Category Archives: SECTIONS

Pride at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative: Groundbreaking Queer Films and Filmmakers / The Film-makers’ Cooperative

Pride at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative: Groundbreaking Queer Films and Filmmakers
The Film-makers’ Cooperative
June 29, 2023
https://film-makerscoop.com/programs/pride-at-the-film-makers-cooperative-groundbreaking-queer-fi

PROGRAMS
Pride at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative: Groundbreaking Queer Films and Filmmakers
A two-night program of paradigm-shifting queer shorts and features in honor of Pride month
9 films

In honor of Pride month, join us at the FMC Screening Room (475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor) on Thursday, June 29th, and Friday, June 30th, 2023, at 7pm, for a two-night program of groundbreaking queer, experimental films by legendary filmmakers in our archive, curated by Matt McKinzie.

Description

IN HONOR OF PRIDE MONTH, JOIN US AT THE FMC SCREENING ROOM (475 PARK AVENUE SOUTH, 6TH FLOOR) ON THURSDAY, JUNE 29TH, AND FRIDAY, JUNE 30TH, 2023, AT 7PM, FOR A TWO-NIGHT PROGRAM OF GROUNDBREAKING QUEER, EXPERIMENTAL FILMS BY LEGENDARY FILMMAKERS IN OUR ARCHIVE, CURATED BY MATT MCKINZIE.

A haven for “outsider” artists since its inception, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative houses some of the most vital and groundbreaking queer films in history. In honor of Pride month, this two-night program showcases a handful of these paradigm-shifting works.

Internal Combustion (1995) by prolific and award-winning multimedia artist and 2017 Guggenheim fellow Cynthia Madansky, in collaboration with filmmaker, scholar, and practitioner Alisa Lebow, is a pioneering work that breaks the many silences surrounding lesbians and AIDS, and reflects on the often unspoken tensions within this epidemic of survival, power, mourning, and loss. Nikolai Ursin’s Behind Every Good Man… (1966) offers one of the first filmic portraits — an uncommonly sensitive and non- sensationalistic one, at that — of the lived experiences of a Black trans woman in 1960s Los Angeles; just last year, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for “cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance.” Elegy in the Streets (1989) sees Jim Hubbard — the founder and president of MIX: the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival — exploring the AIDS crisis from both a personal and a political perspective, with a work that intertwines two motifs: memories of Roger Jacoby, a filmmaker who died of AIDS, and the development of a mass response to AIDS. Meanwhile, Flaming Creatures (1962) — an incendiary, pre- Stonewall depiction of drag queens, trans folks, intersex folks, and queer sexuality — remains one of the most controversial films ever made, having been confiscated by the police shortly following its premiere and soon thereafter landing filmmaker Jack Smith in New York Supreme Court on obscenity charges.

Atalanta: 32 Years Later (2006), dedicated to trailblazing lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, finds the legendary Lynne Sachs reworking the age-old fairytale of a princess looking for her “perfect prince” into “an homage to girl/girl romance” via reappropriated footage and audio from Marlo Thomas’ 1974 feminist version of the children’s parable for TV’s Free to Be You and Me. Peter Cramer’s Black & White Study depicts Cramer’s interracial relationship with fellow filmmaker and activist Jack Waters in a groundbreaking “tableau vivant of opposites and attractions” that premiered at Jim Hubbard’s MIX in 1990. Amnesia (2000) “uses found footage, 19th century photographs of affectionate men, digitized video imagery, and gay ephemera to imagine a past and create a future,” and was directed by Jerry Tartaglia, who passed away just last year and was one of the major champions and preservationists of the work of Jack Smith (not to mention a highly influential filmmaker in his own right). José Rodriguez-Soltero’s Lupe (1966) — an “underground classic of the stature of Flaming Creatures, Scorpio Rising, Hold Me While I’m Naked, or The Chelsea Girls” — offers a “color-saturated, dime store baroque” account of the life of Lupe Vélez (played by Mario Montez in drag) and has influenced everyone from Pedro Almodóvar to Vivienne Dick to Bruce LaBruce. Last but not least, Jean Genet’s lyrical Un Chant D’Amour (1950) predates the founding of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and depicts the fantasy of a gay male prisoner and that of his captor. The iconic French writer’s only film, it would shape the future work of cinematic titans like Kenneth Anger and Robert Bresson.

