexity of the world we live in through exploration of narrative. http://www.cyclofilm.com

CHARLOTTE PRYCE has been making films and optical objects since 1986 and her works have screened throughout the world. She has taught experimental film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Academy of Art (San Francisco), Kent Institute of Design (Canterbury, England), and is currently a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles). She is a graduate of the Slade School of Art, University College London (BFA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA).

AMY RUHL is a filmmaker reluctantly working from Bushwick, New York. Heretofore, her work has had a fascination with subversive ruptures in social history, mapping a visual language for female and queer desire on screen, and the depiction of sexual slapstick.
Unable to choose between being a “visual artist” or a narrative filmmaker, her newest obsessions lead her to both the writing of a feature length script, and separately, a new body of installation work expanding upon themes found in Victorian literature such as bodice-ripping Byronic heroes, eroticism in death, protracted sexual tension as class conflict, and the female dominated genre of “The Supernatural Explained.”  Consequently, she watches a lot of Masterpiece Theater.

MERCEDES SADER is a filmmaker and cultural manager currently living and working in Punta del Este, Uruguay. Her experimental films are influenced by and are the consequence of her election: she choose to live and work in a country that experimental cinema represents a real possibility to film. She is inspired by the circumstances of her own life. In order to promote experimental cinema she is part of a group of artists that organize an annual experimental film festival  and also coordinates workshops and seminars –free of any charge- about script, photography, filming with 16mm cameras, etc. in her city, a little town by the beach.

LYNNE SACHS makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with  a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn. www.lynnesachs.com

CINZIA SARTO was born in Italy, holds a bachelors degree in Architecture from the Cooper Union University of New York. Although she has worked for many years as an architect she is now more involved with visual experimentation from documentary to video-art and  theater video-set.  Her visual research focuses primarily on the experience of human bodies within the landscape they choose to inhabit. Her  documentary “Femmina per Grazia Ricevuta” (co-directed with Lina Cascella) was awarded fist price at Campania Spot Festival (2006), her more experimental work “Una Sporca Vacanza” won the Video art  first price at DigiFestival.Net ’07 and also at Tam Tam Digifestival ’07. Her work has screened at Anthology Film Archive (U.S.A.), Videoholica 2011(Bulgaria), Vox Feminae Film Festival 2010(Croatia), Transverse VT 2 International Digital Art IDAproject (Australia/Japan/China), Museo de Arte Moderno de Cartagena (Colombia), Halles S. Gery (Bruxelles), Douz and Mille Gallery (U.S.A.), product-Festival of Contemporary Art 2008 (Bulgaria), Arcipelago Bit Aly (Italy), Utsikten Kunstsenter Center (Norway), Mark De Puechredon Gallery (Switzerland), 10m2 Gallery (Bosnia-Erzegovina), V/07 Venice Art Fair, Ardeo Trani Film Festival 2011 & 2007 (Italy), Choachella Music and Art Festival 2007(U.S.A.), Art Basel Miami 2006, Ela-Asia Art Taipei 2006 (Taiwan), Museo d’Arte della Citta’ di Ravenna, Malafemmina Video Film Festival(U.S.A.) http://vimeo.com/24309235

YANA SAKELLION. As a designer and an artist Yana works across mediums including graphic design, interactive media, and video. Her practice emphasizes interdisciplinary approach to a conceptual inquiry, with special interest in storytelling. Yana was born to a mixed Russian-Greek family and grew up in Uzbekistan, Former Soviet Union. She often takes inspiration in the memories of her upbringing and migratory experiences. She also traveled excessively between the Former Soviet Republics, Europe and the US, and is fluent in Russian. Yana earned an honorary MFA degree from the Department of Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her work has been exhibited and published nationally and abroad, most recently at the Video and Contemporary Art Festival Waterpieces, Riga, Latvia and Oslo Screen Festival, Oslo, Norway. She is currently holding a tenure-track position on the faculty in the Graphic Design Department at the American University, Washington, DC.

REBECCA TIERNAN is Irish American, grown up between the States and England and has a lot of love for experimental film, video art and theatre. http://vimeo.com/user2449911

LILI WHITE Director / Organizer of AXWFF White made Super 8 films while studying painting and has often curated shows of experimental media and fine art works. When the computer transformed movie making at the end of the last century, she began using that technology. Her films’ form is that of atmospheric collage whose themes regard relationships of power and repression— connecting news issues to science facts, paralleling mythic to personal stories, and reference other art forms. Their idea evinces the “whole” of the subject: like how ALL the facets form A diamond. Her feature “NY(see)” premiered at Pioneer Theatre in 2006. “everything, BUT” won BEST FILM PROMOTING (agricultural) SUSTAINABILITY at 3 A Short Film Fest.

