My House curator, Tobin Gibson, introduces this special event — only the third time Mike Kelley's "fractured feature-length musical" has been screened in a cinema. Extending the artist's subversive, multifaceted examination of trauma, abuse and repressed memories, refracted through the prism of personal and mass-cultural experience, Day Is Done is composed of live-action recreations of high-school yearbook photographs of extracurricular activities, or, as the late artist himself termed them, "socially accepted rituals of deviance." These carnivalesque disruptions of the normal school schedule, in the form of pageants, recitals, variety shows, hazings, slave auctions and dress-up days, mirror events in the broader cultural arena.
Programmed by Michèle Smith
DIM Cinema opens its 2016 season with Ghanaian-born British artist-filmmaker John Akomfrah’s epic film about the African diaspora to postwar Britain. Conceived as a gallery piece based on Homer’s Odyssey, this retelling of Telemachus’s search for his lost father, Odysseus, grew into a feature-length cinematic work structured as a song cycle, with each musical chapter named after one of the nine muses. Intermixing archival footage with original scenes shot in Alaska, and scripted from sound clips of established works of the (mainly) Western canon, the film summons up “a mood, rather than a story, that reflects on the immigrant experience and the violence of displacement with a majestic grace" (Jason Solomons, The Observer). “Striking ... Extends, complicates, and enriches the definition of documentary. Though lofty, The Nine Muses is never grandiose, taking as its subject the primal notion of what constitutes home” (Melissa Anderson, Artforum).
Programmed by Helga Pakasaar and Michèle Smith
Pat O'Neill has been involved in the Los Angeles avant-garde film scene since the 1960s. A former professor at CalArts, his practice includes drawing, sculpture, printmaking and photography, but he is best known for his highly graphic, layered and reflexive films made with an optical printer.
Al Razutis moved to Vancouver from the United States in 1968, after graduate studies in mathematical physics, bringing a combination of technological interests to his multimedia experiments and innovations, most recently in virtual reality and stereoscopic 3-D video. His films have received a number of awards, including a 1988 Los Angeles Film Critics Award.
David Rimmer is an internationally renowned experimental and documentary filmmaker from Vancouver who has also worked in performance, sound, sculpture, and holography. He was an influential teacher in the film and video department at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.
Programmed by Michèle Smith
“This port city, it’s much like any port city: it’s everywhere and nowhere.”
Programmed by Michèle Smith
A screening of works by two Montreal-based artists who embed video in multi-media environments and situations. For her 2012 installation, Anomalies, Julie Favreau took as inspiration a Soviet-era novella about science gone awry, but then utterly transformed it into a series of sci-fi scenarios with enigmatic objects, to “suggest parables about the judicious use of knowledge and technology, and about personal discipline and mindfulness” (Saelan Twerdy, Canadian Art). Dominique Sirois’s recently completed project, Alarm Songs, orchestrates the passage from modernity to the dystopian now using sampled warning sounds from a music database and texts by Freud, Stockhausen, and the Russian poet Alexei Gastev. The suite of four videos connects different epochs through quasi-allegorical figures and narratives to reveal the past function and latent memory of the locations they were filmed in, millenial pantomimes that track the development of militarism, industrialization, globalization, and leisure, as forms of social control.
Programmed by Michèle Smith
“Like Laurel and Hardy, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Rat and Bear!" Stefan Zweifel, Flowers and Questions, 2006.
Dressed in rented animal costumes, internationally acclaimed multimedia artists Fischli and Weiss, "the merry pranksters of contemporary art" (The New York Times), take their characters "rat" and "bear" on a string of adventures that pose serious questions about art, crime, nature, and the meaning of life. Their first film, a Chandleresque crime drama, begins with them stumbling upon a corpse in a Los Angeles art gallery. Hoping it will be their key to fame and fortune, they take it with them, only to find their plans spiraling out of control. “The result is more reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction watched after a dose of psilocybin mushrooms” (Lauren O’Neill Butler, ArtForum). In the sequel, rat and bear’s philosophical debates and fractious relationship are tested against the majestic backdrop of the Swiss Alps, as they find themselves at the mercy of nature, once again grappling to understand the seeming chaos of the world. "In the epic style of an age-old tale, the film traces the path to understanding: the profound, melancholy, but also the comic realization that every "right way" is also a wrong way (and every wrong way also a right way)" (Patrick Frey, Parkett Magazine).
Image: The Point of Least Resistance. Courtesy of Icarus Films and Sprüth Magers Berlin
Programmed by Michèle Smith
Ute Aurand’s trilogy of films Toying with String I-III (Fadenspiele I-III) was made in a spirit of artistic spontaneity and improvisation with her sister, the painter Detel Aurand, between 1999 and 2013. Filmed inside the artist’s studio and outdoors in forests, fields, and mountains, they feature various natural and manmade materials invisibly manipulated to create images in a constant state of metamorphosis. This aspect of the sisters’ films serves as a bridge to the work of local artists Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson, who will show a selection of 16mm films from their collaborative and separate practices.
Programmed by Michèle Smith
Programmed by Michèle Smith
Using abstraction, animation, and re-enactments, Toronto-based artist Jean-Paul Kelly — the 2014 recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award for “artistic excellence in the moving image” at the New York Film Festival — has created a powerful series of short videos that examine the attractors and repulsors of various forms of media representation. Details from documentaries, press cuttings, publications, and online media streams are isolated, superimposed, composited, and otherwise reconfigured into new meanings — often in disturbing pairings of pleasure and pain, desire and trauma. The centrepiece of the program, Service of the goods, is a shot-by-shot reproduction of scenes from Frederick Wiseman documentaries, stripped of their naturalistic signifiers to bring underlying ideologies into sharper focus. “This film is not only a bang-on piece of filmic analysis; it also poses fundamental questions about the representation of social institutions, and those stuck inside of them” (Michael Sicinski, Keyframe Magazine).
(Near) extinct technologies make sound visible in this program of shorts delving into ideas of knowledge, memory, and communication. On a Chladni Plate, a device that marked the birth of acoustics, grains of sand, moving like Busby Berkeley dancers, form intricate patterns in response to changing sound frequencies, their shapes recalling the utopian quest for a “pure,” onomatopoeic alphabet. Wax cylinder recordings combine with modern scientific instruments to animate a text by Rainer Maria Rilke on the possibility of hearing the dead by playing their skulls with a gramophone needle. A histrionic voice-over, translated into a wave of small flames on a Ruben’s Tube, provokes unexpected associations, from the biblical burning bush to various acts of ventriloquism in pop culture. Hand-drawn compositions by electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram are run through her radical invention, the Oramics Machine. Kaleidoscopic effects in the lamphouse of a 35mm-film printer honour Natalie Kalmus, colour consultant on masterpieces of the Technicolor era. The eyes of the George Eastman family and early Hollywood stars reveal chromatic distortions in some early colour film tests. And in a dramatic finale, Satz and experimental filmmaker Lis Rhodes encode their voices as abstract light patterns on 16mm mono and 35mm stereo filmstrips in a collaborative exploration of sound-image synchronicity.