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Mondays from 2-3pm in the Brakhage Center, ATLAS 311

View films from Stan Brakhage and many other visionary experimental filmmakers on 16MM. Each screening will feature three short experimental films that clusters around a question.  Screenings will be followed by lively conversation.

September 23
October 14
October 28
November 18
Decemeber 2

Thursday September 26 at 1 PM in the Brakhage Center - ATLAS 311

Filmmaker and writer Karel Doing will talk about his research into film deterioration and his experiments with growing images. After working closely together with film archivists Doing became fascinated with the effects created by fungi on nitrate film. This led him to do further research which eventually guided him toward the invention of the phytogram. Doing will talk about his process and his book Ruins and Resilience: the longevity of experimental film (Goldsmiths Press, 2024) Additionally, two of his films will be screened.

Wednesday November 13 at 1:30 PM in the Phil Solomon Screening Room - ATLAS 102

Tess Takahashi will discuss abstraction and embodied modes of mark making in relation to questions of race, gender, and sexuality in artisanal films that draw on the tradition of Brakhage’s work: Emma Hart's Skin Film (UK, 2005-8) and Ja’Tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience (US, 2015).

Abstraction in experimental film has functioned as a perplexing blank space for critics, who too often want to connect the abstract image to a solid anchor of meaning – like the body of the artist who made it. But when this anchor is a racialized, gendered, or sexually desiring body, it can have the effect of repeating familiar stereotypes. What happens if, instead of reading these films as demonstrations of selfhood, we read them as opening spaces that interrogate this very relationship?