#thecinematheque

AUGUST 17th 7pm LIVE AND EXPANDED Alex MacKenzie & Lindsay McIntyre at DIM Cinema/Cinematheque

To celebrate the Cinematheque’s 50th anniversary, DIM presents a quartet of projector performances by Iris Film Collective members Alex MacKenzie and Lindsay McIntyre with live sound by Clare Kenny and Peter Bussigel. The evening is bookended by experimental works fresh from Oberhausen, commencing with MacKenzie’s The Hollow Mountain, performed with a modified 1920s hand-cranked projector, and closing with McIntyre’s improvised dance across six 16mm projectors, Worth More Standing. In between, MacKenzie’s 16mm light performances Phosphene and Mall Emotions will be featured.

AUGUST 17th 7pm LIVE AND EXPANDED Alex MacKenzie & Lindsay McIntyre at DIM Cinema/Cinematheque

To celebrate the Cinematheque’s 50th anniversary, DIM presents a quartet of projector performances by Iris Film Collective members Alex MacKenzie and Lindsay McIntyre with live sound by Clare Kenny and Peter Bussigel. The evening is bookended by experimental works fresh from Oberhausen, commencing with MacKenzie’s The Hollow Mountain, performed with a modified 1920s hand-cranked projector, and closing with McIntyre’s improvised dance across six 16mm projectors, Worth More Standing. In between, MacKenzie’s 16mm light performances Phosphene and Mall Emotions will be featured.

TAKE IT DOWN!   New Experimental Films by Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown  

In Person One Night Only: Monday May 13, 7:30pm   1131 Howe St, Vancouver BC  

Presented by The Cinematheque’s Dim Cinema and Iris Film Collective.

In this collection of recent work by North Carolina-based media artists Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown, celluloid film serves as both a material register and critical resource for interrogating the documentary image. Whether using discontinuous montage, handmade techniques for creating and processing images, or dramatic reenactors, these films aim to extend the formal possibilities of non-fiction filmmaking.

We are very excited to have both filmmakers appearing in person!

Bill Brown is a Chapel Hill, NC-based filmmaker, photographer, and author who has been active for over 20 years, creating innovative and challenging video and multimedia works that explore the relationships between geographical space, memory, technology, and humanity. His films include Roswell (1995), Buffalo Common (2001), and Chicago Corner (2009), as well as collaborations with Sabine Gruffat. His interest in the life of art beyond its production has led to several film tours.

Sabine Gruffat is a Chapel Hill, NC-based filmmaker and multimedia artist whose exploratory, thought-provoking films have screened at festivals worldwide. Her projects span video and animation, mobile media and performance, interactive installation, and more, the main commonality being an urgent sense of contemporaneity and playfulness of form, with works that include The Expeditionists (2007), The Free Translators (2008), and I Have Always Been a Dreamer (2012). Like Brown, Gruffat takes a special interest in the exhibition of her works, and has collaborated with Brown for several exhibitions. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

SCREENING:

Take It Down​​ (Gruffat, 2018, 12:30) Employing solarized color positive 35mm film and animation of old postcard images of Confederate monuments in North Carolina, Take It Down documents how Southern identity continues to be bound up in the legacy of the Civil War and the Jim Crow Era. The film considers how these old memorials continue to be sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives.

XCTRY​​ (Brown, 2018, 6:18) Brown re-works 16mm footage that he shot years ago during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Las Vegas. The spatial discontinuities of the road trip are rendered as visual continuities across three frames as Brown goes in search of the next town to fall in and out of love with.

Life On The Mississippi​​ (Brown, 2018, 28:13) A short essay film about a river and the limits of knowing it. Using Mark Twain’s ​Life On The Mississippi as a road map, Brown travels from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans and considers ways that river pilots, paddlers, historical reenactors, and civil engineers attempt to know the river through modeling, measurement, and simulation.

Framelines​​ (Gruffat, 2017,10:14) An abstract scratch film made by laser etching preset patterns onto the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms. The soundtrack is created by filtering and layering the noise made by the laser etched 35mm optical track.

