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The Pleasures of Deception: The Films of Matías Piñeiro, 2011-12 FSC-Radcliffe Fellow
Sunday & Monday, May 13 & 14 at 7:00 p.m.
Location: Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge
Sunday May 13, 7:00 p.m.
The Stolen Man (El hombre robado)
Directed by Matías Piñeiro. With Ana Cambre, Francisco García Faure,
Daniel Gilman Calderón
Argentina 2007, 35mm, b/w, 90 min. Spanish with English subtitles
Monday May 14, 7:00 p.m.
They All Lie (Todos mienten)
Directed by Matías Piñeiro. With Romina Paula, María Villar,
Julia Martínez Rubio
Argentina 2009, digital video, color, 75 min. Spanish with English subtitles
 Harvard Film Archive
The Films of Pema Tseden
Saturday & Sunday, April 21 & 211 at 2:00 p.m.
Location: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Main Lecture Hall, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, Free Admission
Hailing from the Tibetan region of Amdo, filmmaker Pema Tseden's visions of contemporary Tibet reveal a contemplative, tender film language that captures rich textures of the everyday. The first Tibetan to train at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, Tseden was widely known in China as a novelist and translator of works in Tibetan and Chinese prior to his entry into filmmaking. His three narrative features, The Silent Holy Stones (2005), The Search (2009), and Old Dog (2010) have marked his rise as the preeminent cinematic voice of Tibet. With a painterly visual approach inspired by Tibetan tangka scroll paintings, and a masterful sculpting of cinematic time and space that recalls the work of Bresson and Kiarostami, his work reflects a groundbreaking engagement with the transformations and contradictions of a changing social landscape in Tibet.
Saturday, April 21, 2012, 2pm
The Silent Holy Stones (Lhing Vjags Kyi Ma Ni Rdo Vbum, 2005)
(Tibetan with English Subtitles, 35mm, color, 102 min) Tseden's debut tells the story of a young Tibetan monk whose brief departure from the monastery to celebrate the Tibetan New Year at home with his family leaves him captivated by the Chinese television series Journey to the West.
Sunday, April 22, 2012, 2pm
Old Dog (Khyi Rgan, 2010)
(Tibetan with English Subtitles, HD, color, 88 min)
A tale of father and son set against the backdrop of China's burgeoning trade in Tibetan mastiffs, Tseden's most recent work is a profound meditation on time, distance, and human relationships in the context of loss and resistance.
Presented in association with Emergent Visions, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and the Film Study Center
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Calendar
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Previous Events |
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Ed Pincus, LOST AND FOUND
APRIL 6 – APRIL 9, 2012
Location: Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Friday April 6 at 7pm
INTRODUCTION BY ED PINCUS AND DAVID NEUMAN
Black Natchez
USA 1967, 16mm, b/w, 62 min
Panola
USA 1970, 16mm, b/w, 21 min
Friday April 6 at 9pm
ED PINCUS IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID NEUMAN
One Step Away
USA 1968, 16mm, b/w, 54 min
Harry's Trip
USA 1969, 16mm, color, 16 min
Saturday April 7 at 7pm
ED PINCUS IN CONVERSATION WITH ROBB MOSS AND ROSS MCELWEE
Diaries (1971 – 76)
USA 1980, 16mm, color, 200 min
Sunday April 8 at 5pm
INTRODUCTION BY ED PINCUS AND DAVID NEUMAN
The Way We See It
USA 1969, 16mm, b/w, 57 min
Portrait of a McCarthy Supporter
USA 1969, 16mm, color, 16 min
Sunday April 8 at 7pm
ED PINCUS IN CONVERSATION WITH STEVE ASHER AND SCOTT MACDONALD
Life and Other Anxieties
USA 1977, 16mm, color, 90 min
Monday April 9 at 7pm
ED PINCUS AND LUCIA SMALL IN PERSON
The Axe in the Attic
USA 2007, digital video, color, 110 min
Harvard Film Archive
Saul Levine, Selected short films
Thursday 29 March, 7:15 p.m.
