AFA Screening: MFJ 75 "Boundaries"

This program of short films and video works celebrates the publication of Millennium Film Journal No. 75 “Boundaries” (Spring 2022), and features films discussed in recent issues of the MFJ. Filmmakers Jeanne Liotta and Mike Crane will be in attendance for a live Q/A following the screening.

Selected and presented by Millennium Film Journal senior editor Grahame Weinbren and editor-at-large Jonathan Ellis.

Onyeka Igwe the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019, 25 min, digital)

“‘What does it mean to go looking for yourself in the archive?’ A web of overlapping origin stories puts personal, mythic, and bodily ways of knowing on par with official histories. The film is a study of how we interact with the objects, bodies, and institutions that make memory.” MFJ 71/72 “Crisis” (Spring / Fall 2021)

Mike Crane CUTTING THE MUSHROOM (2021, 22 min, digital)

“New modes of relating, communicating, and projecting ourselves in virtual space give rise to new ways of expressing our fractured identities cinematically. The film is an exploration of technologically mediated communication based on correspondence between the filmmaker and an art dealer in the Baltic region. ‘Why will anyone see movie (sic) about art that you buy from me? … Nobody will watch.’”

Discussed in Kim Knowles “Currents at the New York Film Festival,” MFJ 75.

Dana Kavelina LETTER TO A TURTLEDOVE (2019, 26 min, digital)

“A second-degree artistic appropriation of amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region of Ukraine, recombined into a surreal anti-war film-poem. The war videos are interspersed with Kavelina’s own animated segments, staged mise-en-scènes, and archival footage of the Donbass from the 1930s and onwards (when the region became a hotspot for Stalinist industrialization of the Soviet Union, and of heated class warfare).”

Discussed in Grahame Weinbren “Things Are Not What They Seem: e-flux Artist Cinemas 2020,” MFJ 73.

Matthias Müller PENSÅO GLOBO (1997, 15 min, 16mm)

“Film as skin, to touch and be touched, deeply eroticized. A lone man faces his approaching death from AIDS while inhabiting a hotel room in Lisbon. The film uses a ghostly doubling effect achieved through re-photography and home processing, producing what Mueller has called ‘an epidermal cinema.’ Desire and doom are entwined…”

Discussed in Jeanne Liotta “Enter Germs. Enter the World,” MFJ 75.

Julie Murray ANATHEMA (1995, 7 min, 16mm)

“The filmmaker works with industrial found footage, centered around the formally discreet and nearly ceremonial medical practice of ‘scrubbing up’ before surgery to avoid any contamination from germs before the probing investigations of the diseased body. Murray had tried to use a homemade toner, but the process produced a splattering of red dots. The rash proliferates, the surgeon notices the hole in his glove – and we suddenly realize he is no longer safe or immune from danger.”

Discussed in Jeanne Liotta “Enter Germs. Enter the World,” MFJ 75.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

Anthology Film Archive Film Notes

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