AFA Screening: MFJ 82 "Real Life"

Program Notes.

This program celebrating the launch of MFJ No. 82 “Real Life” consists of works discussed in the issue. These films and their accompanying texts are attempts to understand an increasingly convoluted world, in which images are not just a reflection of reality, but part of its very substance.

Programmed by Grahame Weinbren, Vince Warne, and Jonathan Ellis.

Texts excerpts from MFJ No. 82 “Real Life“.

Tomonari Nishikawa SOUND OF MILLION INSECTS, LIGHT OF A THOUSAND STARS (2014, 2’, 35mm)

“On a first glance, the two-minute film’s images look like any number of cameraless film experiments—a rush of blue color and light leaks, scratched frames jumping with flickering energy, and a hushed soundtrack of noise and pops. Beautiful, strange, and abstract—you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a hand-painted work, or an exercise in unconventional darkroom processing techniques. But after a brief cut to black, onscreen text matter-of-factly reveals the significance of the images we’ve just seen…”

—MFJ 82 Introduction, Vince Warne

Samy Benammar ADIEU UGARIT (2024, 15’, 16mm-to-digital)

“The main character, a survivor of the Syrian civil war, is traumatized by his memory of a friend’s execution. Shadows of the past pervade the film, a tone evoked by a dissonance between the dark emotions of the subject and the calming qualities of the Laurantian Waters… Were we to mute the audio and the subtitles, Adieu Ugarit would read as a modest celebration of sylvan lake-country lovingly recorded in black and white and intercut with images of a fine-looking man—with no suggestion of an absent voice-over narrative. It is in the contrast between image and text that a bitter emotional tone conveys the horror of violent death in the mind of someone who can’t escape it.”

—War in Pieces Continued, Grahame Weinbren

Claudia Hart MEMORY THEATER 2 (2022-25, 5’, digital)

“…One piece features a Bladerunner-meets-Las Meninas cyborg transformed into a high-contrast billboard for an intermedia fashion show (Doll Dance (Illumination), 2014/2025). Whether angel, tree, or silvery blob, Hart’s uncanny figures and their environments are wholly expressive. They drift, warp, and decay, seemingly under the spell of unknown pressures, whether internal or environmental…”

—Claudia Hart: Illuminations, Corinna Kirsch

Mike Hoolboom RAIN (2025, 3’, digital)

Mike Hoolboom WHITE HARLEM (2024, 10’, digital)

“The work you’re about to see is not alive, until someone performs the labour of unfolding them. They need to be touched and unfolded. Is that too much to ask? Of course it is. Of course that’s too much. I think the beginning, the establishing shot, the doorway that we walk through to find each other at an artist’s movie screening always begins the same way. By asking too much. By making preposterous statements. What do you call this place anyway: utopia? It literally means: No place.”

—What Is An Artist? An Introduction to the Brakhage Symposium, Mike Hoolboom

Undertime Slopper SELECTED WORKS (2025, 2’, digital)

“Undertime Slopper is an anonymous short-form video artist (or maybe a group, or a self-aware AI, who’s to say?) best known for posting to TikTok. Their videos are compact, usually disheveled collages of AI voiceovers, photogrammetry scans, lip-dubbed characters, and wobbly 3D animation. The character animations hover in an aesthetic limbo, not quite amateurish, not quite refined. They occupy a visual space shaped by algorithmic leftovers: low-poly scans, warped perspective, and uncanny ‘deepfake’ digital mouths. But beyond the noise (or slop), he’s built an absurdist ecosystem, half-myth, half-meme, populated by recurring figures and worlds like King Undertime, Nephew, and the whimsical Albert’s Forest. It’s surreal, funny, occasionally unnerving, and best of all, completely detached from the fine art world.”
—I Love Undertime Slopper, Ari Temkin

John Smith BEING JOHN SMITH (2024, 27’, digital)

“The film sparkles with the filmmaker’s skillful employment of the inbuilt powers of cinema to refer to self-confessed flaws and insecurities. Is it flippant, facetious, ironic, wry, ironical, cynical, dry, poignant? Do we feel by the end of the film that we’ve come to know the filmmaker? Hardly. He warned us not to believe him.”

—War in Pieces Continued, Grahame Weinbren

Open Group REPEAT AFTER ME (2024, 17’, digital)

“Men, women, old, middle aged, young. One by one they stare into the camera, identify themselves, and shout, yowl, grunt, hiss, roar the sounds of war.

UUUUhHHhh TDDURRShHTTZHH TTZHT!

Machine gun. Explosion. Siren. Drone. Helicopter. Bomber Plane.

WZWFFF BU BUUHH! WZWFFF BU BUUHH!

Oversized subtitles approximate the sounds. Once, twice.

WEEEEEEEEHHEWEeee. WEEEEEEEEHHEWEeee.

After producing the extended sound of war weapons or warning sirens, the performer issues the command ‘Повторюй за мною’ or ‘Repeat after me.’”

—War in Pieces, Grahame Weinbren

Total running time: ca. 82 min.

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AFA Screening: MFJ 82 "Real Life"