Sponsor
Ann Arbor T-Shirt
Education Partner
U-M Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Community Partner
Ecology Center
Donor
Gil Omenn & Martha Darling
Curated by Erin Espelie and Jennifer Peterson
The intensity and quality of light in Colorado led visionary artist Stan Brakhage to experiment over several decades with film, editing, and evocation of place, from high in the mountains down to the plains. In turn, other Colorado-linked filmmakers—friends, colleagues, mentees, admirers, examiners—entered the same conversation with light and vision. They have found singular entry points into landscapes and interior microscapes, where boundaries erode between matter and spirit, glacier and seawater, poetry and prose, surface and the subcellular. Ten films, all touching the Rocky Mountain backbone, talk to one another across the stones and meltwater, as they track the ripples across layers of time.
Song 27, Part 1: My Mountain
Stan Brakhage
Lump Gulch, CO | 1968 | 18 |16mm
With an elevation surpassing 13,000 feet, Arapaho Peak in the Indian Peaks Wilderness in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado served as a compass point for Stan Brakhage, who filmed the summit in all seasons over the span of two years.
Jane Brakhage
Barbara Hammer
Lump Gulch, CO | 1974 | 10 | 16mm
For her graduate project, Barbara Hammer looked to the ways Jane Brakhage was awake to the wildlife around her, from trees to seedpods to canines, tangibly distinct from cinematic theory or exclusively cerebral ideas.
The Girl’s Nervy
Jennifer Reeves
New York, NY | 1995 | 5 | 16mm
In an ecstatic extension of the topography of the film emulsion, Jennifer Reeves carries the image to new heights and down darker chasms of mountainous terrain.
Night Hikes—Ethereal Shore
Christin Turner
Berlin, Germany | 2022 | 5 | HD file
Working with performance artist Leonor Beutler, Christin Turner (who received her MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder) wades into the shamanistic rituals that coincide with our understanding of time as expressed in the natural world.
Dark Enough
Jeanne Liotta
Boulder, CO | 2012 | 5 | 16mm
In a text collaboration with poet Lisa Gill, Jeanne Liotta parses the difference between text-as-image and text-as-text, as well as the variables of machine-made sound with elemental vibrations.
Corn Mother
Taylor Dunne
Lake Forest, IL / Grand Rapids, MI | 2000 | 8 | digital
Borrowing from the Wabanaki creation myth of the first woman, also known as the Corn and Tobacco Mother, Dunne captures her mother’s last visit outside her home to her garden.
Phantom Canyon
Stacey Steers
Boulder, CO | 2006 | 10 | HD file
Growing up on the mesas near Golden, Colorado, Stacey Steers has long looked to the natural world for imagery to dissect frame by frame. In Phantom Canyon she explores memories of a journey through the past, from the past.
The Sea Seeks Its Own Level
Erin Espelie
Boulder, CO | 2013 | 5 | 16mm
“They are coming, waves, white-maned seahorses, wind brindled… music everywhere. No, that's noise… The earth convulses in all its glory.” In a distillation of references to the sea in James Joyce's Ulysses, Erin Espelie travels from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. The material effects of an aging Super 8 camera act in concert with the vocals of Marika Borgeson.
Tattva
Kalpana Subramanian
Buffalo, NY | 2018 | 5 | HD file
In 2015 Kalpana Subramanian earned a Fulbright Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship to conduct research in Colorado, where she began making autoethnographic films that inquire into the material nature of our being. Her title, "Tattva" in Sanskrit, means “thatness”—the material manifestation of all matter and organic life.
How a Sprig of Fir Would Replace a Feather
Anna Kipervaser
Durham, NC | 2019 | 8 | 16mm
Nomadic in her search for domiciles, Anna Kipervaser lived near Jamestown, Colorado, drawn by the quality of light in the canyons. Here she presses the landscape of animal bodies in the river of shadows of the filmstrip.
Erin Espelie is a filmmaker and an associate professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is co-editor of Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects (Amherst College Press, 2023).
Jennifer Peterson is a professor in the Media Studies program at Woodbury University. She is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013).