MFJ 67 “Devoted to Artists’ Moving Image: The 50th Edition” AFA Screening

8 May 2018

Lorna Mills ETHEREAL IMPERIAL NO. 2 (2017, 3 min, digital), excerpt. Courtesy the artist.

Location

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003

Date

08 May 2018

Time

7:30 PM – 8:40PM

AFA Screening: MFJ 67 “Devoted to Artists’ Moving Image: The 50th Edition”

Launch Screening!
Program Notes.

A 50 x 50 Millennium Film Workshop Screening, celebrating its 50th Anniversary.

This program celebrates the publication of the 50th publication of Millennium Film Journal, No. 67 “Devoted to Artists’ Moving Image: The 50th Edition”, which offers an indication of the expanse of territory explored by contemporary moving images artists: from celluloid to GIFs, from installations to intimate screenings, working with materials personal or impersonal created with diverse methods and in multiple technologies, or drawn from many types of archive, from family photos to graphic fragments pulled from internet pornography. This program is a sampling of that cornucopia.

Selected and presented by Millennium Film Journal editors Rachel Stevens & Grahame Weinbren, with help from Josh Guilford and Seth Watter.

Lorna Mills & collaborators WAYS OF SOMETHING [Episode 1 excerpt] (2014, 16 min, digital)

“Mills invited over a hundred, mostly North American and European artists to produce a one-minute moving image sequence in response to an excerpt of equivalent length from John Berger’s original BBC program [WAYS OF SEEING]. Mills selected and edited 114 of these ‘crowd-sourced’ responses into a four-part video that mirrors the original program’s episodic structure and is precisely synced to Berger’s voiceover.” –Johanna Gosse, “Ways of Seeing After the Internet

 

Dan Browne PALMERSTON BLVD (2017, 16 min, digital)

“I had started taking photographs of my living room window as a means of working towards an increased sense of awareness, a means for experiencing how seemingly static things encountered amidst one’s daily existence change slowly over time. By the time the project was finished, I had taken 250,000 images (or twice as many as all of my other photographs combined) and inadvertently documented my first year of domestic life as a parent.”

–Dan Browne, from “Fever in the Insta-Archive: An Interview with Dan Browne” by Clint Enns

 

Lorna Mills & Yoshi Sodeoka MONEY2 (2012, 1 min, digital)
Lorna Mills ETHEREAL IMPERIAL NO. 2 (2017, 3 min, digital)
Lorna Mills ETHEREAL IMPERIAL NO. 4 (2017, 3 min, digital)

“What strikes [one] on first viewing of a loop by Lorna Mills is the apparent ugliness of it all: ugliness in terms of subject or content and ugliness in terms of pictorial structure. Beauty, traditionally, prolongs its perception by swinging the eye on a grand tour of sorts; and ugly is that which distracts and confuses and makes the eye smart from its overexertion.”

–Seth Barry Watter, “Lorna Mills, or the Uses of Ugliness”

 

Naeem Mohaiemen RANKIN STREET, 1953 (2013, 8 min, digital)

“In TRIPOLI CANCELLED (discussed in MFJ 67) the kernel of the story is born of an auto-biographical morsel – a story about how Mohaiemen’s father was stuck in this very airport for nine days without a passport before the Bangladeshi embassy intervened – and many of the details are pulled from Naeem Mohaiemen’s real life, but the essence and structure of the story are a dream-like fiction. In contrast, RANKIN STREET, 1953 engages quite directly with traces of Mohaiemen’s personal family history and archive, particularly of his father, through looking at the first photographs his father ever made, shot in their family home.”

–Rachel Stevens, “Naeem Mohaiemen’s TRIPOLI CANCELED”

 

Alee Peoples DECOY (2017, 11 min, 16mm)

“Watching celluloid requires coming together with a bunch of strangers, sharing sights and sounds in a darkened room, maybe making a friend. More than a showcase for the moving image, the Light Field Festival proposes a view of art as a way to be together with other people creatively, while also suggesting that art’s potential for inclusivity increases the more it experiments and deviates from normal experience. Along with other works, Alee People’s suburban nightmare, DECOY, suggests the all-too-real terrors of the carceral state.”

– Patrick Harrison, “Gathering Momentum: Light Field 2017”

 

Anita Thacher LOST / IN MEMORIAM (2010, 7.5 min, digital)

“An ode to deceased women poets, beset with the burdens of motherhood and household, but nonetheless committed to expression of ideas, emotions, language, and art. Anita’s empathy for her subjects runs through this film and her other works like a silver current.” –Grahame Weinbren, “Anita Thacher Remembrance”

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

Anthology Film Archive Film Notes

This program is partially funded by NYSCA through the Millennium Film Workshop, affiliated with Millennium Film Journal and 50X50 screening.