Pwdre Ser, the rot of stars, 2018
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.
Curated by Jennifer Peterson.
In person: filmmakers Charlotte Pryce, Rachel Mayeri and curator Jennifer Peterson.
SCREENING
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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
...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
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.
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.
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.
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Jennifer Lynn Peterson is Professor and Chair of the department of Media Studies at Woodbury. Her scholarly articles have been published in Feminist Media Histories, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, The Moving Image, Getty Research Journal, and numerous edited book collections. She is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). She has published film, art, and book reviews in Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artforum.com. Previously a tenured Associate Professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder (where she taught for a decade), she has also taught as an adjunct instructor at UC Riverside, CalArts, UCLA, and USC. In the early 2000s she worked as an Oral Historian at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and briefly in the Home Entertainment division at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She is currently writing her second book, “Cinema’s Ecological Past: Film History, Nature and Endangerment Before 1960,” which is under contract for publication by Columbia University Press.
Charlotte Pryce has been making experimental films, photographs and optical objects since 1986. Born in London, Charlotte Pryce graduated with a BFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London and completed an MFA in Fine Art/ Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She draws inspiration from the work of visionary naturalists - notably Rachel Carson and Opal Whitely, and the mysteries and sentience of the non-human world are central to her practice. She finds resonance for her ideas in early 20th century writers of eco-fiction, and in the mystical tradition of her Welsh/British heritage. These influences are present in her most recent films Pwdre Ser, Of this Beguiling Membrane, and so it came about (A Tale of Consequential Dormancy), as well as in her magic lantern show, The Tears of a Mudlark. Her practice remains anchored in the physical manipulation of substances, of chemical exploration of the material of cinema.
Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art. Her videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. Her multi-year project Primate Cinema explored the scientific and popular representations of the boundary between human and non-human primates in a series of video experiments; works in the series have been honored at Ars Electronica and screened at major film and art festivals such as Sundance, Berlinale, True/False Film Festival, Transitio Mexico Festival of Electronic Art, Abandon Normal Devices and Edinburgh Festival of Art. Her recent work includes Orfeo Nel Canale Alimentare (Orpheus in the Alimentary Canal), an animated opera about the digestive tract. Mayeri is Guest Curator at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College.