In a career that spans six decades and over 100 films, UCLA alumnus David Lebrun has crafted a multidisciplinary film practice encompassing animation, documentary and experimental techniques to explore different ways of seeing and being in the world. A founding member of the multimedia light show collective Single Wing Turquoise Bird, Lebrun helped create the visual language of the psychedelic era while leaning on his background in philosophy and anthropology to understand and visualize how other cultures, ancient and modern, have used available technologies to represent their own aesthetic and spiritual systems. From the hippie counterculture of the 1960s to Tibetan and Mayan mythologies, Lebrun seeks cinematic forms that draw out the radical specificity of his subjects while simultaneously revealing their interconnectedness across time and place. Beyond documentary, his films can be powerful, transformative meditations on human expression and experience, in and of themselves. The Archive is honored to host Lebrun in person at the Billy Wilder Theater for a weekend of screenings that includes the premiere of the Academy Film Archive’s new restoration of Sanctus (1966) and a special selection of works from Lebrun’s latest museum installation project Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past, which employs innovative digital animation techniques to explore the evolution of fundamental artistic forms and symbols from the Paleolithic through the late Middle Ages.

Admission is free, available at: cinema.ucla.edu/

In a career that spans six decades and over 100 films, UCLA alumnus David Lebrun has crafted a multidisciplinary film practice encompassing animation, documentary and experimental techniques to explore different ways of seeing and being in the world. A founding member of the multimedia light show collective Single Wing Turquoise Bird, Lebrun helped create the visual language of the psychedelic era while leaning on his background in philosophy and anthropology to understand and visualize how other cultures, ancient and modern, have used available technologies to represent their own aesthetic and spiritual systems. From the hippie counterculture of the 1960s to Tibetan and Mayan mythologies, Lebrun seeks cinematic forms that draw out the radical specificity of his subjects while simultaneously revealing their interconnectedness across time and place. Beyond documentary, his films can be powerful, transformative meditations on human expression and experience, in and of themselves. The Archive is honored to host Lebrun in person at the Billy Wilder Theater for a weekend of screenings that includes the premiere of the Academy Film Archive’s new restoration of Sanctus (1966) and a special selection of works from Lebrun’s latest museum installation project Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past, which employs innovative digital animation techniques to explore the evolution of fundamental artistic forms and symbols from the Paleolithic through the late Middle Ages.

Admission is free, available at: cinema.ucla.edu/

Comparisons between humans and animals are foundational to the experimental branches of medicine and psychology. Yet converting the bafflingly complex bodies and behaviors of nonhuman animals into scientific models is not a straightforward process. From testing apparatuses to spreadsheets of findings, from textbooks on animal handling to published journal articles, such a transformation requires an intricate system of interlocking media. Film has been an essential, yet largely overlooked, element within this process. Often treated as purely transparent scientific recordings, the films produced out of animal research are in fact deeply formalist works that tested what film could capture through the image of an animal—variously proposing that they could visualize pure thought, the processes of history and culture, and the influence of the environment on an organism. In this capacity, scientific filmmakers often advanced their own theories of media and their relationship to living organisms, theories which overlapped with and influenced figures like Marshall McLuhan.

Tickets: $10 General | $5 Students/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at link.dice.fm or at the door

Crystals are inherently beautiful.  They form our world; they are part of chemical-based photography that images it. They take innumerable forms, their growth is hypnotic, the light they scatter creates amazing colors.  Many filmmakers have looked at crystals in myriad ways, and this program strives to capture an element of how the filmic investigation of one subject results in a brilliant array of filmic forms.  From early documents to very recent, a well-crafted educational film from the 1950s to a mysterious experimental film and one that positions crystals in a post-humanist world, the program highlights the range of scientific visions and the experimental reuse or repositioning of those visions.

