August 10, 2022
Continents of Drifting Clouds continues to swirl within us. We are deeply grateful to all who were a part of this momentous moment: as programmers, artists, staff, and participants both online and in-person. We are grateful for the hard questions, the high emotions, the fierce creativity, and the fervent faith in the power of collective inquiry and in transformation that emerged, unambiguously, over and over again.
Reverberations from this seminar will guide The Flaherty long into the future. Through the 2022 seminar surveys, you’ve reminded us how deeply we believe in an ongoing exploration of cinema that is – to use just a few of your words – compelling, mind-melding, magical, surprising, intergenerational, manic, emotional, groundbreaking, dissonant, ingenious, intimate, provoking, rigorous, ambitious, urgent.
We believe in experiencing cinema collectively, and in nurturing transformative encounters between heterogeneous minds. We believe in cinema as an art form rather than an industry, as a site of questioning, un-learning, and euphoria.
We also believe in getting past words and into action. We believe in working in solidarity with the many among us striving towards lasting systemic change. We believe in transparency and accountability, in radical care for all our participants and staff, in facilitating generous and generative exchanges, and in being responsible and response-able towards all who gather. We were reminded this year how difficult all of these things can be to achieve, and we are committed to the work ahead.
We believe moments of rupture offer opportunities to assert the ways we want to come back together. We are excited to share a few details about what’s in store at The Flaherty, and invite you all to stay tuned for future announcements. Join us! There are special things in store.
Sincerely,
Samara, Sarie, Aryana, and The Flaherty Executive Committee.
Header Photo by Anne-Katrine Hansen
Announcing the
68th Flaherty Film Seminar
Queer World-Mending
programmed by
Jon Davies and Steve Reinke
The Flaherty is delighted to announce the 2023 Flaherty Film Seminar, Queer World-Mending, will be programmed by Jon Davies and Steve Reinke.
Hegel wrote: “Better a mended sock than a torn one – not so with subjectivity.” How can we mend the wounded world if we are open wounds ourselves? Sexuality is a force that cuts through histories and identities, and offers an embodied approach to thinking. Joining the living and the dead, the program will be a playground of desire, a laboratory for developing new subjectivities.
– Jon Davies and Steve Reinke
Our seminar programmers are selected by The Flaherty Programming Committee via an open call for letters of intent (we invite you to submit your concepts for 2024, see below!). The 68th Annual Flaherty Film Seminar Queer World-Mending will take place in June 2023. More details to come.
Jon Davies is a Montreal-born curator, writer and PhD Candidate in Art History at Stanford University where he is working on a dissertation entitled “The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945–1995.” He was a member of the Pleasure Dome programming collective for several years before working as an Assistant Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (2008–12) in Toronto – where he curated an exhibition of artists who grew up in the shadow of the first decade of the AIDS crisis called Coming After – and then as Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries (2012–15). He has curated artists’ film and video programs for venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Aurora Festival, Gallery TPW, Images Festival, Inside Out Film Festival, and Vtape.
Jon’s book about Paul Morrissey’s film Trash was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009 and his anthology More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings was published by Concordia
University Press in 2021. His writing on film, video and contemporary art has been published in many anthologies, catalogues, journals, and periodicals such as C Magazine, Canadian Art, Criticism, Fillip, Frieze, GLQ, and No More Potlucks. His articles include “Sissy Boys on YouTube: Notes Towards a Cultural History of Online Queer Childhood” for C Magazine (2014) and “Sell Your Parents: Marketing the Handwriting of Julia Warhola and Phung Vo” for Master Drawings (2020). He also co-edited issues #5 and #6 of Little Joe magazine – “about queers and cinema, mostly” – with Sam Ashby (London).
Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his monologue-based video essays. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), mumok (Vienna), MACBA (Barcelona), National Gallery (Ottawa) and the Julia Stoschek Collection. He has shown work at many film festivals including Sundance, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, BFI London and the New York Film Festival. He has been in many exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial 2014. He is represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi (Berlin).
The Toronto International Film Festival named his The Hundred Videos (1989 — 1996) one of the 150 essential works In Canadian cinematic history. In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. Two collections of his writings have been published, The Shimmering Beast, (2011) and Everybody Loves Nothing (2004). He has co-edited several anthologies, most recently Blast Counter Blast (with Anthony Elms) and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman).
He also works as a curator and critic, most notably assembling a box set of George Kuchar's video work for the Video Data Bank. His research interests include rhetorical and narrative strategies for visual art, artists' writing, queer Nietzsche, animation, the voice and psychoanalysis.
Born in 1963 in the Ottawa Valley, he now lives in Chicago and teaches in the department of Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern.
Continents of Drifting Clouds at MoMA August 17th
Still from Amisk. 1977. Directed by Alanis Obomsawin
Please join us for a special screening in The Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden, with a selection of films from Continents of Drifting Clouds, curated by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka.
Summoning the entangled stories of the living and those now gone, the remembered and the erased, this program brings together works by Alanis Obomsawin, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, and João Vieira Torres to trace sources of violence, resistance, and love.
The screening will take place on Wednesday August 17th at 8pm with Sky Hopinka and João Vieira Torres in person. The event is a collaboration between The Flaherty and MoMA, facilitated by Sophie Cavoulacos, The Museum of Modern Art’s Associate Curator, Department of Film.
We invite you to join us! Space is limited – get your tickets at: https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/8061
Contribute to the Continents of Drifting Clouds Catalogue
The Flaherty invites proposals for the 67th Flaherty seminar catalogue: Continents of Drifting Clouds.
We are interested in original texts, as well as works that are already set to be published elsewhere. All contributors will be paid at competitive rates.
If you are writing about Continents of Drifting Clouds or would like to, please fill out our Call for Proposals Form by September 15, 2022.
3D scan of an online artist talk during the 2022 seminar. Courtesy of Alexander Porter.
Inviting Letters of Intent for the 2024 Flaherty Film Seminar
We welcome programming proposals for the 2024 seminar!
Please share your ideas with us via a short letter of intent here. The deadline for submissions is October 1st 2022.
Programmers can be individuals or small programming teams. The Flaherty Programming Committee will ask for a second round of application materials by mid-December, and make a final selection in January 2023.
2021 Flaherty Film Seminar Programmer Janaína Olivera with the Opacity Seminar Catalogue
Order Now - Opacity Seminar Catalogue
The bilingual print edition of the expanded Opacity Seminar Catalogue is available now.
The Opacity Catalogue is co-edited by Dessane Lopez Cassell and Carol Almeida, with contributions by Tina Campt, Tatiana Carvalho Costa, Amaranta César, Christopher Harris, Janaína Oliveira, Athi-Patra Ruga, Yeelen Cohen, and Grace Passô. Managing editor: Jason Fox. Design by Rid, Darwin Marinho and Ella Monstra of ‘Carnaval no Inferno’ Collective.
Other News
Flaherty Recommends
Order the Latest Issue of SEEN Journal
Order your copy of the latest issue of Seen journal, edited by Dessane Lopez Cassell, featuring 2022 Seminar Programmer Sky Hopinka and artist Martine Syms.
Published in print by BlackStar, Seen focuses on film, art, and visual culture writing by and about Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Learn more at: https://blackstarfest.org/seen/
Share your news and submit to our e-newsletter through our website!
We are no longer sending separate email for submissions, please visit our site anytime for instructions to submit your listing for our newsletter through the ‘About’ section of the site’s drop-down menu.
