entering and exiting in peace, part 2 of 4: Home-Duty

Saturday, December 11, 2021 12:30pm
Co-presented with Maysles Documentary Center (ticket info coming soon!)

Programmed by L u m i a
With artists Alison Nguyen, Saul Levine, Frankie Symonds & Devin Utah in person

part 2: Home-Duty

PROGRAM 4

Work (1994) by Pelle Lowe, 21’, Digital
End of Story (2019) by Frankie Symonds, 13’, Digital
On Another Note (1997/2019) by Saul Levine, 5’, Digital
EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY (2020) by Alison Nguyen, 6’, Digital,
ANDRA8: MY FAVORITE SOFTWARE IS BEING HERE (2020) by Alison Nguyen, 20’, Digital
[REDACTED] by [REDACTED]

Light Lick: Amen (1999/2017) by Saul Levine, 4’, 16mm
A Knowledge They Cannot Lose (1989) by Nina Fonoroff, 17’, Super-8
Winter Beyond Winter (2015) by Jonathan Schwartz, 11’, 16mm
Readymades In Hades (1986) by Caroline Avery, 5’, 16mm
Ancient Parts/Foreign Parts (1979) by Marjorie Keller, 6’, Digital
The Answering Furrow (1985) by Marjorie Keller, 27’, Digital
Is As Is (1991) by Saul Levine, 3’, Super-8
Crescent (1993) by Saul Levine, 4’, Super-8

Invocation (1982) by Amy Halpern, 2’, 16mm
Hoarders Without Borders 1.0 (2018) by Jodie Mack, 5’, 16mm
The Living Rock (1989) by Caroline Avery, 10’, 16mm
Objection (1974) by Marjorie Keller, 18’, Digital
A New England Document (2020) by Che Applewhaite, 16’, Digital
Smoke (1995) by Pelle Lowe, 26’, 16mm

Snow Movies (1983) by Caroline Avery, 8’, 16mm
[REDACTED] (1985) by [REDACTED], 3’, Super-8
Run (1994) by Luther Price, 13’, Super-8
Snow (2010) by Tara Merenda Nelson, 6’, Digital
The Abandoned Swimming Pool (2021) by Frankie Symonds & Devin Utah, 16’, Digital
Falling Notes Unleaving (2013) by Saul Levine, 13’, 16mm
Light Licks: Pardes: Counting Flowers (2018) by Saul Levine, 13’, 16mm
Photo Note (2018) by Saul Levine, 1’, 16mm
Fourth of July (1988) by Caroline Avery, 2’, 16mm

TRT: 294+ mins (Not Including Intermissions)

Work (1994) & Smoke (1995)

Pelle Lowe

In 1998, Pelle Lowe was named one of the top ten experimental filmmakers in the United States, when her films were screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of a retrospective exhibition of 8mm Moviemakers. She is currently Visiting Professor of Film and Performance at the San Francisco Art Institute. She taught film and performance at The Massachusetts College of Art from 1990-1997. Her films include Smoke and Bottom Line (1995), Work (1994), Earthly Possessions (1992), Chintz (1990) and Nor (1987), among others. (Text Courtesy of ASU)

End of Story (2019) & The Abandoned Swimming Pool (2021)

End of Story: Part introspective free-fall, part homage to the filmmakers who nurtured me, this movie uses several series created in the last two years as material to consider the powers of context, order, and sensory overload in considering a story.

"The Abandoned Swimming Pool" is a synthesis of self-identification, personal narrative, and transfiguration. A deep interest in autonomy as well as community informs the strange balance of private and public in the film.

Frankie Symonds

Frankie Symonds is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator from and based in the Boston area. Their work seeks to deconstruct and scrutinize the traditional tools of time-based media: fiction, nonfiction, narrative, montage, suspension of disbelief; all in the context of a digital “post-truth, fake news” society and living as a queer person in it. In 2018, Frankie’s film THE GREEN WARDROBE won best experimental film at the Wicked Queer Film Festival in Boston, and went on to be featured at Cinema Of Gender Transgression at Anthology Film Archives later that year. Their work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe at venues and festivals including MFA Boston, ICA Boston, Anthology Film Archives, MassArt Film Society, Dikeou Collection Denver, Outsider Fest Texas and Pantalla Fantasma in Spain. They recently finished producing a 20-episode season of their first cable access series, Queer Cats, which was highlighted at their first solo screening at Cinema of Gender Transgression in New York Winter of 2019.

Shorts by saul levine

Saul Levine

“Saul Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America. With about 35 years of consistent production behind him, and no signs of fatigue, he can show us the shape of a life passionately and uncompromisingly devoted to filmmaking. His works are high-energy messages of friendship, records of sexual love and political activism, radiated by humor, prophetic anger, loneliness and even though rarely, representing repose. His incessant, chaotic outpouring of political energy seems less geared to a naïve notion of bettering the world than to a perpetual pressure to keep it from getting worse.” — P. Adams Sitney.

EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY (2020) & ANDRA8: MY FAVORITE SOFTWARE IS BEING HERE (2020)

A body of work centering on a computer-generated woman based on the artist’s physicality. The project spans video, installation, sculpture, and interactive online performances. Andra8 is a simulacral subaltern created by an algorithm and raised by the Internet in isolation in a virtual void. From the apartment where she has been ‘placed’ Andra8 works as a digital laborer, surviving off the data from her various ‘freemium’ jobs as a virtual assistant, a data janitor, a life coach, an aspiring influencer, and content creator.

‘every dog has its day’ brings together consumer-produced media dating from early Camcorder footage to smart phone videos, to present-day Vlogger uploads and web-cam streams. In a frenetic montage the piece explores internet vernacular, mediated presence, and the inherent manipulation in image production and consumption loops. This work extends the artist’s interest from mass media into the more specified role of the prosumer amidst society’s changing relationship to images.

Alison Nguyen

Alison Nguyen is a New York-based artist whose work spans video, installation, performance, and new media. Her screenings include: e-flux, Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Oberhausen, CPH:DOX, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Crossroads presented by SF MoMA/SF Cinemateque, Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, True/False Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, and Microscope Gallery. Her work has been exhibited at The International Studio & Curatorial Program, AC Gallery Beijing, The Dowse Art Museum, Hartnett Gallery, La Kaje, and The University of Oklahoma, Contemporary Art and Digital Fair, Miami, among others.

Nguyen graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Literary Arts. She currently lives and works in Harlem where she is a MFA candidate in Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts.

A Knowledge They Cannot Lose (1989)

The film concerns the death of my father and the ways in which I was partially able to come to terms with his loss. It is largely about my effort to construct, through memory, an impression of how his life influenced mine and the lives of other people. There is footage of my father taken over the years, images of his handwriting in the form of his journals and letters I'd received from him, scenes of myself reading from his journals and footage shot from television. The soundtrack consists of diverse material: audiotapes that were recorded in my family when I was growing up, testimonials of people who had grown close to him in the last years of his life, Yiddish folk songs. I was obliged to search for and select traces of my father's life from fragmentary evidence, never able to assemble a complete "portrait."  

Nina Fonoroff

An independent filmmaker since 1980, Fonoroff holds a B.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her experimental films have been screened at numerous showcases, festivals, and museums in the US, Canada and Europe. Her 1989 film, A Knowledge They Cannot Lose, was shown on public television and on the Learning Channel. Her 1994 film, The Accursed Mazurka, won Jurors' Choice Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival and an Honorable Mention at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

She has received production grants from the Jerome Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1998-1999. Since 1999, Fonoroff have taught film and video making and film history and theory at the University of New Mexico, where she is currently Associate Professor.

