2 different SCREENINGS on 1 nite!

curated by Lili White

on

Wednesday JUNE 17, 2015!

Can’t get to NYC?
These shows will be streamed on AXWonline.com!

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the SPIRITUAL MACHINE

TRT: 63 minutes

6:00pm

at

Anthology Film Archives
presented thru NEW FILMMAKERS NY

32 2nd Avenue at 2nd Street, NY NY
Admission: $6

FEATURED WORKS:

WASP WAIST; Magda Matwiejew; Poem created and read by Valerie Benoist; Actress: Sheree Mathews
AUSTRALIA; 5.45; digi

Wasp Waist is an animated film about women of the late 19th century who practiced tight lacing by wearing corsets to attain an unnaturally small waist. This small waist was likened to that of wasps segmented body.The ideal of feminine beauty was to have a tiny waist of 16 to 15 inches. Hips were enhanced with bustle’s and breasts with padding heightening female sexuality. Creating ideals of sadomasochism, sexuality, frailty and even death celebrated by Victorian art, music and literature.

The SPIRITUAL MACHINE; Ana Rodríguez León; Actress: Elzbieta Surmacz; Director of photography: Nadia McGowan
Edit: Emm Tusell, Ana Rodríguez León; Music: David Crespo SPAIN; 19.00;

An hypnotic travel to the inner part of human being and the deep mistery it keeps inside. A mistery so full of beauty and of destructive potential. Illness, understood as a possible conflict between the emotive, cognitive and bodily facets of human being, reveals its power as a tool for introspection and self-knowledge.

IN RECOVERY; Alex Hovet
USA; 2.55; digi

In 2006, my father suffered a stroke, and although not projected to recover, today he is healthy but retains mild short-term memory loss. In Recovery challenges my father’s memory with my own. Our memories are at a crossroads, in which he remembers what I cannot from the beginning of my life, but I can remember most of what he cannot in his daily life now. These conflicting experiences compete with standardized medical facts and my own personal recollections of a stroke event. In degrading images from my childhood that I experienced but cannot remember, I reconcile the fact that my father can still remember those experiences, despite trouble recalling many of his own today.

ARCHNEMESIS OF THE ANTICLIMAX; Written, Animated, Edited and Directed by Emily C. Thomas; Narrated by November Wanderin; Introducing Scarlett Dykes as the Little Girl; USA; 26.00; digi

After obtaining cosmic knowledge through an at home yoga work out tape, a young woman creates a time machine powered by menstrual blood, opening a portal for the incarnation of a super goddess race capable of overcoming the patriarchal establishment.

HAM OVER RICE; Ying Liu; Camera Assistant: Mattie Akers; Production Assistant: Lucas Millard; Starring: Gabriel Garcia Roman, Ivan Monegro; USA; 3.37; digi

“Ham over Rice”, is a film painting that draws on motifs from the Chinese myth of HOUYI – the legendary archer who saves the world but loses his immortality – to construct a complex, abstract world that reorders, explodes, and reshuffles everyday routines and imbues them with cosmic significance. Using shot-to-shot “film magic,” it interweaves live action, animation, pictorial text and narration to create a highly fluid and heavily textured visual experience.

LIGHT DIVIDES THE SQUARE; Kimberly Burleigh
USA; 4:48; digi

Computer animation features “rippling caustics,” or refracted light patterns, cast by a virtual fluid body. I formed the virtual fluid body in the computer and then created a rippling surface by periodically perturbing it with invisible shape-shifting objects. I cast a virtual light on the fluid and as the rays of light passed through the surface they refracted and created the “rippling caustics” on another surface placed beneath the fluid surface. (The light patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool are an example of rippling caustics.) The repercussive wave formations as they collided with each other and the edges of the square pool created new patterns. To enhance the aesthetic experience, I added sampled sounds of ringing tones of a finger gliding the edges of crystal glasses, rain, and ice and water tinkling in a glass bowl.

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DANCING THROUGH

TRT: 67 minutes

7:00pm

at

Bluestockings Radical Bookstore & Activist Center
(Volunteer-Powered & Collectively-Owned)

Open 11 am – 11 pm daily / www.bluestockings.com / 212 777 602

172 Allen Street, NY NY 10002

FEATURED WORKS:

SHE VANISHES; Sara Bonaventura; ITALY; 7.26; digi
The video is my anti-manifesto. A mise en scene of an impossibility, a virtual presence. An “impossible body” is enacting a fantasy of loss and distance: of desire, that cannot be satisfied but also a desire for an unsatisfied desire. The spoken quotation is from Luce Irigaray’s classic essay Speculum, of the Other Woman; in french it works well (rien à voir équivaut à n’avoir rien) but it’s hard to translate it in English, due to the ambivalent meaning, ie: having nothing to see equals having nothing, possessing nothing. It was one of those cutting edge sentence reflecting on the gaze (here in Europe), over the female body and against the Lacanian phallocentrism, considering female sexual attribute as a substitute for the penis; they were just playing with words but saying – if there’s nothing, that nothing cannot be a substitute. I was writing my thesis on gender studies and visual culture when I filmed that video. My thesis title was: ID: Interior Density (on visual theories and practices where the body was protagonist, as form and content, identity and difference). Although it seems probably weird or taken for granted nowadays and Irigaray was later criticized. But I still think it’s strong, to ironically deconstruct dichotomies… maybe even more now that naked bodies are everywhere! That’s why I put that e (just as a capital letter, for end but also for eternity, in fact it has been sprayed on a bubble in a children playground here in Venice. To me, that bubble was a vanitas vanitatae reminding us the eternal cycle, but also that we can put an end to something

