CONNECTIVITY THROUGH CINEMA PRESENTS:
VERY ABSTRACT AND A LITTLE BIT HARSH

FRIDAY JULY 11TH @ MONO NO AWARE : CINEMA ARTS NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION
33 FLATBUSH AVENUE, BROOKLYN NEW YORK - LIMITED ATTENDANCE TO 40 - MASKS AVAILABLE
DOORS 7PM – STARTS PROMPTLY AT 7:30PM – FREE OR $5 SUGGESTED DONATION

TRT, 45 minutes. Additional time for discussion / Q & A with Lily Jue Sheng IN PERSON

PROGRAM:
very abstract and a little bit harsh traces the political consciousness of Lily Jue Sheng’s practice through a decade of their experience around unstable cinema economies. The making of Sheng’s Force Majeure coincided with a period of optical printing and their occupation as a small-gauge technician cataloguing late filmmaker and projectionist Stom Sogo’s life work. His untimely passing in 2012 tasked Sheng with handling Sogo’s queer and seminal diary films, which heavily influenced their early artistic process. For the first time, Sheng’s work is screening alongside Sogo’s Slow Death, in a timely combination that speaks to the psychic effects of technology, youth, and capitalist violence. Heritage Architecture marks Sheng’s shift to landscape cinema following a period of labour organizing. The program will be accompanied by a reading from their upcoming chapbook Wage Theft, a mix of poetic and agitprop thinking that draws from class struggles across various fronts and fissures, followed by a Q&A.

PROGRAM:

FORCE MAJEURE 2015-2017,
5 min, 16mm. Scored by Kevin P Keenan.
This almost went in the trash because it’s a poor image. It’s self-conscious and struggling to not be so poor, kind of angry about it. It’s also a shadow companion to MERCURIAL MATTER made at a time I held a job upstairs ingesting filmmaker (and former AFA projectionist) Stom Sogo’s mind-bending Super-8mm films.

MERCURIAL MATTER, 2014-2017,
6 min,16mm Scored by Asha Sheshadri.
Early animistic animations using travel mattes and optical printing to layer single-frame captured images into botanical and graphic collages.

SLOW DEATH, 2000
18 min, Stom Sogo

CHANGE / 变 2016-2017
6 min, 16mm double projection. Scored by Kevin P Keenan and Lily Jue Sheng.
CHANGE is an incantation that begins and ends with the character 变 biàn. It draws attention to simultaneous logics unfolding in time, chance, estrangement, and labor, deploying alienation as a sensory strategy – one filmmakers will recognize in a structural film, while native speakers of Mandarin are first attuned to its unnatural grammar. Those familiar with TCM will pick up on body clocks and hexagrams, while others studying a different set of classics pick up on the distancing effect. It packs a partial history of IChing inspired divination and characters into a few minutes.

HERITAGE ARCHITECTURE 建筑遗产 2024
9 min, 16mm. Scored by Masami Tomihisa and Lily Jue Sheng.
Pedestrian scenes recorded in the background of larger ongoing projects while passing through Shanghai, Keelung, Taipei, and Taoyuan. Culture is not just measured in time and travel to the historic place(s) marked by heritage or mediated cinema. The paradox of culture, one affectively caught up in the familiar and alien, and architecture itself lays bare the very infrastructure we call culture. The film fell together walking Hongkou, where my family is from – looking up old spots, finding eminent domain streets instead. In Taiwan, we encounter deities’ birthdays, street vendors, and A Maiden’s Prayer littering streets all year round. Congregations encompassing the passionately devoted, as well as those bored and impatiently melting under the sun, come to perform this act called spiritual life to captive audiences – which cannot be distilled to geography or god-fearing seen on the surface, but ebbs and flows as money changes hands and interests over generations.

Total running time for the PROGRAM: 45 minutes

Bio
Lily Jue Sheng is an artist filmmaker, organizer, and cinema worker operating inside and outside of the theater. They are from Shanghai and NJ/NYC (Lenapehoking). Their films have recently screened at Anthology Film Archives, the Emily Harvey Foundation, in the parking lot of a hosiery warehouse, Light Field Film Festival, and Mono No Aware. They have received awards from Creatives Rebuild NY, the Jerome Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and Queens Council on the Arts.

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).