Winter beyond winter (2015)

"Winter Beyond Winter (2016) confirms his gift for lyrically transposing what’s close at hand, in this case drawing a reverie of fatherhood from the short, sharp days of New England winter. The camera moves from laden trees to dazzled earth while on the soundtrack a boy reads from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. How strange it is to hear this text in the child’s slightly bored voice, innocent of the narration’s buried heartbreak. From here we follow an older man carrying skates and a boom mic into the woods. He turns a few elegant arcs around a small pond, the camera watching from the side before shaking off its melancholy and taking to the ice. One skater holds the image, the other the sound; the shot is their union. As Martin Buber wrote, 'All real living is meeting.'" - Max Goldberg

Jonathan Schwartz

Jonathan Schwartz (1973-2018) was a filmmaker, teacher, and source of inspiration for all his friends and students. Jonathan incorporated found and collected materials in many of his films, and simultaneously developed his unique 16mm vision through intimate exchanges with his subjects, handheld gestures, in-camera superimpositions, and a profound attention to the transient qualities of the world around us. Whether in his short collage films or works shot in his home, on his many walks, or during cinematic journeys to Israel, India, Turkey, or Iceland, his work simultaneously embodies a devotion to the ephemerality of external worlds and a gestural responsiveness to evanescent internal states. Often incorporating aurally textured poetic readings, and other times eschewing all words, Jonathan's films both lacerate and console as we confront his unique cinematic expression of sorrow, disquiet, and exultation. (Text Courtesy of Canyon Cinema)

Short films by Caroline Avery

Photographed in East Sommerville, MA. An empty lot piled with garbage and remnants of the past lives of its nearby residents cut in with the brave laundry of a preset set of inhabitants next door, the children of whom roam through this claustrophobic making their own private sense of it all. (Courtesy of Light Cone)

CAROLINE AVERY

Seeing's there's no point of reference that does not break down when looked fully in the face, it's preferable to consider them (points of reference) as singular events in a chain of same seen most clearly when seen from the corner of the eye as part of the larger construct that is a person's "Life". Kind of like the blurry forms in the subway cars passing by in the opposite direction in a tunnel. (Don't stare at this metaphor too long or you may go blind)... Insomuch there is no way to bio anyone without having the foolish thing break down when the head is turned to face it head on. How liberating! (Courtesy of Light Cone)

Short films by Marjorie Keller

The Answering Furrow (1985) Owing to Virgil's Georgics. With assistance from Hollis Melton and Helene Kaplan. Music: Charles Ives, "Sonata for Violin and Piano #4 (Children's Day at the Camp Meeting)" and "Ambrosian Chant (Capella Musicale del Duomo di Milano)." Filmed in Yorktown Heights, New York; St. Remy en Provence, France; Mantua, Rome and Brindisi, Italy; and in Arcadia and the island of Kea in Greece. Georgic I – The annual produce first seen in spring – The furrowed earth ready for planting - The distribution, support and protection of young plants – The implements of the garden. Georgic II – The life of Virgil is recapitulated in summer, with a digression on the sacred – The sheep of Arcadia – The handling of bees – The pagan Lion of Kea. Georgic III – The skill and industry of the old man in autumn – Ancient custom and modern method – The use of implements of the garden. Georgic IV – The compost is prepared at season's end – The filmmaker completes THE ANSWERING FURROW with the inclusion of her own image. Note on the music: The music works with the image to parallel the trace of history. Ives recalls Protestant hymns, which recall the origin of the hymn in 12th century Milanese music, which allows for that music closest (in my experience of making this film) to the hum of bees and of amplifiers, the Orthodox Greek chant. — The Film-Makers’ Co-Op

MARJORIE KELLER

Marjorie Keller (1950–1994) was an experimental filmmaker, author, activist, and film scholar. J. Hoberman called her "an unselfish champion of the avant-garde." (Courtesy of The Film-Makers’ Co-Op)

Invocation (1982)

Gesturing hands emerge from the darkness, readying us for the cinematic experience.

Amy Halpern

Amy Halpern’s films are abstract in their concern with light, movement and the film medium, but they are also human in their elements and themes. The idea which persists throughout her work is that liberation — from social, political, psychological, perceptual and even bodily constraints, – is indeed possible. Committed to encouraging a wider awareness of abstract film, Halpern co-founded two screening cooperatives: the New York Collective for Living Cinema (1972-1982) and the Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis (1975-1980).

Hoarders Without Borders 1.0 (2018)

Featuring crystallized magic markers and the kidney stone of a horse, the generously-curated mineral collection of Mary Johnson comes to life in a manual labor of love for the process of archival procedure.

