Events, The Film Study Center

Events
Filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes Short Films and a Work in Progress 7:30 p.m. Tuesday May 7, 2013 Sever Hall 416 Harvard University 24 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA Gabriel Abrantes' work operates at the borders between geographical, linguistic and performative spaces. Questioning the atopia of globalization as a borderless free form of transmission, his films test the perimeters of sites, images and language, constructing a peripheral space where a fractured geography is performed, often through translation. In the local re-staging of classical texts, such as the performance of Aristophanes's Birds in Haiti featuring dialogue in Attic Greek and Creole in the film Zwazo (2012); the encounter between delirious teenage sexuality and postcolonial identity (Liberdade, 2011 and A History of Mutual Respect, 2010); or the exploration of the construction of Portuguese historical identity and its relation to spaces of rapid socio-political transformation (Visionary Iraq, 2009 and Palácios de Pena, 2011), Abrantes' films create hybrid cultural landscapes, fictions that cannot be pinned down to a particular body or identity, but which invent new forms of geo-political circulation. Gabriel Abrantes works not only across countries, genres, and political landscapes, but between the spaces of cinema and gallery-based moving image practices, frequently in collaboration with a co-director, and local and non-professional actors. Born in North Carolina, he lives and works in Lisbon. He received a BA in Cinema and Visual Arts at Cooper Union in 2006, and studied at L' École National des Beaux-Arts (2005-2006) and Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains, France (2007). He is the winner of several prizes, including the Golden Leopard for Best International Short Film at the Locarno Film Festival 2010 for his film A History of Mutual Respect. An exhibition of Gabriel Abrantes' work opens at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT on May 8, part of the new exhibition series List Projects. Film screening followed by a conversation with the artist Related Exhibition: LIST PROJECTS: GABRIEL ABRANTES MIT List Visual Arts Center Showing: May 9-June 30, 2013 Opening Reception: May 8, 2013, 5.30-8pm GalleryTalk: Film Screening/Conversation with Gabriel Abrantes and List Curator João Ribas, 6pm MIT List Visual Arts Center Exhibit Papua New Guinea Portraits and Diaries: An Artist's Talk by Photographer Stephen Dupont 12:00 p.m. Friday May 3, 2013 Carpenter Center B-04 Harvard University 24 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA Over the past two decades, Stephen Dupont has produced a remarkable body of visual work: hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragilecultures and marginalized peoples. He skillfully captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and often in some of the world's most dangerous regions. His images have received international acclaim for theirartistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that have existed for hundreds of years, yet are fast disappearing from our world. As the Peabody Museum's 2010 Robert Gardner Photography Fellow, Dupont explored the human condition by returning to Papua New Guinea and documenting the Westernization of traditional society in Papua New Guinea, from lawlessness in urban Port Moresby to cultural struggles throughout the Highlands and Sepik River region. His work is on view at the Peabody Museum from May 2, 2013 through Sept. 2, 2013. The exhibition is an in-depth study of cultural erosion as well as a celebration of an ancient people. Peabody Museum Exhibition We Are Winning, Don't Forget: Short Works by Jean-Gabriel Périot FILMMAKER IN PERSON Moderated by John Gianvito 9 shorts \| 85 minutes 5:00 p.m. Friday April 12, 2013 Location: Sever Hall, 416 Harvard Yard Free Admission "Jean-Gabriel Périot, born in France in 1974, has over the past fifteen years perfected an innovative filmmaking approach by focusing on archival editing. Moving image and photographic archives make up the raw material of his shorts, which are edited to create an impressionistic story or narrative, typically aided by compelling soundtracks. Periot's work is distinguished for its intense, emotional approach to contemporary and historic political themes. Despite the labor intensive process of compiling a film via multiple edited images, Périot has made numerous short films using digital video and/or film that reside within combined documentary/essay, animation, and experimental genres. His works have been honored with many prizes and shown worldwide in numerous festivals, institutions, and cinemas." - Sally Berger, Department of Film, MoMA Find national tour schedule here Moving Image Source article on Jean-Gabriel Périot This national tour We Are Winning, Don't Forget, is organized by Amélie Garin-Davet and Steve Holmgren, and