Ism, Ism, Ism: Urban Harmonies/Dissonant Cities

Constitución (Constitution), by Melisa Aller

Friday-Sunday, October 2-4, 2020, All Day

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Ism, Ism, Ism: Urban Harmonies/Dissonant Cities

Online

Q&A on Sunday Oct 4, 7:30 pm PDT with co-curator Jesse Lerner and filmmakers Melisa Aller, Azucena Losana, Luis Soldevilla, and Juan Carlos Alom via Zoom!

More information: www.lafilmforum.org, (323) 377-7238

Tickets: Sliding scale, $0, $5, $8, $12, $20, via https://ismcitysymphonies.bpt.me

Promotional Support for these online screenings from Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; WNDX Festival of Experimental Film, Winnipeg; Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque; Lightbox Film Center, University of the Arts, Philadelphia.

At the end of the silent era of cinema, there was an international cycle of films that depicted the nature of the modern city. These films, known as city symphonies or film symphonies, were edited as if following a musical score. The rhythm and succession of the images were immensely important for the filmmakers. In Latin America, some of the earliest experimental films participated in this cycle of city symphonies. For example, São Paulo: a Sinfonia da Metrópole (1929), by Rodolfo Rex Lustig and Adalberto Kemeny, and Humberto Mauro’s film-poem about his home town in Minas Gerais, Brazil, Sinfonia de Cataguases (1929). Ever since those early efforts many filmmakers have maintained a fascination with the city, as Latin American cities were transformed by unfettered growth, industrialization, and massive rural to urban migrations. This program offers a range of urban visions—some more celebratory, others more critical—of the architecture, daily life, public spaces, and transportation of cities such as Buenos Aires, Havana, Lima, Cali, Los Angeles, Santiago, and London.

Bios:

Melisa Aller was born and lives in Buenos Aires (Argentina). She is an experimental filmmaker and visual artist. She studied Political Science at the Universidad of Buenos Aires and Filmmaking and Video in CIEVYC. She is specialist and teaches social, genre and feminist topics.  She has a postgraduate degree at Social Sciences Universidad of Buenos Aires. She also studied with the directors Claudio Caldini and Ernesto Baca. In recent years she has been spent working particularly in the super 8 format, filming and editing all on camera without any intervention from the digital. In 2015, she filmed her first feature film, called “Las Decisiones Formales”, edited in camera and chronologically using 22 rolls of film, which spliced together.

Juan Carlos Alom

The art of creating and interpreting images is akin to translating my spirit. My camera is the compass that guides me and I am grateful to it. Everywhere I have lived, I have delivered myself to light, shadows and to those details that, however minimal they may seem, have made me tremble and convert them into images.

I had hardly begun working as a photojournalist when the scarcity brought about by the Soviet Union’s collapse obliged me to experiment, shaping my artistic vision into one that is driven by precariousness, spontaneity and the necessity to focus on distinct themes such as Afro-Cuban religion, youth, longitude. Even more than those isolated themes, my idiosyncrasy, as both a filmmaker and photographer, entails the quest to document the impossible. For instance, in Habana solo, I begged to concretize the most intimate musical expression through my cinematographic images and to convert the city’s noises into music, but my persistent dissatisfaction with concretizing the impossible led to my photographic series entitled Dressing Room where photographs of musicians in “private” attempt to peak into the depths of their individual expression.

Azucena Losana: I was born in Mexico City in 1977. I live and work in Buenos Aires. I studied Multimedia Arts at the National University of Arts (UNA) in Argentina and Claudio Caldini's experimental film workshop. My work covers experimental cinema, installations and video. I am a fellow of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores del Arte del FONCA, Mexico.

Luis Soldevilla

Lima - Perú 1978. Masters in Media-Design from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam-Holland. Degree in audiovisual production from the Facultad de Comunicaciones of the Universidad de Lima. Bachelors with a specialty in film and video from the same Facultad. Luis's work has a strong link with his academic training, cinema. He takes the cinematic language and fuses it with the expressive potential of space. In his installations, the physical aspect of the image functions as the backbone of the narrative, exploring various connotations of the landscape as a social portrait.