Jodie Mack

Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.

Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Locarno Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. She was the 2017/18 Roberta and David Logie/Film Study Center Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a 2018/19 Fellow at the Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University. She was a 2019 Artist In Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and she is an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College.

A New England Document (2020)

Using found footage with selected images and text from The Marshall Collection at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A New England Document reconstructs the genocidal impulses of two ethnographers' photographic encounters in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, from the perspective of its suppressed stories. The filmmaker and their daughter, New-York-Times-bestselling writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, give voice in fragmentary counterpoint upon sounds of archival ghosts. The film asks, after an Indigenous boy named /Gaishay, what would he have said about the Marshalls if he could have studied them too?

Che Applewhaite

Applewhaite is a cultural worker invested in (un)making the forms of relation, perception and expression that (dis)place shared worlds; through filmmaking, writing and curatorial practices. They hold internationalist and transdisciplinary commitments to politics of time, specificity, and cultural process that elaborate improvisations of life against death.

Their first short film, A New England Document, premiered at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 and won the best emerging artist jury award at Mimesis Documentary Festival at CU Boulder. THey have written for publications including Harvard Magazine, Open City Documentary Festival and Millennium Film Journal and worked for artist-filmmakers Christopher Harris and Ja’Tovia Gary; for the Harvard-Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship and Harvard Art Museums. They received a B.A. in Anthropology and History & Literature from Harvard University.

Run (1994)

Woke up walking alone from a dream toward a translucent sky
a run day ... The edge electric against infinity revealed everything
it was the moment before I was born
the moment before I died
I was pressed between glass
I could see myself walking past
I could see my eye looking at my eye
I was standing someplace far away
looking at myself
pressed between glass
I looked like I was moving but it was more like the way a worm
pushes into itself to get to wherever it goes
I could slip through those spaces and rest for awhile
then distribute everything I am and all that I was
but I panicked
I continued to push
my body into itself
I woke pressed between
glass
I thought I was walking
I saw myself walking
I could see my eye
looking at my eye
and the place where I died
when I was born

(Images courtesy of the artist, and Callicoon Fine Arts, NY)

Luther Price

Luther Price is an American experimental filmmaker. Luther Price received a BFA in Sculpture and Media/Performing Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he studied with Saul Levine. He is an experimental filmmaker whose work has been widely screened in the United States and Europe at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. He is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Snow (2010)

Following a difficult surgery, I spent several days in the hospital and several weeks on narcotic painkillers. Snow is a chronicle of my experience struggling to understand what had happened to me and how my life had changed unexpectedly. Most of the footage was shot during my hospital stay, and during my time under the influence of painkillers. It was hand processed and hand-scratched.

Tara Merenda Nelson

Tara Merenda Nelson is a filmmaker, curator, programmer and lecturer working between conceptual and perceptual realms with small gauge film and digital media. Her films, videos and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (NY and Miami), Mono No Aware (Brooklyn), The 8Fest (Canada), VideoEx (Switzerland) and the Sydney Underground Film Festival (AUS). She has taught digital media and film production courses at Montserrat, Ithaca College, Cornell University, University of Rochester and SUNY Brockport. Currently she is the Curator of Moving Image Collections at Visual Studies Workshop, where she teaches 16mm film production and oversees a collection of over 10,000 16mm films and magnetic media titles. She holds an MFA in Film/Video from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Tara currently resides in Rochester NY with her husband Gordon and dog Lucy.

Flaherty NYC Programmers

Kelsey White Born in Los Angeles when Saturn and Uranus were conjunct with the Sun at the Ascendant, Kelsey White is currently a film projectionist living in Brooklyn, New York. Though much of her time is given towards showing films to the cinephiles in New York City, she continues to pursue a polyphonic set of creative interests, including writing, music-making, and filming. She is a new mother who likes to observe the changing seasons and listen to small talk on street corners, and she attempts to practice non-judgment towards all beings, remaining open to the unknown, while carefully paying attention to the complexity, the irony and pain, as well as the beauty of existence.

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