FILM SHOWING
MM Serra
DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE (2002), 16mm, color, sound (4:00)
MM Serra is an experimental filmmaker, curator, author, educator and the Executive Director of Film-Makers' Cooperative, the world's oldest and largest archive of independent media. She is the recipient of grants and awards from The New York Foundation for the Arts, The New York Council on the Arts, Kathy Acker Award for Lifetime Achievement of Excellence in Avant-Garde Art, Directors’ Choice prize at the Black Maria Film Festival. MM Serra teaches in the Media Studies program at the New School for Social Research on topics such as horror films, sex and gender (until 2016) as well as Avant-Garde and the Moving Image. She has presented lectures at Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretations.
Michelle Handelman
SOLITUDE IS AN ARTIFACT OF THE STRUGGLE AGAINST OPPRESSION (2020) (4:00)
SOLITUDE IS AN ARTIFACT OF THE STRUGGLE AGAINST OPPRESSION, (2020) is a continuation of the project These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves which Handelman started at the beginning of the pandemic. The series recontextualizes characters from her previous works into hypnotic visual essays about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear. Here, one of her characters from HUSTLERS & EMPIRES, (2018) portrayed by downtown New York legend and queer icon John Kelly, is slowed to a halting breath amid a selection of found and original texts sourced during the political uprisings of summer 2020. "As lockdown continues, and fear of the pandemic gives way to the rage of the political uprising, it’s become crucial to read this moment from a perspective of racial inequality and capitalist fascist oppression. In the words of critical theorist Jill Casid, “May none of us rest as we live our dying. May we not forget but actually do the work of reckoning with the still uncounted, of the crimes of the endless war we are still in.”
Handelman is a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital awardee, and NYFA Fellow. Her latest project Hustlers & Empires (2018) was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she has exhibited at the Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, PARTICIPANT, INC, The Henry Art Gallery, Guangzhou 53 Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, PERFORMA Biennial, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Centre Georges Pompidou. During the 1990s, Handelman worked in San Francisco where she collaborated with Monte Cazazza, a pioneer of the Industrial music scene; she also directed the feature documentary BloodSisters, and performed in several films by feminist media pioneer Lynn Hershman-Leeson. Handelman’s writings can be found in QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking, n.Paradoxa, Intl Feminist Art Journal, and Apocalypse Culture. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, Filmmaker Magazine, and The New York Times. She is an Associate Professor in the Film, Media and Performing Arts department at Fashion Institute of Technology.
Narcissister
NARCISSISTER BREAST WORK (2020) (10:12)
Focusing on the exercise by women of their right to bare their breasts in public, this film is an investigation into how prohibitions on female toplessness are grounded in fear of, and desire to control, the female body. More information & press: http://www.narcissister.com/film/
Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Masked and merkin-ed, she works at the intersection of dance, art, and activism in a range of media including live performance, film, video, collage, and sculpture. She presents work worldwide at festivals, nightclubs, museums, and galleries. She won “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at Good Vibrations Erotic Film Festival, a Bessie nomination for the theatrical performance “Organ Player”, Creative Capital and United States Artists Awards, and interested in troubling the popular entertainment and experimental art divide, she appeared on America’s Got Talent. Her first feature film “Narcissister Organ Player” premiered at Sundance 2018 and won Best Documentary at Hacker Porn Festival Rome, Italy 2019. Her activist short film "Narcissister Breast Work" premiered at Sundance 2020 and won a Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short at Outfest 2021.
Lynne Sachs
ORANGE GLOW (2020) (1:30)
A film by Lynne Sachs (text) and Laura Harrison (image)
In September 2020, Lynne Sachs was disturbed by the television images of San Francisco enveloped in wildfire smoke. When she looked at artist Laura Harrison’s gestural painting, she felt as if she was watching the eerie skies of California unfurl on the canvas. Together, Sachs’ words and Harrison’s images respond in horror to the devastating ecological disasters.
“Lynne Sachs has always eluded easy labeling…. She focuses on capturing gestures, inches of skin, fragments of conversations, casual moments in time, personal memorabilia, and weaving them into unexpected patterns….. (She) sublimes the personal into the theatrical …. (and) embraces variegated renditions of filmic language, recording the world, digesting it, and offering it to viewers in its performative beauty.” -How Lynne Sachs Turns Spoken Language into Cinematic Language – A retrospective of the feminist artist and filmmaker demonstrates how she explores communication in her work. Ren Scateni, Hyperallergic (2020).
Shelly Silver
TURN (2018) (4:42)
In 1959, Jean Seberg stares into Raoul Coutard’s 35mm camera lens and then turns – the closing frame of Godard’s Breathless is the back of her head. For the film it is a closing. For her character it is less clear. Is it a refusal? A denial? A shying away from? An admission of guilt or not caring? A disappearing act? In 2017 on the streets of Berlin, twenty-three women, friends and passersby, reverse Seberg’s action.
This Film and Turn were commissioned by the Arsenal and Film Feld Forschung for a particular future. A copy of each will be placed in a heated terrarium to track the films’ demise. For This Film, printed on polyester, it will mean accelerated fading perhaps red to sunset orange then to a hazy pastel. For Turn, printed on volatile acetate, the change will be quicker and more dramatic, as it falls victim to vinegar syndrome. Acetic acid will be released, the base will shrink and buckle, the image will decompose. Through off-gassing, this seemingly unchanging spool of dark plastic will not only be in constant flux but will also have the ability to infect others of its kind.
