For most of this past year we have been trying to find our way through uncharted territory. Last year's version of the Festival was online and limited, and INTERSECTIONS featured only the Experimental Cinema and Video Art Awards.
For this year’s chapter, we are decidedly in a better frame of mind and joyfully snapping back with a program which will take you on a trip through time, place, and space. To help us out of the usual confined mode, screenings will be followed by live 'snapchats' for the curious who want to know more about the diverse works presented.
First off, the Experimental Cinema and Video Art Awards will continue to support and promote local contemporary artists’ work. The current selection will undoubtedly touch on the political and aesthetic trends of this most unusual period.
For those who need an escape from our everyday lives, however, we are offering a chance to see recently restored films by a contemporary of Chaplin, Keaton, and Langdon: Charley Bowers (1889-1946). This creator of idiosyncratic, slapstick live-action and animated shorts was rediscovered in the late 1960s by archivist Raymond Borde of the Toulouse Cinematheque; his films took on "a disorderly life of their own obeying nothing but the logic of dreams" (R. Borde).
Ori Levin (Postdoctoral Scholar in Silent Film at the Visual Studies Research Institute, USC, Faculty Member at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television) will present Bowers' innovative work and tell you more about his use of gizmos, gears, and animation to create a world greatly admired by the likes of André Breton and his surrealist circle.
Nir Evron's film-essay, BELATED MEASURES, is based on never publicly shown before 16mm film materials, found at the LEHI Archives. The LEHI was an underground para-military organization operating in Palestine during the British Mandate. Evron shares his reflections and speculations about the relationship between war and photography, documentary and propaganda, visual traces and destruction. Ran Tal, award-winning documentary filmmaker and Head of the MFA Documentary Film Program at the Tisch Film School in Tel Aviv University, will be in conversation with Nir after the screening.
Ulrike Ottinger started her career as an artist, turning to cinema - both documentary and fiction - in the late 1960s. Her work combines fantasy and ethnography, adding a splash of extravagant aesthetics, humor, and a total aversion to conventions. Yael Mazor, PhD candidate and lecturer at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, will provide more background information regarding Ottinger's work. Her research focuses on German cinema through the prisms of history, memory, and film historiography.
Last but not least, online at the Festival website, we’ll be offering three of the striking, thought-provoking lectures that Laurie Anderson prepared for the prestigious Norton Series at Harvard University. SPENDING THE WAR WITHOUT YOU is far from the concept of ‘talking heads’ - she proposes a combination of virtual backgrounds, mixing history, art, film, animation, music, Brian Eno, Freud, and more. Her themes for each hour-long talk are The River, The Forest, and Rocks. “I will try to tell you what I know about music and life,” she says, and it is certainly worthwhile listening to!
We sincerely hope you will be happy to be in this year's festival mode, whatever it may be!
Vivian Ostrovsky and Sala-Manca