Location: Sever Hall, Rm. 416
If someone were to write a critical history of the avant-garde cinema in Boston, Levine would be its hero. He seldom leaves the city, where, as a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, he has been one of the most influential teachers of filmmaking in the nation, and his energies have for decades sustained the larger community of avant-garde filmmakers in Boston . . . A figure of the perennial Left, Levine has identified with and championed the small film gauges as if they were marginalized citizens of the republic of cinema. He has clung to his artistic freedom by seeking out these least expensive modes of filmmaking and, as Emerson wrote in the essay "Experience," to "hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly."
- P. ADAMS SITNEY, PROFESSOR OF VISUAL ARTS AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
The 2012 Geneviève McMillan Award: Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche in person
The FIlm Study Center annually awards the Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Fellowship to a Francophone filmmaker from Africa or of African descent. This years award honors Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, the French filmmaker born in Algeria in 1966. The Harvard Film Archive will screen a retrospective of his work, with Ameur-Zaïmeche in attendance. The screenings schedule is as follows:
Friday 2 March at 7:00 p.m.
Smugglers' Songs (Les chants de Mandrin)
France 2011, digital video, 97 min. French with English Subtitles
Saturday 3 March at 7:00 p.m.
Adhen (Dernier maquis)
France 2008, 35mm, 93 min. French and Arabic with English subtitles
Sunday 4 March at 5:00 p.m.
Wesh Wesh (Wesh Wesh, qu'est-ce qui passe?)
France 2001, 35 mm, 83 min. French and Arabic with English subtitles
Sunday 4 March at 7:00 p.m.
Back Home (Bled Number One)
France/Algeria 2006, 35 mm, 100 min. French and Arabic with English subtitles
All screenings will be held at the Main Lecture Hall, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (HFA) 24 Quincy St., Cambridge
Sponsored by the Film Study Center and the Harvard Film Archive
For descriptions of each film, please see:
Harvard Film Archive
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu
Director Andrei Ujicǎ in person
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu
(180 minutes) Free Admission
Wednesday 15 February, 7:00 p.m.
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
During his rule of Communist Romania from 1967 to 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu and his administration documented their reign on hundreds of hours of film. Drawing on footage from the Romanian National Film Archive and state television, Ujica transforms a historical chronicle into a spellbinding, sweeping epic by simply proceeding chronologically through the decades with little commentary or exposition; there are no titles, captions or voiceover. Ujica's primary authorial intervention consists of precise selection, ingenious editing and a cleverly subtle soundtrack construction. Although Ujica includes some unguarded moments, all the images are essentially staged; they originate from events public or private that Ceausescu ordered photographed. For most of this slyly astonishing film, Ceausescu seems to be as much in thrall to the image he created of himself as his subjects were presumed to be.
This screening and talk is sponsored by the Film Study Center, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and the Harvard Film Archive. Free and open to the public.
Harvard Film Archive
Sonic Navigations and Electric Songlines
Composer and Sound Artist Betsey Biggs
Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
Location: Barker Center 133, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge
Betsey Biggs is a composer and sound artist who makes audio works which deal with memory, geography, and senses of place. Her works, often composed to be listened to via headphones while traversing specific environments, aims to expose the beautiful in the mundane, and to transform the city into a creative interface through psychogeographic practice. About her "Detox Project", an hour-long audio walk around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker that the experience "proved to be psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears".
More information on Biggs' audio work, as well as lots to listen to, can be found at betseybiggs.org.
Free and open to the public.
Experiments in Place and Collaborative Documentary:
UnionDocs’ Looking at Los Sures
Director Diego Echeverria and UnionDocs artists in person
Tuesday, October 18, 7:00 p.m.
Location: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B-04, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge
In the late seventies and early eighties, South Williamsburg was one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. Largely Puerto Rican and Dominican, it was troubled by drugs and violence, full of abandoned real estate, and badly under-served. Los Sures, a documentary from 1984 by Diego Echeverria, skillfully represents the challenges of this time, while also celebrating a community that was connected, coherent, and full of culture.
UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art based in South Williamsburg, has begun an investigation of the neighborhood that revisits Echeverria's film and creates a constellation of companion documentary projects that update, annotate, challenge, and spiral off from the original. The result will be Looking at Los Sures, an interactive, multi-layer online documentary project that seeks not just to extract important stories from the place, but to also create new shared histories, to deeply enhance local awareness, respect, and tolerance, and to facilitate relationships between neighbors.
For this special event, Diego Echeverria will be present to discuss his original film and respond to the contemporary work of UnionDocs. The program will include excerpts from the original and work from last year’s UnionDocs Collaborative Fellows.
This screening and talk is presented by the Film Study Center with metaLAB (at) Harvard.
Free and open to the public.
UnionDocs
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Sound artist Francisco López at MIT
Monday, April 25
Lecture at
8:00 p.m.
Concert at 9:00 p.m.
Location: The CUBE at MIT
MIT Media Lab, Wiesner Building (atrium level)
20 Ames St., Bldg. E15, Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public
Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. Over the past 30 years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Though many of his sound works are made from location recordings from a variety of environments -- from a rain forest in which he engages in biological fieldwork, to the windswept mountains of Patagonia, to a boiler room in the basement of a building in New York City -- his work insists that the sounds be experienced purely as sounds, and not as signs. He thus extends the notion of the 'sound object' (objet sonore) from musique concrète, and critiques approaches from acoustic ecology. Erasing boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, López proposed a blind, profound, and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion.
He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in 60 countries of the five continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 100 international artists) has been released by more than 200 record labels worldwide, and he has been awarded three times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival.
Presented by the Film Study Center, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Non-Event, and the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology.
franciscolopez.net
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A Film Unfinished
Director Yael Hersonski in person
Introduction by Susan R. Suleiman
C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and
Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University
Tuesday, March 29, 6:00 p.m.
Location: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B-04, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge
At the end of WWII, 60 minutes of raw film, having sat undisturbed in an East German archive, was discovered. Shot by the Nazis in Warsaw in May 1942, and labeled simply “Ghetto,” this footage quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, the later discovery of a long-missing reel, inclusive of multiple takes and cameraman staging scenes, complicated earlier readings of the footage. A Film Unfinished presents the raw footage in its entirety, carefully noting fictionalized sequences (including a staged dinner party) falsely showing “the good life” enjoyed by Jewish urbanites, and probes deep into the making of a now-infamous Nazi propaganda film.
A Film Unfinished documents some of the worst horrors of our time, exposing the efforts of its perpetrators to propel their agenda and cast it in a favorable light.
Yael Hersonski is currently visiting the Boston area as part of the Schusterman Visiting Artist Program.
This screening and talk is sponsored by the Film Study Center. Free and open to the public.
A Film Unfinished official website
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Adventures of a Photographer: A Book Story
An artist's talk by Dayanita Singh
Tuesday, March 1, 6:00 p.m.
Location: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B-04, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge
Award-winning photographer Dayanita Singh is perhaps best known for her portraits of India’s urban middle and upper class families. These images of people working, celebrating or resting at home, show Indian life without embellishment. Her recent work has concentrated on another form of portraiture, of places rather than people. All but a few of Singh’s images are devoid of the human figure and they are typified by composure rather than restlessness. The work’s subtle formality is the product of intense and intimate observation, communicating a unique sense of time and place. Represented by Frith Street Gallery and published by Steidl, Singh's recent projects use the possibilites and peculiarities of color film to produce lush photographs saturated with intense color, and present a landscape which exists as much in the artist’s imagination as in the real world. Publishing is also a significant part of the artist’s practice: in her books, often published without text, she experiments with different ways of producing and viewing photographs. A mid-career retrospective of Singh’s work was shown at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam in 2010. Other recent solo exhibitions include Dream Villa Frith Street Gallery; Privacy at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin and I am as I am, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Singh is the 2008 Gardner Photography Fellow at the Peabody Museum.
Sponsored by the Film Study Center, Sensory Ethnography Lab, and VES 350, Critical Media Practice.
