Interview with Jacqueline Stewart, co-curator of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema
Posted on | May 17, 2013 | No Comments
- Still from Four Women (Julie Dash, 1975)
Interview by Felicia Mings
I had the privilege of chatting with Jacqueline Stewart shortly after attending the March 28th L.A. Rebellion film screening of shorts by Ben Caldwell, Barbara McCullough, O.Fummilayo Makarah at the Gene Siskel Film Center. This event kicked off a series of film screenings across Chicago that dig into the archive of the L.A. Rebellion, a collective of former students of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television who were dedicated to exploring the social, cultural, and political issues of their time—the 1970’s and 1980’s.
My interest in the intersection of curatorial practice and art education made me extremely excited to delve into Stewart’s experience of curating a collection that contains historic, documentary, and fictional works by seminal African American filmmakers.
Felicia Mings: What drew you to this curatorial project?
Jacqueline Stewart: I am a film historian specializing in African American film and when I was doing research on early black filmmakers, I found it frustrating that very few of the films had survived. I ended up conducting most of my research by looking at old black newspapers. This really sparked my interest in learning more about film archiving and preservation, and through Jan-Christopher Horak, Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archives I had the opportunity to do that.
For future film programmers and curators, could you share a bit about the process of collectively curating films with Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak and Shannon Kelley?
Chris Horak and Shannon Kelley have more experience in curating and programming than Allyson and I. Chris has curated work for decades as an archivist presenting public programs on a variety of subjects at UCLA, George Eastman House and abroad. Allyson and I are scholars, and we were able to bring a deep historical knowledge of African American film to the project. Each member of the team brought different strengths and bodies of knowledge, which helped determine what would be in the show.
There are two different versions of this film program, an extensive one that ran for three months in the fall of 2011 at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and a shorter version that is on tour. I will focus on the shorter version that is currently in Chicago. For this program one thing that we came to agreement on was spreading the attention across as many of the filmmakers as possible. Some of the filmmakers are more widely known than others. People who know a lot about African American film are familiar with Charles Burnett and Julie Dash. There have been a few retrospectives of these individual artists, but the work of many others has been left out. [1] We wanted to show work by each filmmaker participating in the project, and that is why we only included one feature film by each of the better-known artists in the program. In addition, we wanted to include work they created as students and as well as their shorter films because people tend to focus on feature length films. The tour consists of four programs made up of shorts, and eight programs that show feature length films that are each preceded by a short.
Still from Define (O. Funmilayo Makarah, 1988)
After the program is done touring, how can people access these films?
At the UCLA Film and Television Archive there is a copy of everything that we have uncovered during the course of the project—the archivists have said that the material has been gaining a lot of use. The archive’s website features an extensive L.A. Rebellion section that features some short student works. We hope to possibly have DVD releases of some of the films some time in the future. Although, an issue that comes up around these films is often copyright. As students, the filmmakers often used music without purchasing or clearing the rights to it, making DVD distribution one of the biggest and most expensive challenges. Therefore, it will be a slow process but it is one that the archive is committed to. Milestone Films released Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding and some shorts on DVD in 2007. And a number of shorts and early student works by others are distributed by Third World Newsreel and Women Make Movies, for rental or purchase.
Who are the African-American students and emerging filmmakers that you are watching out for? How is this new wave of artists work similar or and perhaps divergent to the work of the LA Rebellion filmmakers in relation to content, form, and possible social and political aims?
One person that comes to mind, although she is not a student, is Cauleen Smith, and her film Drylongso. Cauleen comes to mind because she went to UCLA for film school, and she pursued her undergraduate degree at San Francisco State, studying under L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Larry Clark who directed Passing Through. Cauleen was inspired by him as a teacher, and talks in incredible detail about how he taught students to shoot dark-skinned people using proper lighting and film stock appropriate to their skin tones. He was very thorough about these issues that many cinematographers ignore or take for granted, and you can see that Cauleen works to show that beauty and diversity in her work. She is descendant of this movement.
