BITTER FIGURES, SWEETENED FLESH: Films in Dialogue with the Paintings & Artistry of Angie Quick
Inspired by the creative oeuvre of London, Ontario-based artist Angie Quick, this 16mm program seeks to interpret visual and thematic parallels between the painter's oils on canvas and the moving images of nine avant garde filmmakers exploring the photochemical medium.
Through an array of innovative techniques and aesthetics, these works unveil subconscious realities mirroring Quick's own celebration of the grotesque serenity of bodies melded in motion or the pulsating abstractions of landscapes askew, while wordless expressions conjure peripheral memories of psychodramatic narrative through intensely vulnerable yearnings, impulsive turmoil and intimate revelations obsessively etched in emulsion.
PROGRAM
AU BORD DU LAC
Patrick Bokanowski | 1994 | sound | 6 minutes
We are not at the side of any identifiable lake, we are swept up in a different sort of space-time context by the light, the movement and the colors that the place evoked in Patrick Bokanowski's mind. (Jacques Kermabon)
MILK AND GLASS
Sarah Pucill | 1993 | sound | 10 minutes
In this film an interior landscape is scrutinised, and an apparent rational calm is revealed as suffocating. Milk and Glass is an evocative journey from surface to interior -- a black-coated mirror, the hollow of a bowl, a cavernous throat; a brush demarcates a line of lip on a flat surface, a mouth doubles up with the bowl and is virtually spoon-fed till it chokes. (S.P.)
SWISH
Jean Sousa | 1982 | silent | 3 minutes
This film deals with the physical properties of the film medium, and pushing those distinctive features to their limit. The subject of the film is motion, and it is an attempt to get inside of it. It was made with a moving subject and a moving camera with an open shutter, the result being that each frame is unique, without the smooth continuity that is expected in film. The subject, a female body at close range, provides an intimacy and eroticism. At the same time it can be seen as a modern version of Futurist simultaneity. (J.S.)
HER SILENT SEAMING
Nazli Dinçel | 2014 | sound | 11 minutes
A transcription of what I have been told during intimate experiences while separating from my husband. Sections consist of destroyed originals from Leafless (2011), motifs of the "feminine" alluding to Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) and of reconstruction of a pomegranate. These decorative objects are re-valued through a controlled act of cutting, with an allusion to synchronization. Obscured images clear out while the hand scratched text becomes harder to read with each section. Direct sound of cuts and hand processing are composed of 26 frame shots. Un-synced, it reveals a hearing of past images, as an act of translation. (N.D)
MINUS
Chris Chong Chan Fui | 1999 | sound | 3 minutes
minus is a hand-processed, uncut, singular stream of movements. To take away: either to leave remnants of light or to leave remnants of rhythms. Entirely hand-processed and unscathed by the blades of the splicer. This is Chong’s first 16mm film. Inspired by Ritchie Hawkin’s Concept albums. Sound by Antonio Reyes. (C.C.C.F.)
ELIXIR
Amy Halpern | 2012 | silent | 6 minutes
with Asha Wilson & Joyce Campbell. (A.H.)
PLUMB LINE
Carolee Schneemann | 1972 | sound | 16 minutes
Breaking down, splitting apart, burning up: a relationship and the film itself. Edited from scrap diary footage shot in 8mm, hand printed as 16mm. PLUMB LINE is a moving and powerful subjective chronicle of the breaking up of a love relationship. The film is a devastating exorcism, as the viewer sees and hears the film approximate the interior memory of the experience. (C.S.)
ROSEBLOOD
Sharon Couzin | 1974 | sound | 8 minutes
Images of a woman in dance, in flora, in picture, in eyes, in architecture, in sunshine, in color, in crystal, in space, in confusion, in danger, in disintegration, in her hand, in birth, in the Valley of Sorrow, in the sea, in repetition, in sculpture and in herself. (S.C.)
OPHELIA & THE CAT LADY
Tom Chomont | 1969 | sound | 3 minutes
Two films on one reel. With Liz Reiner (OPHELIA) and Carla Liss (THE CAT LADY). On one level the films are portraits; backwards storms, ominous voiceovers, reverse explosions all hurtle towards the quietly petting Cat Lady. (T.C.)
Artist Bios
French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski (b. 1943) studied photography, optics and darkroom techniques with the painter Henri Dimier. Since 1972 he has produced a dozen short films and two features, all using experimental techniques of shooting, animation and post production. Most notably, he has researched lens distortion and helped innovate various techniques of capturing images using non-standard lenses or other transparent or reflective material. His work lies on the edge between figurative and abstract and between live action and animation. The soundtracks to all his films were composed by his wife, Michèle Bokanowski.
At the intersection of eroticism, mysticism, and the everyday one finds Tom Chomont (1942 - 2010). He completed approximately 40 short films between 1962 and 1989, suffering from Parkinson’s during the last decades of his life; a time in which he also produced a wide range of video works. These later pieces include documents of his struggles with illness as well as his immersion in ritual S&M culture.
Chris Chong Chan Fui (b. 1972) is a Malaysian/Canadian filmmaker who currently works with varying materials in an installation format that interconnects fields such as architecture, science, sports, economics, and the moving image. He has created numerous short films and directed one feature.
Sharon Couzin (b. 1943) began making films in the early 1970s. Her work is admired for its complex visual layering that reflects the personal and psychological elements imbued in her imagery. She was a significant figure in promoting the experimental film community in the American midwest and in 1983, while teaching filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Couzin helped found the Experimental Film Coalition, an organization that held regular monthly screenings, created the Onion City Film Festival and published several periodicals.
Born in Ankara, Turkey, Nazli Dinçel (b. 1989) immigrated to the United Sates at age 17. Their hand-made work reflects on experiences of disruption and they record the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire with the film object: its texture, color and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Their use of text as image, language and sound imitates the failure of memory and their own displacement within a western society.
Amy Halpern (1953 - 2022) is cherished not only for her memorable and beautiful films, but also for her inexhaustible engagement and enthusiasm as a devoted presence in the Los Angeles film and arts community. She had a profound curiosity about nearly everything and everyone she encountered, and her extensive body of film work reflects this passion for the sights, sounds, textures, and complex connections to be found and explored in the world around.
Sarah Pucill's (b. 1961) films and photographs explore the mirroring and merging we seek in the Other; a sense of self which is transformative and fluid. At the core of her practice is a concern with mortality and the materiality of the filmmaking process. The majority of her films take place within the confinements of domestic space, where the grounded reality of the house itself becomes a portal to a complex and multi layered psychical realm. In her explorations of the animate and inanimate, her work probes a journey between mirror and surface, in which questions of representation are negotiated via the feminine, the queer or the dead.
Renowned multi-disciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann (1939 - 2019) transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body… meow meow.
In the early 70s, Jean Sousa was a performance artist and studied dance at the Boston Conservatory. She moved to Chicago in 1974 and became the first graduate student in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With access to the Film Department resources, and film history classes with Stan Brakhage, Sousa shifted her interest toward making films. Her work reveals a concern with both the physical properties of the medium as well as an interest in the narrative possibilities of cinema.