Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of October 25th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of October 25th

Home Truths: Films About Housing Rights, Displacement, And The Meaning of Home

Anthology Film Archives / online film series

ends October 31, 2020 / streaming / free-$10

Inspired by the recent COVID-19 induced housing crisis, this series "highlights a variety of films past and present that have dramatized the plight of those who wage a daily battle for safe and secure housing, that have unveiled the structural and economic forces that render that struggle so difficult, and that have chronicled the efforts of activists to make change." The lineup features a huge array of styles and filmmakers, including two from Nick Broomfield, Sidney Sokhona's Nationalité: Immigré (1975) and master of non-brevity, Frederick Wiseman with his 1997, 195 minute opus Public Housing. Streaming for free via Vimeo, thanks to Lux, The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000, Patrick Keiller) is one not to miss. The film takes the documentary scaffold (interviews, archival footage, B-roll) and layers a sense of fiction through an unidentified narrator (Tilda Swinton!) recording their covert project to explore the British housing predicament. The film moves through many neighborhoods and issues, a journey that manages to make one feel as if they are one with the curious speaker, observing habitats & cultures while quietly living among them.  

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Electric Lit Virtual Salon: Magical Feminism w/Elissa Washuta + Marie-Helene Bertino

Electric Lit / online editorial discussion via crowdcast

October 26, 2020 / 6pm ET / $10

Magic. I'm not sure what this has in store but I do tend to trust the Executive Director of Electric Lit Halimah Marcus who will be leading this discussion about magic's role in fiction literature as it pertains to subverting expectations, processing trauma and more. Elissa Washuta, member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, a nonfiction writer, an NEA fellow & Creative Capital Creative grantee and Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Parakeet (which, FYI, is on my to-read list!), and an O Henry & Pushcart Prize winner, will discuss "how magic works in practice and as a rhetorical device in fiction." Personally, I'm intrigued by this movement away from the term "magical realism" and into a different realm, one that, instead, seems to identify and uphold the realness in magic. 

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Trailermania

Greg Hamilton / facebook live screening

October 27, 2020/ 9:30pm CT / free

Deep from the basement of a house in Portland, Oregon, Greg Hamilton leads you on a tour of vintage horror, sci-fi and other strange & unusual 16mm film trailers. Greg is a cineaste, filmmaker (whose short film Thou Shall Not Tailgate introduced me to the wonders of Rev. Linville, a Pacific Northwest wacko with a heart of both diamonds & coal), a writer and so much more bringing you into his home to help you remember the smell of celluloid, the heat of the projector, and the communal audience experience of film lovers-- however remote we may be. As Greg points out on the FB invite, "Part entertainment, part cinema education, TRAILERMANIA is a must for movie fans and is full of rarities and old favorites." So pop your popcorn, turn out the lights and be bathed in the oddities and beauty of film trailers glowing from Greg's screen through your own. 

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Unorthodocs.

The Wexner Center for the Arts / online film festival 

October 25- 29, 2020 / streaming, consult schedule (some geoblocking) / sliding scale, donation suggested

Unorthodocs. is an annual series of creative non-fiction filmmaking brought to you by the Ohio-based Wexner Center for the Arts. This year, the lineup is available online (with some ticket limitations, check site for listings) and will also feature a conversation between each filmmaker and an equally as impressive member of the film community-- critics, filmmakers, film scholars etc. Karim Aïnouz's Nardjes A (2020), which screened at Berlin and Visions Du Reel, centers on a day in the life of an Algerian protestor, a conversation follows the screening between the director and filmmaker/cinematographer/bombastic dresser Kirsten Johnston (Dick Johnson Is Dead, 2020). Other films in the series include Cecilia Aldarondo's Landfall (2020), David Osit's Mayor (2020) and Ephraim Asili's The Inheritance (2020) (which I will finally get to see)! The sliding scale ticket price is a thoughtful gift-- support this Midwest beacon of culture if you can! 

