DATE: Sunday May 21st, 2023 @12:40pm

VENUE: Midtown Cinema

ADMISSION: $8

Wreckage & Rags
A non-explicit program of experimental short films

GIRLS SMOKING

John Peter Coronati
Philadelphia, PA I 2 I 16mm

A painted, scratched, wax-covered 16mm montage set to Lead Belly’s “Ain’t You Glad.” The footage is compiled from a 1980s anti-smoking educational film, an artifact strangely reflective of how cultural phenomena such as moralizing behaviors and gender stereotyping are reinforced through media portrayals.

Frames for Yoko 1-5

David Sherman
Tuscon, AZ I 11 I Digital

A FLUXUS inspired performance framing of Yoko Ono caught on camera in January of 1969, extracted sequentially from Peter Jackson's film Get Back (2021) from footage originally directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg in 1969.

A Body Appeared at the Lake Today

Brian Ratigan
Brooklyn, NY I 5 I 8mm

A found footage examination of what happened at the lake today. Where were you? An exquisite corpse by Non Films. Images randomly selected from found footage; poem written without images; music written without images or words. 8mm found footage: New York, 1953.

How a Sprig of Fir Would Replace a Feather

Anna Kipervaser
Durham, NC I 8 I 16mm I Silent

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.

kauaʻi ʻōʻō

Samy Benammar
Canada I 4 I Super 8

In 2000, the International Union for Conservation of Nature officially declared the Kauai ‘ōʻō extinct. All that remains of this endemic bird of the Hawaiian island of the same name is the recording of its singing by ornithologist David Boynton. Between territories and treetops, I'm still looking for a trace of the vanished birds.

How to Build a House out of Wreckage and Rags

Bernd Lützeler
Berlin, Germany I 8 I 16mm/Super 8

Found footage: California in the 1950's and 60's. A young Indian couple enjoys their personal American dream come true in their home somewhere in the suburbs of San Francisco. In great detail they demonstrate their newly achieved wealth in front of their Super-8 camera. Like postcards, they would send these film rolls to their families back in India. Around the same time, an American missionary couple visits the city of Calcutta to shoot a Christian propaganda film.

There, Where She is Not

Sarah Ballard
Milwaukee, WI I 7 I 16mm

Echoes of a time in my grandmother's life that she no longer remembers—a fractured memory recollected through proxy figures Frances Farmer and Marguerite Duras—a mirror is a placeless place.

In the Broken Eye of the Butterfly

Vera Hector/Justin Brown
Iowa City, IA I 5 I 8mm

The butterfly mime is getting up but there is no one left to watch the show. Skin, eyes, walls, wings, hair, sun, earth. An old song of tomorrow. A musical and visual poem shot in between new and old industrial cities featuring butterflies - live creatures and embroidered ones - as a shared collection of pictures. A two wings film.

Intersection

Richard Peter Tuohy
Australia I 11 I 16mm

A staccato study of street level action and inter-action. People and vehicles on everyday journeys are atomized into coursing fragments of light, shadow, angle and inertia; reiterating and disassembling the creation of motion out of still frames at the heart of cinema. Filmed in ten cities on four continents.