is presented with support from UnionDocs, The Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Cine2000/French American Cultural Exchange and the Museum of Modern Art. TONY BUBA Monday, November 12 at 7:00 p.m. Location: The Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge *Lightning Over Braddock* (1988, black and white, 16mm, 80 minutes) *Betty's Corner Cafe* (1976, black and white, 16mm, 11 minutes) Washing Walls With Mrs. G (1980, black and white, 16mm, 6 minutes) Cinematic chronicler for the past 40 years of his hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania, Tony Buba was recently the subject of a full retrospective at New York City's Anthology Film Archives, which described the filmmaker as "One of the most singular, and egregiously overlooked, filmmakers in the U.S. A national treasure [and] the prime representative of the blue-collar, populist, politically committed yet outrageously entertaining American filmmaking movement that's largely missing-in-action." Buba will screen Lightning Over Braddock, his first feature and the film that established him as an innovator of the "exploded documentary," fusing social documentary, autobiography and whimsical fiction. The centerpiece of Buba's oeuvre, Lightning showcases the filmmaker's eccentric blend of political engagement, poetic self-reflexivity, goofy wit and an unsentimentally committed interest in the working class, in its exploration of both a dying city's travails and the ongoing drama of Buba's troubled relationship with a former subject and local street hustler named Sal Carulli. Winner of numerous awards, including Best Film at the Birmingham International Film Festival in England and a nomination as Best First Feature Film by the Independent Spirit Awards, Lightning was shown at Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, and over a dozen other international film festivals, and was one of the first titles acquired by Zeitgeist Films. Alongside Lightning Over Braddock, Buba's Brattle screening will feature two shorts from "The Braddock Chronicles," a series spanning 15 years and made up of portraits and vignettes describing the life and death of a blue-collar town—and, by extension, industrial America. Co-sponsored by The Film Study Center at Harvard University, Emerson College, Hampshire College and The DocYard The Brattle Theatre PATRICK MCGINLEY Friday, November 9 from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. Location: Sever 416 In this short workshop, location recordist and sound artist Patrick McGinley will present his experiments in small-scale sonic exploration. We will examine and discuss perspective, perception, attention, and focus through sonic surveys of small or unexpected spaces, as in his projects 'One Square Meter' and 'Hidden Sounds'. Light snacks will be provided. Free and open to the public -- bring only your ears. About the artist: patrick mcginley (aka murmer) is an american-born sound, performance, and radio artist who has been based in europe since 1996. since then he has been building a collection of found sounds and found objects that has become the basis of all his work. in 2002 he founded framework, an organisation that produces a weekly field-recording themed radio show, broad- and podcasting around the world. in 2005, he began working closely with the artist-run organisation MoKS in southeast estonia, relocating there permanently in 2009. most recently mcginley has been giving presentations, workshops, and performances based on the exploration of site-specific sound (with the revenant project) and sound as definition of space. in live performance his interest in field recording has developed into an attempt to integrate and resonate found sounds, found objects, specific spaces, and moments in time, in order to create a direct and visceral link with an audience and location. murmer's work is about small discoveries and concentrated attention; it focuses on the framing of the sounds around us which normally pass through our ears unnoticed and unremarked, but which out of context become unrecognisable, alien and extraordinary: crackling charcoal, a squeaking escalator, a buzzing insect, or one's own breath. he works equally with spaces, objects, resonances, and people, in composition, performance, or simply collective action and experience, in exploration of perception via attentive listening. Murmerings THE 2012 McMillan – Stewart Fellow: TARIQ TEGUIA in person October 26 & October 27, 2012 The Film Study Center annually awards the McMillan-Stewart Fellowship to a Francophone filmmaker from Africa or of African descent. This years award honors Tariq Teguia, an Algerin filmmaker. The Harvard Film Archive will screen a retrospective of his work, with Teguia in attendance. The screenings schedule is as follows: Rome Rather Than You Friday October 26 at 7 p.m. Location: Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge With a reception hosted by