June
5
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Lo
Fi Landscapes: Pictures From the New World
Thomas Comerford, Bill Brown and Christine Khalafian in person!
Filmmakers Thomas Comerford and Bill Brown follow-up their 2002 Lo Fi
Landscapes Tour with a new program of films about the space of history
and the history of spaces. These films explore how historical text becomes
physical texture, and how filmmaking itself is memory recovered from landscape's
amnesia.
Mountain State by Bill Brown, 16mm sound, color, 22 mins.
Land Marked/Marquette series by Thomas Comerford, 16mm sound,
b&w/color, 23 mins.
Chicago Detroit Split by TC and BB, unslit 8mm, approx 10
mins.
Also screening is the Los Angeles premiere of: don’t leave without
news by Christine Khalafian (16mm, color, sound, 18 min., 2005)
Shot in modern day Armenia, don't leave without news portrays
a series of chance encounters based on documentary footage, excerpts from
field recordings/interviews, and narrative insights given on the way.
There are no famous landmarks or distinct ethnic symbols to clue the viewer,
and the film eschews the obvious relationship between sound and image.
don't leave without news creates a new environment based on chance encounters,
an amalgam of the harshness of life in a struggling post-soviet republic
and a traveler’s fantasy. Disparate imagery includes Russian children
doing cartwheels on a deserted road, men playing soccer in an open field
nestled in the mountains, Yezdi nomads wondering the land, a tightrope
walker impressing tourists, and two villagers on a pilgrimage to a buried
ancient cross stone. This travelogue of sorts provides a deceptively
nondescript, impenetrable landscape, in the hopes of examining how the
less familiar the imagery, the more viewers need to reappropriate what
they see.
Brown’s Mountain State is a brief history of the westward
expansion of the United States as told by 25 roadside historical markers
in the state of West Virginia. History is a ghost, and every historical
marker tells a ghost story.
Comerford’s Land Marked is a series of four landscape films,
each examining a specific place in Chicago. These places are connected
in their relationship to 17th-century exploration of the Chicago area
by Europeans, in particular, the highly-celebrated French Jesuit missionary,
Jacques Marquette. Rather than attempt to tell Marquette’s story
or offer history, the films examine the monuments to Marquette--the "stories"
the monuments tell--and the relationship of the monuments to their surroundings.
The Chicago Detroit Split is a collaborative film is currently
in production. Surveying their current cities-in-residence--Detroit and
Chicago, Brown and Comerford find the common ground of shared street names,
yet they employ the unslit 8mm format to juxtapose these like-named tracts
of land--the juxtapositions allowing for chance encounters across time
and space between these two Midwestern cities.
Thomas Comerford is a media artist, musician and educator who resides
in Chicago. He currently teaches film production at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago. His work has screened at festivals and venues
which include the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, San
Francisco Cinematheque and the London Film Festival. He has received grants
from the City of Chicago and the Illinois Arts Council to complete his
films.
“Comerford's images revisit film's novelty and the marvel of sound
and image captured in a box and unspooled from another. Their resemblance
to the grainy images of early cinema is therefore no accident... Comerford's
images have been called 'post technological' and they do feel like artifacts
of some previous time, ironically nostalgic for the world still around
us, and also bitterly aware of how things have changed.”
--Felicia Feaster, Creative Loafing
Bill Brown has been making films and zines for over 10 years. Currently,
he teaches film production in Detroit, MI. His films have won many awards
and screened at nearly every film festival on the planet, he has received
both Rockefeller and Creative Capital grants, and in November 2003, the
Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective of his work.
"There's a humor and a wisdom underlying his work that you find in
Mark Twain and E.B. White ... [Brown's work] explores the ties that bind
us and the lines that divide us as Americans. It's about the past as it's
been misrepresented and the present as it's unfolding."
--Josh Siegel, Museum of Modern Art
Christine Khalafian is a filmmaker and curator. Some of her film titles
include Naturalization Day, mark set burn, don’t leave without news.
She taught film at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
and is the founder and head curator of the Milwaukee Underground Film
Festival. She programmed the first North African Arab Film Festival
and curated screenings for the Echo Park Film Center and the Los Angeles
Filmforum, as well as the Milwaukee Art Museum.
She is the recipient of the UWM Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship,
which has taken her to the Republic of Armenia where she filmed don’t
leave without news. Her film mark set burn was shown at the Centre George
Pompidou in Paris, France as part of the Polyphonix 40 Exhibit as well
as the Sundance Film Festival, New York Underground and Los Angeles Film
Festival among several others. She has traveled extensively and is currently
working on a series of experimental videos concentrating on language acquisition
and retention.
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