*** PROGRAM:

THURSDAY, JUNE 29th (Total Run Time = 88 minutes):

Internal Combustion (1995), Cynthia Madansky, 7 minutes, digital, sound, color

Behind Every Good Man… (1966), Nikolai Ursin, 8 minutes, 16mm, sound, B&W

Elegy in the Streets (1989), Jim Hubbard, 30 minutes, 16mm, silent, color

Flaming Creatures (1962), Jack Smith, 43 minutes, 16mm, sound, B&W

FRIDAY, JUNE 30th (Total Run Time = 92.5 minutes):

Atalanta: 32 Years Later (2006), Lynne Sachs, 5 minutes, digital, sound, color

Black & White Study (1990), Peter Cramer, 4 minutes 29 seconds, digital transfer from 16mm print, silent, B&W

Amnesia (2000), Jerry Tartaglia, 7 minutes, 16mm, sound, color

Lupe (1966), José Rodriguez-Soltero, 50 minutes, 16mm, sound, color

Un Chant D’Amour (1950), Jean Genet, 26 minutes, 16mm, silent, B&W

‘Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam’ and ‘Celaje (Cloudscape)’ at MoMA / Museum of Modern Art

Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam and Celaje (Cloudscape) at MoMA
Museum of Modern Art
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/8846

Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam. 1994.
Directed by Lynne Sachs in collaboration with Dana Sachs

Celaje (Cloudscape). 2020.
Directed by Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Next on Wed, Aug 16, 8:00 p.m.
MoMA

Here and There: Journeying through Film
Organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film

What is summer other than a time of becoming? This wide-ranging selection of contemporary films from around the world, all drawn from MoMA’s collection, chronicles states of transformation and transit. Whether exploring the relationship between a person and their surroundings, revealing how bonds are tested or can deepen far from home, or seizing on the poetic potential of coming into one’s own, these works expand on storylines quintessential to the summer film. Encompassing fiction, documentary, and experimental forms, this series brings critical engagement and imagination to journeys both emotional and physical, offering new favorites to delight and inspire before the first cool nights settle in.

Wed, Aug 16, 2023 – Opening Night
8:00 p.m.
MoMA, Floor 1
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
Sculpture Garden

Lynne and Dana Sachs present to introduce their film.

Tue, Aug 22, 2023
5:00 p.m.
Titus 2 Theater

In this intergenerational double bill, physical and metaphorical journeys intertwine, revealing intimate excavations of history and place. Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam chronicles a voyage sisters Lynne and Dana Sachs—one a filmmaker, the other a writer—made from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi in 1994. Reveling in the kaleidoscopic sounds and images of Vietnamese daily life, their road trip morphs into a reckoning with untold histories as the pair openly juxtapose travelogue with their own childhood memories of America’s first televised war.

A different family bond frames Celaje, in which Sofía Gallisá Muriente combines old, new, and found Super8 and 16mm footage to tell her grandmother’s life story and the history of Puerto Rico as twinned narratives. Hand-developing film reels to expose them to the salt, heat, humidity, and wind that whipped around the family home in Levittown, Toa Baja, Gallisá Muriente poignantly gestures to the impermanence of archives both personal and collective on the island. Frequently connecting climate and memory, she has written about the film, “Memories move around like clouds, images rot and age, and the traces of the process are visible on the film and in the country, like ghosts.”

Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam. 1994. USA. Directed by Lynne Sachs in collaboration with Dana Sachs. In English, Vietnamese; English subtitles. 33 min.