LIGHT DIVIDES THE SQUARE; Kimberly Burleigh; USA; 4:48; digi
Computer animation features “rippling caustics,” or refracted light patterns, cast by a virtual fluid body. I formed the virtual fluid body in the computer and then created a rippling surface by periodically perturbing it with invisible shape-shifting objects. I cast a virtual light on the fluid and as the rays of light passed through the surface they refracted and created the “rippling caustics” on another surface placed beneath the fluid surface. (The light patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool are an example of rippling caustics.) The repercussive wave formations as they collided with each other and the edges of the square pool created new patterns. To enhance the aesthetic experience, I added sampled sounds of ringing tones of a finger gliding the edges of crystal glasses, rain, and ice and water tinkling in a glass bowl.

DORIAN; Director: Rebecca Arndt; Choreography: Eva Perrotta & Sophie Bortolussi in collaboration with Asli Bulbul; Music: Sam Crawford & Arthur Solari; Director of photography: Rebecca Arndt; Production: Nu Dance Theater & WAC Inc; Set Designer: Katie Fleming; USA; 20.00; digi
In the middle of the night, Dorian wakes up on her couch, plagued with memories from which she thought she had severed ties long ago. Soon these memories take the shape of a ghostly figure, who might be a past version of herself. Dorian loses control of her manifested “other” and must engage in a claustrophobic battle for control. This cerebral, internal argument transcends time and language through the use of movement and a rich soundscape. With an intimate eye and exhilarating choreography, Dorian C. illustrates the frustrating struggle between the boundaries of how we are defined and our manufactured identity.

ANATOMY OF A POEM; Rebecca Ruige Xu; Sound/Music: Pablo Palacio; USA; 3.31; digi
Computer programming generated animation. Utilizing sound synthesizing and computer graphics programming, this work depicts a famous poem “Drinking Alone by Moonlight” from the ancient East using a Western analytical approach. The poem was written by Li Bai, arguably the most accomplished poet from China’s Tang Dynasty. Instead of literally interpreting the meaning of this poem, we chose to portray it by translating the rhyme and tonal prosody of the poem into sound/music and graphics simultaneously.

COMBTHROUGH; Tabita Rezaire; MOZAMBIQUE; 3.10; digi
A self-portrait exploring the artist’s relationship with her hair and its social and cultural meaning. While the video shows her struggling to take her braids off, the sound superimposes various personal accounts of young women complaining on YouTube about their ‘nappy’ hair or giving a socio-historical explication of ‘afro hair’ disguise

THREADBARE; Kristin Reeves; USA; 5.14; 16MM to digi
A fever-dream processes childhood memories of medical exploitation. The clinical gaze holds tight to the profitable conjuring made possible by vulnerable bodies.

TO MY LOVE; Leslie Wilson; USA; 3.10
Pen and ink drawings, animation, and special effects are blended with vintage footage and old-fashioned valentines. Vintage footage includes “Innocent Party”1959 from A/VGeeks; “Century 21 Calling”, 1964 “Prom: It’s a Pleasure!”, 1961 and the amazing Rosita Royce in “Dance of the Doves
The sound score mixes samples from Rogers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine” sung by Chet Baker, 1964, “Kiss Me Honey” by Ada Jones and Bill Murray, 1913, “Love Boat” by Earl Burnett and the Biltmore Hotel Orchestra, 1929 and “My Funny Valentine” sung by Ruth Gaylor with the Hal Mcintyre Orchestra, 1945

MALDITA VOUGUE (BAD VOUGUE); Júlia Portella & Melina Schleder; Photography director: Tiago Lage, PozziLabs, Tiago Tambelli, Fernando Augusto, Pedro Maffei, Peterson Lomovtov; Editi: Alexandre Barreto; Art Direction: Júlia Portella e Melina Schleder; Costume Design: Júlia Portella e Melina Schleder; Original Soundtrack: Júlio Manaf; Sound Designer: Júlio Manaf; BRAZIL; 11.10; digi
A movie about the desire to fit in and the way this desire can consume you.

GYRE-ATION; Beth Portnoy; Digi; TRT: 6.48
Gyre-ation is a visual exploration of resistance to and acceptance of the forces outside of ourselves. “Gyre” is a circular or spiral form found in nature: rotating ocean currents; wind curl; concentric circles formed by leaves or flower petals. Gyre-ation is a visual exploration of resistance to and acceptance of the forces outside of ourselves. A woman whirls through a vortex of tension between natural and psychological patterns.

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Read an interview with curator, Lili White,
by William J. Simmons on BIG, RED & SHINY!

http://www.bigredandshiny.com