Post-screening Q&A with select filmmakers.
This program of short films includes the work of five female filmmakers who are currently attending or have graduated from the University of Iowa's MFA program in Film and Video Production. The films, while materially distinct, have correlative themes of intimacy, displacement, bi-cultural and female identity, the ethics of representation, voyeurism, male fantasy, and the return of the gaze. Repetition, frames within frames, meticulous attention to the non-human, archival appropriation, and haunting soundscapes generate new relationships to time and historicity. Disembodiedness and aimlessness becomes strategies for achieving and greater understanding of the body and the mediated experience. The formal and playful obfuscations performed by these filmmakers parallel the obfuscation of female histories. Curated by Vertical Cinema.
Level 1 - dir. Laura Ianco (2012, 15 min). A non-fiction colorful web of eclectic images of people, animals, objects, and phenomena; quotidian moments of boredom, romance, sorrow, and agitation; things that seduce and repel. It is a voyeuristic, free-form edited travel that aims to produce, by way of affective disposition, a revelatory disclosure of apparently hidden and unremarkable things.
Am I Pretty? - dir. Jennifer Proctor (2017, 10 min). A visually silent film appropriating audio from YouTube videos uploaded by tween and teen girls primarily in 2012 as part of a meme. In these videos, the young women entreat viewers to evaluate whether or not they are pretty and post their responses in the comments. Am I Pretty? seeks to call attention to the act of spectatorship invoked in these videos, and what results when the visual basis for judgment is withheld - an acousmatic reducation through the denial of the promised image.
Behind the Torchlight - dir. Emily Drummer (2013/2015, 8 min). Behind the Torchlight creates a transhistorical space - a place neighter here nor there - that reflects the missing history of "the usherette" in early American cinemas. Constructed using found and original footage shot at an abandoned movie theater in Brooklyn, NY, the film abstracts historical temporality. At once on display and concealed by the partial darkness of the theater interior, usherettes served as objects of fantasy for moviegoers and were themselves spectators.
Transplanted 2.0 - dir P. Sam Kessie (2017-2018, 10 min). Through a landscape of space and time in conjunction with found footage and narration, Transplanted 2.0 tells of an alien's arrival seeking to understand "home" in this semi-autobiographic tale influenced by one's immigration journey.
Trans/Figure/Ground - dir. Lauren Cook (2016, 5 min). Painted 16mm film undergoes a monstrous transformation become neither analog nor digital. A film about uncanny valleys and the space between.
Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can't Fix (pictured) - dir. Jennifer Proctor (2017, 9 min). In films, as in life, the bathtub is often considered a private space for women - a place not only to groom, but to relax, to think, to grieve, to be alone, to find sanctuary. For Hollywood, though, it's also a place of naked vulnerability, where women narratively placed in harm's way have no escape. Using appropriated movies, this experimental found footage work deconstructs the representations of women in this domestic space as historically framed in popular film.
Self(i.e.) - dir Laura Iancu (2017, 4 min). A short film about the hallucinatory effect of over-articulating one's image through reappointing the functionality of technologies soley designed to produce social capital and a comforting sense of individuality. Beyond provoking sensations of the uncanny, hacking into high-production self-represenation could also point to a purposeful crafting of a new weapons of camouflage and dissimulation through the joke, the negligible and the obfuscation of hypervisibility.
Altitude Zero - dir. Lauren Cook (2004, 5 min). A feminist palimpsest of cinematic representation.
Histories of Simulated Intimacy #1 - dir. Emily Dummer (2017, 11 min). "Great obstacles excite great passions; since eros consists not in possession but in wanting, what could stimulate eros more than distance and especially death, itself the ultimate distance?" - John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air. Histories of Simulated Intimacy No. 1 is the first in a series of sensory essay films that investigate the relationship between distance, intimacy, and technology. Histories situates the concept of technology within its etymological origins; its Greek root, tekhnologia, denotes, "the systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique." Fueled by a body of research that includes ecosystem ecology, the genealogy of voicemail recording, historic dioramas, medical imaging, and prairie reconstruction, the film reimagines the ways in which human influence is always already embedded within natural phenomena. Disparate materials overlap to create a continuum of sentiment - a space in which technologies of intiacy, separated by historical measurements of time, can coalesce in perpetuity.
