Expanding on a discussion that took place at Anthology Film Archives following a screening of Lily Jue Sheng’s work, Steff Huì Cí Ling examines what it means to organize as arts workers while building solidarity beyond the sector and create art with “working-class intention” in a “bourgeois context.”
film
A response to The word island is a bird inside of a mountain at the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival
Out of the international underground film movement of the 1960s, an alchemical avant-garde slowly formed. It formed in the home darkrooms and studios of artists who imagined a new cinema, an altogether handmade thing, wherein the conventional processes of the photochemical lab could be reshaped, the recipes refigured, to transmute the film strip’s latent image into something nobler than an image merely processed.
Where did the association between a computer cursor and a human hand come from? It’s one of those near-ubiquitous design strategies; one so obvious that it feels redundant to break it down.
Christine Lucy Latimer is an avant-garde filmmaker and photographer based in Toronto whose interdisciplinary practice spans over a decade, with over 250 screenings at film festivals and galleries worldwide.
Throughout much of the 15-minute duration of Manuel Piña-Baldoquín’s 2015 video work, Naufragios, the viewer’s focus is directed towards the liminal visual space where an anonymous body of water meets the sky.
Hands rubbed in ash
Ash Wednesday, thumb to the sky
“We wed before Ash Wednesday, and I still didn’t know him.”
In the past half-century of Canadian avant-garde cinema, the nation’s filmmakers have often used the camera apparatus and its paraphernalia as tools for visual construction. At a time when avantgarde cinema was elsewhere developing an overtly romantic sense of the eye of the operator, Canadian artists such as Michael Snow and David Rimmer were using the same tools to explore uncharted territories, in an adventure of perception built upon the mechanistic properties of the camera.
Begin to Google “are we breathing …” and the most popular search finishes the statement with “the same air as Jesus.” Shared realities, coexistence, and collapsed time and history are some of the primary, existential inquiries of humankind. There’s an affirmation and fragility in knowing that we share our physical spaces, even on a molecular level, with people and events both past and present. Curator Ana Paula Cohen considers Yael Bartana’s practice through theoretical notions of cohabitation, aptly outlining Bartana’s non-linear and slippery depictions of time, space and the state of being.
The tradition of cameraless filmmaking spans the history of experimental film; from the work of the Surrealists, to the field of visual music, to the mid-century abstractionists, to a contemporary vanguard of artists working in animation and chemical processes. The artists affiliated with this tradition used many tools in the course of marking, drawing, or in other ways affixing forms onto the film plane. From the direct exposure to light that creates the photogram, to controlled application of paint and emulsion scratches, the processes involved range from the aleatoric to the carefully deliberated.