STEPHANIE WUERTZ is an audiovisual artist based in New York working in a wide range of media both appropriated and original. She is interested in the intersections between art, technology, and science. She has screened and performed live projections of her work at such venues as The New Museum, White Box Gallery, Microscope Gallery, CoExist Gallery, Issue Project Room, Cherry Kino Lab and Anthology Film Archives. She currently works in the department of Digital Media at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“BODILY HEAVENS” is the first in a series of works using microscopic imagery. The work is concerned with uncovering the repressed in vision and by authoritative discourse surrounding the body, working against the intended use, it luxuriates in the surface, texture, and tactile qualities of the material

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Courtney Fellion – AXWFF logo designer-  is a curator, filmmaker, and graphic designer pursuing her Masters in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. After graduating from the University of Colorado’s experimental-focused film program, she was a participant in Sundance Film Institute’s Art House Project has worked with various film venues including the International Film Series in Boulder and festivals including the AURORA International Animation Festival in Norwich, England. She currently works with experimental film distributor Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. She is interested in exhibition and distribution formats, nostalgia for fictive/virtual places, and the hybridization and mythology of the American West.
www.losthorizoncreative.com <http://www.losthorizoncreative.com>

Mari Babao – Photographer for AXW Film Festival and at other times a director, writer, producer. Mari is currently in New York City developing a feature-length documentary and contributing on production for shorts. Mari Babao has been making social issue documentary films for over ten years. Born and raised in multicultural Mindanao in Southern Philippines, her passion for producing social documentaries began during her career in broadcast journalism in which she won for her program KBP’s Golden Dove Award for “Best in Public Affairs Programming” in 2000. She then joined the government as a technical assistant of the Secretariat for the Government Panel of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) negotiating with the Muslim secessionist movement where she participated in crafting government positions for the Interim Peace Agreements on Ceasefire; Rehabilitation and Development; and the Draft Final Peace Agreement. Her recent credits include creating a national television program designed to support the National Peace Agenda of the government of the Republic of the Philippines. As Executive Producer, she produced, wrote and directed the weekly programming of live studio telecasts and short feature documentary episodes for almost two years. The program won Southeast Asian Foundation for Children and Television’s Anak TV Seal Award for responsible programming. She founded Green Circle Media Productions, Inc which produced a weekly television program and ran a nationwide public advocacy campaign contracted by The World Bank and USAID. This led her to produce more social issue documentaries on governance, conflict-prevention, peace building, human rights and multiculturalism. In addition to her work in making documentary films, Mari has co-convened a national youth movement in the Philippines empowering and energizing the youth for political participation.

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2011 Presentation at The 2nd Festival at MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP

THANK YOU, Keara Castaldo,  for making this transcription !

THANK YOU, P & V Enterprises for recording the panel !

This panel is FREE, open to the public, and everyone is welcome!

Experimental film–what does it mean and to whom?
We will include the audience in exploring each artist’s work and questioning why have a “women’s” film festival?

A conversation with international filmmakers was expanded from 5 local filmmakers to 8 participants, led by AXWFF Director, Lili White

FILMMAKERS (from left to right): Angela Ferraiolo,  Rachael Guma, Alice Cohen, Cinzia Sarto (traveled  from Italy), Rebecca Tiernan (traveled from England), Kelly Oliver (traveled from upstate NY), Courtney Krantz, Noe Kidder, Lili White.

PANEL DISCUSSION:           

A panel discussion, moderated by curator Lili White, presented on November 5 , 2011 at MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP included 8 international participating filmmakers, giving them an opportunity to be seen and heard by the public; presenting their own ideas about their work.

AXWFF features work that is simply “the best of recent moving image work made by a woman” — not necessarily institutionally sanctioned or based or feminist theory. The films were assessed on a piece by piece basis. The curator sought a raw power rigorously expressing the ecstatic, the personal mind and/or story that was often based on the artists’ lived experience, and sometimes formed from their own “mission statement.” Some work, may never have been seen in a public forum, but acted as a motion picture diary— obviously made to share with an audience.

AXWFF asks: why is our society missing these voices? Don’t we care to see a different perception that rolls against the tide of what is often programmed? All these filmmakers investigate life on their own terms, and experiment with the medium.

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PANEL DISCUSSION moderated by curator Lili White 

Transcription completed by Keara Castaldo

with filmmakers: Noe Kidder, Courtney Krantz, Kelly Oliver, Rebecca Tiernan, Alice Cohen, Rachel Guma, Cinzia Sarto, Angela Ferraiolo

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Lili White: I guess if everyone could talk about what we saw and what we’re going to see this evening, and say whatever you’d like to about it and we’ll just go down the line.

