FRENKEL DEFECTS: EDITION I – PROCESS REVERSAL

SEPTEMBER 20TH 2013 @ MICROSCOPE GALLERY
4 CHARLES PLACE (AT MYRTLE) BROOKLYN, NY – OFF THE MYRTLE JMZ
DOORS AT 7PM – SHOW AT 8PM

Frenkel Defects is an intermittent, mobile film program focusing on film works from among artist run film labs and film collectives. Edition I : Process Reversal features works from the Process Reversal Collective, L’Abominable (Paris, France) Cherry Kino (Leeds, UK), The Double Negative Collective (Montreal, PQ) and The Handmade Film Institute (Boulder, CO). Filmmakers including Sarah Biagini, Andrew Busti, Taylor Dunne, Martha Jurksaitis, Nicolas Rey, Kevin Rice, Robert Schaller & Philippe Leonard.

Presented by MONO NO AWARE and Microscope Gallery. Curated by Kevin Rice of the Process Reversal Collective. Followed by a Q&A with Sarah Biagini, Philippe Leonard, and Kevin Rice.

Program Details (In no particular order):

I Swim Now – Sarah Biagini (Process Reversal)
[16mm, 8.5 minutes, 1.33:1, optical sound, B&W]

I Swim Now challenges the visual intelligibility of landscape aesthetics by imagining the experiences of one Violet Jessop, a stewardess on board all three sister ships of the White Star Line – the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic – while each suffered varying degrees of collision and wreckage at sea. I Swim Now evokes the intense brutality and repetition of Violet’s unique physical interactions with nature through an expansive accumulation of optical techniques and manipulations.

Terminus for You – Nicolas Rey (L’Abominable)
[16mm, 10 minutes, 1.33:1, optical sound, B&W]

“Terminus for you, by Nicolas Rey, takes us on a strange journey. That of passengers in the Paris metro. they use a moving railway which takes them from one platform to another, from one line to another and from one destination to the next. What do we actually see ? The thick grain of the black and white film composes very pictorial images. Geometric shapes come and go. The faces of people come into view and then flit away. Glimpses of words, titles torn from posters, are interspersed between these fleeting encounters. This playfully introduces different chapters. Love, solitude, couples, etc. The highly polished soundtrack artfully introduces other elements. You have to listen carefully to appreciate the subtle details, like the faces which emerge from the flames blown by a fire-eater. Thus, the soundtrack evokes a variety of atmospheres: that of fairground, of a circus, and the lazy waters of a river flowing between its banks -— the Seine no doubt — setting the pace and commenting, like the posters, on the endless stream of passengers. The filmmaker ingeniously presents people according to affinities: mocking young girls in a hurry, tired old couples… This is a real comédie humaine presented to us — in a few fragments and a small number of shots. Then, a few minutes from the end, the cinematic process reaches the outermost limit and the images disintegrate. The film itself seems to decompose and the faces only leave their final impression on the canvas. Painful spectres, during three minutes, follow one another before giving way to a last joke played by the author. This short visual essay, on the borderline between the documentary — he seizes an everyday situation — and avant-garde film — to which he pays a tribute — defies, with irrepressible joy, any narrow classification. It freely combines painting, photography and cinema and reveals a passion for reality and a love of humanity to which the filmmaker has already accustomed us.” – Bertrand Bacqué – Visions du Réel (Nyon) Catalog 1997

At Hand – Andrew Busti (Process Reversal)
[16mm, 9 minutes, 1.33:1, optical sound, B&W]

(No Description Available)

Cornmother – Taylor Dunne (Process Reversal)
[6 minutes, 1.33:1, silent, Tungsten]

A single cartridge of Super 8 captures my mothers last visit to her garden. Her body is seen slowly dissolving towards illumination, while her image is forever immortalized in light and silver. Poem borrowed from the Wabanaki creation myth of the first woman, The Corn and Tobacco Mother.

Perceptual Subjectivity – Philippe Leonard (Double Negative Collective)
[6 minutes, 1.33:1, optical sound, B&W]

Ideas take shape in a kind of cerebral magma where the referents are assigned to parcels of experience from which intelligible elements are formed. Perceptual Subjectivity is an essay on the structural formation of thoughts.

Salt – Martha Jurksaitis (Cherry Kino)
[8 min., 1.33:1, silent, Tungsten]

A vision of women playing in the sea at Saltburn in North Yorkshire becomes a celebration of the material nature of film. The silver salts in film that react to light also react to the metallic salts in film toners, and a multi-coloured seascape emerges from the salt of the sea. Filmed on a part of the beach that was once notorious for shipwrecks, Salt is a love letter to film and to the churning, crashing, passionate sea. The opening symbol is the alchemical symbol for salt.

Sucia – Robert Schaller (The Handmade Film Institute)
[5 minutes, 1.33:1, silent, B&W]

“(mostly) shot with my handmade pinhole camera, hand-processed 7363, and part of it (the part shot in a Bolex) manipulated using a homemade self-programmed machine…”

Sanctuary – Kevin Rice (Process Reversal)
[3 minutes, 1.33:1, silent, Tungsten]

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