the Film Study Center following the screening Directed by Tariq Teguia. With Samira Kaddour, Rachid Amrani, Ahmed Benaïssa Algeria/France/Germany 2006, 35mm, color, 111 min. Arabic with English subtitles Longing to escape the dead end that seems to loom before them, a young woman in Algiers reads Kafka and Chester Himes while her boyfriend dreams of immigrating to Europe. Finally, they enlist the services of a smuggler to take them to Italy. In his first feature film, Teguia integrates kitchen-sink realism and modernist fragmentation to depict a contemporary Algeria growing restive in a world crisscrossed by flows of labor, capital and desire. With sober long takes of domestic situations and Godardian interruptions of text on screen, Teguia rejects the melodrama that often imbues Arab and French cinema about northern Africa. Throughout, Teguia's frequent camera movement and the charismatic performances of its two lead actors bring the film to piquant life. Inland Saturday October 27 at 7 p.m. Location: Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge Directed by Tariq Teguia. With Abdelkader Affak, Ines Rose Djakou,Ahmed Benaïssa Algeria/France 2008, 35mm, color, 138 min. Arabic with English subtitles Inland weaves together quietly intense sequences, vast and almost empty landscapes, and bursts of chatter and raucous music to present an elliptical story about two wanderers whose paths unexpectedly meet. One is an Arab topographer surveying a remote area in western Algeria that may be a stronghold for radical Islamists; the other is a young African woman crossing the desert to migrate northward. The intersection of their trajectories gives Teguia the opportunity to contrast two ways of seeing: one rational and scientific, seeking to master space, the other engaged in a direct, tactile experience of terrain. Juxtaposing these two projects allows Teguia to comment simultaneously on current geopolitics and on contemporary cinema. Harvard Film Archive TWO YEARS AT SEA Director Ben Rivers in person Saturday, Oct. 20 at 7:00 p.m. Location: Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge TWO YEARS AT SEA UK 2011, 35mm, b/w, 86 min For his first feature film, Ben Rivers (b. 1972) reunited once more with Jake Williams, the eccentric hermit whose ramshackle life deep in the Scottish wilderness is the subject of Rivers' This is My Land (2006) and an episode from I Know Where I'm Going (2009). A captivating meditation on solitude and time's passage, Two Years at Sea is a vivid and at times mysterious portrait of a man who seems to have found a genuine inner peace in the slow unfolding of his ritualized every day. The stunning imagery and visual imagination of Two Years at Sea derive a rare power from Rivers' dramatic use of the pointedly anachronistic 16mm widescreen format – later blown up to 35mm – to cast a swirling photochemical energy around the ragged forest and overstuffed trailer that together constitute Williams' home and universe. Almost entirely worldless, Two Years at Sea uses its richly evocative soundscape and extended long takes to fully immerse the viewer into the resonant tranquility of Williams' life, with photographs and well-worn objects gently hinting but never revealing a past life shed long ago. PHANTOMS OF A LIBERTINE UK 2012, 16mm, color, 14 min An evocative tribute to a photographer friend who passed away suddenly, Rivers' latest short makes poetic use of images found in the friend's apartment to share poignantly unknowable fragments of a life's full adventure. Harvard Film Archive The Great Animal Orchestra: A Performance & Dialogue in Soundscape and Poetry with Bernie Krause & Jonathan Skinner Thursday, Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m. Location: Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall Free and open to the public. Natural soundscapes, biophonies and geophonies, are a narrative of place, a basis for exploring our music and language. How does poetry, in its turn, engage the rhythms, sonorities, and signals inherent within the structure of soundscapes? In performance (of recorded soundscapes and poetic responses) and in dialogue, around concepts about natural and poetic sound, Bernie Krause (author of The Great Animal Orchestra) and Jonathan Skinner (poet and founding editor of Ecopoetics) will tease out some questions and answers about art's relation to the endangered realms of cross-species communication. Co-sponsored by the Woodberry Poetry Room, the Sensory Ethnography Lab and the Film Study Center Double Tide Director Sharon Lockhart in person Monday, Sept. 17 at 7:00 p.m. Location: Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge Offering a poetic counterpoint to her earlier factory diptych, Lunchbreak (2008) and Exit (2008), former FSC-Radcliffe fellow Sharon Lockhart returned to Maine and her abiding interest in American labor in her exquisite and meditative Double Tide, a portrait of a clam digger hard at