Noe Kidder: I made the short film, MY FATHER WAS A GANGSTER with the black and white 16MM with the floating frame. I started out reading LEAVES of GRASS and I started out wanting to make a portrait of New York City and then moved forward — I was thinking a lot about film and September 11th and how pictures of the different missing persons throughout the city and I thought it would be interesting to make a portrait of a missing person but also sort of a portrait of myself in that way too, imagining myself in that situation… and I also had this weird title in my head: “My Father Was A Gangster”— and I don’t know where it came from. So told my friend, Tin and she said, “My father was a gangster.” and told me the story that I made into voiceover in the film. I was shooting a lot around New York sometimes with her, sometimes with other performers. The film is structured around this soundtrack.

Courtney Krantz: DROP STILL is a study in montage and the moving body.  I was interested in the transference of body movement to camera movement and vice versa.  Essentially, it is a type of duet between camera and body.

Kelly Oliver: THE BOROUGH has nighttime shots with rain. It’s kind of about “Parenthood” in the sense that I was feeling very protective of my daughter and I wanted to make a piece that spoke a little bit about that. So I shot a lot of the footage around the borough that I live in at night; and I also had images of my daughter when she was catching fireflies. The soundtrack is a phrase that I took from TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, which was “There are a lot of ugly things in this world that I wish I could protect you from them, that’s never possible.” In my daughter’s voiceover she says sort of part of it, but she couldn’t get the whole thing out, (she’s around 3 years old). So I used some audio from some other sources as well. I was a exploring the ideas behind the phrase. Nothing actually “happens” in the film but there is potential for something to happen in terms of the moving-ness of it and sort of what you are seeing in exterior shots.

Rebecca Tiernan: I did ONE MISSISSIPPI with the girls in the field playing skipping rhymes. The point I really wanted to illuminate was how film itself is a belief system and how it’s a passive activity and I think that’s essentially what I was trying to say.

Cinzia Sarto: UNA SPORCA VACANZA (THE DIRTY VACATION) was my first piece in 2005 I was trying to understand what experimental film means. “Experimental” comes from “experience” to live in the moment and being the moment. This work was a series of documentary images that I was taking and that I wove into a kind of tapestry that made it a singular piece. It actually was a combination of different situations or places that were coming together using computer editing tools. It’s a piece about looking for one’s own voice, in fact at the end the audio, the voice you hear is the letter “Aah” which in Italian means “A” which is the beginning of the alphabet, so it’s a film about getting rid of the garbage and understanding the garbage surrounding us and being able to digest that to continue your path. To find some kind of voice in the mystery.

Alice Cohen: I made the soundtrack of TRANCE ACTIONS with a synthesizer. The visual uses some live footage that’s mixed in, however it’s mostly animation made out of cut-out paper images that I find. I used a lot of “new age” imagery, like dolphins and meditative things, chakras — and it’s a little tongue in cheek but it’s also about layers of consciousness and using such imagery to achieve different layers of consciousness. For me, when I animate, I go into a sort of trance and meditation; so it’s playing with the imagery but also commenting on the state of mind that I get into when I work And the music is part of it too.

Rachel Guma: My work is called 18FPS/45RPM/3SPI. The 18 FPS is going to be projected on Super 8, the 45 RPM is the sound of a record player, and the 3 SPI is stitches per inch. It uses the image of the apparatus of a sewing machine, so the needle going up and down, and I took that Super 8, blew it up onto 16MM, hand processed that, then I took mono filament which is like fishing wire, and I sewed on the 16MM film, and then I projected it back and I shot it back on Super 8 and then I hand-processed that and that’s what you’ll see tonight.

Angela Ferraiolo: I have the installation YOU! THE LAST FOUR SECONDS. I’ve been working with processing digital images abstractly. When you start working with images digitally, you can think of some very abstract idea and say, I wonder what that looks like? A common exploit is to make a softer mirror where you stand in front of a camera see yourself going through some sort of image process. In this piece, you can see yourself in the present time and what you looked like just a few seconds ago. And that’s what’s great about digital processing is you can ask “what would it be like if I took the structure of the snap equation or this natural process and showed it to you in video sequence?” Sometimes you get awful stuff, but sometimes you get spectacular stuff that you’ve never really seen before. So I’m having a really good time with it. But of course I love film and I love that image also, so I think that’s what inspires all of us working digitally.

LW: Angela, you invented that algorithm is that correct, is that the right term?

Angela: Yeah, exactly. If you watch montage, whoever cut that film together has an algorithm running in their head, whether they call it that or not they’re following some principle. And this is just more formalized and reading the computer programming. I’ve formalized that process into a structure that relates to another system of knowledge but it’s not any different than what everyone does intuitively in the editing room.

LW: And you also have taken some of this material and formed individual movies out of it?

Angela: Yeah, totally. Algorithms have personalities, visually, to me.

LW: So not everything you do is interactive?

Angela: No. But it’s all still in the camera. You know, when you go out and use your camera, that’s really the beginning of it. Even if you’re doing something that sounds like its from the other side of the aisle-like from a math department— you still have to have the image in your camera, as all of you making films know…

LW: Alice, you are a musician. When you make your pieces, do you do the sound first and then manipulate the image into place?

Alice Cohen: I started animating and then made music videos and in between I make my own pieces. Sometimes I make music videos for myself, but when I do a piece that’s not a music video, I tend to put the music in afterwards. And for some reason since both rhythms are coming out of me, they tend to work together, both the visual rhythm and the musical rhythm. I do somehow tend to fit the music in, unless it’s a music video then it’s the other way around. I think they bounce back and forth all the time, off of each other.

LW: Rachel, Your piece deals with sewing. So do you want to say anything about why you’re doing a piece like that, which is really a performance piece? And you’re using Super 8 which as we know there’s all these issues about the death of film right now.

Rachel Guma: Well, I’m very fascinated by outdated technologies you know, like Super 8, analog sound, … And I heard that someone sewed on film before; so I did that too and then I found out all these things like how the needle in the sewing machine is similar to like the apparatus in a film projector: the down pause up, the up pause, and then the around kind of thing both the sewing machine and the projector use. Also: women were the first editors in film because they could sew and they thought women sewing is similar to women editing, the cutting and splicing and things like that — I found out about these these connections after I made this piece.

And it builds and grows. When doing live sound or projecting film, each performance is always a different experience every time. Who knows if that needle is going to slip on the record player and then it makes a whole completely different sound and a whole completely different thing and that’s what fascinates me about it.

LW: Kelly your piece is very colorful and you mentioned the lightning bugs- why did you pick those images like the Christmas lights…?

Kelly Oliver: They have an association with childhood, and that was sort of my main motivation with it and it was really just kind of gathering footage of my neighbor’s decorations that they put up. There’s another scene looking through my neighbor’s window and I just wanted to continue that but then sort of adding the Christmas lights to it tones down that voyeurism sort of thing but they mesh together towards the end of the piece along with the child’s voice that is talking about colors.

LW: Courtney, you worked with a dancer in this piece, and in other pieces that you’ve made. Can you tell us a little bit about your procedure, how you work with them?

Courtney Krantz: I’ve developed the material and then I’ve transferred the information to the performer during the process. It might be more information or less information depending on where the process takes us. I have my set score and then we go from there.

LW: So it’s kind of like a storyboard, the score?

Courtney: Yeah, yeah it’s a storyboard.

LW: And you want them to move through space in this certain way?

Courtney Krantz:: Right.

LW: And you use a Bolex?

Courtney Krantz: Yeah.

LW: Which you have to hand-crank?

Courtney Krantz: Yeah and that’s another limitation put on what the film will actually be. So for me it inevitably turned DROPSTILL into a montage-based piece just because of the stipulation in time and where that would go. Working with the Bolex definitely delegates how you use time, and therefore shoot.

LW: Cinzia, was that an actual beach in Italy ?

Cinzia Sarto: It was an actual beach but it was not in the same place where those cement cubes are.

LW: And what are those cement cubes?

Cinzia Sarto: They’re actually made to stop the waves on the shore and they were left abandoned on the shore.

LW: And the dead animals, they were there?

Cinzia Sarto: Yeah, and then towards my filming I kept coming across them, and so they became part.

LW: You studied architecture. Do you think that has influenced the way you forged ahead with your films?

Cinzia Sarto: Yes I think I would stop thinking the same way. What interests me is the relationship between the body and the space they inhabit, so I just am much more free to experiment in this medium than I was in architecture because there are so many constraints and there are so many economics and it becomes much more difficult to work as much.

LW: How did you decide you were going to make a film?

Cinzia Sarto:: I just knew I wanted to make a piece I just didn’t know what I was doing. So I was very quiet and didn’t tell anything to anybody. I had a very good friend who is English; and just waited for months for me to do what I had to do and just took me around. Then I started weaving this world that is a kind of translation of the real world that I was seeing and what was most interesting was how as you (Sarto points to another filmmaker) said before: you start with an intuition and if you let yourself go with that things start coming towards you and you get to a point in which you are surprised by what we generally call “coincidence”. But I think it’s a kind of openness that you can make for yourself and it’s a very exciting way of living; because all of a sudden, what you are making and what you are seeing is in flux, is together.

LW: And Rebecca, your title ONE MISSISSIPPI?

