https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive daily 0.75 2025-03-27 https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/the-universe-in-a-grain-of-sand monthly 0.5 2025-02-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/15e2ae12-9ca4-4853-bb9e-c5db37a6e9d2/GOS-Untitled-2022-Peter-Burr-smaller__FocusFillWyIwLjAwIiwiMC4wMCIsMzgwLDI2Nl0.jpg Events - The Universe in a Grain of Sand - Make it stand out Excerpt from "Untitled" by Peter Burr, as seen in The Universe in a Grain of Sand https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/72ca2fa9-38f5-4868-a3ca-668da65086b9/KateBalsley_Microspectrum-smaller__FocusFillWyIwLjAwIiwiMC4wMCIsMjI2LDE1OV0.jpg Events - The Universe in a Grain of Sand - Microspectrum By Kate Balsley 2016, digital, color, sound, 1:30 A surreal journey through the natural world. Leaves, flowers and other organic materials are abstracted and exist as shapes, forms, colors and textures. Nature is at once strange and beautiful. Microspectrum invites the viewer to reflect upon its complexities. Winner of the Jury Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/e1790b14-36db-4bf6-9296-7624a95b44f1/KateBalsley_-Cosmos-Obscura-smaller__FocusFillWyIwLjAwIiwiMC4wMCIsMjI2LDE1OV0.jpg Events - The Universe in a Grain of Sand - Cosmos Obscura By Kate Balsley; Music by Irina Escalante Chernova 2018, digital, b&w, sound, 4:00 This video contains flashing images. In Cosmos Obscura, the universe is at once known and unknowable. New patterns, rhythms and metaphors are born from old ones, and familiar celestial bodies are refracted into strange and unusual forms. The visuals were created from photographs taken from the Voyager II spacecraft. Photographs of the planets and their moons were abstracted and animated in order to create various patterns, rhythms and images. Other images were inspired by astronomical charts and diagrams, and were created through Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. The musical work was originally created for 8 channels and subsequently adapted to the stereo version. The music focuses on the work from different backgrounds with the noises of nature and those which have an electronic source. Different techniques of electronic experimentation are used such as subtractive synthesis for filtering and modeling of the white noise, as well as granular synthesis, additive synthesis, phase vocoder; in addition to effects with some filters. Technique: Sound Forge 4.5, Ableton Live, Keyboard DX-7 and Soprano voice. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/04a0e840-8645-433e-b432-6f3d319722c9/GOS_Flower-and-Clock-Overlay-smaller__FocusFillWyIwLjAwIiwiMC4wMCIsMjI2LDE1OV0.jpg Events - The Universe in a Grain of Sand - The Universe in a Grain of Sand By Mark Levinson USA, 2024, digital color, sound, 73 min. Los Angeles premiere! How do we make sense of the world around us? Our understanding of nature is shaped by the tools we create to observe it. Both scientists and artists have pushed the frontiers of understanding through an astounding array of human ingenuity and innovation: from glassmaking to semiconductors; from Leibniz’s 17th century binary systems to the art of M.C. Escher; from the diverse boat-building techniques of First Nations peoples to the latest advances in computer generated art and quantum computing. Featuring a dazzling integration of artwork and experimental cinema – Picasso to Hilma af Klint to Stan Brakhage – interwoven with scientists striving to understand the deepest mysteries of nature, the award-winning director Mark Levinson (Particle Fever) celebrates the transcendent power of the imagination to make sense of the universe. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/david-lebrun-proteus monthly 0.5 2024-11-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/8880bd96-4a2f-4fe9-a776-dd426c74d973/Proteus.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Proteus - Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision U.S., 2004, 35mm, color, 60 min. Director: David Lebrun An exploration of the intersection of science and art that itself embodies a visionary fusion of art and documentary, Proteus centers on the fascinating life and career of 19th century German naturalist Ernst Haeckel and his obsession with radiolarians, a species of microscopic marine protozoa. Illustrating the infinite variety of their intricate skeletal structures, challenged Haeckel to reconcile his personal contradictions, as an artist and a scientist, as well as the larger contradictions of his age between the material and the spiritual worlds. David Lebrun delivers heady doses of philosophy, history, aesthetics, religion and evolutionary biology made all the more potent by his dazzling presentation of Haeckel’s scientific drawings. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/6573f054-388a-4c13-8fad-f39cc2257608/tanka.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Proteus - Tanka U.S., 1976, DCP (from 16mm), color, 9 min. Director: David Lebrun Tanka means, literally, “a thing rolled up.” Photographed from Tibetan scroll paintings of the 16th to 19th centuries, Tanka is a cyclical vision of ancient gods and demons, an animated journey through the image world of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that won the Bronze Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and other international awards. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/01ba720e-a63c-4348-864a-02ee6c46224b/Proteus+Hero+Image.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Proteus - Make it stand out DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2022) Courtesy of Knoetze, Hlongwane and Wilson https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/david-lebrun-proteus-nmken monthly 0.5 2024-11-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/b23e4b6a-912d-44d1-8294-5bdcf56276e6/65+Churches+ceiling+smaller-1.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past (2018-2024) - Make it stand out DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2022) Courtesy of Knoetze, Hlongwane and Wilson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/afb8be6d-747f-4a80-a8fe-0e9c9911778c/Cycladic+and+Anatolian+Figurines+2.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past (2018-2024) - Cycladic and Anatolian Figurines (3300–2000 BCE) U.S., 2021, DCP, color, 7 min. Director: David Lebrun. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/80bedbdd-5000-4a3b-862e-ee3977666bbc/American+Gods+70mm.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past (2018-2024) - American Gods Triptych (2000 BCE–1521 CE) U.S., 2024, DCP, color, 10 min. Director: David Lebrun. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/799c808f-6cfb-4273-97e3-8d42cbd428ed/137+Coins+FIFA+Gaul+Coin+TOPAZ+2X.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past (2018-2024) - 137 Coins, Greece via Rome to Gaul (4th to 1st C. BCE) U.S., 2020, DCP, color, 7 min. Director: David Lebrun. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/24be838e-10a3-458b-a211-43807bfc973d/45+Handaxes+1+1.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past (2018-2024) - 45 Handaxes, Lower to Middle Paleolithic (600,000 to 40,000 BP) U.S., 2020, DCP, color, 7 min. Director: David Lebrun. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1532cbf9-ca6e-4cde-8c81-c6e2eeb974b9/Spouted+Vessels+-+Iran+Vessels++1+smaller.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past (2018-2024) - 91 Spouted Vessels, Iran (3200 BCE–224 CE) U.S., 2021, DCP, color, 9 min. Director: David Lebrun. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/d03fa6bb-6f91-42a0-9174-598f22cc8466/Hoysalesvara+1+smaller.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past (2018-2024) - The Hoysalesvara Temple / Karnataka, India (circa 1250 CE) U.S., 2012, DCP, color, 9 min. Director: David Lebrun. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/11154ec4-a017-4e8f-a7e4-f81af62841eb/65+Churches+ceiling+smaller.jpg Events - David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past (2018-2024) - 65 Churches and Cathedrals / Early Romanesque to Late Gothic/France (1050-1500 CE) U.S., 2021, DCP, color, 18 min. Director: David Lebrun. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/between-land-and-sky-accounting-for-the-in-between-nostalgia-for-the-light monthly 0.5 2024-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/bec51a06-c0a5-437b-92aa-87696690c19e/Mask+group+L.jpg Events - Between Land and Sky, Accounting for the In-Between: Nostalgia for the Light - Brilliant Noise Semiconductor, 2006, digital, b/w, sound, 5:48 Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This black and white grainy quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, usually hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected by satellites orbiting the Earth as single frames, or files of information, that are then reorganized into spectral sequences. The soundtrack brings to light the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating the intensity of the brightness into audio manipulation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/c6c7a3e0-79a7-49d9-b2bc-0f2ee7df4f94/Header+Image_Program+3.jpg Events - Between Land and Sky, Accounting for the In-Between: Nostalgia for the Light - Make it stand out Brilliant Noise, 2006 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/3cb2e4a7-4180-4e49-8c6c-f62b548c7b3a/Mask+group+K.jpg Events - Between Land and Sky, Accounting for the In-Between: Nostalgia for the Light - Solar Eclipse Nevil Maskelyne, 1900, transferred to digital, b/w, silent, 1:00 Nevil Maskelyne, celebrated magician, proprietor of the Egyptian Hall and astronomy enthusiast, filmed this solar eclipse in North Carolina on May 28th 1900. Recently discovered in the collection of the Royal Astronomical Society, the film is believed to be the first surviving astronomical film in the world. It is a fragment showing the corona around totality and the 'diamond ring' effect. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/43b8c212-ab7b-4edf-b219-d8385cb505f8/Nostalgia+4+the+Light.jpg Events - Between Land and Sky, Accounting for the In-Between: Nostalgia for the Light - Nostalgia for the Light Patricio Guzmán, 2010, digital, color, sound, 90 minutes Master director Patricio Guzmán travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest desert on earth for this remarkable documentary. Here, the sky is so translucent that it allows astronomers to see the boundaries of our universe. Yet the Atacama Desert climate also keeps human remains intact: pre-Columbian mummies; explorers and miners; and the remains of disappeared political prisoners. Women sift the desert soil for the bones of their loved ones, while archaeologists uncover traces of ancient civilizations and astronomers examine the most distant and oldest galaxies. Melding celestial and earthly quests, NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT is a gorgeous, moving, and deeply personal odyssey. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/rethinking-bodies-rethinking-gender-biologys-expansive-otherworlds monthly 0.5 2024-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/7a5e72e5-d6a3-4e81-bdd0-7ea82f6f6be2/Mask+group+X.jpg Events - Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds - Mother is a Woman Jes Fan, USA, 2018, digital, color, sound, 4:44 In Mother is a Woman, Fan extracted estrogen from urine samples collected from their post-menopausal mother. This estrogen was then blended into a face cream and distributed to Fan’s network of non-biological kin. This project grapples with the slippery constitution of “natural” and “synthetic” genders, posing a series of seemingly absurd questions: What happens if I re-feminize my body with my mother’s estrogen? If your body absorbs my mother’s estrogen, are you feminized by her? If so, who are you to her, and who are you to me? Can our epidermis be our first contact of kinship? Can kinship be infectious? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/74dc98d1-3e9f-43cf-8db3-70a9aff9acba/Mask+group+E.jpg Events - Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds - Bodies and Places are Contiguous Maria Fernandez Pello, USA, 2021, digital, color, sound, 9:42 Earth’s surface cuts across every one of us, it traverses our bodies in the shape of a tube, challenging distinctions between the inside and the outside, the body and the world, self and nonself. Bodies And Places Are Contiguous is a visual experiment, an effort to attend to the recurrent cylindrical formations that permeate human bodies, our technology, our parasites, and most of our cities’ infrastructures. Through a focus on form, the project seeks to generate unexpected connections between categories often seen as entirely separate from each other. The connections that emerge from the repeated attention to tubes are also seen as a challenge to traditionally bounded understandings of the human, the body, and the world. In the film, as inside of any tube, perspective is lost, there is no up nor down, inside or outside, just a dizzying encounter with sameness. Music score improvised by Marina Peterson and Cassius Walker. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/e582a018-2243-43b3-ab4c-c8f71a57dbde/Our+Body+is+a+Planet.jpg Events - Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds - Our Body is a Planet Léonie Hampton, UK, 2022, digital, color, sound, 11:08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/a3dc431a-cc65-447c-81c9-3479c386f3cf/Mask+group+D.jpg Events - Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds - Yummy Body Truck Noam Youngrak Son, Belgium/the Netherlands, 2021, digital, color, sound, 7:00 Noam Youngrak Son’s YUMMY BODY TRUCK is a fictional food truck that sells edible human body parts. What sounds like cannibalism at first turns out to be a biotechno-queer fantasy of interspecies mixing – quite literally so. In the computer-generated video, the pancake-shaped head of a "fluidic chimera" tells of its creation: that a rapidly spinning blade has taken on a multitude of organisms – from bacteria and fungi to plants, insects, reptiles… and also sometimes hominids – ingested, ground up their flesh and mixed it all into a malleable paste of diverse cells, organelles, DNA, enzymes, hormones, pigments, toxins: a pool of proteins, amino acids, nucleic acids, phospholipids, and all sorts of different polymers with all sorts of unidentifiable energy states and genetic information. This mushy mass is now being modeled into human body shapes in the YUMMY BODY TRUCK – similar to the multi-species convergence from fishing waste being reshaped into desirable seafood as surimi. “I can transform into any color, smell, taste, texture or shape depending on what I contain and what you desire. I am a piece of dough – mold me into organisms that are extinct or your fantasy creatures that never existed.” Promises the Chimera. “My plasticity will liberate your appetite”. Both narration and visuals play with our desire and disgust. But the snack from the digital meat grinder also has a sociopolitical undertone. By molding the paste into human body parts, factors such as pigmentation, endocrinological status, and toxin accumulation of the meats gain political significance: lighter or darker pigmentation from melanin indexes “race,” and estrogen residues determine “gender.” The truck serves the edible body parts in a lunchbox, and an instructional video shows visitors how to see, smell and taste them. The flavors of pigments, hormones and toxins are meant to heighten awareness of the nuances of the bodies they eat. If, for example, the chosen carcass tastes bitter, this could indicate a higher toxin content – carnivores are more likely to accumulate environmental toxins than plants. Nevertheless, the “oral intercourse” from the YUMMY BODY TRUCK promises a sensual experience with the result of turning the consumers themselves into chimeras through the fusion of different DNA. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/56c03bd4-80e8-4d4d-91a1-902542bdca13/Mask+group.jpg Events - Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds - How Old Are You? How Old Were You? 入世 Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, USA, 2017, 16mm, color, sound, 15:50 Shot on 16mm film using a handmade camera obscura, How Old Are You? How Old Were You? fractures the logic of time to contemplate bringing oneself back to the origin, the womb. A dialogue between two selves – infant and adult, the film traverses through a series of psychological events, transforming memories, emotions, thoughts, and imagination. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/bc892360-7c16-4316-885b-9fd51975cfba/Mask+group+Y.jpg Events - Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds - The Posthuman Hospital Junha Kim, South Korea/USA, 2023, digital, color, sound, 6:54 The film showcases medical records of posthuman patients in an imaginary hospital through experimental digital images. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/2e24a143-360f-44ba-99f2-94b73b285684/Mask+group+A.jpg Events - Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds - Xenophoria Jes Fan, USA, 2018-2020, digital, color, silent, 7:56 Xenophoria chronicles Fan’s pursuit of eumelanin pigment, the molecule responsible for skin color found in both human and non-human bodies. Referencing the aesthetics of both microscopic imagery and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos, "Xenophoria" includes actions such as dissecting squids and bursting their ink sacs, harvesting fungi with scalpels, and locating bodily moles, irises and skin. The work also includes close-ups of bulbous tumors protruding from faces in the medical paintings by Qing Dynasty painter Lam Qua. In this work, Fan presents an absurdist investigation and fetishization of the molecule responsible for centuries of racial othering, suggesting how this molecule in fact exists within all of us, human or not. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/ec7c261d-1fe1-4509-aeb6-520040ca331f/Header+Image_Program+2.jpg Events - Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds - Make it stand out How Old Are You? How Old Were You? 入世, 2017 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/20061eb6-1f3d-4b21-b267-57a35e9944f6/Mask+group+B.jpg Events - Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds - Autodidact Jeamin Cha, South Korea, 2014, digital, color, sound, 9:00 Youngchun Hur is the father of Private Wonkeun Hur who lost his life in 1984 (during the Fifth Republic of Korea). Suspecting the death of his son, Mr. Hur taught himself forensic medicine to reveal the truth. Autodidact was initiated by my meeting with Mr. Hur, at that time, a family member of the victim as well as an unofficial forensic investigator. The video shows magnified images of Mr. Hur’s investigative materials he studied and his handwritings, while two different narrators tell a story. (The script was made based on my conversation with Mr. Hur about his struggles, in which he went against the state’s cracking down on his attempt to unearth the truth over the last 30 years. The topics of conversation also include politics and key life events of the time, and the forensic evidence he found.) The two alternating narrators are Mr. Hur himself and a man in his early twenties. The work attempts to reflect the “voice” of the others through reading the material only with eyes, reading aloud, and re-reading by a different person’s voice. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/yeelen-repossessing-the-spirit-of-myths-in-africa-through-cinema monthly 0.5 2024-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/ac16c3c9-7406-4c3c-b492-ef2276c91e5a/Film+4+Header.jpg Events - Yeelen: Repossessing the Spirit of Myths in Africa Through Cinema  - Make it stand out DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2022) Courtesy of Knoetze, Hlongwane and Wilson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/e3016949-e2c9-4709-a998-3ec704a16be8/Smoke+Jumpers.jpg Events - Yeelen: Repossessing the Spirit of Myths in Africa Through Cinema  - Smoke Jumpers Daniel Muchina, Kenya, 2023, digital, color, sound, 4:15 A mythical portrayal of a priestess attempting to cross the threshold between mortal and immortal worlds in search of resources for her ailing world. In this liminal space, she meets a group of deified figures known only as Smoke Jumpers; custodians of ancestral knowledge who trade her the secrets of their fire rituals but warn her against their practical use. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/b2ae7623-c099-439d-a0dc-34ee5b456e2a/Yeelen.jpg Events - Yeelen: Repossessing the Spirit of Myths in Africa Through Cinema  - Yeelen Souleymane Cissé, Mali, 1987, 35mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 105 minutes In this epic drama drawing on Bambara culture, which echoes mythic legends in an invented tale, a hero undergoes ordeals that allow him to renovate a decaying society. A young man must penetrate the secrets of the Komo cult (a real caste of specialist knowledge among the Bambara), whose members have abused their spiritual powers. Niamankoro suffers his father's wrath as he travels throughout the Bambara empire and Dogon and Peul societies. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/carolina-caycedo-the-lives-of-rivers-7abp3-m8n96-8hp65 monthly 0.5 2024-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/f492ab5c-9b83-48f8-bb47-c169358e7b56/film+5+screening.jpg Events - Ritualizing Knowledge Systems - spirit moves UK, 2021, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 6:00 Exploring the ancestral, traditional, cultural and spiritual ties that exist beyond the boundaries of the material dimensions, this art film visualizes the transient spirits that have come before us, watch over us, guide us, and protect us. The characters reference spiritual elements of Senegalese and Afro-Brazilian traditions, commemorating their interconnectivity within the Black diaspora, whilst tracing back anaiis’ traveled upbringing and inspirations. United through movement and ritual, anaiis’ guides are summoned into a meditative ceremony as an ode to the mystical powers that lead her path. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/62192f26-f6c0-417e-8857-be6518c3f8a9/afronauts.jpg Events - Ritualizing Knowledge Systems - Afronauts by Nuotama Bodomo, USA, 2014, digital, b&w, sound, 14:00 It's July 16, 1969 America is preparing to launch Apollo 11. Thousands of miles away, the Zambia Space Academy hopes to beat America to the moon in this film inspired by true events. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/4d29a04b-2f13-400a-b0ba-a44de74edf67/dzata.jpg Events - Ritualizing Knowledge Systems - DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness Knoetze and Amy Wilson, South Africa, 2022, digital, color, sound, 8:00 Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2023) is a creative research project by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson. In fabricating a fictional institute and its archive, the artists explore and imagine vernacular technological practices operating across the African continent. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/d4d26481-604a-4e69-a79f-72f572826657/Seeds_2.png Events - Ritualizing Knowledge Systems - Seeds by Philippa Ndisi Herrmann, Kenya, 2017, digital, color, sound, 4:00 The sea was the first to see us and so the sea will be the last to leave us. A visual poem from Kenya that explores blood memory, creation myths and ancestry. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1a24ec25-cb80-40cb-ac74-aeb40ba13e38/Film+5+Header.jpg Events - Ritualizing Knowledge Systems - Make it stand out DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2022) Courtesy of Knoetze, Hlongwane and Wilson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/3eec3ee1-010c-4c8e-ba4c-62199c625cda/osaina.jpg Events - Ritualizing Knowledge Systems - Osaina by Daniel Muchina, Kenya, 2023, digital, color, sound, 2:00 A ritual performance art film which invokes the intuitive aesthetic powers of two critical elements in ritual practices in Africa, i.e. the human body as a process of being, and water as a living spirit in the alchemical process of purification and transformation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/8fb54a5f-944b-465e-8765-f387ae362287/golden+chain+%283%29.jpg Events - Ritualizing Knowledge Systems - The Golden Chain by Adebukola Bodunrin & Ezra Clayton Daniels, USA, 2016, digital, color, sound, 6:00 The distant future. A Nigerian space station in a remote corner of the galaxy orbits an artificial pinpoint of matter so dense it cannot exist in our solar system. It is a recreation of the birth of the universe itself, contained for the purpose of study, and overseen by Yetunde, sole crew member on the space station Eko. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/ce7fc22b-59da-449a-841f-8843600b3afb/tapi+%281%29.jpg Events - Ritualizing Knowledge Systems - Tapi! By Jim Chuchu, Kenya, 2020, digital, color, sound, 25:00 Tapi! is a speculative documentary short film that explores the tension between indigenous spiritual practices and modern religious influences in Kenya. Directed by Jim Chuchu as part of The Nest Collective, the film follows Jackson, a young ritual healer and one of the last practitioners of utapishi, a traditional cleansing ceremony. As local Christian church leaders seek to outlaw the practice, Jackson must confront the erasure of his people's complex history and spiritual traditions. The film was commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) as part of their African Collectives Project, receiving its world premiere at IFFR 2020. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/feminist-film-experiments-with-science monthly 0.5 2024-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/ff760d1e-fd4e-4870-9b94-f9b3464fd59d/Mask+group+S.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - We Rule Catharine Chambers, USA, 2014, digital, color, sound, 4:12 One of the principal characteristics humans and ants share is their social nature, and at the heart of any social species is communication. Ants constantly converse with one another using pheromones, vibrations, and touch. What would they say if they could speak to us? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1305773f-46bb-4fa2-b17b-4cd7af124c39/Mask+group.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - Pwdre Ser, the rot of stars Charlotte Pryce, USA, 2018, 16mm film transferred to digital, color, sound, 6:00 The film depicts an encounter with a mysterious, luminous, electrical substance.  Inspired equally by medieval accounts of visionary experiences and by 19th century photography of the invisible, Pwdre Ser joins Kirlian photography with hand-processed images. Pwdre Ser is the Welsh name for a mythical substance that has been observed by many since the 1400's. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/942822ca-3938-40fa-aaf4-80f7c4abb4e1/Mask+group+Z.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - The Jollies Rachel Mayeri, USA, 2016, digital, color, sound, 12:00 The Jollies is a biographical artwork about the late primate scientist and conservationist, Alison Jolly. Interviews with Jolly’s network of colleagues, her daughter, and science studies scholar Donna Haraway are animated by the species they study: lemurs, a langur monkey, and Cayenne the dog. Jolly (1937-2014) was known for her pioneering theory on the evolution of social intelligence developed through her study of prosimians. Her scientific and conservation work drew worldwide attention to the unique ecosystem of Madagascar. In the film, many voices articulate the significance of her scientific discoveries as well as her career: group living over tool making as a driver for evolution, her description of a female dominant primate society, the role of play in learning, as well as her place in the first generation of women in the field of primatology and her development of community-based conservation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/544bb03f-44e1-42c3-887d-bd9ed686dee4/Mask+group+Y.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - Wolf Release Bill Basquin, USA, 2018, color, sound, 10:00 John Oakleaf, Field Coordinator for the Mexican Wolf Repopulation Project, talks about the challenges of and strategies for introducing captive-born wolves to the wild. Wolf Release is a free-standing video; the material in it is related to Basquin's new feature-length experimental documentary, From Inside of Here (2020). Motion-sensor images: Mexican Wolf Inter-Agency Field Team. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/8bad7098-64b0-4cfc-879f-f0b1e6adf839/the+air_10.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - the air we breathe Christina Battle, Canada, 2023, digital, color, sound, 9:19 the air we breathe is an expanded, experimental documentary that thinks through the complexities of air pollution by weaving together themes of environmental catastrophe, environmental racism, cultural and political shifts, and conspiracy. Combining research into air pollution along with personal storytelling and speculative imaginings, this project deeply considers the complicated ways in which our air impacts us: from the way that smells travel through it and the memories they evoke; to the physical impacts of pollutants through shared inhalation; to the ways in which the air serves as a metaphor of connection in a cultural sense. Exploring the systemically racist decisions that result in unequally distributed impacts of air pollutants across geographies, this work considers the act of breathing as one of both political and social potential. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/4e5370fe-78fe-434c-9fd6-e1ad0e30e872/Mask+group+1.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons Jodie Mack, USA, 2021, 16mm, color, silent, 5:00 A world tender and unhatched, Future chaos in repose, in slumber. Yggdrasil. Microcosmos. Batter in a bowl. A living wreath. Oleander hyacinth blow away dandelion, particles of an interplanetary lullaby. Dedicated to the one I love. Desiccated attic must momento mori in grace engraved. With the loss of the imaginary and the real, I am unspeakable as one remembers I once was this... before myself, and then nothing, before I could touch the envelope that is right before me, translucent, When I could cry but could not answer. —Darcy Shreve https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/e97ee1a7-856c-4d72-9c0e-ea9c8d57f06f/Mask+group+B.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - Wasteland No. 2: Hardy, Hearty Jodie Mack, USA, 2019, 16mm, color silent, 7:00 Garden ghosts flirt with the weeds of spring, cycling matter[s] and lives and deaths. From Felix Salten's Bambi, chapter on Winter: "Can it be true," said the first leaf, "can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we're gone and after them still others, and more and more?" "It really is true," whispered the second leaf. "We can't even begin to imagine it, it's beyond our powers." "It makes me very sad," added the first leaf. They were very silent a while." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/8a4f030b-6bcb-4500-9c5b-6d781cbde1da/Header_Program+1.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - Make it stand out Pwdre Ser, the rot of stars, 2018 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/fe6a1295-4f09-471e-a838-26cb021cf892/Mask+group+A.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - ...THESE BLAZEING STARRS! Deborah Stratman, USA, 2011, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15:00 Since comets have been recorded, they've augured disaster: catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage. ...These Blazeing Starrs! juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when star gazers were translators, explicating the sky more intuitively for predictions of human folly. Comets are now understood as time capsules harboring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. Today we smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, they remain oracles - it's just the manner of divining which has changed. ...These Blazeing Starrs! Threaten the World with Famine, Plague, & Warrs: To Princes, Death: to Kingdoms, many Crosses: To all Estates, inevitable Losses! To Herds-men, Rot' to Plowmen, haples Seasons: To Saylors, Storms; to Cittyes, Civil Treasons. —Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, 1578 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/a5936874-d362-4f7b-a9e8-1dd44c97c06f/How-a-Sprig-of-Fir_still01.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - How a Sprig of Fur Would Replace a Feather Anna Kipervaser, USA, 2019, digital, color, silent, 7:30 Taking its title from Charles Altamont Doyle, the film is a meditation on ritual, at once a labor of love and of pain, of parting. A taxonomy of the investigation of love, of becoming. In perpetual beginning. In perpetual ending. Coming into vision, into the present, a leaving. A leaving. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/b2f4d0a5-9fee-49ab-ae43-90b06b53a9cb/in_ocula_oculorum_still3.jpg Events - Feminist Film Experiments with Science - in ocula oculorum Anna Kipervaser, USA, 2021, digital, color, sound, 12:15 in ocula oculorum interrogates the unknown and the internal, in both subject matter and experience. Dealing with the contemporary state of perpetual doom, the film contemplates various stages of life and death from the point of view of our human bodies and perceptual systems. It explores beta movement and phi phenomenon, pushing the limits of intermittence and persistence of vision, playing with our innate desire for continuity and cohesion by forcing image slip. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/old-nature-natural-history-films-from-the-silent-era monthly 0.5 2024-12-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/93875aaa-0a00-4bb2-9a23-dcf7be4b46ec/Hokkaida.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Hokkaido, Japan [Hokkaida, Japan] Universal Animated Weekly, United States, 1920, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 4:59 In this footage from an American newsreel, we see a Japanese village on the island of Hokkaido burning in a huge fire with billowing smoke caused by a volcano eruption. This natural disaster footage emphasizes action, danger, and a feeling of catastrophe. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/32c6b4d0-650e-4a52-bff3-84e0ecdf4b1d/Octopus.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - La Pieuvre [The Octopus] Pathé, France, 1912, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 4:44 This film about the octopus treats this intelligent species as alien, referring to it as a monster in the intertitles. Most of the film shows the octopus in its seashore habitat, but the last shot was taken in a glass-walled aquarium, a common staging technique in nature films of this era. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/d9fb7f4b-8775-4aac-b91a-53ddc0cd5137/Uit+den+schoot+der+aarde.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Uit den schoot der aarde [From the Belly of the Earth] Production Company Unknown, 1919, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 10:01 This film educates viewers about the origin of life and the evolution of species, which were still relatively new scientific concepts being popularized at the time. We see a volcano, a series of reptiles and primates, along with skeletons, fossils, and other discoveries from nineteenth century paleontology. The film concludes with shots of dinosaur statues from Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark (zoo) in Germany. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/86d66cd2-577f-47c9-a50b-d1aebacafaf0/Travelogue.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Leven in Algerije [Falcon Hunting in Algeria] Pathé, France, circa 1909-1927, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 2:15 This Pathé film shows Algerian men hunting rabbits using trained falcons. It also shows men in and around their clay houses, and a woman spinning wool. The film has unusually vibrant stencil-colored hues. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/c3ad3ba4-f369-4726-8dee-1590be56c4a1/Header+Image_Program+14.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Make it stand out Leven in Algerije [Falcon Hunting in Algeria], 1913 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/53400918-d45b-4ccb-b693-8b03252496c9/Travelogue+%281%29.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Oiseaux aquatiques d'Afrique Occidentale [Water Birds of West Africa] Pathé, M. Livier, France, 1925, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 4:03 This film shows several species of African birds in their habitat in Senegal. The film features an applied stencil coloring process called Pathécolor that was unique to the French Pathé company that produced the film. At the time, such colors were thought to have a realistic effect. Today, however, these pastel hues appeal to the viewer’s imagination. Camera operator M. Livier. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/ec957fd6-c713-435a-8232-55e0160de0c9/Woudmieren+%281%29.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - De Woudmieren/Rupsen/de Krekel [Forest Ants, Caterpillars, The Cricket] Production Company Unknown, circa 1925, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 10:36 This is a compilation film with footage from three different natural history films about insect behavior and life cycles. Each segment has a different color tint. Tinting was an applied color process that was widely used in the silent era, in both fiction and nonfiction films. These monochromatic color tints produce a sense of wonderment that works in tension with the photographic realism of the insect imagery. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/60538339-ec9e-4eca-9c67-b9c898e937d5/industry+marble.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Industrie des marbres à carrare [Marble Industry at Carrara] Gaumont, France, 1914, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 6:05 This film showing the famous marble industry of Carrara, Italy captures an ancient industry at the start of the First World War. Quarries have been operating here since the time of Ancient Rome, and Michelangelo sculpted his statues out of Carrara marble. While this film presents nature as a source of “free gifts” to be mastered and used, around the time this film was made Carrara was the center of an anarchist movement which grew out of the local stoneworker’s culture. Some of the unnamed workers shown here were likely participants in the movement, but such a political context goes unmentioned in the film. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/68d51a70-f331-4444-b261-f54190de3fff/berchtesgaden.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Berchtesgaden en het Koningsmeer [Berchtesgaden Park and the Königssee Lake] Eclair, France, circa 1915, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 3:18 The Bavarian nature park shown in this film is one of the oldest conservation parks in the Alps, and it remains an important biosphere reserve today. But by 1933, Adolf Hitler had purchased a mountain home there, and during World War II the area became a Nazi stronghold. While most of the area’s Nazi buildings were destroyed after the war, the history of this region should remind us that the idea of nature, which is a complex cultural construct, can move in different ideological directions. Certain mythic ideas of nature, particularly related to the eugenicist, racist fetish for “purity,” have been (and are still) used for ecofascist purposes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/6851a435-307d-4fc4-8144-300b7aa9124a/Hout+uit.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Hout uit het Hoge Noorden [Wood from the high north] Fox Film Corporation, United States, 1926, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 11:38 A film about the lumber industry, from tree-felling to log driving downriver to the sawmill. While emphasizing the difficult labor of log driving, the film also shows the remains of the heavily logged forest landscapes. A classic resource extraction film, many such “process” films were made about different kinds of industrial production. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/7b312f58-b52c-4b7a-ae78-035516b54f8b/Capture.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Capture d'oursons blancs dans les glaces de l'océan [A Bear Hunt in the Arctic Regions] Pathé, France, 1911, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 5:10 Hunting films were popular in the silent era. This film shows polar bear hunting and death in a way that today’s viewers will find shocking. Polar bears have become a symbol of species endangerment due to their vulnerability to global warming, but as this film shows, they were once seen by European hunters as mere trophies to be scored. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/4837bc6f-f27d-4837-90de-899511ce85a1/Turkey.jpg Events - Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era - Turkije/Stamboul et la Corne d'Or [Turkey: Istanbul and the Golden Horn] Radios, France, 1912, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 3:51 Travelogue films such as this were extremely popular in the silent era. Such films showed the world’s places and people as exotic visions for the armchair tourist. The genre is a curious kind of geography lesson, in which the foreign location shown is both tantalizing and a source of potential tension. Here we see crowded street scenes, an outdoor barbershop, a busy harbor, and the Hagia Sophia. This is another compilation reel of footage shot by two French early cinema production companies: Radios and Eclipse. Every shot is tinted in glorious amber, red, pink, yellow, and blue hues. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/images-of-broken-light-indexicality-in-astronomy-ii monthly 0.5 2025-02-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/012ae96e-d9c6-41dc-b90c-5e6927f9e203/Passage+artificiel+de+Ve%CC%81nus+sur+le+Soleil+.png Events - Images of Broken Light: Indexicality in Astronomy II - Passage artificiel de Vénus sur le Soleil Pierre Jules César Janssen, France/Japan, 1874, digital, b/w, silent, 0:30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/591a59f1-87e6-4718-9f08-31559c0ac745/powers+of+ten.jpg Events - Images of Broken Light: Indexicality in Astronomy II - The Powers of Ten Charles and Ray Eames, USA, 1977, digital, color, sound, 9:00 Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (1977) is a film created by the Eames Office investigating the idea of an exponential series. The film illustrates scale and the significance of adding a zero to a number. It begins with a scene on Earth: a man and woman picnicking in a park bordering Lake Michigan in Chicago. The journey unfolds as the camera steadily moves away from the couple, reaching the edge of the known universe. The camera reverses its movement back to Earth’s park scene, going further to reach the atomic level of the hand of the napping man on the picnic blanket. Original music score by Elmer Bernstein. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/b12aa8af-d50c-41f7-aae5-5cbd127e1a51/Road+to+the+Stars+2.png Events - Images of Broken Light: Indexicality in Astronomy II - Road to the Stars (Дорога к звёздам) Pavel Klushantsev, Russia, 1957, digital transfer, color, sound, 25 min. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/3752fd85-f343-46ca-ad6c-23de51c55e22/Persistence+of+Memory.png Events - Images of Broken Light: Indexicality in Astronomy II - Cosmos: A Personal Voyage Excerpt from Episode 11 “Persistence of Memory”. Carl Sagan/Ann Druryan, USA, 1980, digital, color, sound, 10 min. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/25786908-f9ef-41db-b6d6-4077b15dc66c/CPF86637820.jpg Events - Images of Broken Light: Indexicality in Astronomy II - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/432df066-453c-457e-9bbf-6144e28a1dec/Screenshot+2024-12-31+at+3.18.31+PM.png Events - Images of Broken Light: Indexicality in Astronomy II - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/6048f016-f6b1-401b-bbdc-5faea024d2df/Screenshot+2024-12-31+at+3.57.56+PM.png Events - Images of Broken Light: Indexicality in Astronomy II - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1be688cc-e529-41c8-aabd-943cbbb44aaa/Header+Image_Program+12.jpg Events - Images of Broken Light: Indexicality in Astronomy II - Make it stand out Марс (Mars), 1968 https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/indexicality-in-astronomy-our-heavenly-bodies monthly 0.5 2025-02-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/e86e00d0-0fe4-4c67-bd1a-0c20d92914f0/Tides+and+the+Moon+still.jpg Events - Our Heavenly Bodies: Indexicality in Astronomy I - Tides and the Moon F. Lyle Goldman/Bray Pictures, USA, 1920, 16mm transferred to digital, b&w, silent, 5:33 Animated diagrams, coupled with live-action footage, illustrate how the moon's gravity creates ocean tides on Earth, and how the combined gravitational forces of the moon and the sun result in spring and neap tides. Films such as If We Lived On The Moon and Tides and the Moon were made with the intention to propagate ideas about astrophysics in a didactic way, demonstrating the difficulties of interplanetary travel and, and some of them, denouncing films and fiction novels as chimeras. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/98936ace-82b7-4735-ad08-8309beeb0e2c/livedonthemoon02.jpg Events - Our Heavenly Bodies: Indexicality in Astronomy I - If We Lived On The Moon Max Fleischer/Bray Studios, USA, 1920, 16mm transferred to digital, b&w, silent, 7:40 Premiere of newly restored version courtesy of Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored, LLC Made in 1920, just at the beginning of Max Fleischer’s career in animation, IF WE LIVED ON THE MOON explores what was known at that time about conditions on the moon. Fascinated by science and technology, Fleischer used his talent with drawing and photography to imagine what life on the moon might be like. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/21545eb4-6731-4d6a-9420-5b1ef53cd17f/Mask+group+X.jpg Events - Our Heavenly Bodies: Indexicality in Astronomy I - Wunder Der Schöpfung (Our Heavenly Bodies) Hanns Walter Kornblum, Germany, 1925, digital, color, silent, 90 minutes Restored version courtesy of the Munich Film Museum Our Heavenly Bodies was a German super production coordinated by Hanns Walter Kornblum, which even outgrossed Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) at the box office in its initial release. The film, made by UFA and Colonna Films, (a company founded by Kornblum to own his films), was restored in 2008 by the Munich Film Museum. Kornblum’s films explaining astronomy and physics at the beginning of the twentieth century were intended to popularize very new and complex theories and were very successful in doing so. For this, Kornblum sought the supervision of experts for the use of animations and visual devices of the moving image. It involved fifteen special effects specialists and nine cameramen, taking two and a half years to complete. It was scientifically supervised by four experts: professors Guthnick, Kopff, Ludendorff and Solger and designed not only as an encyclopedia of knowledge of the universe at the time, but also as a presentation of theories about time that were hotly debated. The time-space relationship was presented through a “television set” that displays images of the earth in reverse footage technique on a planetary journey. With references to the Bible, the film also presents possible catastrophic planetary consequences on Earth, to end with a metaphysical and a hopeful phrase from Goethe. - Jane de Almeida “Our Heavenly Bodies is a German film originally released as Wunder der Schöpfung, which translates as Wonders of the Universe, or literally Wonders of Creation. In essence, it is Carl Sagan’s astounding TV show Cosmos, only condensed into an hour and a half, and released in 1925. This epic documentary takes the viewer all the way from the history and fundamentals of astronomy and explains things like the tides, night and day, the changing of the seasons, etc. The movie gives an explanation on how life started and evolved on Earth, and then takes the viewer on a sprawling tour of the solar system in a spaceship, visiting not only the moon and all the planets, but also different stars. Finally the film speculates on the destiny of Earth as the sun cools and dies: will it freeze, burn, collide with some other heavenly body, or all of the above?” - from another essay on Our Heavenly Bodies by Janne Wass, at https://scifist.net/2018/08/15/our-heavenly-bodies/ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/71a94a67-c2fd-4ae7-beb6-5fad05213c3f/Mask+group.jpg Events - Our Heavenly Bodies: Indexicality in Astronomy I - Make it stand out Wunder Der Schöpfung (Our Heavenly Bodies), 1925 https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/should-we-look-at-animals-the-perils-and-pleasures-of-nonfiction-animal-films