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The University & The Prison

Pozen Family Center for Human Rights + Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, University of Chicago / zoom panel

October 30, 2020 / 12-1:30pm CT / free w/eventbrite registration

For work, I watch a lot of films and the prison industrial complex is a topic I constantly confront in the nonfiction universe. After years of watching these films, I continue to wonder: is anything improving? Are any of these films doing much beyond shining a spotlight or educating on the problem? This panel seems to wonder the same: is all of the scholarship coming out of universities on mass incarceration making any real change to the systems they are studying? This panel will look at the possibilities for change and the challenges that universities face in doing the work of dismantling this broken system. Speakers include Matt Epperson (Director, Smart Decareration Project) Gina Fedock (Asst. Prof. School of Social Service Administration), Michelle Jones (Scholar, Artist, Activist, PhD Student, NYU), Alis Kim (Director of Human Rights Practice, Pozen Center Human Rights Lab) and Reuben Miller (author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration).

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

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of October 18th

 Top Picks for Art Online Week of October 18th

Combahee Experimental: Black Women's Experimental Filmmaking: The Black Surreal

Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University / Zoom webinar

October 22, 2020 / 6pm ET / free w/registration

This event is part of a series that celebrates the contributions of Black women to contemporary visual culture, a series birthed from a 2018 Guggenheim conference, Loophole of Retreat, as part of Simone Leigh's Hugo Boss exhibition of the same name. On October 22, the curators of the series, Leigh (who was recently announced as representing the US at the next Venice Biennale) and Tina Campt (a Black feminist theorist of visual and contemporary art whose forthcoming book is titled The New Black Gaze) will be in conversation with filmmakers Nuotama Bodomo and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich following an online screening of a selection of their films. Films included in the lineup are Bodomo's critically acclaimed Afro-futurist, speculative docu-fiction dream Afronauts (2014) and Hunt-Ehrlich's surreal documentary Spit on the Broom (2019) about the history of the United Order of Tents, a secret society of African American Women founded in 1867. The amount of awe, wonder and brilliance emanating from this line-up of participants is beyond inspiring- don't miss this. 

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Karen Feldman: Angel on Your Shoulder: Representations of Modern Conscience

Arts + Design Thursdays, UC Berkeley/ Zoom webinar

October 22, 2020 / 12-1 PT / free w/registration

Arts + Design Thursdays at UC Berkeley is a public lecture series hosted online that features talks across disciplines, amplifying the work of the university's professor and other Bay Area organizations. This particular lecture stood out to me because I have asked myself this question on more than one occasion: Does Facebook have a conscience? Throughout human history the notion of conscience has floated in the collective conscious-- visually and narratively shape-shifting in an ever-evolving understanding through time. Prof. Karen Feldman, whose wide-ranging background focuses on the ways in which political power manifests in society, will "explore the rhetoric of conscience, and how it was conceptualized and visualized through the ages."

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Yes, there will be singing (2020) by Diana Thater 

David Zwirner / online exhibition

October 14-November 28, 2020 / 24hours a day / free

There are two things I don't think I love more in the world than Bertolt Brecht and whales. It's true. Which is why when this exhibition came on my radar I had to do a quick double-take. Diana Thater's online experience is a livestream that features a series of security cameras positioned in a 360degree circle in a space bathed in a shifting color spectrum. The cameras flit between feeds in a disorienting fashion as the sounds of "Whale 52," a real-life whale of mythic proportions whose unique song beams at 52 Hertz-- a frequency outside of the "normal" whale song range--, shiver through the space. Has he been deafened by sonar? Can the other whales perceive his sound? Is he floating lonely in the light-dappled ocean? Whale 52's rumblings play in contrast to the buoyant, high pitched whirs of the songs of other whales, he is alone and adrift like all of us currently in isolation yet we are all invisibly connected through moments like this exhibition. 

