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Documentary Block Part I

Part of the Northside Film Festival! Filmmakers present for screening. Bob Spells Backwards, Josh Polon and Ryan Maxey, 2 minutes Bob demonstrates his strange compulsion to spell every word he hears backwards. Stella Walsh, Rob Lucas, 15 minutes The tragic story of Stella Walsh, the greatest female athlete in the world, her murder, and the gender controversy that followed. Time, Theodore Collatos, 7 minutes Conversations oscillate between family, politics and sexuality in an voyeuristic contemplation of prison. Terms of Intimacy, Melissa Langer, 9 minutes A glimpse into the emerging industry of professional cuddling and the lives of the clients that use this service. This is Not the End (New York Premiere), Hilary Campbell, 7 minutes The Campbell Family as they are now. Comic Book Heaven, E.J. McLeavey-Fisher, 12 minutes Comic Book Heaven is a short documentary follows 81-year-old Joe Leisner, owner of Comic Book Heaven in Sunnyside, Queens, NY, as he cantankerously assesses the status of his business, the comic book industry, and his future.

A Brooklyn Barrio: Living Los Sures

Hangouts in Los Sures, dominoes a free outdoor screening, and afterparty/screening at UnionDocs. How can the physical spaces of a neighborhood help build local relationships among neighbors? How do you gain a deeper understanding of a place? You hang out! That’s what documentary filmmaker Diego Echeverria did when he made Los Sures. Diego spent a lot of time on the streets of the Southside of Williamsburg, a neighborhood that had been called one of the worst ghettos in America; meeting people, being seen, building trust, hanging out. UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art has been hanging out on the Southside for many years. By obsessively exploring every aspect of Los Sures and documenting the longstanding Latino community as they fight displacement and survive the growth machine, they’ve produced a multi-faceted production of their own called Living Los Sures. Using the original film and this impressive body of new work as points of departure, we have organized a pop-up school of local experiences including talks, tours, installations, interviews, artist interventions, music and play across the barrio of Los Sures. Come for a roaming celebration of street life and neighborhood space and expand your view of how the past pervades the present.

LIVING LOS SURES: PREVIEW IN THE PARK & PARTY

A preview of new works for Living Los Sures by the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio To celebrate the creation of the new documentary projects made this year as part of the UnionDocs Collaborative Production Living Los Sures, a special public preview will be held in Sternberg (aka Lindsay) Park on Saturday June 6th starting at 8:00pm. Activities start at 6pm - come early to hang out and grab a seat before 8!

Refracting Lumiere: Avant Garde Revisions of the Lumiere Brothers

with Joshua Guilford Cinema’s origins have held an enduring appeal for the avant-garde. In the act of returning to cinema’s earliest productions, experimental filmmakers from different eras and regions have discovered a highly flexible and productive artistic gesture. Such returns facilitate interrogations of film history as well as efforts to renew film form or criticize modern media cultures; at their most fruitful, they question the terms of avant-garde film practice itself. The films of the Lumière brothers have lent themselves especially well to such endeavors. As a series of recent screenings produced at film venues such as Cornell Cinema, Mad Stork Cinema, and MoMA PS1 have demonstrated, remakes and revisions of works by the Lumières constitute a veritable sub-genre of avant-garde film: a common form through which highly disparate practitioners have repeatedly reframed our understanding of the cinematic, positioning our filmic present in relation to films past. “Refracting Lumière” presents a highly distinctive subset of experimental films that re-stage, re-situate, or re-purpose filmic scenarios initiated by the Lumières. The program is drawn from the collection of the avant-garde film distributor, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and focuses on works produced in the 1970s, a decade of experimental film practice characterized by sustained inquiries into cinematic specificity, as well as innovative contributions to narrative, found footage, and diaristic film forms. Works exemplifying these tendencies by Malcolm Le Grice, Chick Strand, Hollis Frampton, and Bill Brand will be presented alongside a short compilation reel that reproduces the Lumière brothers’ first public exhibition program in 1895, provided by the New York Public Library’s Reserve Film and Video Collection. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artist Bill Brand.

What You Get is What You See: The City Has Eyes

with Geoff Manaugh The first part of this talk will attempt to look at security professionals, at those who look for a living—to watch the watchers—and to understand urban security as a different kind of spectatorship, with its own narrative expectations and interpretive cinematography. Whether this involves staring for hours at a time at multiple video feeds or simply reorienting CCTV cameras to watch—and thus protect—their own cars parked outside the office, guards are the very definition of urban spectatorship, literally looking at how the metropolis is used or inhabited. The second part of this talk will look the other way, so to speak, at those who seek not to be looked at, who wish to remain invisible and anonymous: how burglars, vandals, and everyday criminals see the city, as an arena of crimes both real and imagined. The point is to reveal the city as a stadium of looking: on the lookout for criminals hiding in the shadows, and looking out for police waiting around the next corner.

