Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to welcome Austrian artist and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann to UnionDocs for a night of cinema and conversation!

“In this selection of short films we have a series of works that incessantly asks “Where are we?” because entirely posed by the apparatus of image and sound itself. Truttmann, who in the years covered here (2009-2022) found herself far-flung in Istanbul, Val Verde (a Los Angeles outskirts), Shanghai, the woods of southern Estonia, and the mountains of Santa Cruz California, before returning to Vienna (her home), has extensively and directly treated the subject of “the uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”, literally “un-home-like”) in her feature film Tarpaulins (2017), and it’s one concept of many ecstatically made concrete and phenomenal – enacted, embraced, and even battled in these shorts.

Truttmann gives us firm locales and solid objects and ideas to grasp, while vigorously separating their form and content before our eyes. Plays on the solidity and contingency of color, surface, word, sound, observation, sociology and ecology, take flight from their origin and assumed stability, disperse and recreate themselves before landing back in a reality of changed perception. Figuration itself becomes a means to discover its situation, its grounds, both globally and particularly, within its culture, and nakedly without it. The placeness of things and thingness of place, or simply the placement of a color becomes phenomenal, upending. Human and animal restlessness are united, ordinary things and situations are given termitic specificity and true characters emerge.”

– Short adaptation from a text by Andy Rector

We’re delighted that Lisa will be in town and in attendance for a conversation following the screening with Filmmaker Anthony Svatek, come through!

Program

Golden Boys

4 mins, 2009

“If you speak in a low voice, no one hears you.”
Two narrow alleys in Istanbul. A crowd of men, yelling. Screaming, shouting, chaotic gesticulation, ­grimacing faces, a deafening buzz of wild voices. The verbal noise dominates the scene. A communicative situation, incomprehensible at first to the alien bystander who doesn’t speak the language. ­Apparently they are traders, I find out. And they call it “the walking stock market”. But what does it really mean? “Today it’s a very quiet day. Everything is still at rest.”

Anything Can Happen

4 mins, 2013

Nighttime. Dogs are barking in the distance. We hear motor sounds and the headlights of a car clicking on and off, and see little sceneries along the road briefly illuminated. An unseen driver connects these momentary landscapes. The headlight beams remain the only light source and actual character throughout the approximately four minutes of rhythmic imagery, in an eerie audiovisual composition. Nothing is incidental, but at any moment Anything Can Happen.

Water Fields

4 mins, 2013

Water Fields is a rhythmic audiovisual composition, taking place in California’s dry landscape.

Babash

 In collaboration with Behrouz Rae, 9 mins, 2014

Babash is a parrot who speaks mostly Farsi but ­sometimes mixes English and Azeri into his ­conversations. A singular language resulting from the place where he lives: a house in Los Angeles shared with an Iranian family. The same place where Behrouz Rae developed a friendship with Babash over the years. This short film is an associative portrait about a special relationship and the ­domestic surroundings in which it grew. An ­assemblage where household objects, daily movements and playful intimacies are mixed with a dauntless montage, precise sounds and a sensitive gaze. Observing this genuine cross-species friendship between Babash and Behrouz, listening to their shared invented language, it’s possible to grasp an equally shared and evocative sense of misplacement.

6500

9 mins, 2015

Unconsciously the human eye adapts to different light conditions, while cameras need adjustment through white balance. The color temperature of different light sources is ­measured in Kelvin. 6500 Kelvin corresponds to the value of overcast daylight and is used as a standard for the neutral registration of white surfaces. 6500 is an essay film on the relativity of words, ­questioning the application of absolute values in an argument, visualized through a play on colors, their spaces, and their highly subjective perception. Quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Colour” ­emphasize this rhythmic flickering and slightly absurd ­conversation between colour and language.

The Courser

12 mins, 2018

We see white stone structures and hear the sound of horses at full gallop, snickering from afar. The sound volume increases rapidly and sets the large group
 of lithic sculptures in motion. Heavy traffic noises eventually mix with the animal sounds and just when they are about to take over the soundscape entirely, images and sounds introduce the actual location: Shanghai, at the intersection of Yan’an Elevated Road and Inner Ring Elevated Road, two major, multi-leveled, urban freeways. Amidst the massive architectural structures and immobile horses underneath it, we may remember Eadweard Muybridge and his early moving image studies.

