Curated by Ben Donoghue

“It is the direct connection of light and audience that interests me. The screen continually shifts dimensionally from being an image-window, to a floating energy field, to simply light on the wall. In my films, the black space surrounding the screen is as significant as the square itself. Silence allows these articulations, which are both poetic and sculptural at the same time, to be revealed and appreciated.” — Nathaniel Dorsky

Since the mid-1960s San Francisco-based Nathaniel Dorsky has explored the poetics of cinematic images, creating new potentials for seeing and experiencing through film. Working exclusively with 16mm film — and since 1980 with silent film projected at 18 frames per second (standard sound film is shown at 24 fps) — Dorsky has created a stunning body of work that presents a rigorous and unique perspective on cinema’s potential. The flicker of the slower projection speed and Dorsky’s method of cutting are integral elements of films that wash over the viewer and saturate the experience with sensuality rather than concrete memory.

For P. Adams Sitney’s Artforum article on Nathaniel Dorsky, see:http://canyoncinema.com/D/Dorsky_Sitney_art_forum.pdf

FILM COMMENT MAY/JUNE 2010:  50 Best Avant-Garde Films of the Decade

In a new poll of 46 critics, programmers and film teachers just published by the New York-based magazine Film Comment, five films by Nathaniel Dorsky were voted amongst the 50 best avant-garde films and videos of the past decade, including the three screening here: Songs and Solitude (#17), Sarabande (tied for #25) and Winter (tied for #33).

Sarabande — “Dark and stately is the warm, graceful tenderness of the Sarabande” (N.D.). 2008. 16mm, colour/silent, 18 fps. 15 mins.

Song and Solitude — Conceived and photographed with the loving collaboration of Susan Vigil during the last year of her life, Song and Solitudeis balanced more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, rather than an exploration of the external visual world as such. 2005/2006. 16mm, colour/silent, 18 fps. 21 mins.

Winter — “San Francisco's winter is a season unto itself. Fleeting, rain-soaked, verdant, a brief period of shadows and renewal” (N.D.). 2008. 16mm, colour/silent, 18 fps. 22 mins.

Ben Donoghue is executive director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT). He previously curated “Cinema and Disjunction,” presented at DIM in February 2009.

Ben Rivers' films picture a young human world in the early morning of time. A world where the clamour of human invention echoes in the deep mountain passes of geological evolution. Rivers' recent films are portraits of people in the interstices of society and their relationship to insular, hermetic spaces. Curator and writer Mark Waugh observes that Rivers' films are, “a documentary series, a eulogy and evocation of a dream of the wilderness. The post apocalyptic hallucinogenic world beyond the noise of the market place.” Waugh describes Rivers' ways of world making as a “psychic return to an elaborate universe made up of imaginary possibility…”

Through Rivers' cinematic time travels into the past and the future, temporality and perception collapse. The pandemonium of cosmic becoming rattles through auto scrap yards and tin can compost heaps. In these worlds, there is a seamless lineage between a lone horse tumbling in a snowy landscape and children driving race carts around a detritus strewn homestead. The imaginary possibility has existed since the beginning of time and is visible in every natural and human invention and incidence of destruction.

Origin of the Species | 2008, 16mm, color, 15 min
This is My Land | 2006, 16mm, b/w, sound (optical), 14 min
Ah Liberty! | 2008, 16mm, b/w, scope, 19 min
A World Rattled of Habit | 2008, 16mm, colour, sound (optical), 10min
Sordal | 2008, 16mm, colour, silent, 8 min
I Know Where I'm Going | 2009, 16mm, color, scope, 30 min

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+ ARTIST TALK// Lief Hall will be participating on an artist's panel titled "Unpacking My Records" at VIVO on Saturday May 29th at 1pm.

+ THOUGHT ON FILM// A monthly reading + discussion group that  aims to promote critical thought around film product and practice through community-based discussion. Thought on Film fosters the close reading of texts confronting issues in contemporary, cutting-edge cinematic practice and philosophy. Provoked by the presentation of Pil & Galia’s The Future Trilogy, May’s gathering will feature Paolo Virno’s essay “Virtuosity and Revolution.” Monday May 31 2010 at 6pm. Cineworks [1131 Howe, back lane entrance] Free

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The Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their work addresses the legacy of modernism and explores avant garde discourses of the twentieth century and the way they operate in the context of a changing landscape of creative work and instrumentalized leisure.  They are contributing editors at Art Papers and have written for many publications including Art Monthly and Mute. They have presented live work at the 2nd Herzliya Biennial, the 5th Berlin Biennial and the 5th Montreal Biennial, as well as at Late at Tate Britain. They have had solo shows at The Showroom, London and S1 Artspace, Sheffield, and their work has been exhibited in Apocatopia, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester and Roll it to Me, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. They work as lecturers in Fine Art at the University of Kent.

