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Location
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003
Date
06 December 2017
Time
7:30 PM – 9:10PM
AFA Screening: MFJ 66 “The Long Form"
Program Notes.
The theme of Millennium Film Journal No. 66 “The Long Form” is the increasing interest in the long format among moving image artists. The issue also includes interviews, artists’ pages, and frame enlargements, along with reviews of three 2017 film festivals, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Oberhausen Short Film Days, and Beirut Film Days. For this screening we have chosen short works from these festivals, with films made in the U.S., the Middle East, the Philippines, and Taiwan. We looked for as expansive a range of approaches, styles, and subjects as possible, to suggest some of the breadth and divergencies in contemporary experimental film and video.
All the works in the program are reviewed in the printed version or the online supplement of Millennium Film Journal No.66. Except where indicated, texts below are excerpted from Grahame Weinbren’s “Two Old Festivals: Oberhausen and Ann Arbor 2017.”
Khavn CAN & SLIPPERS (Philippines, 2005, 2.5 min, digital)
Khavn RUGBY BOYZ (Philippines, 2006, 7 min, digital)
The availability of hi-tech tools has opened windows into parts of the world previously not readily accessible. The subjects of these two films are children making the best of it in the rough world of the Manila slums. Khavn is a 40-ish Filipino artist who has already directed over 100 feature films and dozens of shorter works.
Tom Schroeder THE SPARROW’S FLIGHT (U.S., 2016, 14 min, digital)
Schroeder’s film is a memorial for his collaborator Dave Herr who died of a brain tumor in 2009. Tom and Dave began making Super-8 films at an early age. THE SPARROW’S FLIGHT, made largely from files left on Herr’s hard drive, documents the development of the collaborators’ increasingly sophisticated technique.
Nina Yuen WHITE BLINDNESS (U.S., 2010, 6 min, digital)
Nina Yuen SWITCH (U.S., 2016, 3 min, digital)
Many of Yuen’s films are built on pre-existing texts taken from a variety of sources. Her technique is analogous to the re-contextualizing of archival footage to reveal new meanings. In speaking the texts and performing the indecipherable, absurdist, or ritualistic actions the texts inspire in her, Yuen assumes a character with unstable, inconsistent, multiple identities.
Kinda Hassan IDLE BY THE SEA (Egypt/Greece/Lebanon, 2017, 20 min, digital)
“[A] poetic tour de force exploring how life and death meet in the folded depths of the waters. It moves across eerie landscapes from the silent Mediterranean, where Egyptair MS804 disappeared in 2016 with all its passengers, to the interiors of the filmmaker’s own body and her childbirth.”
-Laura U. Marks, “Experiments at Beirut Film Days”
Yuan Goang-Ming THE 561ST HOUR OF OCCUPATION (Taiwan, 2014, 6 min, digital)
Yuan Goang-Ming DWELLING (Taiwan, 2014, 5 min, digital)
Yuan’s films are ingenious combinations of engineering, set design, and production/post-production technologies. Yuan engineers elaborate crane mounts and zip-lines to enable his cameras to travel along narrow passageways, over wide-open land- and sea-scapes, and through impossible openings.
Blair McClendon AMERICA FOR AMERICANS (U.S., 2017, 30 min, digital)
McClendon’s film is partly composed of some of the tragic and shocking images that have become unsettlingly familiar, of young black men being shot or strangled by police, and confrontational demonstrations, intermixed with non-violent and joyful aspects of African-American culture. McClendon’s film infuses new life into these images by the use of techniques borrowed from avant-garde cinema, such as repetition, looping, multiple windows, superimpositions, and the strobe.
Total running time: ca. 100 min.
This program is partially funded by NYSCA through the Millennium Film Workshop, affiliated with Millennium Film Journal.