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Picture More

Picture More

Dispenser of Delights by Eszter Szabó (2015)

Picture More: Interventions into Filmic Space

Films Screening Online October 20-26, 2021

Live Q&A with Filmmakers and Programmers on Sunday, October 24 at noon Pacific time

3 US premieres and 3 Los Angeles premieres!

Picture More: Interventions into Filmic Space, programmed by guest curator Dana Berman Duff for Los Angeles Filmforum, presents film works that suggest dissatisfaction with the adequacy of the photographic medium to represent reality and which resort to interventions into the image to propose a more authentic experience. These films use added embellishments or layers, such as hand-drawn animation or special effects, treating the image as a space, rather than as a surface. These effects are in the film, not on the film; hence, they are a part of the story, rather than referencing the structure or the medium. Some of the interventions are hilarious, some are mystical or poetic, all are political.

Curator Bio

Dana Berman Duff was named a Cultural Trailblazer by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in 2020, and a retrospective of her short films is scheduled in Los Angeles for spring 2022 at REDCAT. Her film A POTENTIALITY was awarded an Alice Guy Special Mention at the 2020 FIDMarseille Film Festival. Her works in small format film and video have been screened in over forty international film festivals.

Ticketing for Picture More: Sliding Scale, requested $12 for general admission, $8 students/seniors, $0 for Filmforum members, at https://watch.eventive.org/picturemore/play/61635e8125e80a00c20df0f2

Total Runtime: 70 mins

Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the California Community Foundation, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

 

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Re Rupture

Re Rupture

By Hsu Che-Yu

Taiwan, 2019, Digital, color, sound, 15 min.

U.S. Premiere

Re-rupture assembles two seemingly unrelated historical fragments from 1995: "People's Taxi riot" and "Taipei Breaking Sky." Artist Hsu, Che-Yu invited five drivers who participated in the fight at the time to return to the event site, while hanging guitarist Li Na-shao, who narrates the film, from the top of Chongxing Bridge to play music. The act, staged in homage to a failed art project from 20 years ago, is one of several moments in Taiwanese history that Hsu unearths and reanimates.

Hsu, Che-Yu (1985 Taipei, Taiwan) is now studying in Le Fresnoy–Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, France (2020 - 2022). He is a laureate of HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts, Belgium) in 2020. Previously, he obtained a master’s degree from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts (M.F.A., Taiwan). Hsu Che-Yu works as an artist who primarily creates animations, videos, and installations.

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Division Movement to Vungtau

Division Movement to Vungtau

By Benjamin Crotty & Bertrand Dezoteux

France, 2016, Digital, color, sound, 4:30 min.

Los Angeles Premiere

Four pieces of fruit find themselves in a tropical theatre of war.

Walking a line between home movie, experimental film, and propaganda short, Division Movement to Vungtau offers an absurd “reverse shot” of military abuses and excesses. Inserting 3D fruits into amateur footage shot by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War, these seven vignettes re-imagine wartime fact as tropical cinematic fiction.

Benjamin Crotty (1979 Spokane, Washington) Benjamin studied painting at Yale University and film and video at Le Fresnoy–Studio National. Since then, his work has been shown in numerous festivals including BFI London, Rotterdam, TIFF and NYFF, and in institutions such as MoMA, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Tate Modern. His first feature film, Fort Buchanan, had its world premiere at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival before distribution by Norte in France and Grasshopper in the US. His most recent short, The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin, premiered at the 2018 Locarno Film Festival where it won the Fundación Casa Wabi–Mantarraya Award. He was a 2019/2020 resident at the Villa Medici–French Academy in Rome. 

Bertrand Dezoteux (1982 Bayonne, France) lives and works in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Dezoteux has produced an anti-heroic surf film, a cosmic opera inspired by Parade, the ballet composed by Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso, a space opera featuring the evangelistic mission of a certain Jesus Perez, and an ubiquitous fable in which a deliveroo crosses paths with the hybrid creatures of sculptor Bruno Gironcoli. He regularly presents his work in France (Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Musée des Abattoirs) and internationally (Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, MCA Chicago, Frieze London). In 2021, he is the guest curator of the inaugural exhibition of the Pernod Ricard Foundation, for which he brings together 13 artists of different generations and backgrounds.

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Dispenser of Delights

Dispenser of Delights

By Eszter Szabó

Hungary, 2015, Digital, color, sound, 4:30 min.

U.S. Premiere

Photography with watercolors. This video is composed of several collage-like scenes. The background is based on a 3D space with textures of photos of real estate advertisements that were downloaded from the Internet. The protagonists are invented characters that are painted and animated in 2D. 

Eszter Szabó lives and works in Budapest. She has an MA of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, painting department. In 2016 she finished her postgraduate studies at Le Fresnoy École des Arts Contemporains. Her works are mostly non-narrative videos that are animated versions of her paintings. She is exploring the encounter between constructed ideas of men versus human reality. She explores notions of domestication, compliance, inertia, and invisibility. Her approach is to observe and wonder at ordinary details of everyday situations that are so familiar that they almost become invisible. The protagonists of her recent paintings and videos are weary women who wander around in everyday ordinariness.

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Tribut [Tribute]

Tribut [Tribute]

By Katia Sophia Ditzler

Germany, 2020, Digital, color, sound, 2 min. 

Los Angeles Premiere

A performative poetry film on the subject of pecunia, passports, paradises, and privilege.

