SUMMER of FLORA & FAUNA SHOW – PROGRAM NOTES

57 minutes

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SILHOUETTE; Astrid Busch; TRT: 6.00; digi

THE GARDEN- Ann Steuernagel; TRT:10.00; found footage to digi

THIS IS MY SHOW: WORKING WITH NATURE ; Lori Felker; TRT: 14.00; digi

LANDSLAG; Kyja Kristjana; TRT: 4.00; digi

The OCTOPUS; Lili White: TRT: 6.00; digi

WATERCOLORS; Ann Deborah Levy; TRT: 13.00; 16

MANIMA MUNDI; Kate Balsley; TRT: 4.00; digi

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AMERICAN PAPER OPTICS has generously donated ChromaDepth glasses to view the upcoming film, MY WINDOW, by Anabela Costa.

Future Anterior /(Instant); Muriel Montini; 6.00; S8/Digi
Dream Of Me; Agnes Moon; 9.31; Digi
Land Of Mourning Calm; Jessica Bardsley; 15.00; Digi
Elinor Beauregard; Simone Bailey; 1.36; Digi
The Sin; Doris Neidl; 3.06; Digi
Trust; Tammy Kinsey; 7.41; Digi
Hatchet; Hilda Daniel; 0.29 Looped; Digi

Future Anterior /(Instant); Muriel Montini; 6.00; S8/Digi
A woman emerges from the shadows in slow motion. While approaching, we hear echoes of story. It might seem insignificant, but it’s the sort of story that haunts your thoughts for the rest of your life.

Dream Of Me; Agnes Moon; 9.31; Digi
Using images and testimony far removed from the life of its ostensible subject, the documentary attempts to imagine a sister, a relationship, and mixed-race identity.

Land Of Mourning Calm; Jessica Bardsley; 15.00; Digi
Land of Mourning Calm is an epistolary video essay that charts a long distance correspondence between two women–one American, the other South Korean. It is a work of experimental ethnography, which uses personal memory as a mode of exploring female intimacy, self-discovery, and issues of cross-cultural translation.

Elinor Beauregard; Simone Bailey; 1.36; Digi
Drawing from Gustave Calliebotte’s The Floor Scrapers, the video examines labor, bodies, and touch.

The Sin; Doris Neidl; 3.06; Digi
A video inspired by a poem of Iranian writer Forough Farrokzhad. It speaks about love, lust and desire. But it’s also highly mystical.  For the video I used found footage (three of my favorite films: Hiroshima mon amour; La piscine, Jules et Jim) combined with new footage. The words are spoken in Farsi. I am borrowing excerpts from the films and transforming them into a new context. Therefore, on one side bowing to these films of “world cinema”, on the other side interpreting and visualizing Farrokzhad’s poem.

Trust; Tammy Kinsey; 7.41; Digi
TRUST uses digital and traditional elements chronicling the experience of traveling alone as a female, observations of the road, an internal and external journey measured in miles.

Hatchet; Hilda Daniel; 0.29 Looped; Digi
Phonetic sequences propel decapitated segments suggesting threat, violence – dv, stalking, rape – escape. Words are used linguistically, sonically and visually to convey meaning (“hatchet” is repeated in whispers chugging like a train or train of thought locked in a chant of madness or fear; letters move, are hacked, torn, peek and disappear…). The piece is a fright of fancy – a concrete poem part rage, part fear.

http://movies.broadwayworld.com/article/NewFilmmakers-Announces-Summer-Series-2011-20110725#ixzz1TDN8vz2b

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Sorrow; Liliana Resnick; 13.40; 16Mm/Digi
Every Morning We Were Awakened; Gia Michael; 4.32; Digi
Yanqui Walker & The Optical Revolution; Kathryn Ramey; 33.00; 16Mm/Digi
Rice Relief; C+A Projects (Carolyn Radlo & Alanna Simone); 2:42 Digi
A Movie By Jen Proctor; Jennifer Proctor; 12:00; Digi

AFTER the SCREENING converse with us at WHITE RABBIT 145 East Houston Street

Sorrow; Liliana Resnick; 13.40; 16Mm/Digi
Every war has its end. Only, every war has its beginning too. In 2003 during the war on Iraq, an American reservist refused his wife’s advice to flee the country rather than being activated for duty in war. “I’ll come back” he said. When he returned he told to his wife, ”I trained for war, I was even looking forward to it. Now I wish I had never seen it. I cannot bare to be alive.”