Celaje (Cloudscape). 2020. Puerto Rico. Directed by Sofía Gallisá Muriente. In Spanish; English subtitles. 41 min.

This film accompanies Here and There: Journeying through Film

This film is part of Film in the Sculpture Garden.

Lynne & Dana Sachs Screening Introduction at MoMA

New Films / Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre

New Films
CFMDC
June 16, 2023
https://mailchi.mp/f4f27f6ad1ca/cfmdc-march-news?fbclid=IwAR34CiF6W7ZKwPeEjXzVdTi2JALdTo1icatRmMxbnXKqHgiwSjRKoadWWSQ

NEW FILMS

Check out the new additions to our collection this month! You can view the trailers here. Password: cfmdcmarch23

With new films by Christina Battle, Louise Bourque, Celina de Leon, Mivan Makia, Wrik Mead, Calla Moya, Jennifer Reeves, Robin Riad, Lynne Sachs, and Barbara Sternberg. Enjoy the previews!

ARCHIVES OF RESISTANCE

NGOYMALAYIÑ

By Catrileo-Carrión Community
Online Now

Ngoymalayiñ is a word in the Mapuche language of Mapuzugun which translates to “We do not forget.” This phrase responds to the perseverance of Indigenous communities in seeking justice despite the continued violence and denial of their rights by the Chilean government. This exhibition includes a series of nine short videos combining archives in mainstream media, video performances enacted in historically relevant sites, and audio bytes by members of the community.

Online now at archivesofresistance.com.

UPCOMING SCREENINGS

HIGHLIGHTS FOR MARCH:

Films by Michael Snow in Montreal at Cinémathèque Québécoise (March 22) and FIFA Éxperimental (March 25).

Toronto Queer Film Festival & Symposium: Online March 23 – April 23. This year’s theme Queer Wonderlands invokes realms full of transitions, joy, and love, inspired by imagination with the anticipation of what is to come.

Whorehouse Cinema: sex worker film & art festival in Amsterdam, March 31 – April 2. Including CFMDC films Positions by Justin Ducharme, Strip by Kateřina Turečková, Stripped by Jevon Boreland, Every Day Burns by Aidan Jung.

Follow CFMDC on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for news about additional screenings and events.


Cluster #25 Experimental Films and Concert w/ Marina Poleukhina / Labor Neunzehn

Cluster #25 Experimental Films and Concert w/ Marina Poleukhina
Labor Neunzehn
June 14, 2023
https://www.laborneunzehn.org/cluster-25-wmarina-poleukhina-experimental-films-and-concert/

Cluster #25 w/Marina Poleukhina – Experimental Films and Concert

Labor Neunzehn is pleased to invite you to the first event of this year’s Cluster Series. In addition to the exhibition and workshop that will take place at our space, we are pleased to consolidate our collaboration with KM28 by combining six concerts and six experimental film screenings between 14 June and 6 December. Stay tuned!  

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Cluster #25 Experimental Films and Concert w/ Marina Poleukhina

20:00 DOORS 20:30 EVENT STARTS
Location: KM28 (www.km28.de)
Karl-Marx Str. 28, Berlin

INM-FIELD NOTES: https://www.field-notes.berlin/de/programm/197530/cluster-25-w-marina-poleukhina-concert-and-screening-curated-by-labor-neunzehn
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/events/118415134603117

Programme:

A. Film Screening Programme

LA VACHE QUI RUMINE
by Georges REY
1969 / b&w / silent / 3′ 00

PORTRAIT
by Georges REY
1973 / b&w / silent  / 3′ 00

TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS)
by Ben RUSSELL
2010 / color / sound / 10′ 00

A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES
by Lynne SACHS
2019 /  color / sound /  14′ 00

Film courtesy of Light Cone
Curated by Valentina Besegher Scotti

still img from “A Month of Single Frames” © Lynne Sachs

B. Concert / Performance

One pulsating surface (2023).
Solo performance for expressive objects by Marina Poleukhina.

