PROGRAM – TRT: 70 minutes
001 | Stan’s Salon | Jon Behrens | 3:00 | 16mm to digital | color | 1997 |
Synopsis: I was in Boulder Col. on holiday when I attended one of Stan Brakhage’s film salons that he hosted. I saw some very incredible images that night and got to meet the grand master himself. I was so inspired by what I saw and the people that I met that the moment that I returned home to Seattle I made this film. My first fully hand painted motion picture, and the techniques that I used in this film were the beginning of an entirely new phase of my filmmaking and I hope to master this technique some day.
Jon Behrens (US, 1964-2022) was a prolific experimental filmmaker and composer, based in Seattle, WA, who created about 100 films over the course of 40 years. His work screened internationally; around Seattle, he was known for his punk-inflected screenings at small pubs and offbeat venues. Wanting to help the filmmakers in his community (broadly defined), Jon founded Interbay Cinema Society (interbaycinemasociety.org) in 2016, giving grants to filmmakers to have their work digitized (the ICS/Lightpress Grants). In 2018, he and Caryn Cline founded the Engauge Experimental Film Festival, which is still running.
002 | Liquid is Light | Kalpana Subramanian | 4:00 | Super 8mm to digital | b + w | 2016 |
Synopsis: Elemental gazing and cinematic dissolution of a ‘Brakagian landscape.’ Countering counter cinema through resistance of vision. The title ‘liquid is light’ references a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, in a correspondence between Stan Brakhage and Guy Davenport. Shot on Super 8, this film primarily uses in-camera editing and was filmed at Boulder Creek in Colorado.
Kalpana Subramania (US) is an artist and filmmaker whose work investigates film and media through embodied and transcultural perspectives.This film is part of her series Light Mediated, which was in part a response to avant-garde visual aesthetics of light and time. She has a PhD from the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo and is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder.
003 | Late December, East of the Sierras | Bill Basquin | 21:00 | 16mm to digital | color | 2015 |
Synopsis: I shot this silent, in-camera edit a little east of the Sierras in Late December over the course of a couple of sunrises and a sunset. The film is languid, using landscape cinematography to evoke mood. Late December, East of the Sierras is presented with a live musical score.
Bill Basquin (US) has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York; Documenta in Kassel, Germany; and the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
004 | Shedding | Vicky Smith | 4:19 | 16mm to digital | b + w | 2024 |
Synopsis: Multiple passes of hand processed 16mm film, with some flash frames. A performance for the Bolex camera in which dimensions of stasis and movement are physically enacted by filming at varying frame rates. A still figure, saturated with light, appears to be highly overexposed. As layers of the image dislodge it becomes apparent that the exposure is correct, and that the brightness is caused through multiple superimpositions.
Vicky Smith (UK) is an artist, filmmaker, and academic who has worked in experimental animation and 16mm film for 30 years and has screened work internationally in galleries and at festivals.Vicky was part of the London Film Makers Co-op, has a PhD in experimental film, is co-founder of artist collective Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF) in Bristol and lectures at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.
005 | Herbaria x Pelicula: Field Portfolio | Derek Jenkins | 11:00 | 16mm to digital | color & b + w | 2021 |
Synopsis: This “Field Portfolio” is a single channel version of the multichannel installation “Herbaria × pelicula.” A consideration of collection as both archive and act, “Herbaria × pelicula” examines the work that takes place at the HAM Herbarium of Royal Botanical Gardens (Canada), located in Burlington ON along the edges of Cootes Paradise wetland, traditional territory of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee peoples. The herbarium collection, which houses over 60,000 holdings, comprises specimens from around the world but is made up primarily of local vascular plant types gathered by the scientific community and educated hobbyists. Combining documentary footage of the herbarium space, code-generated database animations of digitized specimen sheets, and images of plantlife processed in plant material, the film work positions the specific labour of botanical gathering and collection as an image-making practice in addition to a mode of knowledge production.
