AFA Screening: MFJ 81 "Dedication"

Program Notes.

This program celebrating the launch of MFJ No. 81 “Dedication” consists of works discussed in the issue. Reflecting themes of grief and resilience, the program includes work from recently departed artists who left their indelible mark on experimental film history, alongside new work from emerging filmmakers who push film language to its ecstatic limits.

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

All film descriptions are excerpted from MFJ No. 81 “Dedication.”

Malcolm Le Grice AFTER LUMIERE (1974, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP)

Louis Lumière L’ARROSEUR ARROSE (1895, 1 min, 35mm-to-digital, silent)

“Malcolm was always an original. He knew the path ahead and it was his own, though he was happy to share his journey with others. […] He played jazz guitar. Later he would ‘play’ the film printer and the film projector as if they were musical instruments, albeit heavier and even more temperamental. But performance-instruments they convincingly became. […] He was never in doubt about the importance of his own work and that of those with whom he most closely worked as well as that of a multitude of students whose work was very distant from his own. They all had reason to be grateful for his support – and they loved him, as I did.” –David Curtis, “Malcolm Le Grice (1940-2024)

Chris Kennedy GO BETWEEN (2024, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP)

“One of the major works from this year’s edition of the TIFF Wavelengths series is Chris Kennedy’s GO-BETWEEN, a simple idea turned adroit in the hands of a skillful and imaginative imagemaker. […] Kennedy’s film is simple but fun, its conceit bringing dynamic movement and repetition within a simple scene – cars crossing a bridge suddenly becomes a kaleidoscopic exercise where images and objects appear and disappear and then reappear at random.” –Soham Gadre, “Form, Tradition, and Political Documentation at TIFF Wavelengths”

Zuza Banasinska Grandmamauntsistercat (2024, 23 min, DCP)

“Grandmamauntsistercat is a montage compiled from cold-war era films made at the Educational Film Studio of the same institution. Thus, on one level it functions as a retrospective reflection on how attitudes were expressed in film at the time, and which in both manifestations – the original and the re-worked – address questions of formation, self-image and the ideological character of education. […] The film is focused on the way misogynistic attitudes, expressed in the historical representations of Baba Jaga as hideous and repulsive, persist in the present via the juxtaposition of the myth with the overwhelmingly genteel contemporary material of the film.” –Nicky Hamlyn, “Currents Program 3: Signal to Noise”

Gunvor Nelson MY NAME IS OONA (1969, 10 min, 16mm-to-DCP)

“Transitions were extremely important to Gunvor. She was always thinking about how to enter the front door of an image and how and when to get out. A shot was like an airport and the arrival and departure times of every single plane were critical. Otherwise there might be too much chaos on the tarmac! […] Gunvor once explained to me that when you finish editing your film, you will feel ecstatic. Then, there will be a profound sense of loss. To be inside the making of a film is an incredibly consuming fusion of the intellectual and the artistic. No matter what is going on in your home or in the world beyond, you have your film, and that, sometimes, is enough.” –Lynne Sachs, “Gunvor Nelson (1931-2025)”

Christina Jauernik & Johann Lurf REVOLVING ROUNDS (2024, 11 min, 35mm-to-DCP, stereoscopic 3D)

“[REVOLVING ROUNDS] is a film that defies explanation: it simply astonishes. Somehow the film accomplishes everything you never knew a film was meant to do. Through its harnessing of light in sun-blinding lens flares, its vertigo-esque expansion/compression of space, and especially its tour-de-force gradual extreme close-up, it most fully and gratifyingly expresses the merger on display for the Currents program between the technologies of the medium (here: past, present, and future) and the perceptual themes it explores (here: to see as one suspected only a god might). REVOLVING ROUNDS is something to be experienced, that rare film that demands a specific cinematic context for the full expression of its remarkable power. That experience is everything: a perfect articulation of what cinema can do to further our experience of the world.” –Sarah K. Keller, “Currents Program 4: Space is the Place”

Narcisa Hirsch TALLER (WORKSHOP) (1974, 10 min, 16mm-to-DCP)

“Narcisa Hirsch, who died last year at 96, had much in common with her generation of experimental filmmakers. She worked at a small scale with practically no money, shooting what was around her, declining to engage professional actors or to write treatments or scripts. Yet her work had a way of diverging from the spare, cerebral style associated with film and performance of the 1970s. A friend who attended her recent retrospective at Microscope Gallery mentioned to me a certain ‘warmth’ in her films, and I knew immediately what he meant.” –Nicholas Gamso, “Narcisa Hirsch, ‘Philosophy is a Useless Passion,’ & ‘On the Barricades’”

Christoph Janetzko WALD – THE FOREST (2023, 13 min, DCP)

“Shot between 2019 and 2022, [Janetzko’s] film captures the dying forests of the Harz Mountains, documenting the devastating effects of climate change. […] The destroyed forest becomes an artistic topos, a symbol of an environmental catastrophe caused by climate change. […] Through advanced digital editing techniques – masking, selective color extraction, time-based color changes, and compositing – the film mirrors the degradation of nature in the transformation of the film frames themselves. The dying forest becomes an emblem not only of ecological destruction but also of an urgent artistic vision.” –Ulrich Stein, “On Christoph Janetzko’s WALD – THE FOREST”

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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AFA Screening: MFJ 81 "Dedication"