Experimental Films Program

A cross-disciplinary screening of 11 films from international filmmakers pushing the definition of cinema and the boundaries of image-making into new territory. The program is split into two halves: the first a primarily visual series of films, and the second drawing reference to popular culture and storytelling techniques.

Formalist/Structuralist

A Film

Director: Hisham Bizri

USA/Lebanon / 2010

8 min.

A film poem about love. Between the moment of wakefulness and dream, a woman is captured on film as a trapeze artist, a model, a lover, and a child.

Hisham Bizri is a Lebanese-American award-winning filmmaker, recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy Rome Prize, co-founder of the Arab Institute of Film and is currently an Associate Professor of film at the University of Minnesota.

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Retrograde Premonition

Director: Leighton Pierce

USA / 2010

5 min.

Retrograde Premonition looks and sounds like floating mind—the vicissitudes of thought, feeling, and the senses.

Leighton Pierce’s award-winning short films and videos have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival and the Whitney Biennial, among others. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he is currently head of the Film and Video Production Program at the University of Iowa.

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If you can’t see my mirrors, I can’t see you

Directors: Jenny Hogarth & Kim Coleman

UK / 2010

16 min.

An online video chat generates two live portraits with changeable backdrops. It is a digital two-way mirror, a self-reflexive feedback loop wherein the artists witness themselves talking back, inviting the audience to eavesdrop upon their Skype conversations.

Jenny Hogarth & Kim Coleman’s videos, performance works, and installations unravel the relationship between the camera, subject matter, and author and focus on how people and things perform. Collaborating since 2003, they were LUX Associate Artists 2009/2010.

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Vertical Kromvex Mirror

Director: Christian Newby

USA/UK / 2009

6 min.

A fever-dream. A performance in a cardboard jungle.  A night vision war zone. Anthropomorphism is taking hold. Originally shot on Super 8.

Christian Newby makes films, videos, screen prints, drawings, and installations. Born in Virginia Beach (1979), he lives and works in Glasgow, UK.

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This Quality

Director: Rosalind Nashashibi

UK / 2010

5 min.

35mm

Shot in downtown Cairo, This Quality is a hypnotically deadpan study comprising two halves: first, a young woman stares steadily ahead with an inward, almost painted-on gaze. Second, a survey of covered parked cars turns the machine into a sightless face, like a child covering his eyes.

Rosalind Nashashibi, British artist of Palestinian descent, has exhibited extensively, including the ICA (London), Bergen Kunsthall (Norway), the Pompidou Centre (Paris), and the Venice Biennale. She was the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures Prize in 2003 for her film, The State of Things.

Narrative/Pop Culture

Commercials

Director: Erica Eyers

Canada/UK / 2007

7 min.

Commercials is a series of progressively surreal mock advertisements for products and services, such as a fake family pet, self-confidence building tapes, and a dating hotline.

Erica Eyers (b. 1980), an internationally exhibited Canadian artist living in the UK, creates video melodramas inspired by society's modern-day desires pushed to an extreme by trash TV. With the aid of make-up, wigs, costume and props, the artist herself plays each character.

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Sister

Director: Sue de Beer

USA / 2009

8 min.

This is a video about how I worshipped you and about how I loved you and love you still. This is a video that remembers you to yourself. -Alissa Bennett

Sue de Beer’s work explores the connections between memory, architecture, history, gender and adolescence. De Beer’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Goetz Collection.

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Two Banana Dance

Director: Diane Torr

UK / 2010

3 min.

As a prop, bananas can be many things: a gun, a telephone, a phallus. A woman in black wields these fruits like smoking pistols in a dance of double entendres.   

Performance artist Diane Torr (b.1948) is a pioneer of “drag king” performance, a fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program and of the Macdowell Art Colony, and co-author of the book, “Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance” with Stephen Bottoms (U Michigan Press, 2010).

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The Hottest Day of the Year

Director: Keren Cytter

Germany/Israel / 2010

13 min.

This essayistic film explores colonialism, intermingles real and fictional elements, and refers to the tradition of the romantic anthropological documentary, inspired by Chris Marker’s monumental film Sans Soleil (1983) and the works by Vietnamese theoretician and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha (1952).

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The Coat

Director: Keren Cytter

Germany/Israel / 2010

6 min.

A dramatic love triangle emerges between two brothers obsessed with the game of sudoku and a beautiful young woman from East Germany.

Keren Cytter was born 1977 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and lives and works in Berlin. Her experimental video works illuminate the interpersonal and the private, and are often based on templates of literary or cinematic classics, simultaneously reflecting the influence of the media. She has exhibited widely, including the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, and the Haifa Museum of Art.

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Somewhere only we know

Director: Jesse McLean

USA / 2009

5 min.

Jesse McLean is interested both in the power and the failure of the mediated experience to bring us together. She has shown her work most recently at Migrating Forms at Anthology Film Archives, Director's Lounge in Berlin, and Chicago Underground Film Festival. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

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Panel discussion to follow the screening. Participants to include: Hisham Bizri (Filmmaker, UMN Professor), Lynn Lukkas (Artist, UMN Professor), Sally Dixon (Avant-Garde Film Curator), and moderated by Anna Henson (Filmmaker, Programmer).

Screening in conjunction with Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film, showing April 28 at 9:15pm.