Rebecca Tiernan: The reason it’s called ONE MISSISSIPPI is because of the climax of the film. The women play hide and seek in a field, and they must count down to the number one. In playing this game, they give themselves there to the scarecrow; and they give themselves to “this God”; and they gives themselves to the power of belief in the film. So that’s why it’s called ONE MISSISSIPPI — it’s the pinnacle of the film.

LW: And how did this film arise? What did you do first and what happened in the making of it?

Rebecca Tiernan: I’ve always been a bit obsessed with Southern Gothic books and films and Southern music and a lot of previous films I’ve made have had connotations of that and I wanted to manifest them into something else. I don’t really know how it came about it was just an idea that popped in and again as Cinzia was saying you just kind of get in to the flow of things and it just kind of manifests into something else.

LW: And how did you discover the music you used?

Rebecca Tiernan: I wanted to use music that I could use publicly and so I started looking at film music archive places and I went to the Florida Film and Archive and started listening to old work songs and this one seemed to work best I like the rhythm of it, the beats of it, the pauses. And so I chose that one.

LW: Noe, a lot of your past work you’ve used puppets, like painted material, like literally painted in a studio, so this piece seems a little bit different because of what the images are. Do you want to say anything about that?

Noe Kidder: I’ve only started to recently work with actors. We do project a lot onto actors, and even if they have a strong character we still project onto them. I have been criticized about using my actors, so they seem like puppets. I think it’s both a strength and a weakness, but it plays and I let it play with that a little. I don’t know for sure if that’s what’s going on in this particular piece, but certainly the figures in the film take on different meanings like puppets. I don’t think they necessarily have one specific meaning.

LW: I like to ask everyone; How has your background influenced your work? Or places you’ve been?, the landscape?, and anyone can just chime in if you have any thoughts about that.

Alice Cohen: I was thinking about that earlier because I’m sort of a child of the sixties, and I feel like I’m super interested now in finding old things from that past psychedelic era and I feel like that’s all coming out now. I did collages and things when I was young, but now that I’m older, it’s all sort of exploding— all this stuff that I had seen as a child and all these images I was sort of paying attention to I’m just sort of scavenging and finding and pulling and collecting and throwing out there again, through my lens. The more I make stuff and look at the work, the more I’m looking around me, and I feel like my eyes are going to pop out of my head, just from all the things I have seen and things I want to make out of that. It’s very reflexive.

LW: All of you entered this film festival that accepted only work by women. Do you think that being a woman has influenced a work? Do you think a woman makes work differently than a man? Do you have any thoughts about that? And/or why should we have a women’s film festival at this points in our life? Or I should say, at this point? Feminism started in the seventies, is this something that a necessary? Are you comfortable with this? Do you feel like you have to defend it?

Cinzia Sarto: I don’t have to defend it. I think if we look back we can see that in the past history of film there were few women that were able to make their work and I can name a few which have been great inspirations to me. I am curious to know what women think and how they imagine, and that’s why I want to be in a situation like this, just because it’s not that often that it happens that you can come in contact with that, and of course we make different things, we are different. We are women. That doesn’t make use any better or worse than men. We just have a different perception and that makes me curious. Also I think somehow restriction can create certain energies that can generate very interesting perception. And because somehow women’s working is more restricted sometimes it’s more interesting, any kind of minority that is producing something is more interesting to me, because it comes from a place of un-comfortableness. But I think that being uncomfortable sometimes, especially seeing in the view of today where we are too comfortable, can open up different motivations and so I think it is interesting to look at that aspect of this.

LW: So why do you make your work? How did you get started? Why do you continue to do that? Has anyone ever thought about this at all?

Cinzia Sarto: It’s an illness. It’s a disease (everyone laughs) No— it’s a cure for the disease! This is what we do to cure ourselves. Otherwise we all kill ourselves.

Angela Ferraiolo: It’s more an image for me, like an image that I see in the world or one that I see in my imagination that I feel like I can produce. But it’s always an image, it’s never…—would you say the same?

Noe Kidder: Yeah, when I need something to say it could be totally visual

Angela Ferraiolo: Yeah exactly, there’s something you see, and you need to capture it.

Rebecca Tiernan: In some ways it kind of articulates something that can’t be said. If it’s a visual medium that you want to express it’s the only way you can do it.

Cinzia Sarto: Also we are talking about something specific, which is experimental film, and I think that it’s a very different place to produce from, because experimental to me means to be without expectation, which is very different than doing in a commercial film, and films that have been ordered, and any thing else, because you have to place yourself in that position of nothing in expectation, and that gives you a lot of fear but a lot of freedom to go in different directions so it’s also a way of understanding that could lead into anything. So it’s a way of being I think, besides a way of working and accompanying.

