Programmed by Amy Kazymerchyk

“The Time We Killed portrays the inner life of a writer unable to leave her Brooklyn apartment on the brink of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Robyn Taylor tries to kick her growing agoraphobia by re-imagining her past and contemplating world events of the present. As Robyn begins to overcome the amnesia that afflicted her as an adolescent, she fears coming down with ‘the amnesia of the American people’... The talking cure of psychoanalysis is evoked as Robyn voices her personal history, fantasies, and observations with a wry sense of humor. As Robyn recounts her jump from a bridge, which left her with amnesia at the age of 17, she muses, ‘The bridge wasn’t high enough.’ Recollections of her days in a mental institution seem to predetermine her present-day compulsion to lock herself indoors. And as Robyn becomes increasingly disconnected from the world, flashbacks of her childhood visit her for the first time. Finally, the horror of the U.S. military ‘shock and awe’ campaign brings to light the terrible cost of self-absorption and passivity, and shakes Robyn out of her self-made isolation”. International Critics’ Prize, Berlin (Forum of New Cinema), 2004. B&W, 16mm. 94mins, USA. 

Cast: Lisa Jarnot, Valeska Peschke, Rainer Dragon, Susan Arthur, Jennifer Reeves

Jennifer Reeves is a New York-based filmmaker who has been making experimental films since 1990. Her personal, subjective films employ optical-printing and direct-on-film techniques and explore, from many different angles, themes of memory, mental health and recovery, feminism and sexuality, landscape, wildlife, and politics.

Abigail Child: What We Desire
By Paul Williams
http://decoymagazine.ca/abigail-child-what-we-desire/

Soon after graduating from college in 1968, Abigail Child began a filmmaking career that would become one of the most influential of the American avant garde canon. Her early work launched at a time when the agitprop documentary would gain mainstream acceptance for the first time in American history that, coincidentally, was also a time when the civil rights movement would finally be thoughtfully critiqued and publicly debated.

Child’s films, though not all fitting the documentary model, have a distinct activist quality that are perhaps more apparent in documentary filmmaking. There is, however, an aesthetic quality in her films more often associated with the avant garde and similar to the films that Kenneth Anger was making about sexuality and gender at the beginning of his career – the politically fearless Fireworks (1947) and nostalgic Puce Moment (1949) come to mind – in a sense that is utterly self-conscious about its form and address.

Mutiny (1983) is, in a combative way,  full of fun and could be misread by some viewers who don’t like to be put on the defensive. It is the second part of Child’s Is This What You Were Born For? series about the experiences of women in New York City, and is comprised mostly of footage shot by Child – the dancer Sally Silvers, the violin player Polly Bradfield are all contemporary artists and friends, shot in 1981-83 on streets and offices in NYC. There is other material taken from early documentaries including the high school girls and Bronx street gang [for commissioned docs Between Times (PBS) and Savage Streets (NBC) respectively] as well as from her early doc Game (1972), shot with Jon Child. Using a 16mm camera that records on magnetic track, the film employs lightning fast editing to imitate and then deform modern representations of femininity at home, at work and in public. The active viewer who can see the pattern eventually realizes that these intercutting scenes depict many of the women in mid-cheer: chattering, singing, jumping on gymnastic apparatus, even dancing. Most are aware of the camera and some aren’t, or at least aren’t bothered by it. Conversations rise and fall; shots are fed through upside down and run in reverse, while one woman does an interpretive dance in the middle of a busy workday in an urban office, another drunkenly confides to us and to Abigail Child, and, in a way, to the other subjects in the film.  Not one scene is ever made clear; no utterance makes sense, a babbling crescendo. But it is in the film’s kinetic nature, and in the true Eisensteinian sense of montage, that the meaning becomes apparent when all the disparate sequences are cut together, compared and seen as a whole. Ultimately, a general discontentment is sensed in the growing action with the same feel and style as Arthur Lipsett’s classic Very Nice, Very Nice (1961).  But Lipsett was a lot more hip.

B/Side (1996) is more morose. The kinetic editing that underlines our understanding of Mutiny, here is deliberately paced at a speed better suited for attention to composition and character though with a similar sporadic rhythm. The film’s centerpiece is a shantytown close to the heart of the city’s financial centre that houses a small group of homeless men and women. Child has created a protagonist of sorts, played by New York actress Sheila Dabney. There is an insensate quality to her daily routine; we watch her sleep, wake, and wash – ironically evoking the sleepy, pastoral mornings of Humphrey Jenning’s poetic, nationalist masterpiece London Can Take It  (1940) – before she begins her wanderings along Manhattan’s Lower East Side. These are jarringly intercut with a love scene between Dabney and a young woman. Like a silent melodrama, her interior mindset – fantasies and all – are shot and presented for audience scrutiny. This blend of documentary and narrative address offers a complicated depiction of class, racial relations, economics and the sadness at the heart of the growing alienation of the homeless and working poor in contemporary America.

