Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of August 23rd

 Top Picks for Art Online Week of August 23rd

Note: I'm disappointed now that museums are beginning to open in-person that online content is already starting to wane. I was excited to see so many big-name art institutions move online, it felt like a physical barrier had been broken, a small step towards dissolving some of the inherent elitist boundaries that plague access to the art/film worlds (well, for those with access to internet. And other technology.-- side-eye world, side. eye.). Sharing is caring. And also the dissolution of oppressive hierarchies that create structural inequality. :)

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Cinema-19 commissioned by Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler

Anthology Film Archives, co-presented w/Zeitgeist Theatre and Lounge & Northwest Film Forum/Online Screening

August 19-Ends Fall 2020/Free

A series of 190 second short films from 14 filmmakers in response to Covid-19. The lineup captures the early ache of the pandemic with a mix of claustrophobia, clawing anxiety, trippy night terrors, windows & screens frames to the world, the collective turning inward followed by an outward expression of pain and protest. Each vision is highly individual but shares in the creepy commonality of an unprecedented real-life horror film invisibly unfolding in the world outside. The films are presented in one long stream with no credits separating them adding to the sense of endless, existential dread as days bleed into one another, the calendar a formless blob as lives are flattened out into a strange, forced simulacra-- great curation!

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From the Vaults 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Collection of online streams

New Films added each month of 2020/Free

To celebrate the Metropolitan Museum of Arts' 50th Anniversary they have been reaching into their video vaults each month to present a handful of work, a huge range of work from process videos, to archival memories, to full-on video art pieces. One of this week's additions is Shorelines (1977) by Al Jarnow, an experimental, animated trip to the sea in which shells and rocks and sand and seaweed flicker onscreen, dancing in a frame-by-frame ballet that makes me long for the Summer days of dense wet sand under my feet, when my only fear was of sunburn and riptide (not maskless humans shoulder to shoulder spreading droplets). While exploring this trove of films I got swept up in a piano player speaking on his creation of a score for a silent film, a film from 1972 that documented educational experimental-happening-performance-art visits from area children and also a film from 1926 titled The Pottery Maker, a beautiful, delicate black and white journey around the potter's wheel. Lots of treasures! 

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David Vaughan's The Dance Historian Is In: with host Joanna Dee Das

New York Public Library, Jerome Roberts Dance Division/ Online Zoom screening and talk

August 26, 2020/1-2pm ET/Free  w/Eventbrite Registration

David Vaughn was the Merce Cunningham Dance Company archivist who, from 2012-2017, held monthly screenings of his favorite dance films from the collection of the New York Public Library. Vaughan passed away in Fall 2017 but the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the library continues to hold screenings in his honor hosted by an array of special guests. This month Joanna Dee Das will screen and speak on the dance work of Katherine Dunham, the subject of her award-winning book Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (2017). Dunham's life spanned careers and interests, each overlapping one another as a social pioneer, anthropologist, author, educator and dancer. Her outspoken activism spanned her entire adult life: during the tours of her dance company in the 40s and 50s she would often refuse to perform in places that practiced segregation, at the age of 83, in 1992, she went on a 47-day hunger strike to protest the treatment of the Haitian boat refugees, a culture whose Vodun dance she studied extensively. I think I need to read this book.

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Quest (2017) by Jonathan Olshefski

POV co-presented by Black Public Media/Online Streaming

Limited Run/Free 

Over eight years filmmaker Jonathan Olshefski embedded himself in the lives of the Rainey family in North Philadephia. Falling into scenes without notice, Olshefski's camera covers the most intimate moments of their lives, vivid scenes that span all kinds of social and political issues but also show a tender portrait of an all-American family, their conflict and pain but, even more importantly, their love. With brilliant editing from Lindsay Utz, this film is able to take spans of time and weave them into the type of film where one just feels like they are dropped into the lives of its subjects, dipping in and out of the mundane and the life-altering: an overarching sense of universal inhaling and exhaling. It's unclear how long this film will continue to stream online but it is one worth checking out, one that perfectly echoes a time, place and people through respectful, poignant filmmaking. 

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Hearts in Isolation by Various Artists
Studio Museum of Harlem, Expanding /Online Exhibition
Ongoing/Free

Yes, teenagers are all image-makers now. But, what sets this exhibition apart from Instagram and TikTok is the intention. This exhibition of high school and GED photographers is part of the Studio Museum of Harlem's Expanding the Walls program that is about "yearning and reaching to a new moment." It sees past the immediate present and focuses more on the connectivity inherent in image-making, the shared experience of exhibition, the world as it exists on two sides of the lens, the long tradition of photography-- technique and history. The program is deeply rooted in the archives of Harlem Renaissance photographer James VanDerZee whose work acted as a document of early 20th Century Harlem but also as a collaborative expression of cultural and personal identities. The end result of the Expanding the Walls program culminates in a group show, this year being presented online with the theme Hearts in Isolation. Seeing art that thinks twice before snapping with an understanding that images exist beyond today's (this hour's? minute's) feed, imbues these images with a sense of hope and pause, a future beyond the current competing crises and the 24-hr digital image cycle.

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com