Thursday, Mar 4 – 6:00pm – Film Program

Saturday, Mar 6 – 11:00am – Study Group 

Sunday, Mar 7 – 11:00am – Dialogue

Eric Baudelaire Film Program

Also Known As Jihadi, 2017
99 mins
Also Known As Jihadi follows the progress of a young man’s journey from France to Syria, and back to France where he is incarcerated for allegedly joining Daesh. Based on real events, and drawn from thousands of pages of judicial documents, the cinematic work employs the so-called landscape theory (fukeiron in Japanese). The theory originated in the film AKA Serial Killer (1969) that is codirected by Masao Adachi, who was the subject of an earlier film work of mine: The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011). In Also Known As Jihadithis most recent film, the character’s paths to radicalism are rendered purely through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations traversed by the subject: a biography determined not by what the subject did, but by what the subject saw, and one that questions how these landscapes reflect the social and political structures that are the backdrop for a journey of alienation and return. This new film builds on a link between some of my previous work and the events that are occurring with increasing frequency in many parts of the world. I started thinking about this film more than a year ago, before the events in Paris of November 13, 2015 and before those at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in January 2015. From this vantage point, I wanted to make a film that affirms the position of trying (not) to understand. Or, in the words of Pierre Zaoui, to make a film that “aims to understand and not to understand at the same time—to understand up to the point that one no longer understands—and also to show, refusing to understand or explain, so that with a dreadful feeling of confusion we are surprised to find ourselves understanding, discovering a subtle sympathy, telling ourselves that maybe monstrosity is our shared condition.”

Erika Balsom is senior lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of ‘After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation’ and ‘Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art’, as well as the co-editor of ‘Documentary Across Disciplines’. She contributes to magazines such as Artforum and Frieze, and has published in scholarly journals including Cinema Journal and Grey Room. In 2018, she was awarded a Leverhulme Prize and the Kovacs essay award from SCMS.

Eric Baudelaire (1973, Salt Lake City) lives and works in Paris, France. After training as a social scientist, Baudelaire established himself as a visual artist often focused on social and historical research. Since 2010, he has devoted himself more seriously to filmmaking. His feature films include Also Known As Jihadi (2017), Letters to Max (2014), The Ugly One (2013) and The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011).

Friday, Mar 5 – 6:00pm – Film Program

Saturday Mar 6 – 2:30pm – Study Group

Sunday, Mar 7 – 2:30pm – Research Dialogue

The Films of James N. Kienitz Wilkins

This Action Lies, 2018
32 minutes
It is what it is.

The Plagiarists, 2019
76 minutes
During a series of country vacations, a young couple is shaken by a seemingly fraudulent yet unprovable act that strikes to the core of their cultural pretensions.

Best Year Ever, 2020
14 minutes
In the children’s book Best Busy Year Ever by Richard Scarry, the hustle and bustle of a city is captured through colorful illustrations. Using his performative storytelling narration, Wilkins questions contemporary social issues with understated ironic wit. super 16mm transferred to digital.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn. His work has premiered at international film festivals including Berlin, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, NYFF, CPH:DOX, BAMcinemaFest, New Directors/New Films, and beyond. In 2017, he was included in the Whitney Biennial and a retrospective of his work was showcased at RIDM (Montréal). He has had solo exhibitions at Gasworks (London), Spike Island (Bristol, UK) and currently, Kunsthalle Winterthur (Switzerland).

Thursday, Mar 11 – 6:00pm – Film Program

Saturday Mar 13 – 11:00am – Study Group

Sunday, Mar 14 – 11:00am – Dialogue

The Films of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

Outfox the Grave, 2020
5 mins
A short film and a spell of protection.

A Quality of Light, 2018
8 mins

A Quality of Light reaches into the filmmaker’s familial lineage of black women artists. This film examines the under-told story of the haunted artist who also inhabits the unique political position of being black and a woman. The film applies principles of music theory and West African performance structure in their construction.

Footnote to the West, 2020
5 mins
“Footnote to the West” is a dreamy fragment about the end of the world. A black girl wanders into a Hollywood western and mourns for the dead.

Spit on the Broom, 2019

12 mins

A surrealist documentary that explores the margins of the history of the African American women’s group the United Order of Tents, a clandestine organization of black women organized in the 1840s during the height of the Underground Railroad. ​ The film uses excerpts from the public record, newspaper articles related to the Tents from over the course of 100 years, and a visual tapestry of fable and myth as a way to introduce a history that remains secret. 

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich makes work about the private lives and worlds of black women. Her practice is rooted in archival research and field research, which then gets translated through a writing process, and then finally a filmmaking process that includes narrative, documentary and experimental film techniques. This means working closely with archives that until recently did not preserve or respect black voices and thinking about how to represent histories that have been neglected.

Nzingha Kendall is a film scholar and programmer. Her work focuses on moving images by black women from across the diaspora. She has a PhD in American Studies and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

Friday, Mar 12 – 6:00pm – Screening

Saturday Mar 13 – 2:30pm – Study Group

Sunday, Mar 14 – 2:30pm – Research Dialogue

The Films of Dani and Sheilah ReStack

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, 2017
25 mins
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family.

A Hand In Two Ways (Fisted), 2017
7 mins
A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted), is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions.  Animals, human bodies, children, ritual and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.

Come Coyote, 2018
8 mins 
Come Coyote continues the investigation of environment, queer desire, motherhood, and collaboration. This 8-minute video brings together moments culled from our own life and fabricated scenes. One of the central themes in this chapter is the idea of reproduction and its implications — the reality/fantasy of both logistics and technology of queer reproduction, and the variations of our individual commitment.

Go Ask Joan, 2019
6.5 mins
Go Ask Joan is an experimental narrative that considers human and animal melding using magic accessed through elders. Go Ask Joan uses the medium of video as site of communication between collaborators, therapists and animals. Technology becomes a place to imagine resolution — through birthing of new ideas of family and kin.

Future From Inside, 2020
19 mins

A work in progress, the latest from the ReStacks.

Dani and Sheilah ReStack have embarked on an artistic relationship that is formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, a quotidian zone they share with their young daughter Rose. Both artists have established careers on their own. Neither Dani’ video work or Sheilah’s multimedia performance and installation work could exactly prepare us for the force of the women’s collaborative efforts. – Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope, 2017. ReStack collaborations have shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Iceberg Projects Chicago, Toronto International Film Festival, Images Film Festival, Toronto, Lyric Theater, Carrizozo, NM, Leslie Lohman Project Space, Gaa Wellfleet, New York Film Festival and The Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. They have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council and Visual Studies Workshop, NY. They have been residents at The Headlands in Marin County and their newest video Go Ask Joan was made at the MacDowell Colony this summer.