Still from Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (Barbara McCullough, 1979).
Do you have other curatorial projects on the horizon that we should be aware of?
I have kept pretty busy with the LA Rebellion program touring, but I will be presenting something at an upcoming Orphan Film Symposium at the Academy Film Archive. Organized by Dan Streible, the Orphan Film Symposia bring together archivists, scholars, and filmmakers to discuss and screen neglected films. I have been working with S. Pearl Sharp, a filmmaker, poet, actor and activist who lives in LA. She shared with me work she did back in the 1980s with the Black Entertainment Television network (BET). When BET first came on the air they would show older black films from the 1970s, and even back to the 1930s and 1940s. These were preceded by short video introductions Sharp produced and directed with Thom Eubanks. These introductions are really informative pieces in which she talks with actors and actresses from the films such as Rosalind Cash, Max Julien and Ron O’Neal, as well as interviews with scholars like Henry T. Sampson. These tapes reveal some of the early history of BET. It is important to me that these are all shot on videotape, as there has been a lot of attention paid to the preservation of film, but video is in more danger of deteriorating because people don’t attach the same historical value or see it as aesthetically significant. This project has made me start to think of strategies for preserving other African American video works.
Felicia Mings is a graduate student in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her experiences in developing youth arts programming in Toronto and St. Catharines, Ontario has led to her interest in exploring intersections between curatorial practice, art education and community development, specifically in relation to contemporary African Canadian art.
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[1] In 2011 the MOMA did a retrospective of Charles Burnett’s work titled Charles Burnett: The Power to Endure. Many institutions have honored him.
The moment the LA Rebellion got named was when Clyde Taylor, curated a show at the Whitney Museum in 1986 called “The L.A. Rebellion: A Turning Point in Black Cinema.” This was one of the first times these films and filmmakers were exposed to a large audience. It was difficult to get access to those films before.
Tags: Jacqueline Stewart > L.A. Rebellion > O. Funmilayo Makarah
Interview with Andréa Picard
Posted on | May 1, 2013 | No Comments
Still from Pour vos beaux yeux (Henri Storck, 1929). Image courtesy of La Cinémathèque française.
On the occasion of her program with CATE, curator Andréa Picard spoke with Kyle Riley about the Toronto International Film Festival’s experimental film and video program, Wavelengths. Picard illustrates the program’s history and evolution, the challenges of curating shorts programs, her curatorial vision, and her first encounters with film. Coming from an art history background, Picard highlights the many intersections between the visual arts and moving image worlds and discusses the changing festival landscape.
Kyle Riley is a MA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the dual degree program in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism & Arts Administration and Policy.
Kyle: I wanted to talk first about Wavelengths. I am interested to hear you describe it in terms of what it means to you, what your motivations are and how you see it playing a role within the film community in general and in the festival world in particular.
We’re now heading into our 13th year, so Wavelengths has accrued its own history within TIFF, and has grown a tremendous amount. When Wavelengths was launched, it did so with four programs of shorts on opening weekend, as a forum to celebrate experimental film within a large festival, not unlike Views from the Avant-Garde at the New York Film Festival. Susan Oxtoby, who was the former Director of Cinematheque Ontario at the time, was the section’s founding-curator. The city of Toronto has a very rich experimental film community and history, and the organization’s commitment to non-commercial film and video has always been significant. In that way, Wavelengths was a natural progression, especially given Susan’s curatorial tastes and expertise. The Toronto International Film Festival is a big, very well attended public festival. It doesn’t have a market; its efforts are largely directed toward connecting an engaged and enthusiastic public, as well as attending industry from around the world with the films in its selection. The atmosphere can be electric, charged with the promise of discovery.
