CONNECTIVITY THROUGH CINEMA PRESENTS:
Collectively Singular: A Partial Address

Five films: hands, a monument, an ensemble, a parking garage, and a coffin with Rudy Gerson * IN PERSON *
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13TH 2026 @ MONO NO AWARE : CINEMA ARTS NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION
The Mark O'Donnell Theater 160 Schermerhorn St, Brooklyn, NY 11201 - LIMITED ATTENDANCE TO 60 - MASKS AVAILABLE
DOORS 7 PM – STARTS PROMPTLY AT 7:30 PM – FREE TO ATTEND

TRT, 60 minutes. Additional time for discussion / Q & A with RUDY GERSON *IN PERSON *

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:
Collectively Singular brings together new and recent moving image works organized around the shared and singular problem of address. Moving between subjects of protest, memorial, dance, the city, and landscape, the films offer incompleteness at different registers of detectability: the crowd and the one. Across these works, the camera is the tool to attend to what can be done together and what must be done alone, with others. Film becomes the place to experience the estrangements of the forms we’ve inherited.
A demonstration unfolds across hands. An arm traces a Berlin memorial. An ensemble dissolves into and out of one another. A parking garage, a vanished record. A coffin emerging in the American landscape.

PROGRAM:

Hands on Earth (Tuesday May 14, 2024) / Devotion & the Insatiable — Rudy Gerson
16mm | color | silent (film) +  live reading | 11 min | 2024 | Philadelphia, PA
Hands on Earth (Tuesday May 14, 2024) takes place over a day of collective demonstration in Philadelphia. The film focuses on hands as sites of expression, exertion, and want, departing from typical protest portraiture of the face and the sign. The film is presented here as Devotion & the Insatiable, a live reading that moves between private and public registers, naming a spiritual hunger at the core of imagining political horizons.

BLOCKS (After Jamie Nares), paired with reading of Pasolini text — Rudy Gerson
16mm | color | silent (film) + live reading | 8 min | 2025 | Berlin, Germany (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe)
BLOCKS (After Jamie Nares) repeats Jamie Nares's 1975 operation of tracing a city block with her hand. Here, at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the filmmaker attempts a formal repetition to try to make a gesture unstable against the specific gravity of the site, a subjective, unscientific measurement of a monument that measures back. A reading of a passage from Pasolini accompanies the screening.

Swerve Fatigue (in-progress)  — Rudy Gerson, in collaboration with Jonathan González, co-cinematography by Ty Burdenski
digital | color | sound | 10 min | 2026 | New York, NY (The Kitchen at Westbeth)
Swerve Fatigue extends choreographer Jonathan González's research into into landscape, labor, and the work of artist Beverley Buchanan. Performed live at The Kitchen, this sample is a choreographic film. And part of a larger project. Rather than document the choreography, the film reauthors it.

The Broadwood Suite (No. 00 brownlung) — Rudy Gerson. Sound Mixing, Engineering, Mastering: Dot Rose Levine. Original Music Direction and Composition: Dan Blacksberg. Original Music Composition: Ira Kohen Temple, Michael Winograd  
Digital | color | sound | 4 min | 2023 | Philadelphia, PA (Parking lot on Broad and Wood)
The closing movement of The Broadwood Suite (2023), a five-part film engaging the history of the SPHAs, a professional Jewish basketball team active from the 1920s through the 1940s, and the social dances held after games at the Broadwood Hotel. This final movement holds only the site as it exists now, the parking lot where the hotel once stood.

YAVNEH (working title) — Rudy Gerson
16mm | color | silent | 15 min | 2026 | From Philadelphia  to Utah (American landscapes)
A hand-built white pine coffin travels across American landscape. Structured around the Jewish death ritual of sitting shiva, the film turns away from direct representation, allowing landscape, duration, and absence to accumulate around an ongoing act of mourning, singular and shared.

Bio
Rudy Gerson (b. 1993, New York City; raised in Las Vegas, NV) is an artist, filmmaker, and educator working across moving image, performance, and installation. His practice explores how groups and social selves are formed through shifting frameworks of religion, the family, the party, and spectacle. Engaging forms such as sports, nationalism, dance, and mourning, his work considers how desire becomes collectively articulated through repetition. Working through an obliquely jewish sensibility, his practice asks how inherited forms carry both the weight of capture and the possibility of freedom.

MONO NO AWARE SCREENING SERIES:
The CONNECTIVITY THROUGH CINEMA series will present the work of artists, film-makers and curators who are traveling or presenting special interactive programs in-person. Our hope is to engage the community by showing work with a focus on post-screening discussion. This series is made possible by support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).