Tuesday, January 21, 2020 at 7pm
Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
A lecture by Gregory Zinman
A Colour Box, Len Lye, 1935, 16mm, 3 mins
The Dante Quartet, Stan Brakhage, 1987, 16mm, 7 mins
Removed, Naomi Uman, 1999, 16mm, 6 mins
Inkblot #9: At Twilight, Luther Price, 2008, 16mm, 6 mins
sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars, Tomonari Nishikawa, 2014, digital projection, 2 mins
An Ecstatic Experience, Ja’Tovia Gary, 2015, digital projection, 6 mins
Rather than record the world through photographic means, numerous artists have instead sought to create moving abstractions by intervening into celluloid’s physical makeup: painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with seawater, dirt, or bleach; applying elements such as paper, glue, and even their own blood. Newly published by University of California Press, Gregory Zinman’s Making Images Move provides a comprehensive survey of handmade cinema, from painted film and kinetic art to psychedelic light shows and video synthesis.
Recovering a range of forms, tools, and intentions that, considered together, constitute a kind of shadow history of film, Zinman’s talk will offer an overview of this approach to thinking about moving images, a radical alternative to the representational terms in which the medium is typically understood. While the goal of elevating or transcending abstract painting remains evident in many of the works to be screened, their diverging concerns extend into a variety of other arenas—Brakhage’s engagement with literature, Uman’s feminist erotics, Nishikawa’s ecological ruminations—demonstrating the many ways that handmade cinema acts as counter-cinema, in concept, material, and execution.
Gregory Zinman is Assistant Professor of Film and Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts, from which this screening and discussion derives, and a co-editor, with John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips, of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik.
Tickets - $8, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm.
Above: Luther Price, Inkblot #3, 2007.