The section was named after Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), not only for the film itself but for Snow’s enormous achievements and contributions as one of the world’s greatest interdisciplinary artists. Despite his international engagements, Michael has remained very active in the Toronto scene. While he no longer plays free jazz on a regular basis, he still comes to the Cinematheque on occasion, attends the festival, and has recently been the focus of several exhibitions. It’s been a lovely, longstanding dialogue, and he continues to inspire not only the ethos of the program, but also many of the artists who come to present their work.
While Wavelengths began fairly small and modestly as a showcase for new work, it did so presciently with an eye towards the history of cinema. If I recall correctly, the first year included a gorgeous hand-tinted film by Segundo de Chomón. When Susan left to become the Senior Curator at Pacific Film Archive, I stepped into the role and grew the program. I wanted to ensure a space for visionary feature-length filmmaking as well. At the time (2005) filmmakers like James Benning, Harun Farocki and Heinz Emigholz had not played the Festival in a long while and I felt it was important to re-introduce them to the fold, especially given their recent contributions.
Though still modest within the scope of TIFF, Wavelengths has considerably expanded and now provides a curated space for short, medium and feature-length films and videos that defy easy categorization, such as cinematic essays and hybrid documentaries. Last year marked a major turning point in the program’s evolution, when we collapsed the former “Visions” program under Wavelengths’ umbrella. This new section dismantles the traditional boundaries between experimental film and narrative filmmaking, though we ensure that the feature-length works are definitely made by artists. We champion autonomy, risk-taking—aesthetic and political—unusual collaborations, a sense of urgency and experimentation in a broad use of the term. The former Visions section was my favorite in fact, as it showcased young auteurs making uncompromising works of cinema—ones which are likely to withstand the test of time. There you’d find films by some of today’s most important filmmakers, such as Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel and Lisandro Alsonso, Tsai Ming-liang from Taiwan, Bruno Dumont from France, and one of your most famous alumni, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. As a section that encouraged the pushing of boundaries both formal and of storytelling, its merger with Wavelengths comes at a time when increasingly diverse programs are teaching us that the term ‘experimental’ varies greatly from nation to nation, and story needn’t be incommensurate with formalism.
The shorts programs remain the core and still screen during opening weekend, while the features are spread throughout the entirety of the festival. I was a little apprehensive going in last year, but the changes were enthusiastically embraced. We saw much crossover with the audience and press, confirming my belief that true cinephiles are those with a near-inexhaustible curiosity and a thirst for great cinema, be it that of Nathaniel Dorsky or Tsai Ming-liang, Athina Rachel Tsangari or Aldo Tambellini, Luther Price or Wang Bing—each of whom is avant-garde in their own way. Wavelengths advocates for film and video as art across genres, and beyond categories. We certainly share affinities and a view of cinema with many international colleagues, but I think the merger of “Visions” and “Wavelengths” makes this section unique within the festival world. At least, we aspire to be!
So Wavelengths began as a way to create bridges between underrepresented film and video work and more well-known avant-garde pieces.
It was begun as a sidebar for experimental film, a section to celebrate great artists like Ken Jacobs and Peter Tscherkassky and to discover a new generation of film and video artists. Over the years, the section has grown to reflect the changes in the field, such as the inclusion of visual artists working with moving images. Recently, we’ve presented such celebrated artists as Thomas Demand, Tacita Dean, Mark Lewis, and Francesca Woodman. This facet has become an important progression, as it mirrors the changes in moving image culture while still insisting upon art on screen, and not just in the galleries in installation form. It has, perhaps not surprisingly, also changed my job immensely because I’m now not only working with distributors like the Video Data Bank, Vtape and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center, but also important galleries like Marian Goodman, Mathew Marks, David Kordansky, Eigen & Art, etc. Let’s say in some cases, there’s way more paperwork! One of the most exciting things about Wavelengths is the inclusion of little or unknown artists alongside legendary ones and how it surreptitiously shuttles between disciplines while exploring the art of cinema.
Still from Slave Ship (T. Marie, 2007). Image courtesy of the artist.
