Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 7:30pm
An Evening with Walden
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
Un Miracle, Robert Breer and Pontus Hultén, 16mm, 1954, 1 min
X, Pontus Hultén, 1957, 16mm, 9 mins
En Dag I Staden (A Day in the City), Pontus Hultén and Hans Nordenström, 1956, 16mm, 19 mins
Studie V: Växelspel, Peter Weiss, 1955, 16mm, 9 mins
Renslakt vid Krutvattnet (Reindeer Slaughter at Lake Kruttvattnet), Louise O’Konor, 1967, 16mm, 6 mins
A Film with Taylor Mead, Tommy Tommie, 1967, digital projection, 4 mins
Time Being, Gunvor Nelson, 1991, 16mm, 8 mins
Epitaf, Claes Söderquist, 1979-81, 16mm, 35 mins
As part of an ongoing series dedicated to bringing the most vital international film publications to New York audiences, Light Industry hosts an evening with Stockholm’s Walden, presented by founding editor Martin Grennberger.
“Since embarking on the Walden project in 2012, co-editor Stefan Ramstedt and I have tried to operate at the productive intersections between documentary and experimental forms, to contextualize the work of international filmmakers and artists who rarely get attention in the general Swedish discourse, while also trying to uncover hidden histories of what’s been going on in our own backyard. What have been some of our preoccupations? We dedicated our first print issue to the complete oeuvre of German-born documentarian Peter Nestler, who has been based in Sweden since 1966. We’ve looked at little-known connections between Swedish cinema and the greater avant-garde, like when filmmaker Carl Henrik Svenstedt travelled all the way to Rollinsville, Colorado to meet Stan Brakhage, which eventually led to the Swedish translation (and our republishing) of Brakhage’s small-gauge manifesto A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book from 1971. Or the collective activities of Solveig Nordlund, her then-husband Alberto Seixas Santos, and Grupo Zero in southern Portugal in the early seventies, and her collaboration there later with Robert Kramer and meeting Thomas Harlan. Or how the rural topography of the Värmland region influenced some of the most emblematic work of Werner Nekes. Or how we set out, by publishing a dual dossier, to highlight the correspondences between the work of Laida Lertxundi and Thom Andersen. Walden has also expanded on the material published in the magazine by organizing screenings, often in collaboration with the Swedish Cinematheque, but also with other venues dedicated to experimental work. We’ve programmed retrospectives by Nestler, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and evenings of films by Mary Helena Clark and Peter Kubelka, among others.
The film program for Light Industry is not intended to cover the full scope of Swedish avant-garde film, whose history is still very much a fragmented, archipelagic, indeterminate, even asymptotic one. It aims instead to show some of the variables at work in a loosely connected or rather heteroclite sample of filmmakers, methods, and formal approaches: the early collaborations of Robert Breer and Pontus Hultén and their shared obsessions with kinetic, sculptural movement and experimental animation; Hultén and Hans Nordenström’s En Dag I Staden, which combines political slapstick and collage with a proto-Fluxus anarchy; Peter Weiss’s Studie V: Växelspel, a psychodrama of sorts, using mirrors and elaborate image juxtapositions; Renslakt vid Krutvattnet, by Viking Eggeling scholar Louise O’Konor, a study of the slaughtering of reindeer in the Sápmi region in Swedish Lapland; and Tommy Tommie’s A Film with Taylor Mead, his joyful portrait of Mead’s visit to Stockholm. Completing the lineup are Gunvor Nelson’s Time Being and Claes Söderquist’s Epitaf, two films that share a preoccupation with memory (loss), mortality, and transience, yet articulated through radically different styles.” - MG
Tickets - $8, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.