One pulsating surface is a solo performance for expressive objects, where each object communicates, moves and transforms in relation to a musical gesture. It is the energy, which as gesture and sound shapes the instrument. Together they become weightless, yet tangible, full of sensibility. It is a sculpture, which you observe and to which you listen. And while it is happening, the moment of intimacy unexpectedly finds you and connects with you from the inside.

Marina Poleukhina is composer and improviser.
The focus of her artistical attention lies in an interdisciplinary work. Her music unite a creation of a world that goes beyond only sounds. It connects movement, light, video projections on unusual surfaces, manipulation of ordinary devices that make them become instruments, objects that create their own space. This evolves into new and unexplored acoustical situations of an intense complexity. A territory made of crossroads of genres. 
Her music is played on festivals: Ultima (Oslo), Wien Modern (Vienna), Path Festival (Verona), MATA (New York) and others. She works with ensembles such as Nadar, MCME, Nostri Temporis,Looptail, Zwerm, Platypus, Airborne Extended, Curious chamber; with musicians such as Jennifer Torrence, Alexander Chernyshkov, Alessandro Baticci, Stefan Voglsinger, Tomomi Adachi, Vladimir Gorlinsky, Didi Kern, Franz Hautzinger, Kirill Shirokov; with choreographers such as Johanna Nielsen, Paul Wenninger, Agnes Schneidewind. 
She works and walks in Vienna.

marina poleukhina

Cluster is a new-music series devoted to the investigation of sound and notation, which provides musicians and composers with an exchange area in Berlin, at the crossroad of compositional and performance practices.

Labor Neunzehn is an artist-run project engaged in a cross-disciplinary discourse on time-based-art that involves expanded cinema, modern music, publishing, and the critical reflection in media art, with a specific focus on the migration of these languages between the online and offline domains. As an independent curatorial platform and a non-profit initiative for the production of research projects, exhibitions, performances, workshops, we are committed to the presentation of collaborative outcomes and hybrid formats.

This concert for Cluster Series is generously supported by inm Berlin e.V and the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa

She Carries the Holiday in Her Eyes

She Carries the Holiday in Her Eyes (2023)
4 min., silent

Performers: Barbara Friedman and Laetitia Mikles

A picture of parallels and swirls, two women touch with eyes closed, use cameras in motion, discover a holiday of optics. “I have seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and commanding, and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye.” – from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Manners”

Filmed at Yaddo
Saratoga Springs, NY

‘Film About a Father Who’ in Love, Rebellion, Freedom / Beykoz Kundura, Istanbul

Love, Rebellion, Freedom
Beykoz Kundura
June 4, 2023
https://www.beykozkundura.com/event-detail/4june-23

LOVE, REBELLION, FREEDOM: 4 JUNE

— 15:00 —

THE SILENCE OF THE BANANA TREES
Director: Eneos Carka
2022 / 24′ / English, Hungarian; English, Turkish subtitles
Seventy-something Hungarian Mihály Fekete has filled his house in a leafy suburb of Budapest with art works made by his daughter Réka. It’s clear from the way he talks about her that she’s an important part of his life; however, they have not spoken for years. Her decision to keep distance from her father is painful for him, especially since she is ill. Despite his sorrow, he has resigned himself to do as she wishes. At his home, where this film is being shot, and where he and his family grew up, he is able to draw from a reservoir of tangible memories: vacation slides, letters, videos and children’s drawings.
The film eventually becomes a go-between in an attempt to restore a lost connection. Using abstract imagery and patient observations, documentary maker Eneos Çarka evokes a sense of transience, carrying the viewer off in a maelstrom of recollections and feelings that lead to the gripping finale.

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO
Director: Lynne Sachs
2020 / 103′ / Russian; English, Turkish subtitles
Over a period of thirty-five years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16 mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Like a cubist rendering of a face, Sachs’s cinematic exploration of her father offers multiple, sometimes contradictory, views of a seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately shrouded in mystery. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.  This exclusive streaming premiere is accompanied by a selection of experimental short films by Sachs, many of which also reflect her probing exploration of family relationships.