TAKE IT DOWN!   New Experimental Films by Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown  

In Person One Night Only: Monday May 13, 7:30pm   1131 Howe St, Vancouver BC  

Presented by The Cinematheque’s Dim Cinema and Iris Film Collective.

In this collection of recent work by North Carolina-based media artists Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown, celluloid film serves as both a material register and critical resource for interrogating the documentary image. Whether using discontinuous montage, handmade techniques for creating and processing images, or dramatic reenactors, these films aim to extend the formal possibilities of non-fiction filmmaking.

We are very excited to have both filmmakers appearing in person!

Bill Brown is a Chapel Hill, NC-based filmmaker, photographer, and author who has been active for over 20 years, creating innovative and challenging video and multimedia works that explore the relationships between geographical space, memory, technology, and humanity. His films include Roswell (1995), Buffalo Common (2001), and Chicago Corner (2009), as well as collaborations with Sabine Gruffat. His interest in the life of art beyond its production has led to several film tours.

Sabine Gruffat is a Chapel Hill, NC-based filmmaker and multimedia artist whose exploratory, thought-provoking films have screened at festivals worldwide. Her projects span video and animation, mobile media and performance, interactive installation, and more, the main commonality being an urgent sense of contemporaneity and playfulness of form, with works that include The Expeditionists (2007), The Free Translators (2008), and I Have Always Been a Dreamer (2012). Like Brown, Gruffat takes a special interest in the exhibition of her works, and has collaborated with Brown for several exhibitions. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

SCREENING:

Take It Down​​ (Gruffat, 2018, 12:30) Employing solarized color positive 35mm film and animation of old postcard images of Confederate monuments in North Carolina, Take It Down documents how Southern identity continues to be bound up in the legacy of the Civil War and the Jim Crow Era. The film considers how these old memorials continue to be sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives.

XCTRY​​ (Brown, 2018, 6:18) Brown re-works 16mm footage that he shot years ago during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Las Vegas. The spatial discontinuities of the road trip are rendered as visual continuities across three frames as Brown goes in search of the next town to fall in and out of love with.

Life On The Mississippi​​ (Brown, 2018, 28:13) A short essay film about a river and the limits of knowing it. Using Mark Twain’s ​Life On The Mississippi as a road map, Brown travels from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans and considers ways that river pilots, paddlers, historical reenactors, and civil engineers attempt to know the river through modeling, measurement, and simulation.

Framelines​​ (Gruffat, 2017,10:14) An abstract scratch film made by laser etching preset patterns onto the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms. The soundtrack is created by filtering and layering the noise made by the laser etched 35mm optical track. 

Also Like Life- Films of Hou Hsiou-hsien

Went to Cinematheque to watch Taiwanese director- Hou Hsiao-hsien's film last night. The film I saw was- A Time to Live and A Time to Die, which was filmed as a autobiography of Hou. As an exchange student from Taiwan, It was a surprise to see Taiwanese films in such a foreign country. 

The film was launched in 1985, an old time back then. The film was in a special period of Taiwanese history, when the Chinese National Party was defeated by Communist Part of China during the Chinese Civil War. A lot of people were moving to Taiwan accompanying the vanquished troops fleeting to the Island. Hou was born in that time. Through the movie, we could see how those small characters, those who live in that rural area of Taiwan, had their lives, values, and childhoods interwoven and influenced so intimately and uniquelly in such historically unique period. The language,the scenes, the atmosphere, the people, the color of lives were smoothly connected and collided to depict the common memories shared by the people in that era. 

Also, as the title of the film, the film showed how death can be viewed as an important issues in one's growth. Hou faced death of his beloved family members 3 times over his childhood. Every time one died, it seemed that the reality, the serious life experience, the bitterness of lose was forcing him to grow mature. We could see the different reaction when he realized the death of his  beloved. Each death of his beloved indicated the next stage of life, which he was obliged to move on, to live. That was his childhood, his growth.