“The footage for this film is in two parts: the documentary of demonstrations against the war in Iraq from 2003 in San Francisco, and a fictional story which depicts a woman losing her husband. I decided to make a short film which will tell a story of a journey which knows its end from its very beginning. Although demonstrations against the war were strong, focused, eloquent, and well organized, they did not change the course the U.S. government set up for the events to come.”-L.R.

Every Morning We Were Awakened; Gia Michael; 4.32; Digi
This work is part of a larger film entitled ‘DISINHERITED EARTH.’ this chapter is a reflection on notions of religion as motive and the construction of identity. The work is an investigation into the dichotomies of convention, ancestry, and cultural inheritance. The project blends factual and fabricated personal and collective histories to allow another layer of narrative emerge from the captured dialogue and poetry by the artist.

Yanqui Walker & The Optical Revolution; Kathryn Ramey; 33.00; 16Mm/Digi
This film explores a now-obscure American expansionist and military dictator, William Walker, who through military force and coercion became president of Nicaragua in 1856. The film blends found footage, documentary photography, ethnographic inquiry, and personal travelogue with experimental film techniques such as hand-processing, optical printing, and time-lapse to detour and derail the various approaches to history-making that have been applied to this story. Yanqui WALKER as a contemporary work of film art, not only tells us something about history and how it connects to current political, social and economic situations but also how art and poetry can be a means to subvert and transcend even the most oppressive of narratives.

Rice Relief; C+A Projects (Carolyn Radlo & Alanna Simone); 2:42 Digi
C + A Projects is Carolyn Radlo & Alanna Simone live in San Francisco and collaborate on projects which deal with social and political situations through the lens of their own particular experience, communicating through sparse text and evocative imagery. Rice Relief is a stop-motion animation rumination about food, rank, and privilege. http://thecarolynandalannashow.com

A Movie By Jen Proctor; Jennifer Proctor; 12:00; Digi
A loving remake of Bruce Conner’s seminal 1958 found footage film, “A MOVIE” uses appropriated material from YouTube and LiveLeak; and provides a parallel narrative that explores the changes in historical and visual icons from 1958 to 2010 – and those images that remain surprisingly, and delightfully, the same. It comments on the pervasiveness of footage available for appropriation in an online world, and the way disparate threads in the YouTube and LiveLeak databases can be assembled to create “a movie.”

Special Program at Anthology Film Archives: Wednesday June 15th 2011 at 7:15pm

Click to View the Anthology Schedule

Call & Response; Ellen Lake; 3.30; 16mm / cell phone/digi
Opal; Cara Marisa Deleon; 3.30; digi
Till There Was You; Baba Hillman; 7.30; super8/digi
Never Too Late; Wendy Weinberg; 7.40; digi
Orgasmatique, Dramatique, Horror; Melissa Bruno; 2.13; digi
Dinner For 4; Ariane Loze; 7.00; digi
Pricktic; Hilda Daniel; 0.58; digi
Segment: 38:07; Hilda Daniel; 0.38; digi
Honey Bed; Syni Pappa; 4.08; Super 8
Milling the Lights; Jelena Maksimovic; 15.50; digi

Call & Response; Ellen Lake; 3.30; 16mm / cell phone/digi
Vintage 16 mm film home movies from the late 1930s/early 40s combines with cell phone and digital media today to explore ideas about the evolution of technology, the relationship between past and present, and the perception of time and memory.

Opal; Cara Marisa Deleon; 3.30; digi
An experimental nursery rhyme explores gender and power.

Till There Was You; Baba Hillman; 7.30; super8/digi
Performers:Laura Diaz del Corral, Baba Hillman; Camera: Léna Rouxel, Fernando de Azevedo, Baba Hillman; Music: Columb Farrelly. I don’t know where my steps lead. But I am here through you, through my love for your eyes.

Never Too Late; Wendy Weinberg; 7.40; digi
Using images from vintage films and classic TV and replacing the soundtrack with contemporary dialogue, “Never Too Late” tells the story of two hotel maids who have lived together in San Francisco for 25 years. When the California courts grant same-sex couples the right to marry,

Stella and Rosie decide it’s time to tie the knot. But before they can hire a florist, Prop 8 is passed. Must they head east in search of equality?

Orgasmatique, Dramatique, Horror; Melissa Bruno; 2.13; digi
A performance art video that critiques the exploitation of the female face in popular body genre films (pornography, melodrama, horror) and the role women have been burdened with in cinematic history as the sole bearer of emotion.