LW: Do any of your care about an audience? I mean you must want people to see this if you put it into a film festival. What if there were no film festivals? What would we do then? What do you think of YOUTUBE and putting your work on there?

Angela Ferraiolo: It’s good if the festivals would not care, then it would be fine.

Alice Cohen: They don’t all care because I’ve gotten into a lot of film festivals from people seeing my work online.

Angela Ferraiolo: but, a lot of time they really do care though.

Alice Cohen: It’s just your stuff looks different on the internet, I get a lot of exposure with my music videos say, which are like little films to me, they’re not just music videos they are my films, my work, and but I get a lot of exposure that way to the point where I almost don’t think about film festivals as much because I feel like that’s a way that lots of people see them, but I think I would make it work anyway because I just can’t stop, this is something I have to do, and it’s nice to get feedback and it’s nice to share but I almost get so in my bubble when I’m working on stuff that it’s not a concern. Just the next step after you finish—you want to share it.

LW: And what about when you work absolutely needs to be seen live?

Rachael Guma: This is the perfect opportunity to show my work, to share it with other people and to share that possibility that something might happen wrong or the film might burn — catastrophes that could be something really great, like happy accidents or something. I love that and I love the people around to experience that at the same time. I also work with a film group and it’s great because you just have all of these people doing these live things together and then you work off each other you feed off each other so I actually am the opposite I don’t put anything on YOUTUBE, all of my films remain on film, just because that’s how I feel about it.

Noe Kidder: I feel like the audience is actually part of the work, not even in the screening; but in the making of it, and sometimes quite literally— it could be the people you are working with on the project. But somehow other artists are your audience too. From the very beginning, they’re there, and not necessarily someone to receive what you’re thinking or what you’re doing but they’re the inspiration. They’re there from the very start.

LW: So other artists

Noe Kidder: are the world…

LW: …the audience for this kind of filmmaking?

Noe Kidder: Well not exactly— I think anyone could be the audience— but sort of that, that world that the audience lives in is at the very beginning of the work and almost the reason to make the work.

From a Member of the Audience: sometimes they feed back into your work…

Noe Kidder: Well not so much in this piece but I feel like the audience can be a central player in the work, and it could be this audience, or it could just be “an idea” of an audience.

LW: And the film you’re working on now, very much has that at it’s core.

LW: What about spaces like the Millenium Film Workshop?- this has been around for years but with all the internet access and with people not living in certain neighborhoods smaller film houses are going under because of all the financial burdens. Do you have any thoughts about that? What is it like in Europe? Are there places like this in Europe that you screen in?

Cinzia Sarto: Italy is a little bit of a desert right now.

LW: Because of the financial crisis?

Cinsia Sarto: Because of the financial crisis, because of some kind of lost direction of the culture.

LW: So it’s not just a money thing, you feel.

Cinsia Sarto: No. But of course the money is taken away from these sorts of things, from the arts, from film industry if you analyse that, but I think it is also kind of a general confusion in the culture.

Noe Kidder: Is that about identity?

Cinsia Sarto: Yes.

LW: Do we think this is a global issue?

Other filmmakers: Yeah, yeah.

LW: Rebecca how about in England? You’re based in England now, right? Are there little screening houses like this?

Rebecca Tiernan: I mean, not particularly, if anyone is doing it it’s just a group of friends with a projector and a white wall, which is nice, it’s great, and you have Screen on the Green Fun meets where it’s a nice sunny day, some people put on a screening on a field. But something as intimate as this, as the people who make their own work putting it on, I don’t think so.

LW: Would anyone from the audience like to ask anything?

From a Member of the Audience: For pieces that you that you had a very particular message that you wanted to convey in it, have you ever felt like you’ve had to compromise the media or the creativity of the piece in order to express that message?

Or, do you feel as though creativity and the media that you use traditionally in your work or dream up as a creator comes first? and is never compromised by trying to express that message?

LW: I’ll answer that. My piece was the kind of the verbal assault piece about food, about agriculture, and I’ve shown that piece to quite a few people and they tell me I can’t make a film this way. But I really wanted to make it relentless like that because I feel like we’re constantly bombarded with images and sounds, and the way the news media is deliberately presenting events in asensationalist manner; and really all kind of things are constantly pulling at us like the internet, e-mail… and yet, at the same time, I feel that we’re not really communicating with each other. A lot of people will not get on the phone and talk to each other, or talk to each other face to face. One reason why I wanted to make this festival was so something like that would have to happen. I decided to do it with women because I’m a woman. And so, I got a lot of flack about THE KITCHEN SINK, but I didn’t really care.

Noe Kidder: I didn’t really understand the last part of your question. You’re saying, “does your media compromise your creativity, or do feel like you’re just holding on to the idea and you don’t..”— is that what you’re talking about?

