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Feb 10, 2013 at 7:30 pm

The Improbable Made Possible: Revisited

With Jennifer Reeves, Ryan Marino and Lorenzo Gattorna.

“The spectral yet luminous group program sparks artificial systems set amidst the natural world. The earth and its natives are captured by poetic dialects of deep authenticity and deliberate artifice. The paradoxical recognition of the other is provoked through the mesmerizing reinvigoration of mystical remnants. Enactment, endurance, evocation and even exhumation are the filmic schemes in flux. The ghostly elsewhere is conditioned cinematically into an imagined future, altered present or affected past. The second installment of ‘The Improbable Made Possible’ continues a tradition that radically confuses the trajectories of direct observation and speculative fiction.” – Lorenzo Gattorna

Program

LANDFILL 16 by Jennifer Reeves

9 min., 2012, 16mm

“Exhumed film from my very own landfill in Elkhart, Indiana constitutes the canvas of my hand-painted LANDFILL 16. After finishing my double-projection WHEN IT WAS BLUE I was horrified by the bulk of outtakes that would normally go to a landfill. So I temporarily buried then painted the film to transform it. Within this colorful, pulsating, abstract “moving painting” I attempt to express my dread of man-made waste that endangers land and wildlife. This “recycling” is a meditation on the demise of the beautiful 16mm medium and nature’s losing battle to decompose relics of our abandoned technologies. For the soundtrack, I combined recognizable sounds, from bulldozers to nature audio, with more abstracted textural and rhythmic sounds I created using audio from consumer-goods-creating factories, old 16mm equipment, the cries of a dying bird stuck in my wall, and other oddities.” – Jennifer Reeves

LUMINOUS PASSAGE by Ryan Marino

6 min., 2010, 16mm

“A meditation on the passage of time and light, an evocation of the season of autumn. This film was shot during consecutive autumns in New York, Maine and New Hampshire.” – Ryan Marino

INTERVIEW WITH EARTH by Nicolás Pereda

18 min., 2009

“Through a series of interviews and enactments we learn the story of Nico and Amalio, two children who lost a friend while climbing a mountain. Documentary and fiction seamlessly merge creating a hybrid poetic film.” – FiGa Films

OONA'S VEIL by Brian L. Frye

16 min., 2000, 16mm

“A short screen test of Oona Chaplin, her only film-record, is reconstructed into an intense meditation on seeing and being seen. The original shot was rephotographed, mutilated, exposed to chemicals and even buried. The result is an unearthly film portrait, with occasional spots of black emulsion, creating a continuously shifting exchange of glances between the image and the spectator.” – Courtisane Festival

PHYSICAL CHANGES by David Dinnell

36 min., 2009

“An unnerving work, rooted in and alien from the physical world, an effect enhanced by an ear-splitting soundtrack. Increasingly shrill throughout the work’s thirty-six minutes, the sound pierces the environment, threatening to displace attention to the image and swallow everything around it. Nothing about the imagery appears to elicit this, not the initial flashes of light and distant view of a town or a suburb, not the cloudy sky that often dominates the upper 2/3 of the image. Perhaps a clue lies in the vague, underlying image of vertical shapes that suggest some blocked interior world trying to burst through. More than two dozen images follow – of landscapes of hills and mountains, forests with tall, leafless trees, lush foliage waving furiously in the wind, eerily lit night skies, clouds of all kinds, shimmering, silvery-tinged leaves, tops of trees fluttering in dialogue, cows grazing, deer moving in a forest, a horse and rider approaching the foreground. Largely gray-black, the photography is mistily filtered, alternately luminous and spectral, as if the camera, positioned on an alien spacecraft, were focused on an un-chartered zone between nature and the cosmos.” – Tony Pipolo, Millennium Film Journal

84 min

Jennifer Reeves is a New York-based filmmaker working primarily on 16mm film. Reeves was named one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” in the film journal Cinema Scope in the spring of 2012. Reeves has made experimental films since 1990. She does her own writing, cinematography, editing, and sound design. Her subjective and personal films push the boundaries of film through optical-printing and direct-on-film techniques. Reeves has consistently explored themes of memory, mental health and recovery, feminism and sexuality, landscape, wildlife, and politics from many different angles.

Ryan Marino is a filmmaker and sound artist based in Brookyn, New York. His films have screened at numerous film festivals and art spaces around the United States. His work in sound has consisted of both solo and collaborative performance. He currently runs the experimental imprint Imminent Frequencies.

Lorenzo Gattorna is a filmmaker and programmer residing in Baltimore and raised in New York. His films have screened in exhibitions associated with Baltimore City Paper, CCNY, LMAKprojects, Maysles Cinema, Microscope Gallery, Spectacle Theater, UnionDocs and Views from the Avant-Garde at The New York Film Festival. Past programming credits at Maysles Cinema, Spectacle Theater and UnionDocs include Missing Allen/The Grandfather Trilogy, New York(er) Shorts, The Playing Field, Near and Dear, The Improbable Made Possible and The Experiment. Recently he presented his work at NYU’s Experimental Film Workshop as a visiting artist, participated in the E.P.I.C. Program at the 2010 Migrating Forms and received the 2012 Creative Alliance Media Makers’ Fellowship. Currently he is programming a roaming monthly screening series in Baltimore called Sight Unseen supported by the 2012 MICA Launch Artists in Baltimore Award.

Details

Date
Feb 10, 2013
Time
7:30 pm – 10:00 pm
Program:

Address

352 Onderdonk Avenue
Ridgewood, NY 11385 United States

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