work on the day of an ultra-rare occurrence – two daytime low tides, at dawn and dusk. Double Tide is a meditative expansion and enrichment of the ideas of "stillness" and landscape that remain important thematic constants of Lockhart's oeuvre. Harvard Film Archive The Pleasures of Deception: The Films of Matías Piñeiro, 2011-12 FSC-Radcliffe Fellow Sunday & Monday, May 13 & 14 at 7:00 p.m. Location: Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge Sunday May 13, 7:00 p.m. The Stolen Man (El hombre robado) Directed by Matías Piñeiro. With Ana Cambre, Francisco García Faure, Daniel Gilman Calderón Argentina 2007, 35mm, b/w, 90 min. Spanish with English subtitles Monday May 14, 7:00 p.m. They All Lie (Todos mienten) Directed by Matías Piñeiro. With Romina Paula, María Villar, Julia Martínez Rubio Argentina 2009, digital video, color, 75 min. Spanish with English subtitles Harvard Film Archive The Films of Pema Tseden Saturday & Sunday, April 21 & 211 at 2:00 p.m. Location: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Main Lecture Hall, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, Free Admission Hailing from the Tibetan region of Amdo, filmmaker Pema Tseden's visions of contemporary Tibet reveal a contemplative, tender film language that captures rich textures of the everyday. The first Tibetan to train at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, Tseden was widely known in China as a novelist and translator of works in Tibetan and Chinese prior to his entry into filmmaking. His three narrative features, The Silent Holy Stones (2005), The Search (2009), and Old Dog (2010) have marked his rise as the preeminent cinematic voice of Tibet. With a painterly visual approach inspired by Tibetan tangka scroll paintings, and a masterful sculpting of cinematic time and space that recalls the work of Bresson and Kiarostami, his work reflects a groundbreaking engagement with the transformations and contradictions of a changing social landscape in Tibet. Saturday, April 21, 2012, 2pm The Silent Holy Stones (Lhing Vjags Kyi Ma Ni Rdo Vbum, 2005) (Tibetan with English Subtitles, 35mm, color, 102 min) Tseden's debut tells the story of a young Tibetan monk whose brief departure from the monastery to celebrate the Tibetan New Year at home with his family leaves him captivated by the Chinese television series Journey to the West. Sunday, April 22, 2012, 2pm Old Dog (Khyi Rgan, 2010) (Tibetan with English Subtitles, HD, color, 88 min) A tale of father and son set against the backdrop of China's burgeoning trade in Tibetan mastiffs, Tseden's most recent work is a profound meditation on time, distance, and human relationships in the context of loss and resistance. Presented in association with Emergent Visions, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and the Film Study Center
Calendar
Previous Events
Ed Pincus, LOST AND FOUND APRIL 6 – APRIL 9, 2012 Location: Harvard Film Archive 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 Friday April 6 at 7pm INTRODUCTION BY ED PINCUS AND DAVID NEUMAN Black Natchez USA 1967, 16mm, b/w, 62 min Panola USA 1970, 16mm, b/w, 21 min Friday April 6 at 9pm ED PINCUS IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID NEUMAN One Step Away USA 1968, 16mm, b/w, 54 min Harry's Trip USA 1969, 16mm, color, 16 min Saturday April 7 at 7pm ED PINCUS IN CONVERSATION WITH ROBB MOSS AND ROSS MCELWEE Diaries (1971 – 76) USA 1980, 16mm, color, 200 min Sunday April 8 at 5pm INTRODUCTION BY ED PINCUS AND DAVID NEUMAN The Way We See It USA 1969, 16mm, b/w, 57 min Portrait of a McCarthy Supporter USA 1969, 16mm, color, 16 min Sunday April 8 at 7pm ED PINCUS IN CONVERSATION WITH STEVE ASHER AND SCOTT MACDONALD Life and Other Anxieties USA 1977, 16mm, color, 90 min Monday April 9 at 7pm ED PINCUS AND LUCIA SMALL IN PERSON The Axe in the Attic USA 2007, digital video, color, 110 min Harvard Film Archive Saul Levine, Selected short films Thursday 29 March, 7:15 p.m. Location: Sever Hall, Rm. 416 If someone were to write a critical history of the avant-garde cinema in Boston, Levine would be its hero. He seldom leaves the city, where, as a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art, he has been one of the most influential teachers of filmmaking in the nation, and his energies have for decades sustained the larger community of avant-garde filmmakers in Boston . . . A figure of the perennial Left, Levine has identified with and championed the small film gauges as if they were marginalized citizens of the republic of cinema. He has clung to his artistic freedom by seeking out these least expensive modes of filmmaking and, as Emerson wrote in the essay "Experience," to "hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more firmly." - P. ADAMS SITNEY, PROFESSOR OF VISUAL ARTS AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY The 2012 Geneviève McMillan Fellowship: Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche in person