The Member of the Audience: Um, well I guess part of the beauty and the nature of experimental film or experimental art in general is that the creator generally believes that there’s no other way to communicate this particular message without the exact combination of images or sounds that they use no matter how un-conventional they are, and I was wondering if you ever felt that you had a message, a particular image or feeling or statement you wanted to make, like you were saying with the food, that perhaps it was more important to you that that message be conveyed, even if you took more of a traditional approach to it — maybe you had to compromise using your own experimental style because you felt it was necessary to communicate what you are saying more easily to the viewer…

Alice Cohen: I feel like compromise should never be part of your art if you can help it. I mean if someone’s paying you to do a job and it’s something like that, then maybe you would have to compromise but with your own work I feel like there should be no compromise. Compromise should never even really come up, in your thinking process. Because then you’re kind of doubting your work in some way and not being true to yourself and your message should be no compromise, your message should be getting our your expression and not compromising that in any way, so I feel like compromises aren’t really something that for me ever comes up, I try to do the opposite. Whatever the opposite of compromise is! That’s what I try to do, just sort of pure…

Noe Kidder: But there sometimes are accidents, or problems you might encounter— I think your reaction to that is some kind of

Alice Cohen: Problem solving

Noe Kidder: Yes, not part of the experiment.

from a Member of the Audience: Do experimental films always have to have a message?

Noe Kidder: I don’t think so

Cinzia Sarto: You need to communicate; which is different from having a message.

LW: With the work that has been submitted, I’ve seen a lot of work that it does seem like there’s some underlying message or a bigger issue. There is purely abstract work base on light or a certain rhythm or with a limited number of images but I don’t know if I think that that’s primarily coming out of women filmmakers or not but I have noticed that. And maybe that’s just what’s getting sent to me.

Noe Kidder: Depends if you mean that that’s a message or not, or if it’s a formal message of just light or form, color, or shape….

From a Member of the Audience: I think there’s a difference between film signifying or perusing meaning in a viewer and the filmmaker’s intent. It may be that when one makes a film its that the process is what’s important. It sounds like in your film that the process is very important.

And that may not have to do too specifically with a particular message, it might just be about that the materials are sensuous and interesting to you and significant, what with sewing and film cameras and projectors, and those devices. It might just be an exploration and in your point, sometimes when we do experiments and most of the time when we do experiments, we don’t actually know the outcome is going to be and as such, we just allow the process to take its course and then what happens is what happens.

Noe Kidder: It’s an experiment

from a Member of the Audience: I think then maybe there’s less of a….— your film can still have a message, can still sort of read it that way, but there may not have been any intended message. That’s not a question, just a thought…

LW: Are there any other questions?

from a Member of the Audience: This question is specifically for Angela, I’m curious if you come from a film/video background where you screened your work in a separate theatrical setting. Do you see this kind of installation work as an evolution or as a really different exploration of the different forms of media. And, do you show the work that is produced from the installation as a film in and of itself?

Angela Ferraiolo: I do see this work as an evolution of sequential image I just begin making films at a point in time when technology has moved past celluloid- for me- and so I began making films on the computer and I was also around a lot of computeres, it was also very affordable to do it, and so that can be debated. I would love to see more experimentation with image process of all kinds— what medical image is doing with image processing right now is phenomenal. I would love to see the film committee open to that. Not everyon is , the ball’s in your court. There are people that come up to me, and we’ll be having a normal conversation and when they find out that because a lot of my images are “written”, like, I do write out a color filter for a movie, that I can write them out to make the filters exactly as I like them, that we’re having a great conversation and as soon asthey find out it wasn’t made on film, they say, “Oh, excuse me”, and they just walk away. And I think that that is a common feeling among digital filmmakers. The second question, has this work been showing as a tradition piece or why do I make it as a movie, it’s the same reason anyone makes a movie, this is an interactive piece, if you really want the audience to play it

A Member of the Audience: Actually no I didn’t mean “why do you make it as a movie”, I meant “HOW you make it as a movie.”

Angela Ferraiolo: Well this (installation) piece is interactive so it has to have an inter-actor. A movie that’s made whereby it is generatee algorithmically, you write an algorithm, you spend a while getting it to make a movie that you like, and then you just run the computer many times and have it print out the frames in the sequence that the algorithm prints them out. And then you save that chain of image sequence, which is how special effects filmmakers work, they work with image sequences, because the computer’s rendering process is so complex. And you can bring that back into an editing program and make a movie with it. You can get an especially nice print of your algorithm.

Noe Kidder: are you using the camera to shoot…?

Angela Ferraiolo: you shoot with a digital camera, and then burn it to the computer, but I work frame by frame — it’s like animation.