Lief Hall, born 1981 in Nelson B.C. Canada, is an audio-visual artist, musician and curator living and working in Vancouver B.C.  Hall graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2005 with a Bachelors Degree in Integrated Media majoring in animation. Since then she has exhibited her video and performance works at such galleries as VIVO, Access Artist Run Centre, The Western Front, Helen Pitt and Truck Gallery.  Her latest film 25/27 was part of the Cartune Xprez DVD compilation which toured the United States and Canada. She was the curator of Lucky's Gallery from 2006-2008 and continues to organize art and music exhibitions independently.  Hall's current musical projects include improvisational sound art trio Glaciers, dark electro duo MYTHS and her self titled solo voice works.

Co-presented with the Signal & Noise Media Arts Festival, VIVO Media Arts Centre and Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society.

Like a crochet needle swiftly passing through loops of silk and wool,  sun-thickened fingers prying at garlic-clove sheaths, or a chorus of wedding songs around a table of varenyky and boiled dumplings, Naomi Uman’s camera lives amongst the people, homes and villages she films. 

Setting out to retrace the footsteps of her family’s own immigrant history, Naomi, an American artist who divides her time between Los Angeles and Mexico City, made a reverse journey of her great-grandparent’s emigration from Uman, Ukraine.  She bought a house in Legedzine, just outside of Uman, toured films around the country, befriended village babushki, and established an artist residency for cultural exchange. 

The films in “Ukrainian Time Machine” evolved out of the tactile and visceral experience of living in Legedzine.   Kalendar chronicles her early days of Ukrainian language lessons.  Clay is a portrait of a brick factory that sits atop the ruins of the 5000- year-old, clay-based Trypillian civilization. 

Unnamed Film contains footage, in chronological order, shot from the time she arrived in Legedzine to the time she left.   “Ukrainian Time Machine” is the latest extension of an artistic practice that involves Uman’s prolonged immersion in the world of her subjects; in previous projects, she lived with a diary-farming family in rural Mexico and with a Mexican immigrant family employed in industrial dairy production in California.   
 
Kalendar (2008. 10 mins.)
On This Day (2008.  5 mins.)
Window (2008. 3 mins.)
Coda (2008. 3 mins.)
Clay (2008. 12 mins.)
 
 intermission
 
Unnamed Film (2008. 55 mins.)

Thurday April 1 2010 | 6pm

At Emily Carr University of Art & Design
South Building Lecture Hall, Room 301- 1400 Johnston St. Granville Is. Lectures are free and open to the public

Co-presented by VIVO Media Arts Centre, ECU Spring 2010 Speakers Series and Fillip

Introductory Performance by Frederick Cummings accompanied by James Diamond  

Ryan Trecartin was recently named winner of the Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts, and New Artist of the Year by the Guggenheim Museum’s First Annual Art Awards. Trecartin will screen his forty-minute video P.opular S.ky (section ish) (2009) which will be followed by a discussion with Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk and the audience.

At once highly complex and fast-paced, Trecartin’s videos, which are usually exhibited within installations, place viewers inside exhilaratingly chaotic environments primed for post-racial, post-gender, and post-human encounters that collapse time, space, and identity into a layered and wholly unforgettable experience.

http:// www.vimeo.com/trecartin to view Trecartin's past work

http://www.ecuad.ca to view a full list of guest lectures

The Pacific Cinematheque and DIM Cinema Presents
Kamal Aljafari: The Roof & Port of Memory
Monday March 8 2010 | 7:30pm | 1131 Howe St | $9.50/8 + $3 membership
www.dimcinema.ca | www.cinematheque.bc.ca
Curated by Cheyanne Turions, Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk and Cinema Project

Part essayistic meditation, part family portrait, The Roof is an eloquent and understated exploration of physical and psychic place in the context of filmmaker Kamal Aljafari’s family history. Returning to his parents’ and grandmother’s homes in Ramleh and Jaffa, now part of Israel, Aljafari uses elegant cinematography, unhurried rhythms, and fragmented narrative to convey how space, time and history have been molded by politics and Israeli institutionalized neglect. The roof of the title is an absent one, on the unfinished house where his family has lived since their resettlement in 1948, and it functions as a place of waiting marked by constant deferral. Curator Jean-Pierre Rehm has called the film “as much a stylistic as a political manifesto” that “reveals not so much the meaning of an absent roof, but the architecture of identity, place, and present pasts.”