That’s one thing that really interested me about your screening last night. You really seem to demonstrate an interest in moving image work that operates parallel to or even directly integrates object-based work. For example, during your Q&A when describing the importance of Michael Snow you made it very clear point to address his object-based practice, and you included works like Chris Kennedy’s 349 (for Sol LeWitt) which makes a direct reference to a visual artist, and T. Marie’s Slave Ship, whose method of manipulating each pixel individually to slowly change the scene seems to be an extremely object-based way of working.
T. Marie calls them ‘moving pixel paintings’…
Yeah, exactly.
As distinct as the history and evolution of cinema have been from those of the art world, its history and discourse, the trajectories have not been entirely separate all along. They’ve run parallel. I think there is a little bit of cultural amnesia that comes with the fervent discussions about moving images suddenly being embraced by the art world. One can look to the history of several avant-gardes, from Russian Constructivism, to Surrealism or Dada, through Fluxus to see a dialogue between disciplines, including painting, photography, film, poetry and performance. Of course, it’s much more complex than that but in thinking of film as an art form, rather than popular entertainment, that dialogue has a long history, relatively speaking. That’s not to say that cinema has been completely understood or properly embraced by the art world, especially when we see just how poorly installed many moving image works are within galleries or museums. But we’re certainly at a point in time where moving images are so prevalent within the museum space that in the art world there is renewed interest in the cinema and its own history, narrative and otherwise. Artists like Francesco Vezzoli for instance, or even, it’s too obvious now perhaps, but Christian Marclay, Jesper Just or Douglas Gordon, are mining the history of cinema. Cinema as spectacle, cinema as popular entertainment and iconography, while the form largely becomes subsumed by their own formal preoccupations; in some instances, their lack thereof…and suddenly, the ethics of appropriation is one hot topic!
Catch up with CATE
Posted on | April 30, 2013 | No Comments
CATE’s spring 2013 season is now over, but you can catch up with past programs on our Vimeo page! We’ve just uploaded video from our programs with Fern Silva, Karen Yaskinsky, and REMIX-IT-RIGHT guests. More is on the way!
April 18 – twohundredfiftysixcolors
Posted on | April 12, 2013 | No Comments
Thursday, April 18, 6 p.m. | Eric Fleischauer & Jason Lazarus in person!
World Premiere!
Still from twohundredfiftysixcolors (Eric Fleischauer & Jason Lazarus, 2013). Courtesy of the artists
Crafted from thousands of animated GIFs (the file format used to create simple, looping animations online) twohundredfiftysixcolors is an expansive and revealing portrait of what has become a zeitgeist medium. Once used primarily as an internet page signpost, the file type has evolved into a nimble and ubiquitous tool for pop-cultural memes, self-expression, and considered artistic gestures. Chicago-based artists Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus chart the GIF’s evolution, its connections to early cinema, and its contemporary cultural and aesthetic possibilities, archiving this particular moment in the history of the motion picture and internet culture and reflecting on the future of both. 2013, Eric Fleischauer & Jason Lazarus, digital file, 97 min + discussion.
ERIC FLEISCHAUER (b. 1977, Buffalo, NY) is a Chicago–based artist, curator, and educator working in video, film, and digital mediums. Fleischauer utilizes conceptually–driven production strategies in order to examine the ramifications of technology’s expansive influence on both the individual and cultural sphere. His work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, threewalls, Interstate Projects, Rooftop Films, Microscope Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and is included in the Midwest Photographer’s Project collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Currently he teaches in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
JASON LAZARUS (1975, Kansas City, MO) is a Chicago-based artist, curator, educator, and writer. His practice includes photography, public archive projects, and the exploration of notions of impossibility as a medium. In 2012, cofounded Chicago Artist Writers (with Sofia Leiby), a new art criticism platform encouraging traditional and experimental art criticism by young studio artists. Lazarus’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in major collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Milwaukee Museum of Art among others. He is the recipient of the John Guttman Photography Fellowship, a Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. He is currently an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Tags: 2013 > Eric Fleischauer > Experimental > GIF > Jason Lazarus > New Media
April 11 – An Evening with Rosa Barba
Posted on | April 5, 2013 | No Comments
Thursday, April 11 | Rosa Barba in person!
