The fall F.I.L.M. (Forum on Image and Language in Motion) series opens Sunday, Sept. 16, when filmmaker Sasha Waters Freyer presents Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable (2018).
All F.I.L.M. series events are on Sunday afternoons at 2 p.m., unless otherwise noted, in the Bradford Auditorium, KJ, and are free and open to the public.
Listed below are the programs in the fall 2018 series.
Sunday, Sept. 16: Sasha Waters Freyer, in person, with Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable (2018)
Sasha Waters Freyer makes non-fiction films about outsiders, misfits, and everyday radicals. Trained in photography and the documentary tradition, she fuses original and found footage in 16mm film and digital media. She is chair of the Department of Film and Photography at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Three-time Guggenheim Fellow Garry Winogrand is a canonical photographer, known for his portrayal of American street life during the mid-20th century.
A review in The Hollywood Reporter said, “One of the rare art-world bio-docs that delivers the sensation of seeing a story unfold dramatically onscreen, Sasha Waters Freyer’s Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable introduces a compulsive picture-taker who was for a time hailed as photography's essential artist, then saw critical opinion turn on him.”
Sunday, Sept. 30: The Alloy Orchestra returns to Hamilton to present two of their finest compositions with two canonical films
At 2 p.m., the Alloy Orchestra, the preeminent American music group specializing in composing soundtracks for classic silent films, accompanies Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), an epic action thriller that set the standard for dangerous stunts by director and star Keaton.
Keaton plays Johnny Gray, a locomotive engineer in the Civil War South. When Johnny’s train, “The General,” is stolen by Union spies, he gives chase, risking life and limb to demonstrate how funny overcoming danger can be.
At 8 p.m., the Alloy Orchestra accompanies Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a film about a day in the life of a modern, Communist Russian city. The film was named the greatest documentary film of all time in a 2014 poll by the British film journal Sight & Sound.
Sunday, Oct. 28: Director Sarah Elder presents Uksuum Cauyai/The Drums of Winter (1988)
Produced by Elder and Leonard Kamerling, Uksuum Cauyai/The Drums of Winter explores the traditional dance, music, and spiritual world of the Yup'ik Eskimo people of Emmonak, a remote village at the mouth of the Yukon River on the coast of the Bering Sea.
Composer John Luther Adams wrote in Sight & Sound, “[The] music was not composed for the film. The music is the subject of the film … There is no narration, no one who tells us what to think. Rather than watching from the outside, we feel as though we’re inside the dance house experiencing each moment with the community.”
This classic ethnographic film was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2007.
Sunday, Nov. 4: , in person, with Our New President (2018)
Russian filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin’s most recent film, Our New President, tells the story of Donald Trump’s election as seen through Russian propaganda. It provides a startling look at the transformation of Russian televised news during the Putin years and some of the ways in which Russian hackers have impacted Americans.
Pozdorovkin earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University and is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Sunday, Nov. 11: Director Travis Wilkerson presents Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2017)
“In 1946, my great-grandfather murdered a black man named Bill Spann and got away with it.” So begins Travis Wilkerson’s critically acclaimed documentary, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Wilkerson takes us on a journey through the American South to uncover the truth behind a horrific incident and the societal morés that allowed it to happen.
Acting as narrator and guide, Wilkerson spins a strange, frightening tale. He incorporates scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird, the music of Janelle Monáe and Phil Ochs, the story of Rosa Parks’ investigation into the Recy Taylor case, and his own family history, for a gripping investigation into our collective past and its present-day echoes.
Sunday, Dec. 2: Filmmaker Penny Lane presents The Pain of Others (2018) and Dean Fleischer-Camp’s Fraud (2018)
Over the years, filmmakers have “recycled” films made by others into new works of their own—sometimes as a way of critiquing earlier ideas, assumptions, and films, sometimes as a way of being filmmakers without substantial financial resources.
One of the new “archives” for filmmakers looking to work with “found-footage” is YouTube, and similar sites, where video-posters put their own videos on-line for others to see. Penny Lane is among the filmmakers who have mined YouTube. She will present her new “recycled” film, along with Fleischer-Camp’s most recent film.