monthly 0.5 2024-12-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/e5096c71-78af-42db-a269-67d2bdf4f203/skinner+rev.jpg Events - Should we Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films - The Behavioral Revolution B. F. Skinner, 1975, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 28:36 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/c5e66cc3-d0cb-4bcb-bc1d-34923a0431ad/orcon.jpg Events - Should we Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films - Project Orcon B. F. Skinner, 1942, 16mm transferred to digital, color, silent, 2:59 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/68069e0a-108a-42cd-8db4-91a6b059e1ed/Mask+group.jpg Events - Should we Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films - Problem Solving by Chimpanzees Wolfgang Köhler, 1914-1917, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 8:00 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/c454d502-8f31-4edb-959f-a4468fd3ccd9/calhoun.jpg Events - Should we Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films - Interview with Calhoun John B. Calhoun, 1970, digital transfer, color, sound, 38:28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/b2e1e6f2-edd7-4e5d-b086-805b998d7e25/animal+sex.jpg Events - Should we Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films - Animal Sexual Behavior Films Alfred Kinsey & William Dellenback, circa 1940-1950, 16mm transferred to digital color, sound https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1ab32a93-7cff-4e1d-b404-8dcf05a2e875/elon+musty.jpg Events - Should we Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films - Watch Elon Musk's Neuralink Monkey Play Video Games with his Brain 2021, digital, color, sound, 3:27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/73cf257e-6051-4adf-aa9a-0d52354a7a8e/skinner+pigeon.jpg Events - Should we Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films - Pigeon & Red Block B. F. Skinner, 1947, 16mm transferred to digital, color, silent, 1:01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/14dc1df1-b18d-4a8c-8bf5-58b04784ca94/experimentally+produced.jpg Events - Should we Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films - An Experimentally Produced “Social Problem” in Rats O.H. Mowrer, 1939, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 10:52 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1a217621-ea76-49c2-88f8-0281fa8be1b2/Header+Image_Program+10.jpg Events - Should we Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films - Make it stand out Problem Solving by Chimpanzees, 1914-1917. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/beautiful-science-re-contextualizing-science-film-into-film-art monthly 0.5 2024-11-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/0bf3c1ca-6495-46de-a902-f0bafeff13e9/magic-myxies-other-films-by-fpercy-smith-original-4187+%281%29+1.jpg Events - Beautiful Science: Re-contextualizing Science Film into Film Art - Magic Myxies By F. Percy Smith and Mary Field | 1931, 16mm transferred to digital, B&w, sound, 8 min., 6 sec. Made by British Instructional Films for the series The Secrets of Nature, the film uses time-lapse and micro-cinematography to present the life cycle of slime molds with a factually dubious narration. “The Monthly Film Bulletin's Science Committee was outraged by this film - not for its photography, which it admits is beautiful, but for its commentary. Its review, although very seriously lacking a sense of humour, has a point. The film, released in 1931 (thus the early days of sound), is perhaps inappropriately jolly, and it certainly lacks that sober scientific tone that we expect of British wildlife film. It is much more reminiscent of the gung-ho voice of the newsreel. Worse still, it is inaccurate. As the reviewer fumes "'Myxie' is not too objectionable a shortening of the ugly term myxomycete [did the editor know they already had a non-Latin name, 'slime fungi'?] but the suggestion that a myxie is an animal at one point and a vegetable at another is absurd... Further we should like to know how a myxie can be said to be bad tempered, and why accelerated photography should confer on it the power to 'quiver with delight'." Anthropomorphising the natural world has always been frowned on by British wildlife filmmakers (not least Sir David Attenborough) and while we may enjoy the ebullient commentary - which certainly helps to sell a difficult subject - in the end, we probably have to agree with the verdict of the Science Committee.”—Bryony Dixon, British Film Institute https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/8e76ff5b-b50f-44eb-9666-0dfe0019ae6f/hammer_sanctus-6+1.jpg Events - Beautiful Science: Re-contextualizing Science Film into Film Art - Sanctus By Barbara Hammer | 1990, color/b&w, sound, 19 min. Sound composition by Neil B. Rolnick. In her most recent films, ENDANGERED and SANCTUS, Barbara has addressed the co-fragility of both human existence and the film emulsion, the artist's raw material onto which she creates images. I have just recently screened the completed print of SANCTUS, and I was overwhelmed by it. The film is visually exquisite, and replete with symbolic meaning. She has transformed 'found footage' - scientific x-ray films from the 1950s - into a lyrical journey, transforming this raw material into a celebration of the body as temple. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/ce12ea16-2f7a-49e7-beea-179e96782264/Mask+group.jpg Events - Beautiful Science: Re-contextualizing Science Film into Film Art - Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith Directed by Stuart A. Staples | Co-producer and editor Dave Reeve | 2016, digital b&w, sound, 55 min. | Trailer This meditative, immersive film by tindersticks' Stuart A. Staples is a tribute to the astonishing work and achievements of naturalist, inventor and pioneering British filmmaker F. Percy Smith (1880-1945). Based in a studio in north London in the early years of the 20th century, Percy Smith developed the use of time-lapse, animation and micro-photographic techniques to capture nature's secrets in action. He worked in a number of public roles, including the Royal Navy and British Instructional Films, Smith was prolific and driven, often directing several films simultaneously, apparently on a mission to explore and capture nature's hidden terrains. Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith is an interpretative work that combines Smith's original film footage - preserved within the BFI National Archive - with a new contemporary score by tindersticks with Thomas Belhom and Christine Ott. It creates a hypnotic, alien yet familiar dreamscape that connects us to the sense of wonder Smith must have felt as he peered through his own lenses and saw these micro-worlds for the first time. "The reaction of his contemporary audience can’t have been a million miles from ours now: the dawning realisation that our mental maps of the world are just provisional sketches of a far vaster and weirder territory, the familiar world as we imagine it just one wafer-thin slice of something ultimately unknowable. Watching infinitesimal, perfectly spherical fungi all bloom at exactly the same time, I kept imagining the Dutchmen who invented lenses at the birth of science in the 1600s, looking through early microscopes at fleas and ticks for the very first time, and imagining they had just opened a window onto the world of demons and occult dimensions of reality, so vast was the shift in perspective, so fundamentally alien and unfamiliar these new layers of existence seemed. "The humanising of this utterly unfamiliar world is the film’s subtle masterstroke: the retro-fitted score by tindersticks and Christine Ott is a joy, and gives the unapproachable strangeness of what we’re watching a human, emotional dimension. In one section, eerie antique organ sounds and ponderous vibraphones evoke the brave new world of mid-20th century sci-fi, an association that seems apt – after all, these were alien worlds being discovered by the technology of the atomic age too – wondrous, not a little monstrous, weirdly fantastical. In another section, the grainy, fuzzy analogue bass notes of an early synth somehow perfectly describe the completely alien throb of a pulsating, liquid mould that branches out and flows along vein-like paths looking for new food. Later, a multitude of tiny tadpole-like forms riggle round exuberantly to a jazzy score, evoking the energy of the will-to-life at its most abstract; it made me imagine Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” for some reason, and my toddler pointed at them excitedly and shouted “fish!”"—Michael Smith, Caught By the River https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/eb72ac35-f890-43e7-a70f-6098db2ea67f/Diagnostics.jpg Events - Beautiful Science: Re-contextualizing Science Film into Film Art - Studies in Diagnostic Cinefluorography By Dr. James Sibley Watson | 1947-1955, b&w transferred to digital, silent, 6 min. | World premiere of newly preserved and scanned copy, from the George Eastman Museum “The film is a compilation of a number of Watson's X-ray films which were shot between 1947-1955. There are a total of 23 shots of various x-rays plus 13 intertitles for a total of 36 shots.”—Beth Rennie, Head of Information, Research and Access, George Eastman Museum https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/b3d213f0-93e3-4800-a9f2-0e13c478fec1/Header+Image_Program+8.jpg Events - Beautiful Science: Re-contextualizing Science Film into Film Art - Make it stand out Sanctus, 1990 https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/carolina-caycedo-the-lives-of-rivers monthly 0.5 2024-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/130e985f-4531-4f90-a3fd-a1cc165d7d67/06_AGenteRio.jpg Events - Carolina Caycedo: The Lives of Rivers - A Gente Rio (We River) 2016, digital, color, sound, 30 min. A Gente Rio puts in relation the Itaipu Dam, the second largest hydroelectric plant in the world, and whose process of land expropriation was a catalyst for the emergence of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST); the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River, whose process of environmental licensing has been marked by a series of irregularities and profound indigenous resistance; the Bento Rodrigues Dam, which collapsed, releasing hazardous waste from the mining company Samarco and causing an unprecedented environmental disaster in Brazil; and, lastly, the Vale do Ribeira, where indigenous, caiçara and quilombola communities resist against the construction of a dam. The artist highlights the accumulated knowledge of the communities, as conforming a collective body resisting the extinction imposed by development-oriented projects. Commissioned by the 32 Bienal de Sao Paulo - Incerteza Viva. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/90955aa7-b997-44c5-b9f6-e2ce358fe03e/Water+Portraits.jpg Events - Carolina Caycedo: The Lives of Rivers - Thanks for Hosting Us, We are Healing Our Broken Bodies 2019, HD video, color, sound, 8:48 Human bodies appear incomplete, divided and fractured by water and fabrics as a way to address the cementing, impoundment, and fragmenting of local streams and rivers. The body parts search for each other in an attempt to reconstitute as a collective body. Towards the end of the film a complete human body is revealed, suggesting that if we dismantle infrastructure that divides and splinter bodies of water, riparian ecosystems might stand a chance to become whole again. Filmed on location in the San Gabriel River and the Wanaawna (Santa Ana) river mouth, this inaugural and site-specific activation of the Water Portraits series is the first step towards building a healing relationship with the land and the waters of the unceded Tongva and Acjachemen territories, known by many as Orange County. We are grateful to our human and natural indigenous hosts who have sustained us, despite being submitted to violent processes of colonization and extraction. Commissioned by the Orange County Museum of Art. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/9f69758a-bee2-4d4c-ad94-f7cc0cb3654d/ThreatPromise+Still3+1.jpg Events - Carolina Caycedo: The Lives of Rivers - Dejar de ser amenaza para convertirnos en promesa / To Stop Being a Threat and To Become a Promise 2017, 2 channel HD video, color, sound. 