— 17:00 —

NELLY & NADINE
Director: Magnus Gertten
2022 / 92’ / French, English, Swedish, Spanish; English, Turkish subtitles
The voice of opera singer Nelly resonates in the middle of Ravensbrück concentration camp. Nelly and Nadine met for the first time at Christmas in 1944. They found each other again after liberation and were to stay together for the rest of their lives. Today, Nelly’s granddaughter Sylvie is about to be confronted with her grandmother’s legacy, locked in a box. The photographs, Super 8 footage and audio recordings as well as the poetic and harrowing diary entries that she comes across describe not only her grandmother’s memories of the camp, but also tell the story of her life with Nadine – a relationship that was never referred to as such by the family. “Nothing is real until it’s socially expressed”, says historian Joan Schenkar in conversation with Sylvie.
Over a period of one year, Magnus Gertten accompanies granddaughter Sylvie on her cautious search, following the traces of the untold stories that are found in the various sources. A moving film about a deep and loving lesbian relationship and the necessity of individual and collective remembrance.

Proceeds from the tickets sold in “LOVE, REBELLION, FREEDOM” screenings will be donated to earthquake relief efforts.

About Beykoz Kundura

With its history that spans over two hundred years, Beykoz Kundura is one of the most significant historical and cultural values of Turkey and operates as a professional venue letting business in addition to hosting innovative, interdisciplinary cultural artworks.

This industrial space which had been active from the Ottoman era to the Republic is a cultural heritage with undisputed value due to its contribution to the Turkish economy. Acting as a melting pot where creative ideas are formed while being inspired by the nostalgia of the former factory space set up in a land of 183 decare, Beykoz Kundura maintains its majestic existence on the Bosporus by expanding its historical cultural values with new ones thanks to its team that is driven with the idea to preserve this heritage.

Le Petit Versailles & XY Chromosome Project present FLUTTER

Le Petit Versailles & XY Chromosome Project present:

FLUTTER an evening of film, painting, performance, cyanotype photos, and poetry
Saturday, June 3, 2023 • 8 – 10 pm
Le Petit Versailles
247 East Second Street
Join us. It’s free rain or shine!
Reservations encouraged:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/flutter-film-painting-performance-cyanotype-photos-and-poetry-tickets-639831381887

Join us at Le Petit Versailles, a public community garden in the East Village, where fragments and minor moments will converge in film, painting, performance, cyanotype photos and poetry. Together, poet Lee Ann Brown, painter Mable Ting, performer Tony Torn, photographer Accra Shepp, and filmmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs interpret the word flutter in an attempt to live in the space between the tangible and the ineffable. A paean to the possibly overlooked and the definitively forgotten. 

Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn – The Green Play: a poets play written for John Ashbery by Lee Ann Brown, performed by Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn

Mable Ting – Motion Picture (with Nelson Kim) a time-lapse video record of a painting being created.

Accra Shepp – Dreaming with One Eye open in Case of Attack by Wolves or Other Dangers – cyanotype photos

Mark Street – Flutter – a testament to the ethos of always carrying a camera even when you don’t know why – film

Lynne Sachs – She Carries the Holiday in Her Eyes & A 16mm film 100th Birthday Party Gift – film

Le Petit Versailles is a public community garden in the East Village that presents a season of events, including art exhibitions, music, film/video, performance, theater, workshops and community projects from May to October. LPV is a project of Allied Productions, Inc., a non profit arts organization. Supported by New York States Council for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2010, Mark Street and Lynne Sachs created The XY Chromosome Project, an umbrella for their collaborative ventures. Together they have produced an array of collaborative installations, performances, and two-dimensional art works.

Poster design by Mable Ting.

Accra Shep
MM Serra & Lucia Maria Minervini
Tony Torn & Lee Ann Brown
Mable Ting & Nelson Kim
Peter Cramer & Jack Waters
Mark Street