UnionDocs is very excited to welcome two amazing experimental filmmakers, Sylvia Schedelbauer and Mary Helena Clark, for a dual showcase of their short films. These films will be placed in dialogue with each other, navigating the language and limitations of the medium (while also refusing simple description or characterization.)

Schedelbauer and Clark will both be in attendance for a discussion with scholar and curator Leo Goldsmith after the screening.

A man in a forest is subject to a flood of impressions; rhythmic waves of images and sounds give form to his introspection.

A cascade of images cut frame by frame flow into an allegory of the lunar cycle.

A layered tone poem of found images and woven soundscapes renders a shifting psychogram; a nomadic passage across spaces in and out of time.

A montage of mid-century found footage: mysterious strands are obsessively braided to create a poetic reflection about an anxious interplay of memory and projection.

The Dragon is the Frame proceeds like an experimental detective film, exploring the enigma of depression in its subtle interplay between presence and absence.

“Using footage from Cocteau’s Orphée, Mary Helena Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames.” – Andrea Picard, TIFF

Born in Tokyo Sylvia Schedelbauer first moved to Berlin in 1993, where she has been based since. She studied at the University of Arts Berlin (with Katharina Sieverding). Her films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage.

Selected screenings: Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Robert Flaherty International Film Seminar and Stan Brakhage Symposium. Awards inlcude the VG Bildkunst Award, the German Film Critics’ Award and the Gus Van Sant Award for Best Experimental Film.

Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work uses the language of collage to explore dissociative states through cinema, bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code. Using the conventions of narrative, language, and genre, her films explore shifting subjectivities and the limits of the embodied camera. Her work has recently been exhibited at DOCUMENT, Chicago, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany, JOAN, Los Angeles, Kadist, San Francisco, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Finland, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania, and at festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Leo Goldsmith is a New York-based scholar and curator who works at the intersection of experimental moving-image media, documentary film, media ecologies, and digital culture. He completed his PhD Candidate on found footage and moving-image circulation at the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. He has taught film and media studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, Brooklyn College; Harvard University; Eugene Lang College, The New School; and Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

With Robert Stam and Richard Porton, he is a co-author of Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics (Wiley 2015), for which he contributed an afterword on the aesthetics of oppositional digital media strategies. His forthcoming book on the radical documentary practices of British filmmaker Peter Watkins, co-authored with Rachael Rakes, was awarded an Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation in 2015. With Rakes, he is also the co-editor of the film section of the monthly arts and politics newspaper The Brooklyn Rail, commissioning and editing critical writing on film and video in the areas of experimental and avant-garde cinema, installation film and video, and documentary. He is also a regular contributor to such publications as Artforum, art-agenda, Cinema Scope, and The Village Voice.