From A Member of the Audience: Do you see the installation in more of the gallery setting and then what frame by frame film you produce after is that more of a theater setting? What’s the context?

Angela Ferraiolo: Yeah I think this is more of a gallery piece, it can be, you’re sort of dealing with the way venues see themselves more than how you see things. At a film festival people don’t really want your Macintosh computer showing up at the film festival, they would much rather have a DVD or a digital file, that’s what they’re set up to screen. And this installation can live anywhere, and it really changes: in a gallery it has one personality, at a party it has another personality, it’s an interactive piece it really becomes part of where you show it. So it’s pretty flexible.

From A Member of the Audience: I think a lot about the death of film and I was just reading an article in NY Magazine last week, about Tacita Dean (sorry, I’m a painter) but she has a big installation in the tape, and she only works in 16MM, and when she read to do this installation the last lab that processed 16 went under in London. And I have this conversation very often with my friends that work in 16, and it kind of goes back to an earlier question that Lili posed but only one person answered, and that is: do people think 8 or 16 mm film is more of a tactile medium, that projects more resonance, and so thinking about yourself as women, where sort of the medium is the message and you feel like, many people work from their body, and it’s sort of messier and diaristic (I’m thinking about Schneeman) , do you think that the death of film as a medium is going to impact women adversely? Or are you content to work with digital, I don’t know how many people were working with it.

Alice Cohen: I think it’s what you do with whatever you’re using. And I think that although it’s dwindling it’s not dead and it’s probably not going to be dead, just like vinyl records are having a resurgence, and CDs still outsell vinyl but vinyl has had a huge resurgence and people said that was dead, so I think the things that are tactile and that peopl love will continue even if it’s a small group and you know it’s not going to die out. There is a richness to film that is not there in video but there are other things that are there in video sometimes that are not there in film, it’s what you do, to make it look rich and to have depth, unless you want a cold thing and that’s something else. It’s choices, it’s choices that people make and I don’t think one is more feminine or not feminine or anything like that. I think it’s what you do with it.

Kelly Oliver: I don’t actually even always think about 16mm as being tactile because when I use it myself I immediately transfer it to video and it’s more about the way it looks for me as opposed to physically running it through a projector. I agree it’s one of those things where people who have cameras are going to continue to use them, but it’s a small number of people, they’re not actively producing the cameras on a large scale anymore so it’s rests more on if you can find it and be able to use it.

LW: Any of you who shoot on film- are you horrified that its being shown on DVD? How do you feel about that?

Noe Kidder: I think its fine, that how I edit it. I think it all depends on the kind of projection that you’re doing, and it makes it easier to have a festival…

Courtney Krantz: I also edit on Final Cut but each venue has a different capacity and its not always an option. For me shooting on film, I have certain considerations. Coming from a photographic background, film is about working with light, but is accessible to have something on a tape or DVD.

LW: Is it more important to have something seen or not seen? DVD makes it cost effective and easy to mail out…

Angela Ferraiolo: Its a strange medium cause you have that choice. With painting, you go see the painting, its not a choice. And the same with film, you need to see that film. But this is a weird “in-between” in this technology right now and I don’t know if its really a choice.

From A Member of the Audience: The key thing is that it is not mechanically reproducible

Angela Ferraiolo: That’s exactly what I’m saying

Noe Kidder: How much of a mass media is it is relative…

From A Member of the Audience: As a painter, I went to get my work photographed last year, and now I can no longer get a 4” x 5” transparency any more. But to reproduce them digitally, I don’t think it has the richness when they are reproduced that way.

Angela Ferraiolo: That’s exactly what I’m saying, but no one seriously goes to a paintings and asks which is better: the photograph of your painting or the reproduction of it…I would never ask this question. But filmmakers are put in this position all the time and of course they would like to see it projected as film. Filmmakers are in a difficult position right now…

the Member of the Audience: to continue: how all these different mediums and economics right now and different version of many different lengths of one’s piece. I wonder if one has a different attitude towards what their film is: is it a precise of precise length or do you have a more flexible attitude about what your actual piece is…?

Noe Kidder: I thought about this because of a longer piece: Because of how we make DVDs with chapters and how it would be received if I broke it down into chapters, how it could be read different way in a longer format work. Its something to think about but I don’t know what direction that will go in yet, but I wouldn’t be thinking about that without that possibility existing now…

Lili White: I think editing in a “collage” fashion using Final Cut gives you a lot of leeway and you do get different ideas when you are examining what you do. Since it is so fluid, if you work on a consistent basis, you can have something like 10 different movies all made with the same collage pieces. Something made using Final Cut lends itself to that— you can change it in one little way like invert the color to come up with a whole other version of it.