Still from Outwardly From the Earth’s Center (Rosa Barba, 2007). Courtesy of the artist and the Video Data Bank.
German-Italian artist Rosa Barba’s work takes shape through artists’ books, sculptural film-based installations, and short films. Often set in monumental, even menacing landscapes, her films combine documentary, performance, and science fiction tropes to examine surreal confrontations between nature, humans, and their technologies. Her subjects include life in the “Red Zone” around Mount Vesuvius, military test sites in the Mojave Desert, and a fictional account of life on a Scandinavian island whose inhabitants attempt to stop seaward drift of their homes.
Presented in collaboration with SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program and the Video Data Bank.
ROSA BARBA (b. 1972, Agrigento, Italy) currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited in film festivals, art biennales, art museums, and galleries worldwide. Solo exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2012) and Kunsthaus Zürich (2012), among others. In 2010, she curated the exhibition, A Curated Conference: On the Future of Collective Strength within an Archive at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. In 2008, Dia Art Foundation commissioned Barba’s first web-based project. Barba has received several prizes, including the Nam June Paik Award (2010).
Tags: 2013 > Essay > Italy > Netherlands > Rosa Barba > Sweden > USA
April 4 – Spin/Verso/Contour: An Evening with Hannes Schüpbach
Posted on | March 30, 2013 | No Comments
Thursday, April 4, 6 p.m. | Hannes Schüpbach in person!
Still from Spin (Hannes Schüpbach, 2001). Courtesy of the artist
The films of renowned Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach are lyrical, often transcendent portraits of people, spaces, and everyday life. A painter, performance artist, and expert on textile art, Schüpbach weaves together light, gesture, and a keen attentiveness to the material world into meticulously structured compositions. His films, notes curator Haden Guest, open onto “a multi-layered world, where superimpositions and reflections suggest the hidden depths of the places and people evoked within them.” For this program, he presents Spin/Verso/Contour (2001-2011), an affecting trilogy about his parents, and L’Atelier (2008), a portrait of an artist’s studio in Paris.
Organized with the support of SWISS FILMS–The Arts Council of Switzerland.
HANNES SCHÜPBACH (b. 1965, Winterthur, Switzerland) is a painter, performance artist, filmmaker and curator of artists’ films. Schüpbach is best known for his 16mm films, which have been shown at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur; the Centre Pompidou; the Biennale de l’image en mouvement, Geneva; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Tate Modern, London; and the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Tags: 2013 > Artist's Film > Experimental > Hannes Schüpbach > Switzerland
March 30 – L.A. Rebellion
Posted on | March 29, 2013 | No Comments
Saturday, March 30, 12:30 p.m. | ENCORE SCREENING
Still from I & I: An African Allegory (Ben Caldwell, 1979). Image courtesy of the artist and UCLA Film & Television Archive.
From the early 1970s through the late 1980s, a group of African and African American filmmakers emerged from UCLA’s film school with a body of provocative and visionary works. Referred to now as the L.A. Rebellion, this group would have a radical impact on black cinematic practice and alternative filmmaking in the U.S.
Presented in association with UCLA Film & Television Archive and supported in part by grants from the Getty Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the L.A. Rebellion series is curated by Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Shannon Kelley, and Jacqueline Stewart. This screening is generously supported by the Black Cinema House. Upcoming screenings will take place at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center and Northwestern University’s Block Museum.
