The Wolf House / La Casa Lobo

The Wolf House

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo)

Sunday October 20, 2024, 7:30pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

These three films explore the fragile intersection of motion, memory, and material, with decay etched into every layer. Creation and destruction blend as each frame clings to echoes of the past, constantly shifting but never fully wiped clean. Employing a range of non-traditional materials, from soot and charcoal to natural elements and glitter, these films construct worlds in which transformation is perpetual, and deterioration reveals deeper truths. Motion becomes a reflection, presenting characters and landscapes in a constant state of flux, where no image, or memory, can remain fixed.

Program and notes by Sam Gurry. Thank you to the filmmakers and KimStim Distribution.

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña (both 1980, Chile) have been working together since 2007. They were educated at the Universidad Católica, Santiago de Chile. León also studied at UDK (Berlin) and De Ateliers (Amsterdam).With their experimental films, Leon and Cociña create a new interpretation of the religious symbolism and magical rituals that are deeply rooted in the traditional culture of Latin Amer-ica. For the production of their films they combine different techniques such as photogra-phy, drawing, sculpture, dance and performance. An unpolished cinematographic language characterizes the stop-motion films of León and Cociña. The papier mâché figures and inno-cent-looking drawings strongly contrast with the heavy topics such as religion, sex and death the films deal with.León and Cociña have won numerous awards and their films have premiered at Rotterdam and Locarno among other international film festivals. Their work is frequently exhibited in museums and biennials in Latin America, but it has also been presented at venues such as the Whitechapel Gallery, the Guggenheim, KW Berlin, the Venice Biennial 2013 and Art Basel Statements 2012 with Upstream Gallery.Their first feature film, ‘La Casa Lobo’, was produced as a nomadic work in process art installa-tion in many different public locations like museums, cultural centers and art galleries. To-gether with Niles Atallah, they founded the film production company Diluvio.

Benni Quintero is a mixed medium animator/teaching artist born/raised/based in and unbearably attached to Los Angeles. The doctor said they have great long term memory but terrible short term memory. Many of Benni's projects are an effort to honestly log or reimagine human moments in all their absurdity before they forget.

Sarah E. Jenkins is a queer Appalachian artist & experimental animator from central Pennsylvania. Their recent moving image work explores extraction, hidden labors, and disappearance via in-studio and site-responsive stop motion animation. Jenkins' work has been exhibited at the ICA Boston, Emerson Contemporary, Buffalo AKG Museum, and the Torrance Art Museum. Last year, there was a screening retrospective of Jenkins’ moving image work for the Ciné Culture Series at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her films have recently screened with GRRL HAUS Cinema, Boston Underground Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Jenkins is an Assistant Professor of Animation, Creative Arts & Visual Culture at Hampshire College. When they aren’t teaching or making art, Sarah spends time reading Tarot and taking meandering walks with her adventure cat, Nessie.

Slate Lines

By Sarah Jenkins

USA, 2018, color/sound, 3 minutes

Using the forest itself as a creative partner, artist Sarah Jenkins utilizes a similar palimpsest technique as León & Cociña to imbue their lines with a life their own. The piece was created on site at an artist residency in the post-industrial slate mining town of Corris, Wales. All audio was recorded on site and remixed in the studio. A portrait of sun dappled rocks and moss concealing edges unknown.

Queenie and the all or nothing king

By Benni Quintero

USA, 2018, color/sound, 4 minutes

Born and raised Angeleno, Benni Quintero, created this film using a variety of non conventional material including glitter, paint, and fabric. This richly textured manifestation of anxiety and compulsion presents our protagonist, Queenie, as a island to herself.

The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo)

By Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña

Chile, 2018, color/sound, 75 minutes

Collective trauma retold as a shadowy fairy tale.

Mixing together cues from The Three Little Pigs, The Brothers Grimm, and Alice in Wonderland, this surreal nightmare unfolds one frame at a time. In the hellish regime of Chilean dictator Auguste Pinochet, an isolated Nazi run commune flourished in which numerous children and political dissidents were tortured and abused.

La Casa Lobo is a film hooded with grime, soot, dust, and charcoal littering the environ of each room. There is no respite. There is no reprieve. The style of animation, called simultaneously palimpsest, destructive, or draw & erase, is a constant stream of change. The characters warp and shift changing mediums as they change forms. Characters are constantly painted over again and again and again creating a new image while, also, still showing the previous ones. The history of each shot cannot be erased fully, the ebbing remains.

In order to expedite the lengthy animation process and respect the ever-changing nature of the project, the filmmakers employed a Dogme 95-esque series of ten rules. Among them, no puppets were rigged, no shots faded to black, and the film is one long continuous shot. The final rule, number 10, may be the most revealing; “It’s a workshop, not a set”, a phrase reminiscent of another, “It‘s a promise, not a threat”.