The utilization of prior footage, recontextualized, is a common practice in experimental filmmaking. This program highlights two supreme examples, both drawing on earlier “science” films utilizing remarkable photographic techniques to create new art, one utilizes cine-radiography to examine the interior of the human body in action; the other a meditative tribute to one of the primary pioneers of microscopic and time-lapse photography. In a research visit at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, Barbara Hammer came upon some of the reels of x-ray films, or cinefluorography, by Dr. James Sibley Watson, also known in the film world for his films The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933). Watson was also a doctor who developed a method of filming the innards of people by x-rays (most likely unhealthy large doses). There are over 233 x-ray films at the George Eastman Museum, most of which are not preserved, digitized, or available for viewing. Hammer utilized the available footage, tinting, layering, and more, to create one of her masterworks, a humorous and pensive meditation on the human body, its fragility and resilience. F. Percy Smith, working with Mary Field, was a key innovator in microcinematography and time-lapse photography, creating phenomenal close-up images of plants, insects, molds, and more, used in educational films distributed in the United Kingdom in the first half of the 20th century. Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith, made by Stuart A. Staples of the band tindersticks (whom also score the film with Christine Ott) removes the wry educational narration of Smith’s original films and combines excerpts in new ways to create a sense of wonder at the camerawork while also rending the living things in the films into near abstract yet fantastic forms.
Tickets: $15 General | $10 Students/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at link.dice.fm or at the door
Filmforum hosts Carolina Caycedo in conjunction with the exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum focusing on her work regarding “water and land stewardship, food sovereignty, and fair and just energy transition.” In her video work, Caycedo utilizes varying modes – documentary, dance, visual effects, observational, poetic, meditative -- to explore the milieu, the losses, and the possible re-births, of waterways in the Americas. The films contrast the lifestyles of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in their understanding of the uses of and debts owed to the rivers that give us life. These beautiful films, often existing as installations but which reach a different level of power in a theatrical presentation, express indigenous beliefs while reckoning with modernity, using the visual technology of today in common cause with activists and stakeholders seeking to restore our rivers and by extension, ourselves.
Tickets are free | RSVP requested at link.dice.fm
Showcasing three short films made by the Chinese state in the 1980s, this program ventures into the uncanny field between documentary and science fiction. As the socialist country stumbled into capitalism, nonfiction films gave forms to alternative epistemologies that reconfigure bodies, medicine, military, and education. The boundaries between documentary, science education film and fiction genres were constantly shifted according to specific political campaigns, resulting in hybrid and often experimental practices and the constrution of a new national subjectivity that transcended modern western science. Through this double engagement with both form and content, this program does not produce yet another exceptional account of Chinese media and science, but rather sheds light on the necessary political, medical, and scientific conditions of truth claims.
Tickets: $10 General | $8 Students/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at link.dice.fm or at the door
This program of short experimental films and videos expands on the process of ritualizing bodies of knowledge, highlighting the role film plays as a cultural interface that engages sacred reflections and revelations informing the performance of rituals for cultural inheritance. Films from Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze & Amy Wilson, Jim Chuchu, Philippa Ndisi Herrmann, Adebukola Bodunrin & Ezra Clayton Daniels, and anaïs extend the limits of its artistic form to include divergent worldviews. The aforementioned filmmakers use the technological capacity of cinema to manipulate the temporal and spatial in order to stage complex multi-dimensional stories, in turn reproducing memories and re-integrating repressed knowledge systems and cultural heritage.
Tickets: $10 General | $8 Students/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at link.dice.fm or at the door
This program examines the technical capacity of filmmaking to encode and organize new myths for the expansiveness of modern African people. Pairing legendary Malian film Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987) with contemporary Kenyan film Smoke Jumpers (Daniel Muchina, 2023), this program illuminates the intricate relationship between the structured systems of knowledge prevalent in ancient African societies and the creation of visual narrative forms as vehicles for disseminating this wisdom. It investigates how the fusion of visual art and scientific methodology finds expression through cinema, evolving into a ceremonial conduit.
Tickets: $10 General | $5 Students/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at 9025.blackbaudhosting.com or at the door
Chile’s Atacama Desert is a natural environment where the heat of the sun keeps human remains intact (such as those of Pre-Columbian mummies; 19th century explorers and miners; and the remains of political prisoners, "disappeared" by the Chilean army after the military coup of September, 1973). Astronomers also flock to the food of the mountains to study space while the surviving relatives of the disappeared search for their bodies nearby. Guzman, a stalwart and champion of third cinema, the anti-capitalist, socialist cinema movement of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, uses the Atacama Desert as a stand-in for the expanse of the human condition, undergirded by the scientific wonder that the desert propagates. His feature film Nostalgia for the Light will be preceded by Solar Eclipse, the first known moving image captured of space as a way to orient the audience towards the wonders of our solar system before challenging the way it is romanticized in popular media and Brilliant Noise, a granular and intimate look at the Sun by the British duo Semiconductor.
Tickets: $13 General | $11.50 Military/Students/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at vidiotsfoundation.org or at the door
Bodies in flight, bodies in stasis. Our bodies are bound by both the current reality and aspirational future of science, but expand even further in the search for an otherwise. This program takes as its jumping off point questions, experiments, and memories of the body, wrestling with history, memory, gender, social institutions. Junha Kim and Noam Youngrak Son approach deconstructions of humanism and socially-encoded bodies with whimsy and sardonic humor. Léonie Hampton, Maria Fernandez Pello, and Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu honein on the atmospheric intimacy of human bodies and the memories they hold. Jeamin Cha and Jes Fan present the expansive potential of scientific practices that inform race, history, violence, and personhood.
Tickets: $10 General | $5 Students/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at link.dice.fm or at the door
This screening of short experimental films highlights some of the ways in which women, nonbinary, and feminist filmmakers have used film to approach the topic of science. Questioning scientific objectivity, deconstructing traditions of scientific visualization, deploying an array of cinematic techniques, and sometimes using humor, these films demonstrate experimental film’s ongoing, provocative engagement with scientific knowledge and representation.
Tickets: $10 General | $5 Students/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at link.dice.fm or at the door