Dinner For 4; Ariane Loze; 7.00; digi
MÔWN (Movies on my own)  is a series in which Loze plays with our reflex to interpret images and to associate them to create a coherent narrative. In these shorts, Loze plays all the parts, and she is also the director, the camerawoman, the scenarist and the editor. The edit constructs a relationship between 2 or more different characters and the architecture that surrounds them. By reducing the means to a minimum, one actress and a camera, the artifices of filmmaking become more visible and the spectator has to use his/her imagination to construct the story and to overcome the artificiality of this recomposed image of reality—Three women sitting around a dinner table, waiting.The atmosphere is tensed. The fourth one arrives, she will be the only one to eat, the others will observe her. Between these four women, a silent conflict develops and the gestures of each of them are judged by the others. Feelings of mistrust and anxiety grow. The outcome surprises them all.

Pricktic; Hilda Daniel; 0.58; digi
A nervous tic, a sinister twitch, a butterfly, beermat and desire edge inside a woolly slit of fluttering violence. In PrickTic, pressed seduction teeters and is dragged into a covert drama played out in non-verbal sound. The wrenching of audio clip and image from their original form into distressed violence is echoed in the narrative.

Segment: 38:07; Hilda Daniel; 0.38; digi
Experimental entomology, phonology-linguistics, power, abuse and sex in 38 seconds or less. In Segment, I have taken a small bit of archival footage (a children’s science film from the great Prelinger Archive online) and, reprocessing sound from aged film and record, exposed an overlooked narrative from the original film and restructured a new narrative thread which may have broader implications.

Honey Bed; Syni Pappa; 4.08; Super 8
Honey Bed is an intimate portrayal of femininity and the act of subversion in the post modern times of depression. The film was shot in one Super 8 film cartridge with no retakes.

Milling the Lights; Jelena Maksimovic; 15.50; digi
Lights, bodies, movements. Love story filmed by a broken web camera.

Lili White was interviewed by Kerrie Welsh, an experimental filmmaker whose work has been presented in galleries, festivals, and international conferences. The interview appeared in On-Verge, an online forum for arts and cultural dialogue developed by the CUE Art Foundation in collaboration with AICA USA.

View the interview online at this link, courtesy of the CUE Art Foundation: Lili White Interview, or read the interview below.

Another Experiment By Women: A Conversation with Lili White

Posted on On-Verge.org, June 10, 2011 by Kerrie Walsh

Still from MIRROR MOVES for PRIVATE EYES by Alice Cohen, Courtesy of the Artist

Lili White is an internationally exhibited experimental painter and filmmaker whose work has been described as “a magical act.” Known for pieces such as The Dreaming: A Sleepover Research Project at Shofuso – the Japanese garden in Philadelphia – where she slept overnight recording her dreams, she describes her own work as exploring power, repression, and the ramifications of inaction. She aspires to create a form which is like that of experiencing a dream.

Throughout her career White has curated alongside her artistic practice, and her current curatorial projects seem to be almost an extension of the explorations she undertakes in her artistic work. For the past year she has been programming the monthly Women’s Nights at Anthology Film Archives’ New Filmmakers Series, showing short work ranging from Diane Kitchen’s subtle and sublime Ecstatic Vessels to Alice Cohen’s playful cut-out animations as seen in Mirror Moves for Private Eyes. The work is diverse, abundant, sometimes imperfect, consistently thought-provoking, and occasionally mind-blowing. You aren’t likely to have seen it before, but you may want to see it again.

Last November, emerging out of a collaboration with Victoria Kereszi’s Eye-Am: Women Behind the Lens, White curated the first Another Experiment By Women Film Festival (AXWFF). She challenged participants to present their own vision of movie making and rethink what experimental means. As anyone who has been to one of the Anthology screenings lately can attest, it’s a project that’s growing into something quite magical indeed.

The next program takes place at Anthology Film Archives on June 15th and centers around themes of love and sex. Screenings at Anthology in July and September will lead up to the Another Experiment By Women Film Festival this October at Media Noche Gallery and November at Millennium Film Workshop.

Still from Ecstatic Vessels by Diane Kitchen, Courtesy of the Artist

KW: Tell me about the Another Experiment by Women Film Festival?

LW: I think we’re in an interesting time of change. Remember that quote about how no art can be truly democratic unless the materials are as cheap as a pencil and a piece of paper? So many people have a computer and probably an editing program: video is accessible. With the YouTube phenomenon we’re immersed in an age where anyone can use these tools to try to communicate. So this is a festival that’s experimental in nature and uses work made by women seeing what they can come up with as their own unique vision. How do I put that? I want people to be experimenting. I want to see something fresh, not necessarily some kind of form that they learned at school or somewhere else. I’m curious to see these things together: a new experimental form and a woman showing it to me.

KW: So what does experimental mean to you?

