LANGUAGE NATIVES -Shorts Block #2 - 9 short films from India, Germany, Spain, USA, HARRISBURG!
1PM at the Midtown Cinema
Shorts Block #2 --- LANGUAGE NATIVES (75min)
"Dance Film" by Kelly Gallagher/Digital/USA/1min ---This animated film playfully upends the traditional focus of most avant-garde choreography films by turning its attention on the spectator of a dance instead of the dancer herself. This film is about the act of watching, and what it means to look at someone with love, tenderness and openness. "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.” - Nelson Mandela
"scrape" by Sierra Grove/Super 8, 16mm/USA10min
---I relish in the position of amateur filmmaker and skateboarder, and I explore the overlap of both practices in their shared tactile and responsive gesture. There is synergy between my hand with a knife carving into the surface of the film strip, and my skateboard grinding against a ramp’s edge.
"Fragments of a Journal in Hell" by Rebecca Barten/16mm/USA/8min ---A narrated found footage collage film bringing together fragments of writing by the French Surrealist poet, essayist and philosopher, Antonin Artaud. A look at and exemplification of a self under siege, undergoing agonizing psycho-physical states. At the same time, the film celebrates an improbably alive artistic practice struggling to still create personal metaphors during a wartime of the self and the world.
"TRIP-tych!" by Brian Lonano, Kevin Daniel Lonano/Super 8,16mm/USA/9min ---A home movie-experimental souvenir shot over the course of 7 years
"Leaf Peeper" by Vito A. Rowlands/Super 8/USA/3min
---A frantic frolic in Fall foliage. A stop-motion autumn adventure. A symphony in blaze orange.
"there's no static on television anymore" by Eric Dietrick/Digital/Harrisburg/PA/USA/11min ---A city symphony.
"Language Decay" by Zazie Ray-Trapido/16mm/USA/3min
---Time causes disintegration, wherein different variations and versions emerge. Because of physical separation, my grandmother slowly forgets her native tongue and the languages she spoke as a child, mirroring the movement and transformation of living languages. The act of remembering brings back these decomposing versions of past selves, selves that never were or briefly were, then hidden away but not discarded. The film intentionally chooses to leave all sequences unsubtitled.
"Language Unknown" by Janelle VanderKelen/16mm/Spain, USA/6min ---This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelium, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.
"Analogue Natives" by Bernd Lützeler/35mm, 16mm, Digital/India, Germany/26min. ---This experimental documentary circulates around interviews with four veterans who worked all their lives in analogue film labs and animation studios in Mumbai, and who all lost their businesses and jobs around 2012–14, when the Hindi film industry went through a drastic shift to digital production. They reflect on the loss of their craftsmanship, but also on the philosophies of their handmade film practice. We learn about the art of living and working under precarious conditions in India. Finally, everything results in a futile collage of nostalgia and memories, mashed up with the absurd aesthetics of AI slop.