Derek Jenkins (Canada/United States) is a motion picture photographer born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1980. His practice is handmade, personal, and documentary, with an interest in labour, ecology, and technology—specifically the reciprocal relationships between tools, materials, and ways of knowing. His films have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries, including DocLisboa, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, McMaster Museum of Art, Antimatter Film Festival, the8fest, FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter, Media City Film Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, non-syntax Experimental Image Festival, Microscope Gallery, and Prismatic Ground, among many others. Previously a technician at Niagara Custom Lab, he is Executive Director of Hamilton Artists Inc. and board chair at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. He lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario.
006 | Tobacco Barn Light Studies | Rocío Mesa | 2:00 | 16mm to digital | b + w | 2019 |
Synopsis: The tobacco plant was introduced to Granada (Southern Spain) in 1923. It became a monoculture in the region until the end of the century. When the tobacco production stopped being profitable, the farmers switched to new crops like wheat, corn or asparagus. However, the lands of Granada are still replete with tobacco barns: large empty houses where the leaves used to be hung to dry. They inhabit the landscape like architectural ghosts.
Rocío Mesa (Spain) is a Spanish filmmaker, programmer and producer based in California. She is the director of “LA OLA – Independent Films from Spain”, an organization focused on the promotion of the Avant-guard Spanish cinema in North America, and a freelance programmer for festivals such as the LA Film Festival.
007 | Monosabishii | Wenhua Shi | 4:20 | 16mm dual projection to digital | color | 2023 |
Synopsis: A visual poem was composed, when no one is at home.
Wenhua Shi (US) pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Hamburg, European Media Art Festival, EXIS, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Crossroads, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. He is the founder and one of curators of RPM Fest.
008 | Bosco | Lucie Leszes + Stefano Canapa | 8:00 | 16mm to digital | b + w | 2023 |
Synopsis: Three filmmakers bring back images of the forest, they are reworked and destructured with the means of the photochemical laboratory. “Bosco” is a visual breakthrough punctuated by a contrasted and hypnotic black and white.
Lucie Leszez (France) studied film at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and furthered her exploration of the link between art and language at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She is a member of the L’Abominable laboratory and an active contributor to the Revue Documentaires. Her work moves between experimental short films and 16mm performance. She also coordinates workshops of cinematographic practice in analog formats.
Stefano Canapa (Italy) holds a Master’s degree in History and Technique of Cinema. He has been making films since the late 90s. He was a member of the Groupe Zur, a collective of artists from different backgrounds who work at the crossroads of the visual arts, theatre, music and film. For over twenty years he was part of the film-makers‘ collective in charge of the artists’ film laboratory L’Abominable, making shorts and features films, documentary and experimental, as well as performances and installations with musicians from the field of experimental music.
009 | And By The Night | Anna Kipervaser | 10:00 | 16mm to digital | color | 2017 |
Synopsis: After a period of no revelations, Surah al-Duha was revealed to Prophet Muhammad, stating that God had neither forsaken nor forgotten him. And to be patient. The film is also a response to my abortion.
Anna Kipervaser (US) is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism, and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and digital video. Her work has screened at festivals internationally; her films also screen in classrooms, galleries, microcinemas, basements, and schoolhouses! Her films are distributed by CFMDC, Alchemiya, and Canyon Cinema. She is also a painter, printmaker, educator, curator of exhibitions, programmer of screenings.
010 | Puedo Ver Todo Menos Mis Ojos/I Can See Everything But My Eyes | 2:00 | Super 8mm to digital | b + w | 2019 |
Synopsis: Inspired by the mythological creature Ouroubouros, this visual experiment attempts to use temporality to recreate the form of a circle through the use of moving lines.
Leandro Varela (Argentina) is an archivist and filmmaker. Focusing on abstract animation and audiovisual production using analog formats, he employs experimental animation techniques to create short films and videos which cover themes related to the history of film formats and of non-commercial film genres. He is currently based in Buenos Aires, where he works as an archivist at the Buenos Aires Film Museum.
Caryn Cline (US, curator) is a filmmaker and educator originally from the Missouri Ozarks. She is the ED of Interbay Cinema Society and the curator of the Engauge Experimental Film Festival.
Lori Goldston (US, composer + cellist) Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography. Read more at lorigoldston.com.
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