Cinédoc Paris Films Coop Screening: MFJ 83 "Round and Round"

Program Notes.

“In 2025 we endured the tragic loss of a pair of artists, who in life were united in love: Florence Jacobs, in June, and in October, Ken Jacobs. Together they were the prime movers behind our organization, putting sweat, ingenuity and vision behind a utopian idea that we all might be able to share the tools, knowledge, space, and resources required for filmmaking, and forge an alternative community of cinema opposed to the practices of capitalism and industry.”

– Joe Wakeman, Exec Dir. Millennium Film Workshop

Programmed by Grahame Weinbren, Vince Warne, and MFJ editors.

Texts excerpted from Millennium Film Journal and Filmmakers Coop Catalogue.

This screening is part of the Cinédoc cine-club program at Reflet Médicis.

Ken Jacobs Nissan Ariana Window (1968, 12’)

“Nissan Ariana Window is 3/4’s of our daughter’s name. She was just a kid when these pictures were taken. Some were taken before she was born: pregnant Flo together with pregnant cat China sunning themselves under the skylight. Andrew Noren likes the movie.”

– Ken Jacobs (Filmmakers Coop Catalogue)

@welcometo_blue The Scent Sang a Song (2025, 2’50)

+ A selection of short works throughout the program

“There’s a pervasive sense of voyeurism, a loneliness, a fascination with light, movement, a blurry shoegaze haze, tiny slices of infinity. Many of them—notably, the extraordinary 2.5-minute short film The Scent Sang a Song—seemed to be filmed in an abandoned elementary school, a liminal space of fluorescent light fixtures, chain-link fences, portable classrooms, windows overlooking palm trees silhouetted against a dark sky.”

– Vince Warne (MFJ 83)

Chiara Caterina L’Incanto (2021, 20’)

“The images are dynamic, each shot an immediate, palpable connection with the eye of the cinematographer. Visual montages are set in apposition to selected fragments of dialogue, not to illustrate events they describe but to encompass them. A fraying flag flaps forlornly in a violent wind, its thumping flutter punctuating Donatella Colasanti’s expressionless articulation: “They had left with the intention of killing us …” She was found badly injured, hardly alive.

The oversized multi-fingered hand of a mechanical shovel hoists stones onto a boat, the soundtrack Rosa Bazzi’s baby voice: “We went out nice and quiet and we didn’t do anything.” The borders of the frame, clogged with grime, highlight Rosa’s evasions, building one on another like the pile of stones. The images function not as a window into a past reality, but as surfaces in tense balance with their pictured subjects.”

– Grahame Weinbren (MFJ 76 Fall 2021)

Christoph Janetzko WALD (The Forest) (2023, 13’)

The location is the Harz Nature Park, a forest in the German low mountain range. It is undergoing a slow process of dying. The landscape is employed not as a starting point or background for projection of the filmmaker’s imagination; rather, a viewer’s perception is subjected to a visual-artistic composition through a temporal process. Time is shown here both in the changing of the seasons and as the trace of destructive environmental development. After the title fade-in —an almost Wagnerian landscape in cloudy mist— Janetzko reinforces the impression of a dark danger, an incipient nightmare, a looming catastrophe. The film represents a turn towards a non-filmic reality: we are invited to reflect on the issue of climate change and its consequences, just as other experimental filmmakers address sexual diversity, racism or feminism. Janetzko’s experimental film points beyond the immediate sensory film experience to a meditation on a global social challenge.”

– Ulrich Stein (MFJ 81 Spring 2025)

Sarah Ballard FULL OUT (2025, 14′)

“Ballard calls to mind the notion of cinema as a type of hypnotism and reverie both exhilarating and disorienting: the sheer, gravity-defying, delirious movement of both the cheerleaders and the camera brings the film round (and round) to first experimental cinematic principles again, while also resonating with a long, cyclical history of the allure and uneasy ethics of imaging women’s states of being.”

– Sarah Keller (MFJ 83)

Open Group REPEAT AFTER ME (2024, 15′, with audience participation)

“Open Group is a well-known Ukrainian artist collective founded in Lviv in 2012. The current permanent members are Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga. It is in several ways a unique work, making unusual, specific demands of its viewers and offering a unique cinematic experience in return.”

“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.

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

WZWFFFBUBUUHH!WZWFFFBUBUUHH!

After producing the extended sound of war weapons or warning sirens, the performer issues the command
‘Повторюй за мною’ – ‘Repeat after me.’”
– Grahame Weinbren (MFJ 82 Fall 2025)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

Cinédoc Paris Films Coop Film Notes

Purchase Tickets (available soon!)

The Millennium Film Workshop gratefully acknowledges support for the Millennium Film Journal by the following individuals and organizations: Deborah and Dan Duane; Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation; C. Noll Brinckmann, anonymous donors; and New York State Council on the Arts. Special thanks to Magda Savon for introducing us to the Open Group.

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Cinédoc Paris Films Coop Screening: MFJ 83 "Round and Round"