Characters

16 mins, 2020

Hú Zhǎng Zū writes ancient Chinese poems with water on the ground in Fuxing Park, Shanghai. After a few minutes, the characters dry out and disappear. She comes to the park almost everyday and practices her handwriting with her friends and colleagues. Together they have lively discussions about the strokes and shapes – both amongst each other and with the many spectators. Hú Zhǎng Zū is the only woman within the bustling crowd of men, and due to her calligraphy skills she is respected and highly admired. I come back to see her often, in order to learn from her and capture these ephemeral moments.

Critters Chorus, Cycle 1

14 mins, 2022

Whirring and flashing in the night sky. Wild foliage on a moist forest floor, rapidly passing by. Nervous encounters at a redwood tree, gurgling chatter with turkeys at dusk. Casually coiffed horses, unpredictable flying objects and flapping rotors. Speckled skin scrabbles, covered in lush ferns. Swirling fog, dripping haze, old man’s beard, light – diffracted. Sassy badgers, strings and figures.

Critters Chorus, Cycle 1 is the first part of an ongoing project, developed while delving into unfamiliar habitats. Lead by questioning the so-called “species problem”, Truttmann investigates the (im)possibilities of taxonomic categorization of living organisms from an artistic point of view. This way she creates a fictional ecosystem of rhythmic montage and unruly composition, in which the species raise their voices against imposed classification. Audio and video recordings have been collected during artist residencies in southern Estonia (Maajaam Project Space, 2019) and in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California (Djerassi Resident Artists Program, 2022).

Memorabilien (Excavate), excerpt

4 mins, 2021

In 2019 Lisa Truttmann’s apartment and studio space were destroyed entirely in a major fire. In her work Memorabilien she takes up this decisive life event in order to reflect upon the meaning of personal things and their value as possible art objects. Truttmann rescued fragmentary objects, archived and staged them as photographic and cinematic still lifes. In a playful and essayistic manner, Truttmann shares her work and thought processes, spanning a web in which the relationship between subject and object is continuously re-woven. During this process of medial abstraction, the memorabilia undergo a spatial transformation as well: Moving images soon detach themselves from the projection screen, the cinema space opens up, the stage becomes a temporary photo and film studio and finally transforms into a walk-in exhibition space.

Program Duration: 76 mins

Bios

Lisa Truttmann (born 1983) is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. In her practice, she combines documentary, essayistic, and poetic methods to investigate the sociologies and ecologies of landscapes and architectures. She is interested in relationships between human and non-human agents as well as in their spaces of interaction. Truttmann understands her subjective view as an approximation and considers her artistic process as an attempt to playfully comprehend complex systems. Associatively she intertwines collected material in image, sound and text as well as objects in installations and rhythmic montages. Oscillating between cinema and exhibition space, her works always reflect the language of their medium. Lisa Truttmann studied Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts, where she made her first essayistic feature film Tarpaulins (2017). Her films and installations have been shown internationally at film festivals and exhibitions, including Edinburgh IFF, CPH:DOX Copenhagen, New York FF, Images Festival Toronto, Ann Arbor FF, Bertha DocHouse London, Alianza Francesa Buenos Aires, Viennale, Diagonale, Kunsthalle Wien, KHM Wien, MAK Wien, and Kunstsammlung NRW. She has been teaching in the field of artistic moving images since 2017.

Having grown up at the foot of the Austrian Alps, Anthony is deeply awed by the living world, and the way people’s understanding of nature is informed by our increasingly technological and urban lives. He is based in Brooklyn and Callicoon, NY.

Amongst others, his work has been shown at the NYFF, IFFR, Edinburgh IFF, Ann Arbor FF, Big Sky, Prismatic Ground, DOCNYC, Diagonale, and published by Harper’s Magazine and Le Cinéma Club. His work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, and Simons Foundation, and he is the recipient of the New Visions Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Current directed work includes HUMBOLDT USA (in production), TESTUDO HERMANNI (sixpack), SOME THOUGHTS ON THE COMMON TOAD (narrated by Tilda Swinton), and collaborations CONTRACTIONS (editor, director Lynne Sachs, NYT OpDocs), and LITTLE, BIG, AND FAR (associate producer, director Jem Cohen, NYFF).

Anthony works professionally under the company Kulturfolger Productions, which includes directing, producing and editing commissions for NYS Parks Department, BBC World News, Deutsche Welle, and Pioneer Works. He has staffed seasonally at the Flaherty Film Seminar, The Climate Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History.