Aljafari again draws from the lived experience of his kin in Port of Memory, following the reaction of his family when they receive an order to evacuate their home in Ajami, Jaffa's once-wealthy sea-front neighbourhood. Their lives and those of the other residents are thrown into disarray because they don't have access to the means to effectively fight back. Radically poetic, Port of Memory is a reflection on the absurdity of being at once absent and present, blending the mundane gestures of everyday life and collective memory.

 Kamal Aljafari (b. 1972) is originally from Ramleh, Palestine. He graduated from the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. His film Visit Iraq (2003) he received the Visual Art Prize of the City of Cologne (2004) and an award from the Sundance Documentary Fund (2007). In 2005, he was awarded a fellowship by the German Kunstfonds. The Roof won the Best International On Screen (Video) Award at the Images Festival in Toronto (2008) and also the award for best soundtrack at the FID Marseille documentary festival in France. He was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar at Colgate University in New York. Through 2010, he is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. His work has shown at many international film festivals and will be exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, March 2010.

programme

The Roof | 2006 | 61:00mins | DV
Port of Memory | 2009 | 63:00mins | DV

programme running time: 124mins

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Thought on Film
Tuesday March 09 2010, 6pm
Cineworks Independent Filmmaker's Society 1131 Howe St. (alley entrance)

The March meeting of Thought on Film will feature a selection of theory that has influenced Aljafari's practice. www.cineworks.ca for more information

 
The YouTube School for Social Politics (YTSSP) invites historians, artists, and theorists to construct passages of historical inquiry through assemblages of YouTube clips. In an increasingly invisible society we are each a consumer, creator, and clearing house for knowledge, just as much as we are receiver, producer, and disposer of material goods. These notions of surplus knowledge play a central role within the YouTube School for Social Politics. Scattered throughout YouTube lie countless personal and collective points of view and scattered historical moments. By arranging segments of documentaries, personal missives, family films, newsreels and music videos, new light is shed on the sociopolitical landscape of history past and history present.

Co-presented with ARTSPEAK and VIVO Media Arts

The “projection performances” of New York-based artist and architect Bruce McClure are immersive cinematic [or proto-cinematic] happenings. Lightning surges of luminescence and thunderclaps of sine waves create visceral experiences on the screen and in the body. McClure’s illuminations are time-based: they are essentially ephemeral and singular, existing outside the bounds of simulation and reproduction. His alchemical, hallucinatory experiments with light, darkness and sound will employ two projectors running simultaneously. As beams of light converge with optically generated sound, the audience is enveloped in interactive play with apparatus.

McClure will conduct  four unique performances using two projectors: You Know My Methods (2003), Christmas Tree Stand - Part 1 (2004), Evertwo Circumflicksrent Page 298 (2007), and Cong In Our Gregational Pompoms (2009).

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Working the Room
12 + 13 December 2009, 10am-5pm
Cineworks Studio [1131 Howe, back lane entrance]
Cost is $75 for Cineworks members / $125 for non-members

Led by Bruce McClure, this workshop will examine how the variously dimensioned spaces in the trajectory between the spectator and projected image, via lamplight, can be reconfigured as boundaries where cinematic work can be made.  

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Deliberate Obstructions + Calculated Aimlessness
10 December 2009, 7pm
Cineworks Studio [1131 Howe, back lane entrance]
Free

This conversation with Bruce McClure will explore the potential of the 16mm projector as a liberated instrument of the projection of pictures and an optical soundtrack. Local expanded-cinema artist, curator and writer, Alex MacKenzie, will moderate the discussion.

