EVENT, SCREENING
Illuminations Program: Elsewhere/Here
Saturday, Mar 16, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Location la: Redstone Theater
Part of First Look 2024
With Lewis Klahr, Bram Ruiter, Carl Elsaesser, Simon Liu, Erica Sheu, Bruno Delgado Ramo, and Mike Stoltz in person
Playful, elusive, and tactile, these eclectic works are unified by their filmmakers’ attempts to orient themselves in a world of constant, turbulent flux. The past (and in some cases the future) is always present; memory haunts many of the films, yet all are grounded in lucid and poetic observation of physical reality. The films in Part One offer encounters with places occupied by ghosts, while those in Part Two explore realms of domestic and urban anxiety. All twelve films are masterfully wrought, whether by established avant-garde luminaries or exciting new artists. Co-curated by Edo Choi and David Schwartz.
Part One: Elsewhere
Here & Elsewhere
Dir. Bram Ruiter. Netherlands. 2023, 11 mins. DCP. In Spanish and Ancient Greek with English subtitles. A romantic film in which water serves as a guiding force for a journey with an unclear destination. North American premiere
It follows it passes on
Dir. Erica Sheu. U.S./Taiwan. 2023, 5 mins. DCP. Incense yields a little light and leads the way for the islanders to hide from bombing. Broken dishes time travel. Imaginations of a postwar island, Kinmen, from familial anecdotes. Tracing the roots of cross-generational sentiments behind the glare of glasses, the display of a self-made museum. New York City premiere
West Lounge
Dir. Kevin Jerome Everson. U.S. 2023, 5 mins. DCP. An unfortunate event in Columbus, Mississippi, told by an unreliable narrator. North American premiere
Banging on Their Bars in Rhythm
Dir. Kevin Jerome Everson. U.S. 2024, 11 mins. DCP. Filmed at the former Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio. High contrast black-and-white footage creates its own sound on the audio track. The title of the film is taken from the film script for the 1997 film Air Force One, which was filmed on location at the Reformatory. World premiere
Stone, Hat, Ribbon & Rose
Dir. Eva Giolo. Belgium/U.K./Italy. 2023, 16 mins. DCP. A map—a world—unfolds on a table. We take an audiovisual tour through Brussels, which at the same time forms a cinematic message to Chantal Akerman. North American premiere
How to Run a Trotline
Dir. Carl Elsaesser. U.S. 2024, 18 mins. DCP. At once a reticent elegy to and a shy repudiation of fathers and homes, both original and adopted. World premiere
Caracole (for Mac)
Dir. Nathaniel Dorsky. U.S. 2022. 7 mins. 16mm. “Mac McGinnes, a dear friend and neighbor, often sat in with me during my editing sessions. This brief but light-filled farewell was made for Mac upon his passing.”—Dorsky North American premiere
Ten-minute intermission
Part Two: Here
Seasonal Concerns
Dir. Maximilien Luc Proctor. Germany. 2024, 3 mins. 16mm. A triple exposure on EXR 50D 16mm film: two layers shot in summer, and the third captured on the cusp of winter. A collection of statues fading in and out of consciousness, around the Weissensee lake in northeast Berlin, where the filmmaker lives. North American premiere
Five Days Till Tomorrow
Dir. Lewis Klahr. U.S. 2022, 12 mins. DCP. Begun in 2015 and completed in 2022, Five Days Till Tomorrow evokes a timeless oneiric twilight, depicting a menagerie of fantasy comic book characters as they sleep, loll, and patiently inhabit a landscape of 1970s futuristic architecture waiting for the extended night—described in the title—to come to its end. World premiere
Holographic Will
Dir. Mike Stoltz. U.S. 2023, 5 mins. 16mm. A domestic swirl filmed while the building was being sold. How much longer can we afford to stay? A kaleidoscopic portrait of destabilization during the struggle to stay in a rent-controlled apartment amidst an affordable housing crisis. New York premiere
Hey Sweet Pea
Dir. Alee Peoples. U.S. 2023, 11 mins. 16mm. Parental aging and an existential wave collide in funny ways. Hey Sweet Pea borrows scenes from the 1984 children’s sci-fi movie The Neverending Story to process our collective grief. North American premiere
Labores en curso
Dir. Bruno Delgado Ramo. Spain/Belgium. 2024, 29 mins. Super 8mm. A record of places as they are being made: construction sites, artist studios, kitchens, a garden—spaces in which a process, a state of incompletion and transformation, occurs. “It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing; it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us.” —Spinoza World premiere
Single File
Dir. Simon Liu. U.S./Hong Kong/Italy. 2023, 10 mins. DCP. In this stroboscopic film, a virtuosic application of analogue darkroom practices and video processing techniques conceals and reappraises the nature of personal expression in the face of censorship. Times ahead and behind collide—a new linearity is required; the glittering lore of the way things were, generations lost to resolution errors. New York premiere
Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / discounted for MoMI members ($7–$11). There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases. The cost of admission may be applied toward a same-day purchase of a membership.
