Unless otherwise indicated, events are scheduled for Sunday afternoons at 2:00 in the Bradford Auditorium—Room 125, in the Kirner-Johnson Building
Since 9/11, Dutch-Indonesian filmmaker Helmrich has been using his unique brand of in-close candid filmmaking and his commitment to cinema-as-motion to explore the evolution of life in the world’s largest Islamic republic. He offers an opportunity to see the life of the Sjamsuddin family in Jakarta and in rural Indonesia from the inside. 95 minutes.
(For Part 2: Shape of the Moon, see listing for 2/26. Hemrich will visit Hamilton on March 3rd to present part 3, Position among the Stars.)
Suitcase of Love and Shame began when Gillooly saw an item, advertised under that name, on Ebay. She bought the suitcase and discovered inside it a collection of memorabilia, mostly audio tapes, sent back and forth between two lovers during the early 1960s. These tapes, as re-presented by Gillooly, become a fascinating window into the social realities of late 1950s and early 1960s American culture. Gillooly teaches filmmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“Suitcase of Love and Shame aims at a cross-generational consciousness about exhibitionism, privacy and voyeurism”--Gillooly.
Thanks to the Kirkland Endowment for support of this event.
Those of use who know Lawrence Brose’s work have come to feel that the Federal indictment against him, now in its 4th year, is the most egregious current case of harassment of an American artist by the American government. The “evidence” against Brose includes silkscreen images made from frame sequences of his film De Profundis. Come see for yourself if the film’s imagery deserves to be evidence for a charge of “child pornography.”
“De Profundis” is a reference to Oscar Wilde’s famous letter from Reading Gaol and Brose’s film is a revisiting of Wilde’s incarceration, from within a montage of imagery of radical gay performances “queered” by Brose’s complex process for colorizing the imagery that can require as many as 24 separate steps per frame sequence. De Profundis is gorgeous and feisty, a feast for eye and ear. 65 minutes.
Screening and discussion. (See listings for 2/10 and 3/3)
The most recent installment of Dutch-Indonesian filmmaker Helmrich’s ongoing project of documenting an Indonesian family during personal, governmental, societal, and technological change confirms Helmrich’s status as one of the most inventive and engaging of contemporary documentary filmmakers. Believing that cinema is motion, Helmrich has developed a panoply of jerry-rigged technologies for capturing the motion and emotion of human experience and uses the remarkable intimacy his approach gives him to explore the daily life of a struggling family in the world’s largest Islamic republic. 110 minutes.
[at 7:00]: A test screening of Helmrich’s current work-in-progress.
Friedrich is one of the pivotal independent filmmakers of her generation. Her The Ties That Bind, Damned If You Don’t, and Sink or Swim are canonical works in the histories of both avant-garde cinema and documentary filmmaking—as well as feminist breakthroughs. Her feisty new film, Gut Renovation, is about the transformation of what for decades was her Williamsburg, Brooklyn neighborhood, and the impacts of urban gentrification.
Thanks to the Kirkland Endowment for support of this event.
Robb Moss, former white water river guide and globe-hopping freelance filmmaker, mentor to dozens of successful filmmakers, Creative Advisor for the Sundance Institute Documentary Lab, and current Senior Lecturer on Filmmaking at Harvard, returns to Hamilton to present one of the masterworks of personal documentary: The Same River Twice.
Plus extra added attraction: Alfred Guzzetti’s new high-definition video, Time Exposure (2012), the haiku of personal documentary.
Caouette arrived on the independent film scene with the remarkable and harrowing personal documentary, Tarnation (2003). Audiences, blown away by Caouette’s depiction of his troubled childhood, had to wonder how Caouette’s filmmaking career could continue. If your first film is a review of your entire life, what’s your second film going to be about? The answer? Caouette’s new film, Walk Away Renee. While Tarnation is the horror film of personal documentary, Walk Away Renee is the suspense thriller.
Preparation for Caouette’s visit: if you’ve not experienced Tarnation, join Scott MacDonald’s Facing Reality: A History of Documentary course on 4/16 at 7:00 for a screening and discussion of Tarnation.
Think you have a sense of what China and “the Chinese” are like? Check out your preconceptions by experiencing People’s Park, the new film by Harvard University Sensory Ethnography Lab veteran, J. P. Sniadecki, and his partner, Libbie Cohn, who studied political science at Yale (the two met when studying at Tsinghua University in China). An inventive single-shot film with a complex and evocative soundtrack, People’s Park is currently making the rounds at international film festivals. 78 minutes.
Davenport is one of the major contributors to what has come to be called “personal documentary”: that is, documentary films that investigate the filmmaker’s personal experiences. Her new film, First Comes Love, is a fascinating (and sometimes hair-raising) depiction of Davenport’s struggles deciding to become a single mother and dealing with the realities of a pregnancy, a newborn son and a disapproving father.
Thanks to the Kirkland Endowment for support of this event.
Preparation for Davenport’s visit: Join Facing Reality: A History of Documentary Film for a screening and discussion of Nina Davenport’s Operation Filmmaker (2007) on 4/23 at 7:00: lured to Prague to film an upbeat story of Hollywood filmmakers offering a young Iraqi a chance to fulfill his dream of becoming a filmmaker, Davenport becomes entangled within a complex ethical and psychological relationship that forces the filmmaker and her audience to consider the power and limitations of documentary filmmaking.
Events are presented in the Kirner-Johnson Auditorium at 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoons (except when otherwise indicated). Running times for films are listed; lectures and in-person filmmaker presentations can run from 1½ to 2½ hours.
This series is made possible by the office of the Dean of the Faculty,
by the generous support of the Kirkland Endowment,
and by the Experimental Television Center re-grant program.
Events are curated by Scott MacDonald, with help from Heather Johnsen and Bret Olsen.