Tags: 2013 > Barbara McCullough > Ben Caldwell > Elyseo J. Taylor > Julie Dash > LA Rebellion > O. Funmilayo Makarah
March 28 – L.A. Rebellion
Posted on | March 22, 2013 | No Comments
Thursday, March 28, 6 p.m. | Filmmakers Ben Caldwell, Barbara McCullough, and O.Funmilayo Makarah in person! Introduced by co-curator Jacqueline Stewart!
Still from Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (Barbara McCullough, 1979).
In the 1970s and 80s, a group of young African and African American filmmakers emerged from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television with a body of provocative and visionary works that would have a radical impact on black cinematic practice and alternative filmmaking in the U.S. Now referred to as the L.A. Rebellion, these artists took up urgent social and cultural dynamics of their time, including Black activism and militancy, everyday life, and spirituality to forge a cinema responsive to the lives and concerns of African American communities and the African diaspora. Introduced by co-curator Jacqueline Stewart, the program kicks off a multi-institutional series of screenings in Chicago exploring the L.A. Rebellion and features short films by Julie Dash, O.Funmilayo Makarah, Elyseo J. Taylor, including stunning new preservation prints of Ben Caldwell’s I & I: An African Allegory (1979) and Barbara McCullough’s seminal Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979).
Presented in association with UCLA Film & Television Archive and supported in part by grants from the Getty Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the L.A. Rebellion series is curated by Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Shannon Kelley, and Jacqueline Stewart. This screening is generously supported by the Black Cinema House. Upcoming screenings will take place at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center and Northwestern University’s Block Museum.
::PROGRAM::
Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, Barbara McCullough (1979, USA, 35mm, B&W, 6 min)
Medea, Ben Caldwell (1973, USA, 16mm, Color, 7 min)
I & I: An African Allegory, Ben Caldwell (1977, USA, 16mm, Color, 32 min)
Four Women, Julie Dash (1975, 16mm, Color, 7 min)
Black Art, Black Artists, Elyseo J. Taylor (1971,USA, 16mm, Color, 16 min)
Define, O. Funmilayo Makarah (1988, USA, DV, Color, 5 min)
L.A. In My Mind, O. Funmilayo Makarah (2006, USA, DV, Color, 4 min)
Tags: 2013 > Barbara McCullough > Ben Caldwell > Elyseo J. Taylor > Jacqueline Stewart > Julie Dash > LA Rebellion > O. Funmilayo Makarah
March 21 – Wavelengths: in the blink of an eye
Posted on | March 17, 2013 | No Comments
Thursday, March 21, 6 p.m. | Curator Andréa Picard in person!
Still from View From the Acropolis (Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, 2012). Courtesy of the artists and Motive Gallery.
Named for but also infinitely inspired by Michael Snow’s 1967 masterpiece, Wavelength, the Toronto International Film Festival’s avant-garde program presents films and videos that defy convention, suggest alternate ways of thinking, and sometimes re-emerge from a distant past in order to comment on the present. Curated by Andréa Picard, who has curated Wavelengths since 2006, this program is a Wavelengths compendium featuring a number of works from the 2012 line-up (including Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, Ernie Gehr’s Auto-Collider XV and Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s View from the Acropolis which were all cited in the New York Times’ best films of the year wrap-up and screen as Chicago premieres) and highlights from previous editions, including a 35mm restored print from La Cinémathèque française of Henri Storck’s too-rarely seen 1929 Surrealist gem, Pour vos beaux yeux. Blinking is not encouraged!
ANDRÉA PICARD (b. 1977, Toronto, Canada) is a film curator and writer based in Toronto and Paris. For twelve years she was a member of the programming department at TIFF Cinematheque (née Cinematheque Ontario) and has been curating Wavelengths, the Toronto International Film Festival’s celebrated avant-garde series, since 2006. She also writes the “Film/Art” column for Cinema Scope magazine.
::PROGRAM::
349 (for Sol Lewitt), Chris Kennedy
(2011, Canada, Video, Color, Silent, 1 min.)