The FIlm Study Center annually awards the Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Fellowship to a Francophone filmmaker from Africa or of African descent. This years award honors Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, the French filmmaker born in Algeria in 1966. The Harvard Film Archive will screen a retrospective of his work, with Ameur-Zaïmeche in attendance. The screenings schedule is as follows: Friday 2 March at 7:00 p.m. Smugglers' Songs (Les chants de Mandrin) France 2011, digital video, 97 min. French with English Subtitles Saturday 3 March at 7:00 p.m. Adhen (Dernier maquis) France 2008, 35mm, 93 min. French and Arabic with English subtitles Sunday 4 March at 5:00 p.m. Wesh Wesh (Wesh Wesh, qu'est-ce qui passe?) France 2001, 35 mm, 83 min. French and Arabic with English subtitles Sunday 4 March at 7:00 p.m. Back Home (Bled Number One) France/Algeria 2006, 35 mm, 100 min. French and Arabic with English subtitles All screenings will be held at the Main Lecture Hall, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (HFA) 24 Quincy St., Cambridge Sponsored by the Film Study Center and the Harvard Film Archive For descriptions of each film, please see: Harvard Film Archive The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu Director Andrei Ujicǎ in person The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (180 minutes) Free Admission Wednesday 15 February, 7:00 p.m. Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts During his rule of Communist Romania from 1967 to 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu and his administration documented their reign on hundreds of hours of film. Drawing on footage from the Romanian National Film Archive and state television, Ujica transforms a historical chronicle into a spellbinding, sweeping epic by simply proceeding chronologically through the decades with little commentary or exposition; there are no titles, captions or voiceover. Ujica's primary authorial intervention consists of precise selection, ingenious editing and a cleverly subtle soundtrack construction. Although Ujica includes some unguarded moments, all the images are essentially staged; they originate from events public or private that Ceausescu ordered photographed. For most of this slyly astonishing film, Ceausescu seems to be as much in thrall to the image he created of himself as his subjects were presumed to be. This screening and talk is sponsored by the Film Study Center, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and the Harvard Film Archive. Free and open to the public. Harvard Film Archive Sonic Navigations and Electric Songlines Composer and Sound Artist Betsey Biggs Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. Location: Barker Center 133, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge Betsey Biggs is a composer and sound artist who makes audio works which deal with memory, geography, and senses of place. Her works, often composed to be listened to via headphones while traversing specific environments, aims to expose the beautiful in the mundane, and to transform the city into a creative interface through psychogeographic practice. About her "Detox Project", an hour-long audio walk around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker that the experience "proved to be psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears". More information on Biggs' audio work, as well as lots to listen to, can be found at betseybiggs.org. Free and open to the public. Experiments in Place and Collaborative Documentary: UnionDocs’ Looking at Los Sures Director Diego Echeverria and UnionDocs artists in person Tuesday, October 18, 7:00 p.m. Location: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B-04, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge In the late seventies and early eighties, South Williamsburg was one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. Largely Puerto Rican and Dominican, it was troubled by drugs and violence, full of abandoned real estate, and badly under-served. Los Sures, a documentary from 1984 by Diego Echeverria, skillfully represents the challenges of this time, while also celebrating a community that was connected, coherent, and full of culture. UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art based in South Williamsburg, has begun an investigation of the neighborhood that revisits Echeverria's film and creates a constellation of companion documentary projects that update, annotate, challenge, and spiral off from the original. The result will be Looking at Los Sures, an interactive, multi-layer online documentary project that seeks not just to extract important stories from the place, but to also create new shared histories, to deeply enhance local awareness, respect, and tolerance, and to facilitate relationships between neighbors. For this special event, Diego Echeverria will be present to discuss his original film and respond to the contemporary work of UnionDocs. The program will include excerpts from the original and work from last year’s UnionDocs Collaborative Fellows. This screening and talk is presented by the Film Study Center with metaLAB (at) Harvard. Free and open to the public. UnionDocs
