Brilliant Noise, 2006
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.
Curated by Jane de Almeida and Jheanelle Brown.
SCREENING
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.
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.
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.
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Interdisciplinary researcher Jane de Almeida works in the arts, film and new media fields, investigating the intersection among media, subjectivity and perception. As a professor and researcher, she was Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College (1999), Visiting Fellow in the Department of Architecture and History of Art at Harvard University (2005), guest researcher at MediaLabMadrid (2006), and Visiting Scholar in the Dept. of Communication at University of California, San Diego (2007). She holds a Master degree and a Ph.D. in Communication and Semiotics from the Catholic University of Sao Paulo. Currently, She has been teaching at Mackenzie University in São Paulo, Brazil and at the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. She has been a member of the editorial and Scientific Board of FILE since 2005. She also organized a seminar about Digital Media called Aesthetic and New Technology.
Jheanelle Brown, Los Angeles Filmforum board member is Project Director and Curator, leading project management, offering scholarly and curatorial guidance to project scholars, developing several film programs, developing the overall curatorial framework of the film series, and serving as co-editor of the resulting publication. Jheanelle is a film curator/programmer, lecturer, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is currently Special Faculty at California Institute of the Arts. She has co-curated Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today and the traveling film showcase Black Radical Imagination: Fugitive Trajectories from 2018 to 2019.
Semiconductor: For over 25 years, UK artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, aka Semiconductor, have explored the human experience at the intersection between science and technology. Their innovative works confront us with the seemingly unknowable ephemerality of the natural world around us, contextualizing scientific data into captivating sculpture, moving image and drawings that encourage us to expand our perceptions of reality and question our role as observers.
Known for their meticulous research, Semiconductor utilizes a different technological approach with each piece, often spending months in science laboratories around the world studying the devices used to make sense of the natural world, these include; CERN, Geneva (2015); NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, California (2005); Mineral Sciences Laboratory, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (2010); Extreme Light Laboratory, University of Glasgow (2023) and the Charles Darwin Research Station, Galapagos (2010).
Semiconductor also has their work “Spectral Constellations” in the exhibition “Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art” at the Williamson Gallery at the ArtCenter College of Design as part of PST Art: Art and Science Collide. https://www.artcenter.edu/about/exhibitions/seeing-the-unseeable-data-design-art.html
Patricio Guzmán was born in 1941 in Santiago, Chile. As an adolescent, inspired by the work of Chris Marker, Frederic Rossif and Louis Malle, he was drawn to documentary. He studied filmmaking at the Film Institute at the Catholic University of Chile and at the Official School of Film in Madrid, where he earned his degree in Film Direction in 1970.
Guzmán returned to Chile in 1971, and directed his first documentary, The First Year, which covered the first 12 months of Salvador Allende's government. The film was released in commercial theaters that very year. Chris Marker, impressed by the film, offered to help get it seen in France. Two years later, Marker again provided invaluable assistance again when he donated the raw stock necessary to commence filming The Battle of Chile, Guzmán‘s 4 and ½ hour documentary trilogy about Allende's final year.
The day of the coup, Guzmán was imprisoned in Chile's National Stadium, where he remained for 15 days. After regaining his freedom, he left for Europe with his footage. Eventually, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) offered to support the editing and post-production. Guzmán flew to Havana and finished the film a few years later.
Among his many other renowned documentaries In God's Name (1987) (Grand Prize, Florence '87) about the Catholic Church's fight for human rights in Chile; The Southern Cross (Grand Prize, Marseille '92) about the theology of liberation and popular religion in Latin America. In 1995, Town in Stasis focused on the historical memory of a Mexican village.
In 1997, Chile, Obstinate Memory looked into collective political amnesia in Chile. 1999 brought Robinson Crusoe Island about the remote Chilean island of the same name. In 2001, The Pinochet Case examined the case brought against General Augusto Pinochet (Grand Prize, Marseille '01). In 2002, he completed Madrid, a look at Spain's capital.
Guzmán‘s acclaimed, award-winning film Salvador Allende (2006) tells Allende's story, from his youth in Valparaiso and his early presidential campaigns, to his bold nationalist reforms and his death during the violent rightist coup of September 11, 1973.
The master filmmaker‘s gorgeous and personal meditation work, Nostalgia for the Light (2010), won the Best Documentary (Prix ARTE) at the European Film Academy Awards. It was named to the Top Ten Best Movies of 2010 by Sight & Sound. He lives in Paris with Renate Sachse, who collaborates on the scripts for his films.