Order tickets. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission.
About the filmmakers:
Nathaniel Dorsky, born in New York City in 1943, is an experimental filmmaker and film editor who has been making films since 1963. He has resided in San Francisco since 1971.
Carl Elsaesser is a Brooklyn and Maine–based artist whose films have been screened at festivals and including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, among many others. In his practice, Elsaesser mixes genres and materials to produce work that “critically investigates the overarching presence of the historical without losing sight of individual experiences of human connection.”
Kevin Jerome Everson (b. Mansfield, Ohio. Lives and works in Charlottesville, VA) is the Commonwealth Professor of Art and Director of Studio Arts at the University of Virginia. Recipient of the Guggenheim, Heinz Award, Berlin Prize, Alpert Award, Rome Prize, and Creative Capital, Everson’s art practice encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture and film, twelve award-winning features and over 200 solo and collaborative short form works that screen regularly at international film festivals, cinemas, galleries, museums and art biennials.
Eva Giolo is an artist working across film, video, and installation. Her work has been exhibited at Sadie Coles HQ, Harlan Levey Project, WIELS centre for Contemporary Art , MAXXI–National Museum of 21st Century Art, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Palazzo Strozzi, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, and major film festivals like International Film Festival Rotterdam, Viennale, FIDMarseille, Vision du Réel and New York Film festival among others. She is a founding member of the production and distribution platform elephy.
Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic films, which use found images and sound to explore the intersection of memory, history and the passage of time. Klahr’s films have screened extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia – in venues such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, Image Forum Tokyo, the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Tate Modern, the Pompidou Center, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and the LA County Museum of Art.
Simon Liu (b. Hong Kong, 1987) is an artist filmmaker whose work has been exhibited at institutions including MoMA, MOCA LA, The Shed, PICA, Moderna Museet, “Dreamlands: Expanded”, M+, and the Whitney Biennial 2024,. His films have screened at festivals globally including the Toronto, New York, Berlinale, Rotterdam, BFI London, Edinburgh, Jeonju, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals alongside the Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, and Media City. Liu is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.
Alee Peoples maintains a varied artistic practice that involves screen-printing, sewing, sculpture and film. Currently living in Los Angeles, she has taught youth classes at Echo Park Film Center and shown her sculpture and film work at GAIT, elephant, and Insert Press. Peoples has shown her films at numerous festivals including Edinburgh, Images (Toronto) and New York Film Festival, and at museums and spaces including SFMoMA, Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Pompidou Center, Dirt Palace (Providence) and The Nightingale (Chicago). Started in 2022, Arroyo Seco Cine Club is a thematically programmed film series she co-curates with Mike Stoltz. She is inspired by pedestrian histories, pop song lyrics and invested in the hand-made.
Maximilien Luc Proctor (MLP) is a French-American filmmaker, critic and curator. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma with honors in Film and Media Studies in 2014 before moving to Heidelberg, where he shot his first feature film, FRAGMENTS OF A MEMORY OF A FILM, while working as a barista and karaoke host. In 2017 he moved to Berlin and completed his second feature film, SREĆAN PUT, in 2021. Alongside fellow film critic and Ultra Dogme editor Ruairí McCann, he records music in the band Two Nice Catholic Boys. He is the founder and co-editor of Ultra Dogme, and the avant-garde instructor at Berlin’s Art-on-the-Run film school.
Bruno Delgado Ramo is a filmmaker and artist-researcher who explores site-specific features and incorporates them into his films and screening arrangements. He devises his work as research grounded in material and experimental practice of cinema means, leading to films, installations, live proposals and text matter. His work has been internationally presented at film festivals and art spaces.
Bram Ruiter writes, “My films are collage-like morphologies concerned with the act of creation. I’m fascinated by objects, subjects, procedures and materials deemed lost, incomplete, non-traditional, broken and obsolescent.” His films have been shown at the Viennale, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Pesaro Film Festival, and the Netherlands Film Festival and many others.
Erica Sheu 徐璐 makes short films, expanded cinema and installation with celluloid film. Her work is often about diary film, handmade film, screen and projections, cross-generational memories, Taiwanese identity politics. Her experimental short films have been shown at NYFF, TIFF, IFFR Bright, (S8) Mostra, EXiS, TIDF, Microscope Gallery, among others. Sheu holds an MFA in Film/Video from CalArts and works and lives in Los Angeles. Sheu is a founding member of Taiwan-based experimental film collective, 後照鏡 ReaRflex.
Mike Stoltz is a moving image artist whose practice is dictated by process, working directly with the tools of cinema (images, sound, and time) to reexamine the familiar, the communal, and the medium itself. His works are rooted in a bodily encounter with the subject. Stoltz’s 16mm films and videos have screened internationally at venues such as Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Courtisane, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), Light Field, International Film Festival Rotterdam, REDCAT, International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has programmed film screenings for Magic Lantern Cinema, The Echo Park Film Center, and The Arroyo Seco Cine Club. He is currently teaching Cinema at Binghamton University.