Musical Insects

Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape.

An homage to Chicago’s East 95th Street Bridge, Calumet Fisheries and to a couple of the city’s infamous cinematic brothers.

The Greek island of Syros is visited by a series of unexpected guests. Immutable forms, outside of time, aloof observants to human conditions.

Relatively little export, cultural or otherwise, reaches the west from southeastern Africa. Spurred by curiosity about how knowledge of place spreads, Kuyenda N’kubvina looks at how thought and culture propagate in Malawi. Weaving our way through video halls, book stores, radio stations and dance floors, in cities and small villages, we meet Malawians who traffic in rhythm and ideas. The video was instigated by the filmmaker’s ignorance about the people and culture of this region, and accompanies her as she seeks out individuals and infrastructures that channel and articulate Malawian identity.

Deborah Stratman brings past perspectives into the contemporary moment in a montage of unfinished film footage from artist Barbara Hammer with evocative sound, texts, and teachings from artist Maya Deren. Vever poetically draws connects between three generations of women filmmakers who separately, and now together, have taken on unknown challenges, and opened themselves up to reinterpretation in their filmmaking practices.

Inspired by a chapter in Francois Rabelais' 1653 epic novel "Gargantua & Pantagruel" wherein Pantagruel finds that the explosions, cries and other sounds generated from a battle that had occurred the year before have been frozen into discernable shapes - and that the sounds could be released upon the breaking or melting of the frozen forms.

A flicker film made with images taken in Malawi. FF was in response to an assignment given by artists Melissa Dubbin and Aaron Davidson who created the soundtrack to which they invited artists to make a “Future Film”.

Ray Lowden keeps seventy-two large birds of prey, five deer and some wallabies at his place in Northumberland, England. He has had ten days off in twelve years and loves what he does. The film is a little homage to his variously coy, imperious, curious, stubborn and comic raptor menagerie.

The urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find gold in alluvial gravel is part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, smelters, former city officials, and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot on location in Dawson City, Yukon Territory.

Both a letter to a cancer stricken, alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, "The Magician's House" is full of ghosts. Including that of Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the Magic Lantern or "Sorcerer’s Lamp". The music, La lutte des Mages (The Struggle of the Magicians), was composed by Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann. Gurdjieff thought of man as a kind of "transmitting station of forces." To him, most people move around in a state of waking sleep, so he sought to provide aural conditions that would induce awareness.