Rebecca Shapass
ROYGBIV (before the end, the lights shine bright) (2022) (15:51)
ROYGBIV (before the end, the lights shine bright) observes modes of connective and enforced time-keeping through human-made infrastructures gridding the sky & ground. Street lights, trains, and electrical cabling are used to frame the backdrop of blue hour – a fleeting sliver of time bookending the day just before sunrise and after sunset.
Rebecca Shapass is an artist and filmmaker compelled by the uncapturable – what escapes both image & language — and how these absences haunt memory & archive. Her work has been exhibited and screened with institutions including Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), The Basement @ the Knockdown Center (Queens, NY), and the McDonough Museum of Art (Youngstown, OH), amongst others. Currently, Rebecca lives & works in Pittsburgh, PA where she is completing her MFA at Carnegie Mellon University (2023).
Shelly Silver
WE (1990) (4:00)
A short, graphically dynamic work contrasting contradictory views of perception and interpretation, by way of society's assumptions vis-a-vis phallocentrism and fetishism. Written, directed, edited: Shelly Silver. Text: Correction, Thomas Bernhard. Music: Floating Pad, Henry Mancini.
"Even as the text instructs us otherwise, it is impossible not to read We's two images - that is, to respond to their symbolic quality, their suggestiveness. In a stream of associations, the rhythmic flow of people on the left becomes an ejaculation while the rhythmic hand on the right marks detachment, self-centeredness. Simultaneously, we may say to ourselves, "Yes, it is only a crowd of anonymous people. It is only a penis. But even as we attempt to discipline our interpretative urges, the hermeneutic created by this simple juxtaposition is driving us crazy with questions: Who is he? Why is he alone? Does he have a lover...? Does everyone in this crowd masturbate? Do they seek isolation from the mass? Are they aware of one another? Are they relational in less-populated situations? Why was this private image made public? Why is this image private...?" Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies, Sexual Orientation in Film and Video, Columbia University Press, 1996
Kathy Brew
MIXED MESSAGES (19:20)
MIXED MESSAGES is an experimental video collage that incorporates found footage, performance, interviews with young girls, documentary, animation, images from advertising and television, and a dream narrative in a work that examines gender-stereotyping in popular culture, concluding with a post-modern version of the Pandora myth.
Kathy Brew, an independent video maker and curator, has worked on a multitude of media projects, from experimental work to independent documentaries, and public television productions. Serving as Guest Curator for Doc Fortnight from 2017 to 2020 at the Museum of Modern Art’s annual festival of international nonfiction media, she showcased some of the most important new discoveries in documentary film/ video and experimentation within the media arts field. She teaches in the MFA Art Practice department at the School of Visual Arts.
Bette Gordon
MICHIGAN AVE (1974) (6:17) An investigation of the relationship between two women and a formalist study of cinematic syntax. Directed by Bette Gordon and James Benning.
Martha Edelheit
SNO-WHITE CRIMSON (1973) (2:00)
One part out of three from Edelheit’s 1973 video-installation/performance piece, “The Albino Queen and Sno-White in Triplicate,” featuring a triple-projection film, originally projected onto the inside of a white silk tent.
Martha Nilsson Edelheit was born in New York City, and lived there most of her life. She moved to rural Sweden in 1993. She has been exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions since 1960. Her solo exhibitions started in New York City at the Reuben Gallery, and include shows at Byron, AIR, Artists Space, Judson, and SOHO20. Other US solo exhibitions include Rutgers University (NJ), Wilson College (Chambersburg, PA), Evanston Art Center (Evanstown, MA) and OK Harris (Provincetown, MA). She has been in group shows at The Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim Museum, The Queens Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The New York Cultural Center, The New School Art Center, The Grey Art Gallery, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. She has shown extensively in Stockholm, Finland, Germany and Austria. She was an Artist-in-Residence at The Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Wilson College (PA), a guest lecturer at Montclair State College (NJ) and the New School (NY), and a visiting artist at the California Institute of the Arts. Nilsson Edelheit made experimental films in the 70’s which were shown widely in Europe and the United States. One, Shown at The Museum of Modern Art (NY), is now in the Library For The Performing Arts, NYC. Her work is in many private collections in Europe and United States.
Bette Gordon
I-94 (1974) (3:25)
Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities. Directed by Bette Gordon and James Benning.
Bette Gordon is an independent filmmaker and professor of film at Columbia University. “Emerging from the avant-garde underground of the 1970’s and ‘80s, Bette Gordon made her mark with subversive investigations of sexuality and gender roles that invert genre expectations with their feminist themes. Following a string of groundbreaking experimental shorts-including the structuralist landmark THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, codirected with James Benning- Gordon made her narrative feature debut with VARIETY, a noir-tinged study of voyeurism, pornography, and fantasy that turns the conventional male gaze back on itself. Fifteen years later, Gordon followed it up with LUMINOUS MOTION, a similarly provocative, dreamlike thriller about a mother and son who share an unsettling bond.” (Criterion Collection).
MM Serra
JUST FOR YOU GIRLS! (1998), 16mm, color, sound (2:00)
A period-style advertisement recontextualized from a feminist perspective.