LW: Experimental means you don’t know how it’s going to come out when you first start to make it. And although I talked about the computer and video, we’re also accepting other media forms including film.

KW: Can you talk more about the idea of a unique women’s vision and how you contextualize that?

LW: Someone needs to see the work an artist makes. There needs to be an audience. This is New York, everything is here. Why not, since there isn’t anything like that here? Women may have different issues and concerns, want to be able to put that into some kind of artistic form, and AXWFF gives them their own space and time to have their work seen. That’s the starting level. It will go wherever they’re going to take it.

KW: There is sometimes an idea that we’re supposed to be past that, that it’s in some some way no longer needed or is even passé.

LW: The women who made it in the 1970’s are in the museums– but we need a new starting block for us, others.

KW: I wanted to ask you about that, because you used the term democratic…

LW: Maybe some see the world as just a high and low: there’s YouTube, there’s the museums, and there’s a lot of film festivals that use name players to draw people through the doors. Maybe that’s a marketing thing.

Still from Ecstatic Vessels by Diane Kitchen, Courtesy of the Artist

KW: So what makes Another Experiment By Women different?

LW: I want to show the best, the newest, and I’m not going to be concerned about how one person’s movie will look next to another’s movie. If we want to see it over and over again, that’s a measuring stick. That’s a different thing than having a theme curated around something like landscape, light, or gender. I want work that shows there’s a brain behind it.

KW: One of things that I was taken with when we were having our initial conversations was when you said you, “weren’t interested in promoting art celebrity.”

LW: I’m interested in people showing their own personal mind. The work needs to be strong. The fact that these are shorts gives exposure to a greater number of artists.

After the screenings at Anthology we’re going to a nearby inexpensive bar, White Rabbit, to see if this will grow into some kind of community: discuss the films— as a painter we’d critique our work: people talked about what worked what didn’t. At White Rabbit, supportive discussion can take place. Perhaps women will start helping each other— either making things or thinking about things in a different way.

KW: Tell me about the work, who is applying?

LW: I’m getting a lot of stuff from Europe and Asia— international filmmkers like Liliana Resnick from Croatia, and Italy’s Cinzia Sarto. We’ve screened work by Alysse Stepanian, Caroline Bernard, Cecilia Araneda, Muriel Montini.

KW: You said you weren’t interested in promoting art celebrities, but then the next thing you said was a lot of the stuff coming in from Europe is from art celebrities over there.

LW: The women I just mentioned are heavy hitters.

KW: Are you getting more internationally than from here?

LW: Maybe half are European. I’ve gotten a lot of from the states as well. We’ve screened people like Sasha Waters Freyer with You Can See The Sun In Late December that presents issues around maternity; and Noe Kidder with Paradise about the loss of her father. But I’d like to see even more from New York, since part of what I’m interested in is fostering a community– one right here that is in internationl dialogue.

KW: Are there themes or qualitative differences in what you’re getting from the States and from Europe?

LW: The European stuff may be a little more personal, but I’d have to think about it.

Still from Ecstatic Vessels by Diane Kitchen, Courtesy of the Artist

KW: You said you’re not interested in seeing what people learned in school. I wanted to follow up on that, because I know many people feel like you have to have gone to certain schools to make it in certain New York art scenes.

LW: I think a lot of things are programmed in our society. That game is one game, but can we make another one? Usually serious work dialogues with the past. That’s OK, but are there other people out there who want to make meaningful work and are willing to put it out there? AXWFF could be a place for them. If people support it, then there is a need for it. People have to be there investing their time, and their energy, and probably a little bit of their money, too. We will probably fundraise because the The Manhattan Community Arts Fund grant that I received to do this festival was less than what I requested.

KW: I like that you said, “willing to put it out there,” because it really is a risk everytime-

LW: Yeah, it is a risk!

KW: It sometimes feels like you should always already feel comfortable doing that if you’re making work as an artist, but every time you decide to really go for it and put it out there it can be scary.

LW: Yeah it is. And I don’t necessarily want things that are perfect. A mundane example is, “Oh my tripod, I should’ve used a tripod….” That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about having some kind of fresh view on things that you’re making, more than anything else. So let’s see if that can actually happen!?

KW: Your philosophy about the work has been very visible in the screenings I’ve seen: not all of it was perfect, but it all had a very strong voice. Some of it was absolutely mindblowing, while some of it made me wonder how a particular voice could develop under the right circumstances. I like that you’re starting with the work but also talking about making connections and forming community. It’s working in the right direction.

LW: Maybe it’s too idealistic?

KW: It’s the world–we have to invent it.