Sound artist Francisco López at MIT Monday, April 25 Lecture at 8:00 p.m. Concert at 9:00 p.m. Location: The CUBE at MIT MIT Media Lab, Wiesner Building (atrium level) 20 Ames St., Bldg. E15, Cambridge, MA Free and open to the public Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. Over the past 30 years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Though many of his sound works are made from location recordings from a variety of environments -- from a rain forest in which he engages in biological fieldwork, to the windswept mountains of Patagonia, to a boiler room in the basement of a building in New York City -- his work insists that the sounds be experienced purely as sounds, and not as signs. He thus extends the notion of the 'sound object' (objet sonore) from musique concrète, and critiques approaches from acoustic ecology. Erasing boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, López proposed a blind, profound, and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in 60 countries of the five continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 100 international artists) has been released by more than 200 record labels worldwide, and he has been awarded three times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival. Presented by the Film Study Center, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Non-Event, and the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology. franciscolopez.net
A Film Unfinished Director Yael Hersonski in person Introduction by Susan R. Suleiman C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University Tuesday, March 29, 6:00 p.m. Location: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B-04, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge At the end of WWII, 60 minutes of raw film, having sat undisturbed in an East German archive, was discovered. Shot by the Nazis in Warsaw in May 1942, and labeled simply “Ghetto,” this footage quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, the later discovery of a long-missing reel, inclusive of multiple takes and cameraman staging scenes, complicated earlier readings of the footage. A Film Unfinished presents the raw footage in its entirety, carefully noting fictionalized sequences (including a staged dinner party) falsely showing “the good life” enjoyed by Jewish urbanites, and probes deep into the making of a now-infamous Nazi propaganda film. A Film Unfinished documents some of the worst horrors of our time, exposing the efforts of its perpetrators to propel their agenda and cast it in a favorable light. Yael Hersonski is currently visiting the Boston area as part of the Schusterman Visiting Artist Program. This screening and talk is sponsored by the Film Study Center. Free and open to the public. A Film Unfinished official website
Adventures of a Photographer: A Book Story An artist's talk by Dayanita Singh Tuesday, March 1, 6:00 p.m. Location: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B-04, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge Award-winning photographer Dayanita Singh is perhaps best known for her portraits of India’s urban middle and upper class families. These images of people working, celebrating or resting at home, show Indian life without embellishment. Her recent work has concentrated on another form of portraiture, of places rather than people. All but a few of Singh’s images are devoid of the human figure and they are typified by composure rather than restlessness. The work’s subtle formality is the product of intense and intimate observation, communicating a unique sense of time and place. Represented by Frith Street Gallery and published by Steidl, Singh's recent projects use the possibilites and peculiarities of color film to produce lush photographs saturated with intense color, and present a landscape which exists as much in the artist’s imagination as in the real world. Publishing is also a significant part of the artist’s practice: in her books, often published without text, she experiments with different ways of producing and viewing photographs. A mid-career retrospective of Singh’s work was shown at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam in 2010. Other recent solo exhibitions include Dream Villa Frith Street Gallery; Privacy at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin and I am as I am, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Singh is the 2008 Gardner Photography Fellow at the Peabody Museum. Sponsored by the Film Study Center, Sensory Ethnography Lab, and VES 350, Critical Media Practice. In conjunction with the Singh exhibition opening at the Peabody Museum on March 2 Sophie