In conjunction with the Singh exhibition opening at the Peabody Museum on March 2
Sophie Brunet lecture
Thursday, Dec. 8, 4:30 - 6 p.m.
Sever Hall, room 416
Film editor Sophie Brunet has worked with FSC fellow Dominque Cabrera, and she is also the editor of Marcel Ophuls, Bertrand Tavernier, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, Pavel Longuine and Jonathan Nossiter.
"Here is where, in my opinion, all the difficulty and all the beauty of editing resides: in this incredible and agonizing struggle between the “heart of stone” and the absolute empathy that is demanded of the editor." - Sophie Brunet
Let Each One Go Where He May, Director Ben Russell in person
Sunday, Dec. 12, 7 p.m.
ArtsEmerson
Bright Family Screening Room
Paramount Theatre, 559 Washington St., Boston
Ben Russell’s increasingly ambitious films are among the most notable developments in 21st century avant-garde cinema. Let Each One Go Where He May (2009, U.S./Suriname) is his feature film debut.
Let Each One Go Where He May traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname over land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, in a rehearsal of the voyage undertaken by their ancestors who escaped from slavery at the hands of the Dutch 300 years prior. A path still traveled to this day, its changing topography bespeaks a diverse history of forced migration.” - Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival
Ben Russell is an itinerant photographer, curator, and experimental film/videomaker whose works have screened in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East Indian Trading Company buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and the Sundance Film Festival to the Museum of Modern Art (solo). He has made films about the assassination of Easter Island, the divining powers of Richard Pryor, and the end of the world. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2008, he began The Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island and currently resides in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Presented in association with ArtsEmerson
Mark Tribe:
Mediation, Performance, and the Public Sphere
Wednesday, Nov. 17, 6 p.m.
Carpenter Center of the Visual Art, room B-04
24 Quincy St., Cambridge
In 1968, protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago chanted “The whole world is watching,” and shortly thereafter their images appeared on the evening news. These days, protesters bring their own cameras and post video clips on YouTube, but few seem to notice. Has participatory media changed how we perform, document, and experience political action? If the public sphere is not only a discursive space, but also a performative and visual one, how is it transformed by contemporary technologies of mediation? How can video installation and performance art be used to interrogate conventional notions of protest, history, and popular culture?
Mark Tribe will discuss recent work and current projects, including The Dystopia Files, Sweet Child Solos, and The Port Huron Project.
Mark Tribe is a new media artist and curator whose interests include art, technology, and politics. He teaches courses on radical media, the art of curating, open-source culture, digital art, and techniques of surveillance in Modern Culture and Media, Brown University. In 1996, Tribe founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology, now based at the New Museum (NYC).
Presented in association with Sensory Ethnography Lab
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"Acoustemic Stratigraphies: Recent Work in Urban Phonography" with artist Steven Feld in person
Friday, Oct 22, 10 a.m. - 12 noon
Sever Hall, Room 416
Steven Feld is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, jazz musician, phonographer, author and Professor at UNM. Recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius prize" fellowship, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the founder and director of VoxLox, a documentary sound art label whose CDs advocate for human rights and acoustic ecology.
voxlox.net
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Screening: David Holzman’s Diary and My Girlfriend’s Wedding
Director Jim McBride in person
Saturday, Sept. 25, 7:00 p.m.
Main Lecture Hall, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (HFA)
24 Quincy St., Cambridge
Sponsored by the Film Study Center and the Harvard Film Archive
The FSC is presenting Jim McBride at the Harvard Film Archive, with back-to-back screening of his first two films, and a post-screening discussion with the director.
Harvard Film Archive
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David Holtzman's Diary (1967)
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"The City in Film" Screening and Discussion with Scott MacDonald
Thursday, Sept 16, 2:00 p.m.
Screening Castro Street and Side/Walk/Shuttle
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B04
Scott MacDonald is an historian and theorist of independent and avant-garde cinema. He is a Visiting Professor at Hamilton College, and is currently writing a book on Bostonian documentary.
Presented in association with VES162 Media Archeology of Place
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