Co-Presented with Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society

The Exception and The Rule: Karen Mirza & Brad Butler
Brad Butler in attendance
Monday 23 November 2009, 7:30pm
Pacific Cinematheque [1131 Howe]
Tickets $9.50/$8 students + $3 membership

UK artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s artistic practice challenges and interrogates participation, collaboration, the social turn, and the traditional roles of the artist as producer and the audience as recipient. This investigation currently manifests in The Museum of Non Participation, a cross-cultural artistic intervention and appraisal of standard forms of representing and experiencing the everyday in Karachi and London. The Exception and the Rule is Mirza and Butler’s most recent film from this ongoing series. Conscious of their outside perceptions of the city and its geo-political weight, they investigate the everyday patterns of Karachi’s inhabitants and social architecture.

Their earlier work, Non Places, The Space Between, and The Autonomous Object? provide history and context to Mirza and Butler’s commitment to questioning the objectivity of the cinematic frame and its implications in anthropology, ethnography, and architecture.

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Experimental Ethnography
Saturday 21 November 2009, 12-6pm
Cineworks Studio [1131 Howe, back lane entrance]
$50 for member, $75 for non-members
info@cineworks.ca for registration

Led by Brad Butler, this workshop will draw on the genre of experimental ethnography. Participants will consider the ambiguous relationship between image, narration, sound, and text and explore ways of re-contextualizing or disrupting visual evidence through the creative use multiple audio and visual voices.

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Outside the Museum of Non-Participation
Participatory Artist Talk and Dinner Party with Brad Butler
Sunday 22 November, 5-10pm
Cost is $10 and includes a delicious hot meal. BYOB.

Pre-registration is required. Please send a message to programming@dimcinema.ca to confirm your seat.

Brad Butler, UK filmmaker and programmer of the no.w.here media arts centre in London, will present an artist talk on his curatorial, pedagogical and social filmmaking practices. In light of Butler's practice, dinner guests are encouraged to participate, sharing their own experiences as cultural producers and bringing a curiosity about how to expand their own practices in light of our shared stories.

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Co-Presented by Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society, The Pacific Cinematheque, and VIVO Media Arts Centre
www.dimcinema.ca | www.cineworks.ca | www.cinematheque.bc.ca | www.vivomediaarts.com

Dear DIM Cinema Patrons, I am sending this newlsetter out early to give you advance notice of the two events attached to DIM's November 23rd screening. Brad Butler is visiting us from the UK and London's no-w-here Media Arts Centre. He will be facilitating a workshop on Experimental Ethnography and hosting an Artist Talk/ Dinner Party. Both events require pre-registration. Hope to see you in November. Cheers. Amy

The Exception + The Rule
Screening with artist Brad Butler in attendance
23 November 2009, 7:30pm
Pacific Cinematheque [1131 Howe]
Tickets $9.50/$8 students + $3 membership

UK artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s artistic practice challenges and interrogates participation, collaboration, the social turn, and the traditional roles of the artist as producer and the audience as recipient. This investigation currently manifests in The Museum of Non Participation, a cross-cultural artistic intervention and appraisal of standard forms of representing and experiencing the everyday in Karachi and London. The Exception and the Rule is Mirza and Butler’s most recent film from this ongoing series. Conscious of their outside perceptions of the city and its geo-political weight, they investigate the everyday patterns of Karachi’s inhabitants and social architecture.

Their earlier work, Non Places, The Space Between, and The Autonomous Object? provide history and context to Mirza and Butler’s commitment to questioning the objectivity of the cinematic frame and its implications in anthropology, ethnography, and architecture.

info@cineworks.ca for registration

Led by Brad Butler, this workshop will draw on the genre of experimental ethnography. Participants will consider the ambiguous relationship between image, narration, sound, and text and explore ways of re-contextualizing or disrupting visual evidence through the creative use multiple audio and visual voices.

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Outside the Museum of Non-Participation
Participatory Artist Talk and Dinner Party with Brad Butler
Sunday, 22 November, 5-10pm
Cost is $10 and includes a delicious hot meal. BYOB.

Pre-registration is required. Please send a message to programming@dimcinema.ca to confirm your seat.

Brad Butler, UK filmmaker and programmer of the no.w.here media arts centre in London, will present an artist talk on his curatorial, pedagogical and social filmmaking practices. In light of Butler's practice, dinner guests are encouraged to participate, sharing their own experiences as cultural producers and bringing a curiosity about how to expand their own practices in light of our shared stories.

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