Theater of War with In Country

with Meredith Davenport, Jessica Catherine Lieberman, Fred Ritchen, Mike Attie and Meghan O'Hara. Americans have been bombarded by photographs and videos from battlefields far removed from the safety of our cities and towns. War stories come home through veterans’ very personal experiences and images which influence popular video games and are rehearsed through the growing phenomenon of live-action military simulation and recreation. On Sunday evening, borrowing the focus of documentary photographer Meredith Davenport’s new book, we ask questions about the Theater of War. How do images of war enter into and influence our personal narratives, our cultural psyche? Do iconic images of conflict perpetuate trauma? Can games or play using these representations help metabolize the violence? Have war photographs lost their meaning? Is there a new visual vocabulary that could be used to discuss war? Seeking answers and discussion, Meredith Davenport will present her photography alongside presentations from Jessica Catherine Lieberman and Fred Ritchin, both experts on the topic who have written essays for the book. Clips will be shown of the recently released feature, In Country, which documents a community of men who gather each year to dutifully recreate battles from the Vietnam War. The directors of this fascinating film, Mike Attie and Meghan O'Hara will join in the conversation remotely.

Eclipses

with Daniel Hui At the juncture of the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, the particular and the universal. A woman begins to come to terms with society after having withdrawn into her own world to mourn her late husband. The film splinters away to document the characters surrounding her – people from different classes, including the director’s own family. An investigation of the landscapes in which we live, work, and play, this is Singapore seen through the prisms of family, class and race.

Still Matters: A Screening of Archival and Found Footage Re-Appropriation

with Lei Lei, Daniel Traub, and Xin Zhao In 2009, the Beijing-based archivist and artist Thomas Sauvin salvaged over half a million discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the outskirts of the city. Sauvin processed, archived, and curated selections of these photographs in a project called Beijing Silvermine. The images were taken between 1985 and 2005, a period of tremendous social and economic change in mainland China, as well as the height of consumer film photography in the region. From 2011 to 2012, a collaboration between Sauvin and the Chinese animator Lei Lei led to the creation of Recycled, an experimental video work that animates over 3000 of the Beijing Silvermine photos, reconstructing anonymous memories of place and personal history in China over a 20 year timespan. Taking Recycled as a point of departure, this screening will include a selection of works from experimental filmmakers and artists who explore innovative formal approaches in their reconstructions of place and memory on moving image. The concept behind this program was partially inspired by RECYCLED CINEMA, an earlier screening program held in Boston that was developed and curated by the new Boston-based film initiative Crows & Sparrows in collaboration with the Balagan Film Series.

Bloody Marys with Scott Carrier

with Scott Carrier and Jonathan Goldstein Peabody Award-winning journalist Scott Carrier has been all over. His work, both written and spoken, has taken him around the globe and back, each time with a new story of the road. Recently, he has taken a step into new territory, the world of podcasts. With Home of the Brave, Scott provides a weekly story "from the archives, the road, and the end of the world." Join UnionDocs for a discussion, and a Bloody Mary, with Scott.

What You Get is What You See: Two Turntables, An Image Macro, and a Bear Named Mr. Truffles

with Kenyatta Cheese A spectator of spectators, Kenyatta Cheese will show how Internet meme and pop culture communities actively defy the traditional narrative of spectator passivity and reveal an experience that is communal, participatory, and emotional. Kenyatta will argue that the audience has always desired participation and that this desire was only rendered passive in order to fit the needs of large scale, industrialized commerce. He then suggests that we change the discourse around the creative process towards a model of networked participation that embraces varying levels of effort and expertise.

The Story of Telling

with Tirtza Even and Iva Radivojevic Communicating social and political realities in visual media: the inevitable, yet nuanced, failure of the act of representation.Tirtza Even’s presentation, “The Story of Telling,” will review her efforts to communicate social and political realities in visual media. Even’s linear and interactive video work have consistently been engaged with representing the encounter with a variety of groups and individuals, typically ones whose lives embody complex or decentralized social/political settings (in Palestine, Turkey, the U.S and Germany, among other locations). At the same time (and perhaps especially) the work could also be described as an exploration of the inevitable, yet nuanced, failure of this very act of representation. Even’s most recent projects include Land Mine (A feature length documentary, 2014, work-in progress); Natural Life (a feature length documentary on incarcerated youth, 2014), and Once a Wall, or Ripple Remains (a multi-channel video / 3-D animation reflecting on personal encounters in Palestine, 2009.