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

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of October 11th

 Top Picks for Art Online Week of October 11th

Process & Performance, Pamela Z

EMPAC/zoom discussion, examples + demonstration

Oct 15, 2020/ 6pm ET/ free

So I just went down a Pamela Z rabbit hole and am now a bit obsessed: this video is gorgeous & insane! Using a mix of software, gesture-controlled MIDI instruments & more, Pamela Z layers together musical phrases, performance, visuals with precision, beauty and even hints of humor. Watching this one video it felt like she became a sort of cyborg, enhancing the sonic space through movement-- like a theramin plus-- while singing with the heart of a very human person. When experimental music reaches the heights of Pamela Z's work one truly feels like they are living in a futuristic world, one where creativity and art are existing in a whole new universe full of endless, multi-displinary possibilities. Pamela Z is doing a residency at EMPAC (the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center@RPI), this talk will speak on the new work she is creating there and her visionary process as a whole. 

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The 28th Annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival

Online festival + performances + lectures via FB Live + Youtube

October 15-17, 2020/ free, some registration for limited events

The first time I read Tennessee Williams was in high school, The Glass Menagerie. When reading that play something hit me, something that felt familiar and tangible, much more human than the stale Shakespeare or the 20 millionth production of The Wiz that my school put on. There was some kind of stage direction for a screen to project the images of Blue Roses (OMG! David Lynch, my teenage brain exploded) on stage, an erasure of the four-walled space, an augmentation of what was possible, possibly my first introduction to performance art and straight line to my first love, cinema. When I saw this event come up on my feed one presentation on Saturday (October 17 from 2:15-3:15pm CT) reminded me of that sharp distant memory: Thomas Keith (William's editor for New Directions since 2002) will speak on the fest's featured play, Summer & Smoke, focusing on "Williams’ inherent and natural inclination toward experimental, visual, spatial, plastic and presentational aspects of theatre that defied and expanded the bounds of traditional realism, with some focus on early drafts of the play, which included elements of film"-- oh hell yes! 

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Postcolonial Film and the Archive: History, Theory, Practice

C21 Media Studies Research Collaboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, UWM Moving Image Society + UWM College of Letters and Science/ online symposium

October 16, 2020/12-4pm CT/ free w/registration

From the event page: "Bringing together scholars to examine media from across the globe, this event will explore the historical, cultural, and political value and use of colonial and ethnographic films in connection to cultural heritage, preservation, and appropriation. From reexamining the ways in which archives and their materials are mobilized to tell certain narratives and not others, and the complexity of preserving and researching these materials in varying contexts, to interrogating the ontological and indexical status of film as memory artifacts, this symposium will raise questions about cultural heritage, ownership, historiography, and gaps and exclusions in classical film history approaches to the study of 'postcolonial' film." The line up of presentations is overwhelming but the two that quickly stood out to me were films from Polish settlements in the Brazilian Wilderness in the 1930s and also a talk on the state's role in the preservation and/or destruction of archives using the largest collection of films in Ghana as a case study. The event will explore "the history, theory, and practice of postcolonial film and archives" from a broad array of visual pasts whose implications and frames are forever burnt into the present. 

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Mikio Sakabe

Tokyo Fashion Week/online fashion show

October 17, 2020/12am CT (3pm Tokyo?)/ free

Won't lie, I do not know much about the brand Mikio Sakabe, or Tokyo fashion week for that matter, but ever since glimpsing the label's collaborations with the footwear company grounds I've followed them on Instagram with a cult-like fervor. Their clothes have a delicate feel (think sheer, lacey, florals) but with a restricting edge (a tight buckle, a bounding tie-back, arms of a formidable length). The shoes though, the shoes! Baubles of round plastic, breathy looking knits, translucent rubber, streetwear ready sneakers (and sandals!?) that scream at me on the internet asking to transport me into some cloud-like headspace where I can float ethereally through the greys and chaos of a cityscape....ahhh...I am totally aware of the frivolity of fashion but, I tend to treat it like I do most art: dreaming is a needed escape, creativity is a form of resilience, the senses can define and change lives. Also: donate to your local food bank...it's all about balance.