In the 21st century, her films to continue to investigate the everyday drama of contemporary America by looking into the past, primarily with found footage. She has become a sought after world-class installation artist, creating split-screen, didactic meta-narratives at galleries around the world.

The above reviewed films, along with The Game (1972), are part of the upcoming  Abigail Child presentation at DIM Cinema. DIM Cinema is a continuing series of avant garde works by important domestic and international filmmakers; the program is curated by Amy Kazymerchyk and screened monthly at the Pacific Cinémathèque in Vancouver, Canada.

 
Programmed by Allison Collins

"Narrative represents real or imaginary events in time. As with a landscape painting, a narrative film seems to offer an experience that stands in for—pretends to be—creates an illusion of—something taking place before us. In order for it to work, we must enter into the illusion, suppress our awareness of presence and treat illusion as a present reality." MALCOLM LA GRICE

Can we define time-structures for cinema and particularly expanded cinema that go beyond narrative? Or if not beyond it: around, underneath, across? The works in “Movable Facture: Time Frames” are drawn from an earlier moment in film’s history, when a preoccupation with structure was attended to through a variety of formal experiments and strategies that skirt or avoid narrative immersion. The selection is drawn from classic structural films such as Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia, and little-seen local gems found in Pacific Cinémathèque’s West Coast Film Archive.

Programmed by Amy Kazymerchyk

"Its beauty is quite ineffable. It's the sort of visual experience that transforms everything seen by the viewer for several hours afterward ... What it actually does is capture the subconscious of the city itself, the dream state of the whole past existing in simultaneous disarray." 
LUC SANTE, LOW LIFE AND EVIDENCE

Following DIM's presentation of his feature-length Benjamin Smoke in March, “New York" highlights Jem Cohen’s 20-year practice of picturing New York City. Cohen constructs his city portraits as a witness and collector, compiling film reels and audio recordings that develop into compositions over time. Cohen focuses his camera on the liminal spaces of the city and the people who live and work on the margins. In Lost Book Found Cohen reflects, “I became invisible, and then I began to see things that had once been invisible to me.” 

"New York" begins with Cohen's 1988 film, This is a History of New York, which borrows the narrative of monumental epochs to frame fragments of industrial decay and vagrant life along the Hudson River. A decade later,  Lost Book Found (1996) follows listings of places, objects, and incidents from a found notebook to decode the city's confessions. Little Flags (2000) and NYC Weights and Measures (2006) straddle 9/11, portraying the aura of publicness and pride in the financial district, before and after the event. In Long For the City (2008) Cohen pictures New York through Patti Smith's reflections on her forty-year history under its sky. Cohen's most recent production, a series of nine newsreels from Occupy Wall Street affirms his practice as flaneur and verite historian.

PROGRAM

Programmed by Amy Kazymerchyk

Lit by the glow of a bubbling fish tank diffused by a taffeta shawl, Benjamin Smoke lounges on a stack of pillows and asks, “What happens when you make music that gets you off like drugs, sex, or god? You tell me— what is it about having a great orgasm that’s so good...?” Benjamin (1960-1999) was a member of Atlanta’s underground and experimental music scenes in the 1980s, including the Opal Foxx Quartet. His yearning to write original music lead to the formation of Smoke, a band admired by the likes of Michael Stipe, Chan Marshall, and Patti Smith (who appears in the film). For 10 years, filmmakers Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen filmed Benjamin at his home in Atlanta’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood, opening a window onto his life with drugs, music, AIDS, queer drag, and his mother. Benjamin Smoke explores the life of a true American rebel in a little known, rapidly disappearing pocket of the U.S. South. “In the straw coloured light, in light rapidly changing, on a life rapidly fading; have you seen death singing, have you seen death singing, have you seen death singing?” (Patti Smith). “A haunting portrait of a lyricist-singer who is the very embodiment of the famous observation that burning the candle at both ends produces such a lovely light” (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times). 72 mins, 16mm, B&W and colour, 2000, USA

With: Benjamin Smoke, Patti Smith, Tim Campion, Brian Halloran, Coleman Lewis, Bill Taft

Programmed by Laura U. Marks

This year the Damascus-based Syrian documentary festival DOX BOX has decided not to hold the festival or seek government permits, as a statement against the regime. Instead, Dox Box is circulating films on "DOX BOX Global Day," to engage audiences worldwide with the complex situation in Syria. This program includes rarely seen masterpieces such as Omar Amiralay's A Flood in Baath Country, Nidal Al Dibs's Black Stone, and Oussama Mohamed's Step by Step, as well as works by emerging filmmakers. While world attention is on Syria, these films helps audiences share the experiences of Syrian people and learn about the country’s political, economic and social climates over recent decades. They also express the critical and creative agency of Syrian filmmakers through each film's particular style and sensibility, poetic or acerbic, sharp or tender. These are not only political and social witnesses but rare works of cinema.

PROGRAM

Supported by: School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures, SFU Wild Rice, DIM Cinema, Doxa Documentary Film Festival and Reel Causes.