Terrible Resonance: A Live Podcast about Subversive Sound, Earthquakes, Ghosts, Outer Space, Sonic Weaponry, and Whales (Late Show)

With Jeff Emtman and Joe Morgan Terrible Resonance is a journey from 0-20hz, telling stories from the well-studied rumbles of Earth’s crust, songs of whales and elephants, and resonant points in the human body to the areas of the unknown that lead to wild speculation: hauntings, the “brown” note, spontaneous orgasm and not-so-secret weapons programs from the Pentagon. The show runs roughly 90 minutes and includes a live infrasound demonstration from Brooklyn-based musician Joe Morgan. Earplugs will be provided. Children and service animals should use extra precaution during this portion of the show.

Terrible Resonance: A Live Podcast about Subversive Sound, Earthquakes, Ghosts, Outer Space, Sonic Weaponry, and Whales

With Jeff Emtman and Joe Morgan There is a murky and uncertain world of sound below the bassiest bass we can hear. Despite the physical limitations of our ears, these rumbles, called “infrasounds” affect us, in wildly different ways--sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying. Terrible Resonance is a journey from 0-20hz, telling stories from the well-studied rumbles of Earth’s crust, songs of whales and elephants, and resonant points in the human body to the areas of the unknown that lead to wild speculation: hauntings, the “brown” note, spontaneous orgasm and not-so-secret weapons programs from the Pentagon. The show runs roughly 90 minutes and includes a live infrasound demonstration from Brooklyn-based musician Joe Morgan. Earplugs will be provided. Children and service animals should use extra precaution during this portion of the show.

A Cocktail of Mistakes, or a Mistake of Cocktails: The (Notorious) Legend of Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in 2 or 3 Easy Lessons

With Bradley Eros and Brian Frye. Every Tuesday night for more than a hex of years, the RBMC illuminated the snowy-white screen of the Collective Unconscious on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Initiated by Brian Frye & immediately joined by Bradley Eros, both shared the core curating frenzy of this no-budget operation, managing to produce over 300 programs and exhibiting more than a thousand artists. When Frye left, it relocated & regrouped, mutating into Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema at Participant Inc’s gallery just around the corner, for a year, with a team of at least six, but primarily & irrepressibly Eros & Joel Schlemowitz. It later became a restless, nomadic cinema, mushrooming & mutating in myriad incarnations, most notoriously at Issue Project Room on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, both indoors and out. Lastly, it explored more artworld and musical contexts, transforming the field of experimental film, as both quixotic and quicksilver.

Field Niggas and Antonyms of Beauty

Director Khalik Allah joined in conversation by Omar Mullick. Set entirely at night, Field Niggas takes us to the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem and introduces us to its faces. Not just avoiding but repudiating condescension, Khalik Allah’s camera, a longtime, welcome presence in the neighborhood, spotlights his subjects in stunningly composed, dignified portraits that are hypnotically woven with street images. The non-synch audio track consists of conversations with and among those faces: dreams, regrets, arguments, affection, observations, opinions. Field Niggas is a mesmerizing viewing experience, that finds its rhythm using field hollers. The title draws from Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots” speech, in which he targets the power balance that creates a dangerous wedge between the “house slaves” and the “field slaves.” Khalik Allah’s singular, trenchant film serves as an ardent call to rise above social constructs.

The Klansmen, the Journalist, and the Artist

With artist Deanna Bowen, curator Liz Park and Regan Good. On the occasion of the exhibition Traces in the Dark presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the University of Pennsylvania, UnionDocs presents an artist presentation, screening and conversation with the Toronto-based artist Deanna Bowen. She presents the findings from her meticulous research on Canadian and American Ku Klux Klan activities in performance, prints, bookwork, and collage at ICA in a group exhibition about the things that lie in the margins of recorded history. Through this body of work, Bowen advances her argument that iconic images of civil rights protest ironically occlude the Klan's activities, and, in response, she shines light on the invisible perpetrators. At UnionDocs, she discusses her research and screens her 2012 short film Paul Good at Notasulga, based on an original audio recording from 1964 of the late civil rights journalist Paul Good's coverage of a violent incident. Liz Park, Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at ICA and the curator of the exhibition, will moderate a conversation about the burden and privileges of being the keeper of an archive and of being the storyteller with Bowen and the late journalist's daughter Regan Good.

The Uprising

With Peter Snowdon and artist Ganzeer The Uprising shows us the Arab revolutions from the inside. It is a multi-camera, first-person account of that fragile, irreplaceable moment when life ceases to be a prison, and everything becomes possible again.This feature-length documentary is composed entirely of videos made by citizens and long-term residents of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria and Yemen. The film uses this footage, not to recount the actual chronology of events or analyze their causes, but to create an imaginary pan-Arab uprising that exists (for the moment) only on the screen. It has screened at over twenty international film festivals, including Turin, Edinburgh, Bratislava, and MoMA's Doc Fortnight

All or Nothing: Final Hours Fundraiser Party

The music, the dancing and the free and cheap drinks. Drink and dance to support Living Los Sures. We're celebrating our final days raising funds for Living Los Sures and all of the backers who have so generously donated thus far.

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