THE SCENT OF PLACES
THE 61TH ROBERT FLAHERTY FILM SEMINAR
JUNE 13 – 19, 2015, COLGATE UNIVERSITY, HAMILTON, NY
PROGRAMMER: Laura U. Marks
The title “The Scent of Places” suggests the ways cinema makes the subtlest of presences perceptible. It brings lost or forgotten events into present awareness. It gives form to unbidden feelings. It invents stories more truthful than fact. It detects patterns—emotional, social, and political. It sharpens perception so that we can see and hear, smell and feel more clearly. Filmmakers from the Arab world are some of the most adept at these creative strategies. Living in the Arab world in recent decades, with its barrage of external and internal pressures, demands filmmakers and artists to come up with smart and subtle ways to express forces, histories, and experiences that lie under the radar. The goal of the program is to focus not on the works’ geographic, social, and political context, but on their aesthetic qualities: the scents of places that they make present. So the program brings Arab artists together with other international filmmakers who share creative strategies with them. The program also diminishes large-scale politics to focus on more intimate and playful gestures. The richest and strangest scents—those of ordinary life—float through these works. They discover patterns in the chaos of the world. They fabulate, or invent fictions that become true. They engage in psychodynamics, teasing people into expressive acts. They crackle like Geiger counters in the presence of invisible forces. With rhythm and performance they shake up the world and squeeze it for its juice.
PROGRAMMER: LAURA U. MARKS Dr. Laura U. Marks is a scholar, theorist, and programmer of independent and experimental media arts, and the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke, 2000), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota, 2002), Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT, 2010), and Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015). Marks curates programs of experimental media for venues around the world. She teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
The Flaherty gratefully acknowledges our 2015 Seminar sponsors:
