print March 2015

Morgan Fisher

Much recent engagement with photochemical film tends to reflect a fetishistic investment in the uniqueness of its materiality. The work of Morgan Fisher is different: His interest is in the conjunction of this material support and the demands of industry. For Fisher, film is less artisanal than it is inextricable from the standards imposed by corporations in the field, such as Agfa-Gevaert. Of course, it is exactly this tie to industry that has cast the medium into obsolescence, a topos that looms large in Fisher’s recent exhibition “Past Present, Present Past.”

In the 1970s, Fisher worked in

film February 03, 2015

Shorts Circuit

IS THERE A MAJOR FILM FESTIVAL that takes artists’ film and video as seriously as Rotterdam? What too often figures as a marginalized sidebar emerges here as a key focus, with dozens of screenings covering the broad spectrum of experimental practice. From curated programs to installations in hotel rooms open 24/7, from gorgeous photochemical film to the wilds of digital psychedelia, from an eight-performance retrospective by Bruce McClure to the world premiere of Kevin Jerome Everson’s eight-hour Park Lanes (2015), Rotterdam had it all.

In the shorts section, several standout films explored the

interviews February 2015

1000 WORDS: AURA SATZ

PERHAPS THE SIMULTANEOUS DENIGRATION and exaltation of color in the West can be explained by its fundamental instability, its lack of fit with rationality and order. Color has variously been allied with the occult, the primitive, and the feminine; some say it is merely cosmetic, others that it is deeply spiritual. It is inherently subjective, bridging the external world and internal experience, and notoriously difficult to codify. Through the Latin celare, it has etymological ties to notions of disguise and concealment. What David Batchelor has termed chromophobia in his book of the same name

film October 31, 2014

Every Which Way

LURKING IN THE SHADOW of the Frieze Art Fair and relegated to the very back pages of the print catalogue of the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival was Experimenta, an assembly of nineteen programs devoted to experimental cinema and artists’ film and video. Curated for the second year running by LUX’s Benjamin Cook and the BFI’s Helen de Witt and William Fowler, the sidebar showcased some sixty-two works varying in length, ranging from productions with crews the size of a Sundance darling to films made by a single individual in the artisanal mode long associated with avant-garde cinema.

print September 2014

LIVE AND DIRECT: CINEMA AS A PERFORMING ART

THIS PAST MAY, “Memories Can’t Wait—Film Without Film,” the theme program of the 2014 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, began with a blank screen. No celluloid ran through the projector; instead, light was transmitted without intermediary, bright enough to bounce back and partially illuminate the faces of the seated spectators. Soon enough, members of the audience started to throw crumpled balls of paper in the way of the beam, causing shadows to appear on the screen. Others joined in, and paper airplanes began to soar, with laughter and conversation filling the room. The old

print December 2013

Erika Balsom

1 LUTHER PRICE (International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany) The highlight of this tightly focused survey of the work of Boston-based experimental filmmaker Luther Price was the midnight screening of Clown (1991) in a makeshift bar at Oberhausen’s central train station. Rumor had it the floor might collapse, but that didn’t stop people from crowding in.

2 A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (Ben Rivers and Ben Russell) How should a person live? Where can one locate utopian and even transcendent experience in a world that consistently forecloses it? Rivers and Russell lead the viewer