Brunet lecture Thursday, Dec. 8, 4:30 - 6 p.m. Sever Hall, room 416 Film editor Sophie Brunet has worked with FSC fellow Dominque Cabrera, and she is also the editor of Marcel Ophuls, Bertrand Tavernier, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, Pavel Longuine and Jonathan Nossiter. "Here is where, in my opinion, all the difficulty and all the beauty of editing resides: in this incredible and agonizing struggle between the “heart of stone” and the absolute empathy that is demanded of the editor." - Sophie Brunet Let Each One Go Where He May, Director Ben Russell in person Sunday, Dec. 12, 7 p.m. ArtsEmerson Bright Family Screening Room Paramount Theatre, 559 Washington St., Boston Ben Russell’s increasingly ambitious films are among the most notable developments in 21st century avant-garde cinema. Let Each One Go Where He May (2009, U.S./Suriname) is his feature film debut. Let Each One Go Where He May traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname over land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, in a rehearsal of the voyage undertaken by their ancestors who escaped from slavery at the hands of the Dutch 300 years prior. A path still traveled to this day, its changing topography bespeaks a diverse history of forced migration.” - Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival Ben Russell is an itinerant photographer, curator, and experimental film/videomaker whose works have screened in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East Indian Trading Company buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and the Sundance Film Festival to the Museum of Modern Art (solo). He has made films about the assassination of Easter Island, the divining powers of Richard Pryor, and the end of the world. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2008, he began The Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island and currently resides in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Presented in association with ArtsEmerson Mark Tribe: Mediation, Performance, and the Public Sphere Wednesday, Nov. 17, 6 p.m. Carpenter Center of the Visual Art, room B-04 24 Quincy St., Cambridge In 1968, protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago chanted “The whole world is watching,” and shortly thereafter their images appeared on the evening news. These days, protesters bring their own cameras and post video clips on YouTube, but few seem to notice. Has participatory media changed how we perform, document, and experience political action? If the public sphere is not only a discursive space, but also a performative and visual one, how is it transformed by contemporary technologies of mediation? How can video installation and performance art be used to interrogate conventional notions of protest, history, and popular culture? Mark Tribe will discuss recent work and current projects, including The Dystopia Files, Sweet Child Solos, and The Port Huron Project. Mark Tribe is a new media artist and curator whose interests include art, technology, and politics. He teaches courses on radical media, the art of curating, open-source culture, digital art, and techniques of surveillance in Modern Culture and Media, Brown University. In 1996, Tribe founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology, now based at the New Museum (NYC). Presented in association with Sensory Ethnography Lab
"Acoustemic Stratigraphies: Recent Work in Urban Phonography" with artist Steven Feld in person Friday, Oct 22, 10 a.m. - 12 noon Sever Hall, Room 416 Steven Feld is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, jazz musician, phonographer, author and Professor at UNM. Recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius prize" fellowship, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the founder and director of VoxLox, a documentary sound art label whose CDs advocate for human rights and acoustic ecology. voxlox.net
Screening: David Holzman’s Diary and My Girlfriend’s Wedding Director Jim McBride in person Saturday, Sept. 25, 7:00 p.m. Main Lecture Hall, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (HFA) 24 Quincy St., Cambridge Sponsored by the Film Study Center and the Harvard Film Archive The FSC is presenting Jim McBride at the Harvard Film Archive, with back-to-back screening of his first two films, and a post-screening discussion with the director. Harvard Film Archive	David Holtzman's Diary (1967)
"The City in Film" Screening and Discussion with Scott MacDonald Thursday, Sept 16, 2:00 p.m. Screening Castro Street and Side/Walk/Shuttle Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B04 Scott MacDonald is an historian and theorist of independent and avant-garde cinema. He is a Visiting Professor at Hamilton College, and is currently writing a book on Bostonian documentary. Presented in association with VES162 Media Archeology of Place
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