8:03 Sound design: Daniel Correa Weaving footage from diverse hydrographies such as the Colorado, the Yaqui, the Xingu, the Spree and the Magdalena Rivers, the two channels contrast the indigenous and rural 'campesino' lifestyle, with the extractivist approach to water and land, by juxtaposing encountered perspectives and understandings of what a territory is, and how it may be inhabited. Along the video, the indigenous perspective casts visual spells on the extractive one, making it wobble, shake, unfold, and eventually transforming it into a spiritual vision. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/d3bda813-7814-40c7-b6ab-657637ae96e2/Reciprical+Sacrifice.jpg Events - Carolina Caycedo: The Lives of Rivers - Reciprocal Sacrifice 2022, digital, color, sound, 12:40 Caycedo’s film Reciprocal Sacrifice takes viewers on the journey of a salmon seeking to return to its spawning grounds in the Sawtooth Mountains. The salmon narrates the challenges it faces as it swims upstream and tells of the heating of the water in the lakes, creeks and rivers in the Snake River Basin. With a voiceover by Thomas “Tatlo” Gregory of the Nez Perce Tribe, viewers learn of the salmon’s generosity in sustaining people and ecosystems over generations. Caycedo writes, “this performative generosity is at the core of regional indigenous survival, their 20th-century fight for fishing rights and self-governance.... The film looks to highlight the cosmological story concerning self-sacrifice, generosity, love and gratitude enjoining us to care for salmon-human relations and inviting humans to take the turn to self-sacrifice in order to save the salmon relative.” Commissioned by the Sun Valley Museum of Art https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/db10ab81-54e2-4e7a-860d-067eed88ff17/EVENT+7+DETAIL.jpg Events - Carolina Caycedo: The Lives of Rivers - Make it stand out Reciprocal Sacrifice, 2022 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/2a8bcc15-9000-4d01-b760-7c2b1bd4ca32/Carolina+Caycedo+Sowing+Moisture+%282023%29+00_01_57_28+video+still+3.jpg Events - Carolina Caycedo: The Lives of Rivers - Sowing Moisture / Sembrando humedad 2023, HD video, color, sound, 5:06 Song by Hema´ny Molina A plant-portrait of the peat moss sphagnum magellanicum compiled from footage taken during a 2022 visit to the peatlands of Karukinka ('our land' in the local Selk’nam language) in Tierra del Fuego, hosted by Ensayos and WCS Chile. The montage is a visual and physical traverse across this vital wetland and a purposeful allusion to the idea of planting and growing water. Sphagnum is both a reservoir of water and a carbon-capturing plant. The film features a song by Hema'ny Molina Vargas, a poet, artisan, and member of the Selk’nam indigenous community Covadonga Ona. She presides over the Corporation of Selk’nam people in Chile, the community's legal arm. In September 2023, the Selk'nam people were lawfully included among the indigenous ethnic groups recognized by the State of Chile, after decades of being proclaimed extinct. This recognition acknowledges the Selk'nam as living people with the right to continue transiting. Hema'ny's song is about walking on water, sung in the form and metric of traditional Selk'nam chants. Commissioned by Anchorage Museum of Art https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/science-of-the-word monthly 0.5 2025-02-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/a0b8ace2-bf66-40fa-838d-e37262ab0da7/violence.jpg Events - Science of the Word - The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys, USA, 2017, digital, color, sound, 9:45 Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil, in collaboration with artist Jackson Polys, investigate the recent court case that decided the fate of the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick, Washington State in 1996. The video is an urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and post-mortem justice. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/041f71f3-4244-4e13-8643-1d3d4ca884c6/fire+this+time.jpg Events - Science of the Word - The Fire This Time Mariam Ghani, USA, 2022, digital, color, sound, 26:08 A kaleidoscopic trip through the intertwined histories of pandemics, riots, and colonial violence. An archive constantly haunted by its possible collapse. Featuring the voices of science journalist Sonia Shah, poet and literary scholar Anjuli Raza Kolb, medical anthropologist Christos Lynteris, epidemiologist Keiji Fukuda, economist William A. Darity Jr., and historians Nayan Shah, Kellie Carter Jackson, and Nancy Tomes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/70529c7e-6c8a-404c-ad79-6c4b9f4f9b81/Inside+Life.jpg Events - Science of the Word - 内共生 (Inside the Shared Life) Erin Espelie 2017, 9:13m, HD video & 16mm, color, sound This film combines sounds of marine life with moving images of the circulatory system, life at different scales, and Lynn Margulis's words on accepted versus iconoclastic science. She talks also about time, how the new is privileged over the true. This film has a captivating slowness. Among other things, it seems to be about epistemology, how we know or don't know. Dorion Sagan for Vdrome https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/d41d8f21-3300-41de-a9e2-5e18dab70d0b/Mask+group.jpg Events - Science of the Word - JIÍBIE Laura Huertas Millán, 2019, digital, color, sound, 24:46 Conversations are rituals. The Murui Muina, Amazonian and Colombian first nation, have particularly elevated this art and its political implications through the ritual de la palabra dulce, a collective conversation allowed by the use of the coca plant powder, called mambe or jiibie. During the ritual, the most pressing political questions are discussed collectively: subjects such as neo-colonialism, ecology, activism but also questions of family and intimate life are considered. In this film, the fabrication of the coca powder in preparation for the ritual unveils an ancestral myth of kinship. The coca plant is neither a product nor an object, but a person, a sacred interlocutor, a kin, the beating heart of a collective body. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/145a1097-4be2-4b7b-aa64-0cf40f017ace/Film+18+Header.jpg Events - Science of the Word - Make it stand out DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2022) Courtesy of Knoetze, Hlongwane and Wilson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/b0b20911-7f72-456f-a3c3-8aaa11d0b7ad/dust+to+data.jpg Events - Science of the Word - Dust to Data Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, UK, 2021, digital, color, sound, 15:25 Dust to Data tracks through the colonial history of archaeology, to current parallels in the data mining of DNA and social media image banks. Working with the Department of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy interrogate the construction of a ‘civilisation’ and its racist ‘origin’ stories that define people into categories: some as human and neutral, others as non-human and/or abnormal. In the film, Achiampong and Blandy employ motifs, such as the recurring gleaming pyramid as an image of order and hard simplicity, and 3D models of Australopithecine skulls (extinct close relatives of humans who lived around two million years ago). The film also features a fragment of a letter from William Du Bois, author of the seminal book about race and society The Souls of Black Folk, rebuking one of the pioneers of modern archaeology, William Petrie. Dust to Data explores how science has been used to justify prejudice. This can be found in the origins of archeology, exposing the archaic mathematical tactics employed by Petrie to justify his own assertions about white supremacy. Although debunked by his contemporaries, Petrie embraced eugenics - the practice of altering or ‘improving’ the human species through selective breeding - as a tool for social control. This view was integral to the birth of archaeology, and its pseudo-scientific legacy still permeates fractious assumptions within the field and in wider culture today. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/carolina-caycedo-the-lives-of-rivers-7abp3-p2scd monthly 0.5 2025-01-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/c53811ff-5ac4-4517-bbbb-06afcd626bfd/monisme+2.jpg Events - Unstable Ground: Science, Extraction, and Belief in Monisme - Monisme Riar Rizaldi, Indonesia, Qatar, 2023, digital, color, sound, 115 minutes Repressed by the state-sponsored violence, a mystic is determined to stay in his land in the foothill of Mount Merapi. Nothing can change his determination to stay on his land and keep practicing his belief of being one with the mountain. On the other side of the mountain, a volcanologist keeps insisting that the end of the world is near. Although he is criticised heavily by his female assistant by questioning his worldview, this volcanologist insists that the only reality is a scientific one. Gaining knowledge from the earth-sensing technology, he declares that mitigation is the only way for humanity to survive from a colossal eruption of Merapi that he predicts. Not far from where volcanologists conducted their research in Merapi, the sand mining industry blooms. One miner, while documented by a filmmaker, contemplates the impact of sand mining and extraction economy for the community, the mountain, and his own psyche. In Merapi, everything is connected by the presence of paramilitaries. A form of state apparatus. Formed in a spirit of collective filmmaking and between factual and fictional, future and past, material and incorporeal, scientific and magic, Monisme reflects the intermingled relationships between people in Mount Merapi: from a mystic who believes that Merapi is a God who gives him life and death, a volcanologist who sees Merapi as a threat to human existence, to a sand miner who treats Merapi as a source of livelihood because it provides him with resources to extract. Monisme trips to the place where actuality is intertwined with myth and legend. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1729117942172-OLMXDD9S7Y5FB9Q71B92/Film+16.jpg Events - Unstable Ground: Science, Extraction, and Belief in Monisme - Make it stand out DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2022) Courtesy of Knoetze, Hlongwane and Wilson https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/carolina-caycedo-the-lives-of-rivers-7abp3-6z334 monthly 0.5 2025-01-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/08453f71-2fac-4e74-ad77-c4c30f93f4b0/space+and+india+2.jpg Events - This Bit of That India - Space and India Vijay B Chandra India, 1971 digital transfer, color, sound, 21 minutes Space and India is both an informational documentary about the India space programme and astronomy and an authorial, visionary kaleidoscope of space scientists, the landscapes produced by cosmic science of architectural scale instruments and the societal imaginary of science. -Creative Encounters With Science and Technology https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/3a40f4aa-7ee4-4abd-8e23-8640dd6490e8/exlporer.jpg Events - This Bit of That India - Explorer Pramod Pati India, 1968, digital transfer, b&w, sound, 7:03 An experimental short which daringly uses rapid cutting, dissonant noises, intercut negatives etc. to capture the tensions the urban youth of India experienced following the turmoil of the ’60s. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/59348520-1b5e-4a29-9e44-78d090b0b52a/This+Bit+of+India.jpg Events - This Bit of That India - This Bit of That India S.N.S Sastry India, 1972, digital transfer, b&w, sound, 19:54 A layered reflection on youth culture, diversity, progress, education, technology and sexuality. The film juxtaposes documentary moments that celebrate individual freedom with a theatrical performance of Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, as a metaphor for repression and conformity. -25FPS Festival https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1729884131588-Y0OCYBBE2PZ6LQOXVE8O/space+and+india.jpg Events - This Bit of That India - Make it stand out DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2022) Courtesy of Knoetze, Hlongwane and Wilson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/d3457811-857b-4bf7-a51c-ae2aecf7e1d3/TRANSENDENCE.jpg Events - This Bit of That India - Transcendence K.Vishwanath India, 1972, digital transfer, color, sound, 20:36 A film on Auroville. Auroville is an international city on the outskirts of Pondicherry, evolving a new way of life transcending the past and the present in search of true answer to the inner questions of man. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/natural-history-in-experimental-and-artist-animation monthly 0.5 2025-02-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/4bd3902d-9499-4095-b808-89e9c6f6e415/Lattice+%281%29.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Lattice Maria Constanza Ferreira, 2017, digital, color, sound, 2:41 Iridescent waves, geometrical gardens, and spiraling sand dunes found in the landscapes of a crystal’s microscopic structure. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/43874f46-b620-4ad1-a433-5c035444f2ad/Spring+%281%29.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Spring Jamie Scott, USA, 2017, digital, color, sound, 4:09 Spring is Jamie Scott’s second seasonal time-lapse film and the first collaboration with composer Jim Perkins. It is the culmination of 3 years of experimentation. The film challenges the status quo by shooting timelapse flowers with a moving camera which enabled him to create a seamless transition from scene to scene. The visuals and music were created in parallel and therefore sync together seamlessly. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/32dcf221-941b-48a0-ac0e-f641586584a1/wROUGHT.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Wrought Anna Sigrithur & Joel Penner, Canada, 2022, digital, color, sound, 22:24 A visual exploration of decay begs questions about our relationships with other species. Wrought begins with that universal moment of disappointment: despite all best efforts, our food has gone bad. But instead of turning away in disgust, Wrought zooms in with curiosity through timelapse photography. Wrought explores how we construct categories for the world. It examines the categories of spoil, ferment, compost and rot, coaxing audiences to decompose the binary of human and non-human. We are forged from the relationships that transgress such binaries; we are all, indeed, wrought. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/a45bb403-287e-4542-bc24-1d051e9c1294/Sila%2C+Silap+Inua%2C+Silla+2.png Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Sila, Silap Inua, Silla Alisi Telengut, Canada, 2020, digital, color, sound, 2:39 Associated with the exhibition "Critical Zones" at ZKM in Karlsruhe, the work explores the ideas of "sila" and "critical zones" and was created as part an excursion from Filmuniversitaet Babelsberg to ZKM. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/531103c3-bac0-4d51-8ae3-dcdf7ecbd36f/Critically.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Critically Extant Sofia Crespo, 2022, digital, color, sound, 9:00 Critically Extant is a project that explores just how little we know about the natural world by testing the limits of the data openly available to us in our digital lives. To achieve this, AI algorithms were trained on millions of open source images of nature and some ten thousand species. The resulting models were then used to generate visual representations of species that are critically endangered, yet have little or no online presence specially on social media The goal of this was to not only trace the edges of our knowledge, but to also explore how we can create feedback loops in the digital that can be positive for the natural world. The project was inaugurated as an Instagram exhibition, exploring how the pieces can become part of our daily digital intake of content as a means of creating awareness and potentially engagement on behalf of the species shared. Naturally, as the data available to us represents but a partial fraction of the real number of species currently estimated as known to us, the pieces in this series show animated specimens that bear some, little, or even no resemblance to the species they are meant to depict. This underlines the difficulties we face in shifting also our digital spaces towards more balanced representation, but it should be grounds for agency too: as we can all create and contribute both physically and digitally and as such can actively work to form new feedback loops that can help bring the critically endangered species into our daily lives in order to get to find ways to care for them? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/8012bf7c-4949-4501-945d-50bfe0882c38/NOT+%28A%29+PART-1.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Not (A) Part Vicky Smith, UK, 2019, 16mm transferred to digital, color/b&w, sound, 6:00 NOT (A) PART was conceived in relation to both the rapid decline of flying insects and the high recurrence of animation, handmade or contact film that works with the subject and/or material of flying insects. Numerous dead bees found on walks were positioned directly onto negative film and contact printed. Occupying approximately 24 frames they run at a rate of 1 bee per second. The length of the film is determined by how many specimens are found over a specified period of time. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/62f94691-fd66-4c7d-9bae-cd88b8bf13d9/Herberia.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Herbaria x Pelicula: Field Notes Derek Jenkins, Canada, 2021, 16mm, color, 11:01 This “Field Portfolio” is a single channel version of the multichannel installation “Herbaria × pelicula.” A consideration of collection as both archive and act, “Herbaria × pelicula” examines the work that takes place at the HAM Herbarium of Royal Botanical Gardens (Canada), located in Burlington ON along the edges of Cootes Paradise wetland, traditional territory of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee peoples. The herbarium collection, which houses over 60,000 holdings, comprises specimens from around the world but is made up primarily of local vascular plant types gathered by the scientific community and educated hobbyists. Combining documentary footage of the herbarium space, code-generated database animations of digitized specimen sheets, and images of plantlife processed in plant material, the film work positions the specific labour of botanical gathering and collection as an image-making practice in addition to a mode of knowledge production. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/991f4d96-f06a-49d0-aca1-be60b0f247a5/Darwin+Sleeps+2.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - While Darwin Sleeps Paul Bush, UK, 2004, 35mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 4:52 More than three thousand insects appear in this film each for a single frame. As the colours glow and change across their bodies and wings it seems that the genetic programme of millions of years is taking place in a few minutes. It is a rampant creation that seems to defy the explanations of evolutionists and fundamentalists. It is like a mescaline vision dreamt by Charles Darwin. The film is inspired by the insect collection of Walter Linsenmaier in the natural history museum of Luzern. As each insect follows the other, frame by frame, they appear to unfurl their antennae, scuttle along, flap their wings as if trying to escape the pinions which attach them forever in their display cases. Just for a moment the eye is tricked into believing that these dead creatures still live . . . https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/633f6af2-62b3-47cd-b2b2-c34e98e8be51/ATHYRIUM+FILIX+FEMINA-2.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Athyrium filix-femina Kelly Egan, Canada, 2016, 35mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 4:19 ATHYRIUM FILIX-FEMINA , the 2nd "quilt film" paying homage to pioneering female artists, was created using Atkins' original cyanotype recipe, coating 35mm film, and exposing each filmstrip to sun. The images are a combination of botanical photograms like Atkins’ images and found footage that tells the story of a young girl tormented by a gang of bullies that, weaved together, produce a feminist narrative that questions malecentrism within the history of the photographic arts and sciences. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/60547aa1-f672-4dad-a02a-031d8f6159b8/SoniumLap.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Somnium Lapidum Emily Pelstring, Canada, 2016, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 3:19 This stop-motion 16mm film offers an audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. The concept is inspired by Camillo Leonardi's "Speculum Lapidum", published in 1533, which describes the magical healing virtues of a variety of stones, categorized by colour. The character-based animated vignettes are inspired by the woodcuts in “De Hortus Sanitatis”, a natural history encyclopedia published in 1485, which details various methods of harnessing the power of gems. It was believed at the time that a given gem's powers could be absorbed through focused viewing. Proposing an analogy between this belief and attraction to cinema, this film offers audiences an opportunity to absorb the depicted stones’ energies by viewing their images. The title, Somnium Lapidum, or Dream Stones, is a reference to the imaginative content of the “Speculum Lapidum” and the dreamlike experience of cinematic viewership. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/0d1e6d71-f02e-47e5-8c00-003e8ad75864/Film+13+Header.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/5f4f7924-1a97-4148-9732-1f8f7e47c6d6/Chemical.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Chemical Somnia Scott Portingale, Canada, 2022, digital, color, sound, 3:47 A cross-continental collaboration between filmmaker Scott Portingale and composer Gorkem Sen. The film transports the viewer into chemical dimensions, exploring phase transition, fluid dynamics, and chemical reactions. Timelapse and high-speed photography were used on a macro scale to capture these elemental relationships in less than a square inch area on a petri dish. Uniquely resounding original music preformed by Gorkem Sen on an instrument he invented, the yaybahar. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/c8e64b7b-77e2-4e80-89bc-105becf5a277/Becoming.jpg Events - Natural History in Experimental and Artist Animation - Becoming Jan van Ijken, Netherlands, 2018, digital, sound, color, 6:14 BECOMING is a short film about the miraculous genesis of animal life. In great microscopic detail, we see the 'making of' an Alpine Newt in its transparent egg from the first cell division to hatching. A single cell is transformed into a complete, complex living organism with a beating heart and running bloodstream. The first stages of embryonic development are roughly the same for all animals, including humans. In the film, we can observe a universal process which normally is invisible: the very beginning of an animal's life. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/carolina-caycedo-the-lives-of-rivers-7abp3-hwzre monthly 0.5 2024-11-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/0ef7c528-28a4-4f47-8293-4db64b40e63c/vibrancy.jpg Events - The Crystalline Entities - The Vibrancy Wenting Zhu, China, 2020, digital, color, sound, 2 min. Affected by polarized light, THE VIBRANCY records the fascinating crystallization processes of various substances. The crystallization process is increasingly fascinating—the colour is awakened, the crystals seem to be sentient, teasing the light, simple and magnificent colours bloom and shine in the dark, depicting a fascinating source of life with wonder manifested everywhere. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/ba117063-f0e0-49c5-a69f-1673e02ec895/last+tings.jpg Events - The Crystalline Entities - Last Thing Deborah Stratman, 35mm to digital, Color, sound, 2023 What happens to us / Is irrelevant to the world’s geology / But what happens to the world’s geology / is not irrelevant to us. - Hugh MacDiarmid Last Things looks at evolution and extinction from the perspective of the rocks and minerals that came before humanity and will outlast us. With scientists and thinkers like Lynn Margulis and Marcia Bjørnerud as guides and quoting from the proto-Sci-fi texts of J.H. Rosny, Deborah Stratman offers a stunning array of images, from microscopic forms to vast landscapes, and seeks a picture of evolution without humans at the center. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/7fec3875-e39d-475d-aeb0-9bcf7541f5a5/leacock+crystals.jpg Events - The Crystalline Entities - Crystals Richard Leacock, 1958, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 24:30 This color film from 1958 and made by the Physical Science Study Committee shows Alan Holden from the Bell Laboratories explaining how crystals are formed and why they are shaped the way they are. The film goes on to show crystals growing while under a microscope. Blue Ribbon winner, American Film Festival. Ricky Leacock (1921-2011) was a major documentary maker, generally in the direct cinema mode. His most well-known film is probably CRISIS (1963), but he was also cinematographer on Robert Flaherty’s LOUISIANA STORY (1946), one the cameramen on MONTEREY POP (1967), and formed Leacock Pennebaker Inc. with D.A. Pennebaker in 1963, making multiple filsms in the 1960s and 70s. In 1969, he was appointed Professor of Cinema at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. CRYSTALS is one of five films Leacock made for the Physical Science Study Committee Physics series. https://www.afana.org/leacock.htm Alan Holden (1904-1985) was a physicist who helped to develop sonar equipment used to detect submarines during World War II. Born in New York City, went to work for the Bell Laboratories Division of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation in N.J., after receiving his bachelor's degree from Harvard in physics and mathematics in 1925. Later, in 1935, he joined the research staff where he worked as a physicist until retiring in 1960. During World War II, he helped to develop methods for producing the large crystals that form the heart of the sonar equipment used by the United States Navy to locate enemy submarines. The Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC), made up of a group of MIT scientists, created a series of films in the late 1950s and early 1960s aimed at teaching the physical sciences. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/186e159d-8153-40ad-a5aa-d2697944c7bf/arctic.jpg Events - The Crystalline Entities - The Arctic Wenting Zhu, China, 2019, digital, color, sound, 2:45 The making of THE ARCTIC began in October 2018 and lasted for about seven months. It records the crystallization processes of different salts. During this period, we explored various forms of the crystals and their wonderful growth patterns. Most of the footage was captured by time-lapse photography. The tile of this film comes from the icy sensation of the Arctic. We hope this film can remind viewers the stunning beauty of the ice world and the importance of protecting our planet. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/91850213-a106-4b19-8db4-eeb15785abe0/Instant+Life+2.jpg Events - The Crystalline Entities - Instant Life By Andrew Kim and Ojoboca, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 2022 Ludwig Faces produced, directed, shot and edited the film Instant Life (1941).1 On the occasions when he screened the film for an audience, he stated, vehemently, that the film should be understood, principally, as a solution to the problem of moving picture spectatorship.2 After each screening of his film, Faces would hand out a small sheet of colored paper to every member of the audience. On each sheet there was a typewritten riddle. He did not provide an answer to the riddle, nor did he ask for one. Descriptions of the evening’s events come from three filmmakers who were present for three separate screenings.3 Not long after attending the third screening, they began to call themselves The Unholy Three.4 Upon leaving the back room of the laundromat that had served as the evening’s cinema on their third and last viewing, The Unholy Three decided that they had to put aside all of their other projects and dedicate their time solely to cracking the riddle. After a few months they felt they had arrived at an answer. They did not reveal their answer to anyone.5 Shortly after, in the fall of 1979, they began production on a film, also titled Instant Life. Their film, which was originally conceived as a shot-for-shot remake of Faces’ film, eventually became three separate shot-for-shot remakes of Instant Life (1941).6 Upon completing the three versions, they decided that all three should be shown sequentially as a single film. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/4c166b1a-c54e-4947-bb65-e578404a95ef/crystal+morph.jpg Events - The Crystalline Entities - Crystal Growth Morphologies Kenneth Jackson and Charlie Miller, Bell Labs, 1974, color, silent, 10:43, Footage Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ This short, silent film shows fascinating crystal growth under magnification, in real-time. The width of the film frame, for most of the samples, is only 1mm wide (only one, the Tristearin sample, is 1/4 of that). Kenneth Jackson and Charlie Miller were the Bell Labs researchers who made the film to document their work. This film was leased during the 1970s and 1980s for audiences of university students, to complement relevant classwork. Crystal-growing techniques were very important to technological advancement at Bell Laboratories. Early crystal experimentation to find better rectifiers for radar and microwaves in the 1940s gave way to explorations of germanium and silicon crystals later on. These, of course, led to the development of the transistor, and beyond--in particular, how crystals grow on different surfaces. Later, this research would lead to ways of crafting the layers of silicon chips, such as the molecular beam epitaxy method. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1a99ee1a-795d-48c6-9c8d-229bdfe4d9b4/Film+9+Header.jpg Events - The Crystalline Entities - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/5977614b-77d5-49e0-9fa1-709ca4c7e4df/decker+crystals.jpg Events - The Crystalline Entities - Crystals Elwood Decker, 1951, Color, silent, 2:15, Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive Elwood Decker (1902-1992) was an American painter who also made a few short films. This film emphasized very brilliant colors. Some of the crystals were thin and elongated, almost like needles. Others looked like snowflakes growing. The growing crystals were seen through translucent abstract forms, which drifted over and through them, like ghosts. This was achieved by a making a series of double exposures on the same film print. In his journal he wrote, '...Like the Dunes, the simplicity of crystals make them seem like moving abstraction... ideas, rather than things...' Elwood's latest abstract movies with growing crystals caused another ripple in the circle of artists he was connected with. He knew he had only scratched the surface and was pioneering with totally new and original concepts. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/resisting-western-sciences-colonial-mandate-rock-bottom-riser monthly 0.5 2025-01-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/4a1a764d-56c4-434c-982b-c3cea1c4aa53/Film+17+Header.jpg Events - Resisting Western Science’s Colonial Mandate: Rock Bottom Riser - Make it stand out DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2022) Courtesy of Knoetze, Hlongwane and Wilson https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/d999fa2d-e878-4f5c-a9ab-624d9dc902e9/The+Fourfold_film+still+4.jpg Events - Resisting Western Science’s Colonial Mandate: Rock Bottom Riser - The Fourfold Alisi Telengut, Canada, 2020, digital, color, sound, 7:14 Based on the ancient animistic beliefs and shamanic rituals in Mongolia and Siberia narrated by my grandmother, an exploration of the indigenous worldview and wisdom. Against the backdrop of the modern existential crisis and the human-induced rapid environmental change, there is a necessity to reclaim the ideas of animism for planetary health and non-human materialities. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/1729887330371-8CPG0MWQX1ODJ117NOOQ/rock+bottom+hero+social+small.jpg Events - Resisting Western Science’s Colonial Mandate: Rock Bottom Riser - Rock Bottom Riser Fern Silva, USA, 2021, 16mm transfer to digital, color, sound, 70 minutes From the earliest voyagers who navigated by starlight, to present-day astronomers scanning the cosmos for habitable planets, explorers have long made Hawaii the hub for their searching. Today—as lava continues to flow on the island—another crisis mounts as scientists plan to build the world’s largest telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s most sacred and revered mountain. In his dynamic feature debut, Fern Silva examines myriad encounters with an island world at sea. Drawing from subjects as seemingly disparate as the arrival of Christian missionaries and the controversial casting of Dwayne Johnson as King Kamehameha, the film weaves a vital tapestry of post-colonialism and pop culture with cinematic brio and a wry wit. Rock Bottom Riser is an essential document and an exhilarating tour-de-force, a palimpsest that traverses geology, ethnography and astronomy. https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events-archive/documentary-and-science-fiction-locating-the-uncanny-in-1980s-chinese-state-sponsored-films monthly 0.5 2024-10-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/ac1a6b48-b897-4639-86e6-0a3183cbce57/Chinese+Film+Forum3+1.jpg Events - Documentary and Science Fiction: Locating the Uncanny in 1980s Chinese State-Sponsored Films - Do You Believe? Central Newsreel & Documentary Film Studio, China, 1980, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 35:00 In 1979, less than one year after China entered its reform era, reports surfaced nationwide about children allegedly possessing extrasensory powers. The Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio, the only state film studio dedicated to nonfiction filmmaking, set out to investigate these superpowered children. It is the only film titled with a question mark in the studio's history. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/34633a4f-b791-4c9f-a97a-3ef31283eac9/Interviewing+Qingong+Masters2+1.jpg Events - Documentary and Science Fiction: Locating the Uncanny in 1980s Chinese State-Sponsored Films - Interviewing Qigong Masters August First Film Studio, China, 1989, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 20:00 Originally a breathing exercise dating back 2,000 years in China, qigong experienced a surge in national popularity during the 1980s, taking on new significance. This film features qigong masters who can breathe messages onto leaves, restore mobility to paralyzed legs, and generate infrared energy. In a way, these masters also helped reconfigure the documentary genre, blending science with fiction, and tradition with modernity. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/67c692e6-e358-447d-9f16-cc9267de98ab/Ballad+of+the+Ming+Tombs+Reservoir+3_+1.jpg Events - Documentary and Science Fiction: Locating the Uncanny in 1980s Chinese State-Sponsored Films - Ballad of the Ming Tombs Reservoir August First Film Studio, 1958, 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 20:00 This excerpt from a socialist "artistic documentary" envisions a commune twenty years into the future, where every member achieves self-fulfillment through advanced technology and heightened class and gender consciousness. While many consider the film to be the first Chinese sci-fi, some critics argued it was still a documentary, as the genre reflects the present, and the communist present was already a harbinger for the future. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6706937053141b00e72f89fe/bbb088dd-b9c4-4a1f-8924-7b8c33af032b/Header+Image.jpg Events - Documentary and Science Fiction: Locating the Uncanny in 1980s Chinese State-Sponsored Films - Make it stand out Do You Believe? 1980 https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/about daily 0.75 2024-11-18 https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/404 daily 0.75 2024-11-06 https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/home daily 1.0 2025-04-01 https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/archive daily 0.75 2024-11-18 https://www.filmforumexperimentations.org/events daily 0.75 2025-04-01