Experimental Cinema

Sight Unseen presents Contemporary Shorts @ the BMA
Saturday, April 20 2013, 14h
The Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive., Baltimore, MD 21218
Free Admission

Sight Unseen presents a group program of short films and videos chosen in response to the newly reopened Contemporary Art wing at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Featuring both local and international artists, the screening will be followed (a gallery talk relating pieces from the contemporary collection to the works shown.

Programme:
- The Hunch that Caused the Winning Streak and Fought the Doldrums Mightily (Stephanie Barber, 2010)
- Journey to a Star (Tom Borax, 2012)
- Growing/Innit (Mark Brown, 2008)
- How to Conduct a Love Affair (David Gatten, 2007)
- Solar Sight II (Larry Jordan, 2012)
- Can't Remember, Can't Forget (William Knipscher, 2012)
- A Lax Riddle Unit (Laida Lertxundi, 2011)
- Andy at Work (Jonas Mekas, 2006)
- lions and tigers and bears (Rebecca Meyers, 2006)
- Dark Windows (Miranda Pfeiffer, 2011)
- The Biscuit Song (Luther Price, 2008)
- Landfill 16 (Jennifer Reeves, 2011)
- Eyecandy (Tasman Richardson, 2005)
- Audition (Karen Yasinsky, 2012)

See full programme here.

Balagan presents... DIY Dystopia
Thursday March 14, 2013 19:30h
Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA USA

With the natural world teetering on the brink of multilateral catastrophe, a group of analog filmmakers have taken matters into their own hands. Through direct contact with the medium – lifting and reassembling images on the film strip – adhering waste matter to celluloid – leaving emulsion to languish in the landfill – the artists interpret physical processes that ravage our land. Their grave methods yield results of unexpected poetry, vibrancy and beauty.

Attendees of this show will also receive a special, locally-produced, collaborative zine, made available through the Papercut Zine Library!

Xcèntric: The latest US experimental cinema
Sunday December 2, 2012, 18:30h
Xcèntric CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona

This programme offers a panorama of very recent works by foremost experimental filmmakers in the United States. It includes pieces of animation, appropriation or documentaries by authors already known to Xcèntric (such as Jennifer Reeves and Robert Todd) and many others who we will discover in this screening.

- Passage Upon the Plume (Fern Silva, 2011, silent, 7 min)
- Tokyo-Ebisu (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2010, 5 min)
- Point de Gaze (Jodie Mack, 2012, silent, 5 min)
- A Preface to Red (Jonathan Schwartz, 2011, 6 min)
- Under the Shadow of Marcus Mountain (Robert Schaller, 2011, silent, 6 min)
- Curious Light (Charlotte Pryce, 2011, silent, 4 min)
- The Electric Embrace (Norbert Shieh, 2011, silent, 2 min)
- Craig’s Cutting Room Floor (Linda Scobie, 2011, 2 min)
- Undergrowth (Robert Todd, 2011, 12 min)
- Landfill 16 (Jennifer Reeves, 2011, 9 min)

Chronic is an experimental narrative about a young woman who began mutilating herself as a girl to cope with a traumatic mid-western childhood. The lush optically-printed scenes take Gretchen’s point of view from her punk youth, a stay in a mental hospital, and her release into the big city. Scripted scenes are inter-spliced with documentary and found footage, illustrating the culture Gretchen lives in, her inner world and relationships from her birth to her final day.

Available on DVD for the first time, this 2004 debut feature of avant-garde veteran (and Ohio-raised) Jennifer Reeves combines elements of narrative, experimental, and documentary techniques to create a truly lyrical example of personal storytelling. In The Time We Killed, Reeves burrows into the perspective of a reclusive woman (poet Lisa Jarnot) who tries to ignore the world outside of her New York apartment. But images from her past and current world events (from 9/11 to the war in Iraq) cause her to confront and fight her growing agoraphobia. Shot on a mix of 16mm and digital video, the brilliantly textured film has achieved extraordinary acclaim for such a radically experimental work and has won major prizes at the Berlin and Tribeca Film Festivals.

ATA: Jennifer Reeves’ When It Was Blue
Friday, March 16, 2012, 19:30h
Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110

SF Cinematheque presents: Jennifer Reeves In Person

“Drawing as much from the feminist surrealism of Peggy Ahwesh, the interior psychological exploration of Stan Brakhage, and the globalized interiority of Warren Sonbert as from the Vertovian heritage, Jennifer Reeves turns the screen into a materialist writing-pad that moves at the speed of private thought.” (Michael Sicinsky)

Presented by Cinematheque as a work-in-progress in 2008, Jennifer Reeves’ now-completed When It Was Blue is a work of incredible ambition and scope. Described by Chris Stults as “an overwhelmingly powerful achievement on a truly epic scale,” the dual-projected, feature-length, 16mm work is a dazzling, deliriously immersive and visceral sound/image experience. Shot over thre years in Iceland, New Zealand, Costa Rica and North America, in documentation of our fragile natural world, the film—fiercely overpainted, spectacularly edited— explodes with color and an overpowering sense of nowness, a rushed sense of urgency. In its attempt at maximal expression and globalizing vision, in its fusion of simultaneously micro- and macroscopic views of nature with a blurred sense of subjective visuality and interiority, When It Was Blue is a filmic achievement on par with the most ambitious works of Stan Brakhage, Jack Chambers and Michele Smith, an ecstatic work of complex visual philosophy which aspires (tragically) to nothing less than the reconciliation of objective and subjective realities. Other short works by Reeves will screen. (Steve Polta)

Red Hook Cine Soiree!!
Saturday July 31st, 15h
BWAC - Red Hook, Brooklyn
499 Van Brunt Street, Brooklyn, NY

Guest Programmer Joel Schlemowitz presents...

A salon of experimental and underground films from cine-artists Marie Losier, Jennifer Reeves, Nathaniel Lambert Cummings, Bradley Eros & Tim Geraghty, Jim Jennings, Jeremy D. Slater, Sheri Wills.

A summer afternoon and short works of avant-garde cinema? Our agenda is to program our soiree attuned to the enchantment of the season of Mid-Summer Nights' Dreams, to indulge ourselves in the hazy and lazy segment of the calendar, to enlighten ourselves lightly and sprightly, to work Puckish mischief on the screen, to take respite from the oppressive sun in the magic lantern parlor by the sea.

Expect red wine and soft cheese, and 78s of 1920s Hawaiian guitar played on the Victrola!

Xcèntric: Closing Session Of The Ninth Season
When It Was Blue, Jennifer Reeves
Wednesday June 30th 2010, 20h
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona, Spain

Artist in attendance.
Jennifer Reeves is one of the most prolific experimental filmmakers. Her work walks the line between pictorial abstraction and the stamp of the photographic image, and plays at upsetting the linearity of filmic time by using multiple projections. In this frenetic double projection 16-mm film, Reeves leaves her corner of New York to film in distant landscapes—Iceland, New Zealand, Central America, the United States—and then paint on the celluloid, creating variable tones of blue. With Blue, Reeves refers to planet Earth and devotes the work to the natural landscape and everything that is fading, diminishing and disappearing. Blue also has the connotation of anguish, which floats like a symbol in this marathon of textures and reflective depth.

- When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, 2008, double projection in 16 mm, 68 min.)