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Speculative Archive + Trevor Paglen : : |
: Ici et Ailleurs |
Chris Marker :: : |
: : Nancy Andrews |
Lynne Sachs : : |
: : Akram Zaatari |
Fenrando Solanas + Octavio Getino ::: |
: Andy Warhol |
In recent years, the CIA has been using unmarked civilian airplanes to kidnap and transport suspected terrorists to countries like Syria, Egypt, and Romania where they can be tortured outside of the official US military and prison system. In his lecture-based piece, N4467S: Tracking the CIA's "Torture Planes" Trevor Paglen uses diagrams, photographs, and other documents, to navigate the fog of misinformation surrounding one of these planes—visiting the street addresses of front companies, observing airfields, and comparing the many fake signatures attributed to its owner.
The Speculative Archive's new videos stem from their time living in Syria over the past year and a half. Not a Matter of if but When features Rami Farah, a young Syrian performer, addressing the camera to speak to, with, or about those who govern, about being governed, and about the governing situation. They will also being showing the work in progress We Don’t Like it as it is but We Don’t Know What We Want it to Be, which looks at the way in which the concepts of "imminent threat" and "preemption" are used by the Asad regime in Syria to control the population. The piece uses as its framework a large unfinished shopping center in central Damascus, about which a Syrian architect has said, "within this building you will find the story of the failed state of modern Syria."
—ARTISTS IN ATTENDANCE—
September 16 + 17
N4467S: Tracking the CIA's "Torture Planes" [2005, lecture, 45 min]
Not a Matter of if But When [2006, DV, color, sound, 15 min]
We Don’t Like it as it is but We Don’t Know What We Want it to Be
[2006, DV, color, sound, 15 min (work-in-progress)]
Cinematic essayist and audio-visual poet Chris Marker has been making and collaborating on work for over fifty years, including such classics as Letters from Siberia, Cuba Si!, La Jetée, and Sans Soleil. In the 1960s and 1970s he was actively involved with SLON, a filmmaking collective dedicated to activist production. Marker reemerged to make films under his own name again in 1977 with Le Fond de l’air est Rouge [A Grin Without A Cat]. Examining the International Left in the decade following 1967, Marker describes this film as "Scenes of the third World War 1967-1977." Using the war in Vietnam as its starting point, the film goes on to look at conflicts between the people and the state throughout Europe, Asia, & South America; Paris in May of 1968; and "those Cheshire cats known as politicians, who cannot explain why what was in the air never quite materialized on the ground."—Pacific Film Archives
September 26 + 27
Le Fond de l’air est Rouge [A Grin Without a Cat]
by Chris Marker [1977, 35mm, color, sound, 180 min]
Cinema Project is delighted to have Lynne Sachs in Portland for our Women's Perspective in Film series. She has been making films for over twenty years, exploring the intricate relationship between personal memories and broader, historical experiences. Lynne Sachs' two night presentation I am Not A War Photographer explores her decade long artistic immersion in the cultural effects of war. As a filmmaker Sachs has begun her investigations in places torn by conflict and war, past and present. She uses her own subjective narrative, whether through diary excerpts, letters to a friend, or essayist voiceover and combines abstract and reality based imagery to push the boundaries of how we view these stories/histories. On the first evening Sachs will present Vietnam and war as history, screening her film Which Way Is East along with excerpts of another film Investigation of a Flame. On the second evening we will move to the contemporary experience focused on the Balkan’s and Middle East with her film States of UnBelonging and her web-based collaboration www.house-of-drafts.org.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
October 10
Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam [1994, 16mm, color, sound, 33 min]
Investigation of a Flame (excerpts) [2001, 16mm, color, sound, 45 min]
October 11
States of UnBelonging [2005, DV, color, sound, 63 min]
www.house-of-drafts.org with Jeanne Finley [2001, website project]
First released in 1968, it came to represent one of the most articulate voices of the western world's first supra-national revolution: the radical student, worker, and civil rights movements in Europe and the Americas which were then spilling over local and national borders with lighting speed. La Hora de los Hornas (The Hour of the Furnaces) defined itself as the first embodiment of a "Third Cinema"—a radical cinema in which group production and the politics of distribution and presentation (the film was designed to be stopped and discussed as it was being projected) took precedence over mere aesthetic concerns. If, thirty years later, it bears witness to a bygone era of utopian radicalism, it remains a central cinematic example of the marriage of aesthetics and politics at the core of avant-garde art. Part III, Violence and Liberation, considers the role and meaning of violence in political struggle, presenting an array of newsreel material, interviews, songs, poems and extracts from films by various filmmakers including Joris Ivens.
October 24
Part I :Neo-Colonialism and Violence [1967, 16mm, b&w, sound, 95 min]
October 25
Part III: Violence and Liberation [1967, 16mm, b&w, sound, 45 min]
+ Guest Speaker TBA
Jean-Luc Godard has been an innovative force in film for over 50 years. Most well known for his narrative films that helped develope the French New Wave, Godard has never stopped pushing the boundaries of film, video, and media. In the late 60s and early 70s Godard began working as part of the Dziga Vertov Group with Jean-Pierre Gorin and others making what are considered some of the first agit-prop films. The group was commissioned in 1970 by Palestine to create a film about a Palestinian family titled Until Victory; but after their defeat in the Six Day War, the project was dropped.
Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) is a collaboration between Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville—expanded from the original idea to encompass both a French and a Palestinian family—which delves into the cultural differences of these two places while exploring how differently they are viewed and captured by the media. Using layered film and video, fragments from television, photographs, literature, and projected film, this piece begs us, as viewers, to question how we are seeing.
November 7 + 8
Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) [1974, 16mm, 55m, sound, color]
Nancy Andrews—animator, performer, and professor—has been making 16mm films for ten years. Her unique ability to combine live action, puppetry, and various forms of drawn animation, inspired by early film and vaudville, is highlighted in her recently completed Ima Plume Trilogy (Monkey’s and Lumps, The Dreamless Sleep, and The Haunted Camera) . Ima Plume, chalk talk specialist and public illustrator, is the central character in these part fiction/part documentary films which traverse from historic figures, monkeys, globsters, the human relationship to the unknown and unseen, to the investigation of her own death. Nancy Andrews will also screen three early animation shorts by pioneers Emil Cohl, J. Stuart Blackton, and Max Fleischer.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
November 19
Monkeys and Lumps [2003, 16mm, b&w, sound, 38 min]
The Dreamless Sleep [2004, 16mm, b&w, sound, 30 min]
November 20
The Haunted Camera [2005, 16mm, b&w, sound, 31 min]
Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by J. Stuart Blackton [1906, 16mm, 3 min]
Fantasmagoria by Emil Cohl [1909, 16mm, b&w, silent, 1 min]
The Ouija Board by Max Fleischer [1920, 16mm, b&w silent, 9 min]
Lebanese video artist and curator Akram Zaatari has created more than 30 videos and installations, and is one of the founding members of the Arab Image Foundation—a Beirut-based organization that aims to promote photography in the Middle East and North Africa by locating, collecting, and preserving the region's photographic heritage. With that, much of Akram's video work is centered on examining the role of photographic representation. Through collecting and archiving images from his country, Akram focuses on historical issues relating to the Lebanese Civil Wars, resistance to and mediation of these conflicts, and male sexuality. The first night of this program features early and recent works encompassing all these points: In This House follows Akram's quest to uncover a buried letter from the Lebanese resistance in a village in southern Lebanon; Red Chewing Gum is a short love poem about the end of a relationship, a changing neighborhood in Beirut, and capturing images. Akram's recent feature length documentary This Day uses as its starting point archival images, from portraits of Bedouins in the desert to war era Beirut, to ruminate on the role of the photograph's ability to convey truth.
—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—
November 30
Red Chewing Gum [2000, video, color, sound, 10 min]
Crazy of You [1997, video, color, sound, 26 min]
In This House [2005, video, color, sound, 30 min]
December 2
This Day [2003, video, color, sound, 86 min]
Though clearly established as one of the most recognized and important figures in 20th century art, Andy Warhol's enormous body of film work remains largely unrecognized and unseen. While many have heard about some of his more notorious works like Empire or Sleep, the most commonly seen works attributed to Warhol are actually the films of Paul Morrisey, for which Warhol only contributed his name. Since shortly after his death in 1987, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum have taken on a tremendous effort to catalogue, restore, and preserve Warhol's immense film legacy. The 1965 double projection piece Outer and Inner Space is a 33 minute film consisting of two reels, projected side by side, simultaneously. On both screens is Warhol regular Edie Sedgewick sitting in front of a television watching a tape of herself. Both on the monitor and on the screen, Edie is having a conversation with an unseen person outside of the frame. the effect of which is that we see a total of four Edie's sometimes talking individually and sometimes all at once. Bill Horrigan, curator at the Wexner Center, has said that this film "has virtually all the themes of Warhol's work in one place": echoing the repetitive and serial elements from his paintings, with his overarching interest in portraiture and celebrity. The film will be followed by a reel of ten of Warhol's Screen Tests featuring Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, and John Cale.
December 12 + 13
Outer and Inner Space [1965, 16mm, b&w, sound, 33 min]
Screen Tests (Reel No.18) [1964-66, 16mm, b&w, silent, 40 min]