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

Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of October 4th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of October 4th

Practice Lecture Series: Ephraim Asili

MFA Art Practice, SVA NYC/Zoom Webinar

October 6, 2020/12-2pm ET/ free w/registration

"That conversation about the chore wheel is truth," or something like that was what a colleague of mine said during a Zoom conversation when discussing Asili's latest film The Inheritance which recently dropped at TIFF and NYFF. Radical, communal living is a microcosm unlike any other, one that I have only witnessed from a safe distance living next door to a Food Not Bombs house whose members would come over to retrieve sneakers and bagels that ended up on our porch eave after their nightly meetings...I haven't seen the film but I have heard that it is a frank look at the dynamics that flourish in an intentional living space, a space filled with idealism and activism but also the chaos and interpersonal dynamics inherent in humanity. The piece is based on the director's own experience but also historical accounts of the West-Philly liberation group MOVE, a group known for trying to reconcile peace, love and anarchy to sometimes devastating results. This Webinar is hosted by the School of Visual Arts MFA Art Practice Program and will feature Asili speaking on his film and art-- don't miss!

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TIME (2020) by Garrett Bradley

The Momentary, Amazon Studios/ Online Screening & Zoom Q+A

October 7, 2020/6-8pm CT/ free w/registration

I don't know how to describe the film TIME as it fully speaks for itself. At its heart, it is about Fox Rich, a woman who was incarcerated after robbing a bank with her husband when pushed to their financial limits. Now free, Fox works tirelessly to free her husband who faces a 60 year sentence. Fox strives for a sense of normalcy, purpose, excellence and family while forced to acknowledge the devastating loss they face daily. Unguarded moments of frustration blend with scratchy, personal home videos shot over the years by Rich for her husband, placid images of a Southern lifestyle unfold in warm greys, voice-overs from Rich and her sons speak of what time and image can rend or birth--  growth, change and becoming push through the years tainted with a quiet void. It is a film about the prison industrial complex but, it is much more than that, it is a deeply felt portrait of a woman and her family collaborating with a filmmaker to tell their story with the reflection and complexity it deserves: this is the forefront of a new way to think about documentary film. This screening is (amazingly) free and will also feature a post-screening live Q+A with the director via Zoom. 

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Ask An Archivist Day

UCLA Film & Television Archive/ Instagram, Twitter + Facebook

October 7, 2020/10am-2pm PT/free 

Was there ever a moment where you wondered what the optimal storage situation for film reels is? Or what the best way to archive VHS home movies would be? Or if organic material or hand-painted film frames need to be stored differently? You haven't thought about these things? I can't be the only one who has regularly thought about these things! I feel like on an almost monthly basis I dream of some alternate life where I work in a darkened basement room repairing and preserving weird artifacts of the moving image's past...wait, do they work in darkened basements? What tools do they use? What is the optimal temperature for DCP storage? Well, on this magical day all of your (my?) archival questions can be asked via the UCLA Film & Television Archive's Ask An Archivist Day! Obviously, I was far too excited when I learned this was a thing (me=nerd), I hope you are too. 

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Conversations at the Edge: American Artist & Blue Life Seminar (2019)

School of the Art Institute of Chicago via Gene Siskel Film Center Virtual Cinema/Online Talk + Film Screening

October 8, 2020 talk, October 4-10, 2020 film/ 7-8:15pm CT/free, film free w/registration

I just finished watching American Artist's piece Blue Life Seminar via the Gene Siskel Film Center Virtual Cinema, the centerpiece of their 2019 exhibit I'M BLUE (IF I WAS I █████ WOULD DIE). The piece exists on a plane of digital life, wavering between fictions and facts, perceptions, shifting between the Dr. Manhattan (the Marvel superhero) and Christopher Dorner (a Black L.A. Police Officer who was driven to dire ends, including a FB Manifesto, after reporting excessive force by a fellow officer only to be fired). "Luckily I don't have to live everyday like most of you concerned that the misconduct you are a part of is going to be discovered, looking over your shoulder..." words that could come from either figure, both in a space thwarting control-- refusing to become control-- expounded on in a space controlled and questioned by this visionary contemporary artist, whose work often "examines Black labor and visibility within networked life." The Conversations at the Edge lecture series at the SAIC is one that is so expertly curated it seems to exist steps into the future, luckily you can experience American Artist's futuristic brilliance via this online offering from the esteemed series. 

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