349 (for Sol Lewitt) is a digitally animated version of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #349. A recreation of LeWitt’s geometric vocabulary and primary colour palette, 349 careens through emblazoned emblems, lifted from walls and transported into dialogue with the legendary artist’s lifelong exploration of spatial systems and human emotion. (Andréa Picard)
Pour vos beaux yeux, Henri Storck
(1929, Belgium, 35mm archival print, B&W, Silent, 8 mins.)
Long thought lost, Henri Storck’s scarcely seen 1929 Surrealist gem, Pour vos beaux yeux (made in collaboration with painter Félix Labisse) uses playful optical tricks in its tale of a young dandy who tries to send a glass eye through the post, to no avail. Shown here in a 35mm restored print courtesy of La Cinémathèque Française.(Andréa Picard)
Class Picture, Tito and Tito
(2011, Phillippines, 35mm, Color, Sound, 5 mins.)
Filipino artist collective and “photography film” aficionados Tito & Tito convert a single 16mm colour strip into washed-out 35mm; the sea, like history, swallows but also spawns.(Andréa Picard)
Garden/ing, Eriko Sonoda
(2007, Japan, Video, B&W, Sound, 6 mins.)
Shot frame-by-frame and eschewing all digital effects, Garden/ing is a trompe l’oeil hall of mirrors that meticulously stymies a view from a window with enlarged photographs of its very vista. (Andréa Picard)
Slave Ship, T. Marie
(2010, USA, Video, Color, Silent, 7 mins.)
The apocalyptic sublime of J. M.W. Turner’s 1840 masterpiece The Slave Ship, with its fiery conflagration and strewn debris amid wild waters, is the source for T. Marie’s time-based pixel painting-film: a languorous, searing abstraction with a hot, translucent palette updates the classic scene in reference to today’s skewed social hierarchy and the sale of human life. (Andréa Picard)
Capitalism: Slavery, Ken Jacobs
(2007, USA, Video, Sepia, Silent, 3 mins.)
Transforming nineteenth century stereographic images of cotton-picking slaves into haunting, flickering worlds of depth and movement, Ken Jacobs re-awakens a frozen and shameful moment in history. (Andréa Picard)
View from the Acropolis, Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan
(2012, The Netherlands, 35mm, B&W, Sound, 15 mins.)
Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebran de Haan’s glorious 35mm View from the Acropolis extends the Dutch artists’ interest in Europe’s shifting power dynamics by offering a monumental meditation on the original Turkish site of the Pergamon altar, now stowed in the famous Berlin museum which holds its name. (Andréa Picard)
Auto-Collider XV, Ernie Gehr
(2011, USA, Video, Color, Sound, 9 mins.)
Ernie Gehr’s Auto-Collider XV, from his ongoing series devoted to vehicular form and movement, is a no-holds-barred trip into painterly abstraction, where an Agnes Martin painting meets a rapid-fire back-and-forth Gerhard Richter squeegee and the world is swiftly rent asunder. (Andréa Picard)
August and After, Nathaniel Dorsky
(2012, 16mm, Color, Silent, 18fps, 19 mins.)
Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After is dedicated to two recently departed friends, legendary filmmaker George Kuchar and actress Carla Liss. The film shows them vibrantly, resiliently alive shortly before their passing and then sets off in search of soothing beauty, yielding searing 16mm images awash in colours both belonging to and transcending our natural world. Well into the twilight years of 16mm filmmaking, Dorsky continues to present textures and hues that are indispensible to the art of cinema. We will be poorer without them. (Andréa Picard)
Tags: Canada > Chris Kennedy > Eriko Sonada > Ernie Gehr > Europe > Experimental > Henri Storck > Japan > Ken Jacobs > Lonnie van Brummelen > Nathaniel Dorsky > Siebren de Haan > T.Marie > Tito and Tito > Toronto International Film Festival > USA
Interview with Karen Yasinsky
Posted on | March 17, 2013 | No Comments
Still from Marie (Karen Yasinsky, 2009). Image courtesy of the artist.