Tickets: $15 General | $10 Seniors/Students | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
Available in advance at link.dice.fm or at the door

Before being ideas, scientific theories are themselves constituted by image making. With computer-generated imagery, it has become increasingly difficult to recognize the indexicality of the film image, mainly because of simulation. In the case of scientific films, this issue is even more delicate, as the image requires a direct recognition of reality, under penalty of not constituting scientific evidence. With increasingly aestheticized images, scientific images in turn are captured from distant spaces, through sophisticated hybrid technologies, very different from the optical array images of telescopes. This program presents an overview of films considered scientific, with educational intentions on astronomy since before the invention of cinema, so that the most diverse film techniques used by filmmakers and scientists in different eras can be appreciated. 

Before being ideas, scientific theories are themselves constituted by image making. With computer-generated imagery, it has become increasingly difficult to recognize the indexicality of the film image, mainly because of simulation. In the case of scientific films, this issue is even more delicate, as the image requires a direct recognition of reality, under penalty of not constituting scientific evidence. With increasingly aestheticized images, scientific images in turn are captured from distant spaces, through sophisticated hybrid technologies, very different from the optical array images of telescopes. This exhibition intends to present an overview of films considered scientific, with educational intentions on astronomy since before the invention of cinema, so that the most diverse film techniques used by filmmakers and scientists in different eras can be appreciated. 

It is impossible to overestimate the influence of scientific knowledge on artists’ investigations of the world, and nowhere is this influence more apparent than in contemporary moving image artists’ responses to the climate crisis. In the context of mass extinction and global climate change, the science of ecology underlies key issues currently facing humanity, and, thus, ecological considerations are understandably pervasive in contemporary moving image artworks. This program presents a selection of works that engage with aspects of ecology in the form of natural history, understood in the way that ecologist and conservation biologist Tom Fleischner (2021: 17) defines it: as “a practice of intentional, focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world” that “creates a forum for interaction with Others, encouraging compassion and respect, helping us rediscover passion for the world and each other.”

Strikingly different from today's nature documentaries, these films celebrate logging, hunting, and other forms of resource extraction. Portraying nature through the lens of popular scientific knowledge, this program illuminates the impulse of objectification underpinning Western science. Watching these films today, a dialectic between colonialist/capitalist domination and nascent ecological awareness emerges in the collision between "old nature" as depicted on screen and "new nature" as we understand it today, in our era of global warming and mass extinction. 

The history of experimental film in India is tied to the history of India’s quest for modernity and is particularly visible in the experimental films on science and technology produced by the Films Division of India during the cultural revolution of the late 60’s and early 70’s. This program will showcase a selection of these avant-garde state supported films that reflect the radical values, perspectives and ideas that shaped the vision of Indian democracy. Today, as India is ruled by a right-wing regime, these cinematic experiments remain important.

Many things collide in Riar Rizaldi’s Monisme: magic, science, indigenous knowledge systems, violence, and a tenuous boundary between the past and the future, fact and fiction. These all collide around Mount Merapi, one of the most active stratovolcano in the world, located in Java, Indonesia. Monisme’s multiple collisions ultimately illuminate the various modalities of relation between humans and nature.

Rock Bottom Riser is an essential document and an exhilarating tour-de-force, a palimpsest that traverses geology, ethnography and astronomy. Silva's feature is preceded by Telengut’s short which expands on the West’s concept of indigeneity while also putting forth the indigenous Mongolian and Siberian belief in animism as a way to nourish our world.

Aimé Césaire, the late writer, politician, and co-founder of the Négritude movement, proposed a new hybrid science in 1946 — a science of the Word. He argued that the study of the Word (mythoi, a poetics of knowledge) will condition the study of nature (bios). Philosopher Sylvia Wynter, inspired by Césaire’s idea, stated that humans must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we have known and understood it. Can science deal with and make sense of the human predicament, as Wynter calls it? How can scholars, artists, scientists, and the general public reconcile the tension between scientific and technological advancement, the earth-centered mandate of indigenous wisdom, and righting historical legacies colonial violence?