Still/Here and Perseverance and How to Develop It
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | April 17, 2003
Thursday, April 17, 2003, 8pm
STILL/HERE
2000, Chris Harris, USA, 60 min, 16mm
and
PERSEVERANCE AND HOW TO DEVELOP IT
2002, Jenny Perlin, USA, 14 min, 16mm
Directors in person!
The Department of Film, Video & New Media is pleased to welcome back alumni Chris Harris and Jenny Perlin to present their most recent films. Inspired in part by Eugene Aget’s photographs of Paris, Still/Here is Harris’s meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute much of north St. Louis, an area that is home to many working class and working poor African Americans. Though such subject matter has traditionally been approached through the conventions of documentary realism, Still/Here obliquely acknowledges these conventions even as it interrupts them with a series of self-reflexive breakdowns, erasures and gaps. Perlin’s Perseverance and How to Develop It investigates the connections between depression, self-help, controlled environments and success in the US. Perlin pulls together interviews, recreations of people acting out their neurosis, and rare archival footage of union riots from the 1940’s, as well as texts from self-help books and Freud, to create ironic connections between a success oriented workforce then and now. (Descriptions courtesy of Madcat Film Festival)
About
Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