Money origami, burning and laundering money, money in museums. Psychedelic plant ornaments found in the overgrown garden of an abandoned Ukrainian Belle Époque castle. Tanks that are shooting, money that is eaten, fetishized passports that are kissed in an objectophiliac manner in front of the Brandenburg Gate. A tribute to migration and the ghosts of both past and future.

Katia Sophia Ditzler (1992) studied Interdisciplinary Art and Cultural Anthropology in Leipzig, Berlin, Kyiv, and Moscow. In 2017/18 she was a recipient of the Darmasiswa scholarship and studied karawitan music, shadow puppetry, and dance at ISI Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her work explores the intersections of literature, music, video, as well as performance art. After working in Melbourne, Australia, at a virtual reality art space she returned to Berlin. Her most recent work explores the political mythologies as well as propaganda mechanisms of the war between Ukraine and Russia.  She also solo-hitchhiked from Germany to Singapore when she was 19/20.

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Spregledani razgledi / Phony Sights

Spregledani razgledi / Phony Sights

By Ana Čigon

Slovenia, 2019, Digital, color, sound, 20 min.

Los Angeles Premiere

Phony Sights is a satiric critique of the current social and political changes that are happening locally, in Europe and in the World. It presents a vision of the world in the form of intimate letters and computer-modified urban landscapes of different world cities. It covers a wide variety of topics such as class inequality, political powerlessness of the individual, critique of the multi-speeds Europe, political and economic fight between the superpowers, accumulation of wealth of the richest elite, etc. Phony Sights considers social and political issues and even astrophysics when searching for an answer to the questions: Where are we? Where are we going?

Ana Čigon (1982) is an artist from Slovenia who works in diverse artistic fields like film, video art and performance. Her projects tackle socio-political issues, such as the under-representation of women in art and history, LGBTIQ+ topics, and marginalized social groups, the effects of capitalism on society and such. Her works often contain elements of humor and irony. She is a winner of OHO Award, finalist for the Slovenia Henkel Award and finalist of Vordemberge Gildewart Foundation Award. Her films have been presented on international film festivals worldwide, for which she received numerous nominations, two audience choice awards and three jury awards.

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Black Bullets

Black Bullets

By Jeannette Ehlers

Denmark, 2012, Digital, color, sound, 4:33 min.

Black Bullets was filmed on location in Haiti and is inspired by The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) was the first Latin American country to gain permanent independence from a European (France) colonial power as a result of the first and only successful slave rebellion in History. The world's first black Republic occurs. In a poetic and mesmerizing manner  Black Bullets pays tribute to the act of revolt. Black Bullets was filmed on The Citadel, a mountaintop fortress in Haiti built by king Henri Christophe after the Revolution. The fortress itself has become a sign of freedom and an icon of Haiti.

Jeannette Ehlers is a Copenhagen-based artist of Danish and Trinidadian descent whose practice takes shape experimentally across photography, video, installation, sculpture and performance. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. Ehlers’ work often makes use of self-representation and image manipulation to bring about decolonial hauntings and disruptions. These manifestations attend to the material and affective afterlives of Denmark’s colonial impact in the Caribbean and participation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade—realities that have all too often been rendered forgettable by dominant history-writing. Jeannette Ehlers has just been shortlisted for the national monument to The Windrush Generation at London Waterloo Station. On 31 March 2018 she unveiled I Am Queen Mary, a public sculpture project in collaboration with La Vaughn Belle, at KAS, Cph, DK

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When the Light Is Displaced

When the Light Is Displaced

By Zaina Bseiso

Palestine/USA, 2020, Digital, color, sound, 7 min.

U.S. Premiere

Interested in its parallels with the fate of the Jaffa oranges, the filmmaker tells her father about her intention to film the last orange grove in Los Angeles. Their disagreement transforms the grove into a space of contemplation on the politics of storytelling in the multi-generational experience of Palestine in exile.

Zaina Bseiso is a film director, producer, and curator working primarily in documentary and experimental cinema. Her work explores the relationship between the materialities of place and issues of memory, surveillance, corporeality, and nationalism. She received her Master’s degree in Film and video from the California Institute of the Arts. Bseiso is based in Los Angeles and was raised in Egypt by Palestinian parents. Her practice mainly traverses among Egypt, Palestine, Cuba, Mexico, and the US. She is co-founder of Bahía Colectiva, a community of filmmakers that collaborate in practice and curation.

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It

It

By Anouk De Clercq and Tom Callemin

Belgium, 2017, Digital, color, sound, 13 min.

A light phenomenon travels over a landscape. We look into what lies in the shadow of our own lights, like looking up at the screen that lights up in the dark. “It” is an audiovisual investigation into a reality that temporarily changes, in a search, a quest for something to light up in the dark.

Tom Callemin, born in 1991 in Ostend, Belgium, lives and works in Ghent. He studied photography and fine arts and works as a visual artist in photography and video. His work has been awarded and shown in solo exhibitions and has been included in several international group shows.

Anouk De Clercq explores the potential of audiovisual language to create possible worlds. She is interested in what lies behind ‘reality’ or in between the visible and the imaginary. She has received several awards, including the Illy Prize at Art Brussels in 2005 and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in 2014. Her work has been shown in Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, MAXXI, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ars Electronica, among others. Anouk De Clercq is affiliated to the School of Arts University College Ghent as an artistic researcher. She’s a founding member of Auguste Orts. www.portapak.be