Collective Memory and Amnesia; Mapping Cities and Family Life by Martin Herbert, Frieze

‘We do not remember’, says Chris Marker’s narrator in Sans soleil (Sunless, 1983), ‘we write memory much as history is rewritten’. At the level of the individual, though, memory is history, underwritten by divergences in perception and by the fragile wirings of consciousness. This sphere of relative truth has been Kerry Tribe’s heartland since The Audition Tapes (1998), wherein 15 actors play a grandfather, a mother, and a pair of artist siblings in ‘a video project on family history and memory’. Between their conflicting testimonies, familial trauma flickers, ungraspable: the grandfather’s memory is disintegrating and he only remembers good times, and ‘what Mom and Virginia experienced as abuse, he and Grandma may have just experienced as parenting’. Layers of exposed artifice – actors coached onscreen, different performers’ takes on the same character, false starts – reinforce an impression of imperfect narrative conveyance. The only certainty in The Audition Tapes, played against a background of high emotional stakes, is the abyssal and paradoxical one that no certainty exists.

Doubt, Tribe would go on to demonstrate, can dissolve a city. For her 2002 book North is West/South is East: 32 Maps of Los Angeles, she asked strangers at Los Angeles International Airport to draw thumbnail memory-maps of LA: the results, ranging from a neat grid of roads by ‘Richard’ to an empty obelisk by ‘Krista’, are as individual and experientially skewed as Saul Steinberg’s famous 1976 map of the insignificant world as seen from domineering Manhattan. That’s the reality inside those travellers’ heads, you feel, its individuality redoubled in confrontation with others…(read more) 

Songs Sung Blue: The Films of Michael Robinson by Michael Sicinski, CinemaScope

One thing that unites many of these exemplary but otherwise disparate films and videos—Nathaniel Dorsky’s Song and Solitude, Ken Jacobs’ Capitalism: Child Labor (both 2006) David Gatten’s What the Water Said, nos. 4-6, Jeanne Liotta’s Observando El Cielo, Phil Solomon’s In Memoriam—Mark LaPore series (all 2007)—is their willingness to engage in rather direct, even sweeping emotional effects. These films exist along an affective spectrum as vibrant and variegated as anything in the recent work of Wong Kar-wai, Gus Van Sant, Claire Denis, or Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Nothing “minor” here.

Michael Robinson’s work is at the heart of this new shift. In fact, the development of his film work could be seen as a response to this precise problem: How can experimental cinema retain its connection to history, remaining cognizant of the various crises of representation, without lapsing into nihilism? Or, for that matter, how is it possible to harness filmic effects in order to produce feelings of dread, longing, or even spontaneous release, without veering into ridiculousness or self-importance? How can we accept the failure (for now) of the grand designs of modernity and still operate on a plane of sincerity, commitment, and belief?…(read more)

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Check out Michael Robinson’s work on vimeo, including his trailer for last year’s inaugural Migrating Forms

MIGRATING FORMS 2009 TRAILER from Michael Robinson on Vimeo.

His work could be seen as a comment on cultural invasion. What is at stake in Zhao’s method is the search for a shared language—a language capable of reaching an audience that is familiar with only one or the other category of experience. His works could be labeled quasi-documentary, as they question the documentary format by diluting it with images from more popular media. He consciously authors his videos’ “image dumps” to signify a moment in our visual culture when an endless profusion of images is canceling out content and meaning. In the meantime, he identifies his own practice as a reconfiguration of the codes of representation that these media are making available… (read more)

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Journalist: Director Zhao, it’s my pleasure to interview you. First of all, I want to ask how you understand Prof. Cui Weiping’s conclusion of “Sisyphus’s children?” Like Sisyphus rolling the huge boulder up the hill, the petitioners also struggle to achieve an impossible mission with unflinching courage. Including yourself, over ten years shooting is also a long, persistent process.

Zhao: I like this metaphor a lot, and I’m deeply touched by it. Her conclusion is very accurate. These people’s life and mental state is exactly like what she concludes…In this film, stubbornness is a virtue. In fact I see stubbornness as human nature, but its nature is not easily perceivable in most people. I think that this nature can nurture a person. Perhaps you may never come across such a situation that reveals your stubborn nature. I also feel that this is very complicated. Personality determines a person’s overall temperament, but fate is formed by different aspects and forces. No one wants to live such a tough life, but they have no choice. Actually lots of people who come to Beijing to petition have to give up eventually because of the political situation here, as well as their own financial problems… (read more)

Zhao Liang interviewed about Petition, via dGenerate Films

MIGRATING FORMS 2010 TRAILER from Migrating Forms on Vimeo.