Ali Aschman and Jeremy Bessoff in conversation with Karen Yasinsky on the occasion of the screening ‘Fire is a Fact: An Evening with Karen Yasinsky’, a program of short puppet and hand-drawn animations from 1999 to 2012.
Ali: When Jim Trainor introduced you last night at Conversations at the Edge, he described your work as being “private” and stemming from a “secret imagination”. The early puppet animations that have more of a narrative structure do seem to communicate emotions and experiences that seem very personal. Is there an element of revealing your own psyche in making these works?
Karen: I don’t see how it cannot, but it’s not literal. When I look back to when I was a painter, before I started animating, my paintings were very similar to the animations in that they were cartoony and had little figures that were pushing or pulling or touching. So when I started animating, it was about those little interactions and gestures. In developing characters throughout the narrative and the animation, I think I was going towards emotions, not necessarily from my own life, but ones that I was interested in. In grad school I had studied Freud and did a lot of reading about psychoanalysis and that definitely went into these early works.
Jeremy: When you’re thinking about theory and also making work, I sometimes find it hard to negotiate the two—how to represent that I understand the idea, and how it relates to my project, but then visually communicating that idea seems very difficult, and I’m wondering how you deal with that.
Karen: It’s a great question because this is all done retrospectively. I was reading Freud and then making these animations probably a year or two after that, so I see now that they were influencing, but I wasn’t setting out with these Freudian ideas when I was developing the characters. Even in my later work, these things that I read are influencing me but I’m not setting out to describe the ideas with animation—whenever I’ve tried to do that it doesn’t work, it falls flat.
Jeremy: So you’re kind of absorbing this stuff and it comes out unconsciously, it leaks out intuitively.
Karen: Yeah, and I think for me it was just that I needed to narrow my subject, and the most narrow I could get was a scene from a film. It was very specific, and then within those confines I could just let my ideas go. So everything that these little things would suggest to me could become very important.
Still from I Choose Darkness (Karen Yasinsky, 2009). Image courtesy of the artist.
Ali: In No Place Like Home, Who’s Your True Love, Still Life with Cows and I Choose Darkness there seem to be power relationships at play, where one character is weak in some way and another dominant – whether that be through an absence of body parts such as torso or head or eyes, or an ability to stand up, or to protect themselves. With the exception of Still Life with Cows in which both characters are women, it seems like this power position is related to gender. Can you speak about that?
Karen: I often get the question at the end of a screening of my films if I have a problem with men. And the answer is no. But the movies are about struggles to connect and usually it is a heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman, ideas of fear, about giving yourself over, and connection, fear of the unknown. After finishing I Choose Darkness, I was really through with all of that because it was heavy, and it was part of, I think, every movie I did. The subject matter was these relationships, trying to find something in another, and then being thwarted in some way through one of the party’s fears or inabilities to connect.
Jeremy: And then your medium changed once your subject changed. Is that fair to say?
Karen: Well my medium changed for this subject reason, I thought if I start with puppets I have to deal with relationships, and I think I realized I’m making these melodramas. Music was a big part of it too, it was composed for the films, and I just felt like I want to do something else. This happened at a point when I saw this film, Heart of London by Jack Chambers, which has a strong, but at times really difficult, structure relating to his ideas. I also started thinking about the artist Bruce McClure, who does projection performances and creates these feelings that are totally detached from narrative that you have to interpret as emotions. Some people leave his performances feeling anxious, like they just had an assault upon them, because the light and sound is very intense. I think some people have a very negative experience, and I had an ecstatic experience. Some people really love it. So I really got interested in how to manufacture emotion through formal means—leaving it up to the individual to interpret. Read more
Tags: 2013 > Animation > Interview > Karen Yasinsky > USA
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Still from Spin (Hannes Schüpbach, 2001). Courtesy of the artist