This two-part program is composed of experimental moving images made by women; the time frame starts in the last century and ends now - or almost.
Why textures? Because we are watching as film grain, the tiny silver particles on celluloid, phase into pixels on our multiple screening devices. Our visual language changes as do our pleasures and an occasional regret. But handmade work can reveal hidden poetics and lead us to other pleasures.
Program 1: In Different Corners
An aesthetic dialogue between techniques such as animation, pixilation, still photography, time lapses, stop motion, as well as between spaces: indoors, outdoors, public, or private. It is also a conversation of works by artists of multiple nationalities, scattered in different corners of our globe.
Followed by conversation with Vivian Ostrovsky and Sharon Balaban
Inger Lise HANSEN
Hus
1998 / 16mm / color / sound / 7' 30
HUS is a film which attempts to reveal the private and hidden layers of our habitation. It is a live animation film shot on location which incorporates both pixilation (stop motion) and time-lapse photography. Every single shot reveals a concealed layer of the house and exposes it to the passing light. Within the accelerated time of the film, the house gradually breaks down piece by piece and frame by frame. Once it is completely dismantled, the house is reconstructed in a different location. A film about time and processes, about disintegration and construction.
“In HUS I was interested in physically deconstructing and reconstructing one object. I imagined the house as a shell that separates ‘private and public spheres.’ Through the use of animation, I could open up this ‘shell’ and examine it. HUS is shot with three cameras from different angles. In the editing I purposely didn’t cut the shots to motion, so that the film appears to be going back and forth in time. HUS was shot in the California desert, on the edge of Silicon Valley.”
Maria KOURKOUTA
Retour à la rue d'Éole (Six Peintures Populaires)
2012-2013 / 16mm / B&W / sound / 14' 14
Insignificant fragments, reworked, reassembled, slowed down, put in loops, of popular Greek films from the 1950s and 60s. These fragments are accompanied by short excerpts of poems written by Greek authors and by Manos Hadjidakis' music. It is a found footage movie, a collage which evokes a return journey to contemporary Greece, in the center of Athens.
Miriam GOSSING & Lina SIECKMANN
Ocean Hill Drive / Super 16mm / color / sound / 20' 49
OCEAN HILL DRIVE examines a rare phenomenon, the so-called ‘shadowflicker,’ that occurs in a suburban area on the outskirts of Boston. As a result of an erroneously installed wind turbine, the flicker effect, which alludes to structuralist experimental cinema, appear in images showing the landscape and architecture of a Massachusetts coastal town. The film focuses on the visual quality of the pulsating shadows that intrude the suburban domestic sphere and disrupt the social and psychological equilibrium of the community. Documentary images are complemented with a female voiceover, which is based on multiple interviews transcripted and assembled into a single narration. The film slowly uncovers fragmentary memories from the time when the flicker began. An atmosphere of suspense and intangible fear is generated throughout the film, while the actual source of the flickering lights remains unknown.
Maki SATAKE
Walk
2013-2015 / Video / color / sound / 8' 23
"All starts here. I walked with new life." (Maki Satake)
Anita THACHER
Loose Corner
1986 / 16mm / color / sound / 10' 00
In LOOSE CORNER, Anita Thacher creates, by means of subtle special effects and superimpositions, an environment of boxes where objects and individuals take on unreal proportions and characteristics. The viewer feels that he or she has entered a world that has lost its reality, controlled perhaps by a series of distorting mirrors. In the film, we accompany a man and a woman, a child and a dog, as well as objects, to an impossible place: a corner. And there, several oddities arise that correspond to what and how we see. The surprises in the corner... surprise and satisfy us too.