Read an article on Leslie Thornton by 2010 Migraitng Forms juror Tom Zummer:

Paradise Crushed, or: “…just stand in that quicksand for a moment, this shot won’t take long…”: Some notations on the works and life of Leslie Thornton
by Tom Zummer
Nov 2002

Leslie Thornton has long been considered a pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics, working at the borders and limits of cinema, video and digital media. Such seminal works as her ongoing series Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985- ) operate in the interstices between various media-forms, often using simultaneous, interacting projections of film and video to address both the architectural spaces of media, and the imaginary spaces of the spectator’s involvement. Thornton uses the process of production as an explorative process, a collective endeavor “position(ing) the viewer as an active reader, not a consumer.”  She is a contemporary of such fellow explorers as Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Gary Hill, Michael Snow, Alan Sondheim and Harun Farocki, all artists who are opening up new spaces for media, re-mapping its boundaries within the projective spaces of the museum or gallery as well as within the public spaces of the cinema, television and internet transmission…(read more)

Steve Reinke
By Melissa Gronlund
Mar 2009

Such an alter ego – or just ego in extremis – is one of the most interesting aspects of Reinke’s practice, suggesting not only a sustained project of construction of the self (similar to his penchant for turning individual videos into larger projects – such as ‘The Hundred Videos’ or his current series ‘Final Thoughts’, which will continue, he says, until he dies) but also his investigation of the way in which art theory, the diaristic form of avant-garde cinema and home use of videos has developed a rhetoric of conflating the technological apparatus of the video with one’s own ordering and remembering capacity: mind as machine, memory as pop songs and Super-8 reels, happiness as photographed flowers. By trespassing and acting within these genres Reinke’s videos push to the limit the capacity of the videotape to function as a means of ‘making sense’ of material, whether this material is a library, a philosophical system, sexuality or the self…(read more)

The Lover’s Wind
By Lucy Raven and Tiffany Malakooti

Lamorisse’s decision to include a first person narrative from the perspective of the wind itself neatly sidesteps the ethnographic dilemma many of his contemporaries faced when charged with documenting Iran, not only to the rest of the world, but to itself. The “we” of the voiceover refers to the Lovers’ Wind and its siblings; it also positions the narrator as a universal character, a myth that blurs the genres of travelogue and documentary.

Upon its completion, Baadeh Sabah [The Lover's Wind] was rejected by the Ministry of Art and Culture. The majority of the footage depicts pastoral landscapes, with the odd wolf or bird crossing through them. The first half of the film is nearly entirely uninhabited by people, and the few who appear later are mainly farmers and nomads, a far cry from the students, intellectuals, and modern professionals the shah was looking to see…(read more)

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Lee Anne Schmitt on California Company Town
By Max Goldberg

Signs: There are many in California Company Town, enough to make it seem that Schmitt is collecting them. One dangles in front of derelict construction in Richmond, taunting citizens with “Another Quality Affordable Homeownership Opportunity.” A triangular “Department of the Interior” emblem in Sequoia National Park—where, we learn, the socialist commune of Kaweah was evicted in the name of land preservation in 1892—is pleasing to the eye but pocked by gunshots. In the context of Schmitt’s travelling archive, signs all pose the same staggering question: What happened here?

At a certain point we realize that California Company Town is moving chronologically through the different industries that have written themselves upon the American west. Every few minutes we pull up to another town, and Schmitt moves her magnifying glass over some crumbs of its history. Her decision not to refer to a map allows the film’s expository information to be contained within the contemplation of landscape rather than the other way around. The frames are generally devoid of human activity, giving us the feeling that Schmitt is collecting evidence—but evidence of what? The very notion of emptiness seems up for grabs: the desolation of Schmitt’s delicate 16mm footage jostles against tourist replicas of the old west, wilderness frescos, and the romantic vistas of forgotten promotional films like the color-drained Heritage of Splendor (1963, narrated by Ronald Reagan and sponsored by the Richfield Oil Company)…(read more)

Restricted, but Not Deterred
by Dennis Lim
Mar 26, 2010

While most books and films about this hermetic regime try to peel away the scrim of party-line misinformation, “The Juche Idea” does more or less the opposite: it co-opts the language of North Korean agitprop. As an independent filmmaker, Mr. Finn said, he was struck by the low-budget resourcefulness of the North Korean movies he found for sale on eBay and by the film theories of Kim Jong-il, which often relate to the national philosophy of “juche,” roughly translated as self-reliance. One of his maxims, for instance, prescribes that films be made quickly, cheaply and with the proper ideology. “It’s already what I was doing, like I had my own quasi-Marxist state in my apartment,” Mr. Finn said. “So I decided to make my own juche film.”

Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art, Mr. Finn’s meticulous, deadpan mockumentaries often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe…(read more)

The Quick and the Dead
By Darrell Hartman
Jan 14, 2010

In his best-known film, Our Daily Bread (2005), the director offers an unflinching, unsettling view of Europe’s food-production industry. Whereas American films like Fast Food Nation (2006) and Food, Inc. (2008) take to the pulpit, Geyrhalter’s nearly wordless documentary depicts slaughterhouse horrors with the cold precision (an Austrian specialty?) of a Haneke thriller.

The emotional response Geyrhalter cultivates is more profound and subtle than outrage. If anything, his technique highlights the system’s genius and efficiency…(read more)