New Films By Los Angeles Filmmakers in REDCAT’s Transforming Spaces

On March 30, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) presents Transforming Spaces, the first in a series of screenings that showcase new work by Los Angeles-based moving image artists. Next week’s edition, curated by CalArts School of Film/Video faculty Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud, features CalArts faculty, alumni and several of the School of Film/Video’s frequent visiting artists.

From the press release:

Transforming Spaces presents recent film and digital works by artists who use media to explore ways in which space can be transformed and articulated for today’s consideration. The films included are, for the most part, contemplative and reflective…. Recorded images move between objective clarity and abstracted detail, between documented reality and expressively controlled composition. Some play with storytelling, keeping narrative flow mysteriously ambiguous and evocative. Others use the theater itself, and the internal world of each viewer, as spaces given shape through the time created by film projection. Common through all is a singular use of sound, creative in myriad ways that equal and amplify the images.

Still from Laura Kraning’s ‘Port Noir.’ | Image courtesy of REDCAT.

Filmmakers in the program are:

• Abigail Severance (Faculty) – Kinesthesia Series (US Premiere)
  “Kinesthesia Series is an on-going exercise in motion, repetition and the wily experience of time and memory. Made for abstract, rhythmic and existential pleasure, it consists of short interludes between 30 seconds and 3 minutes long that are shot on 16mm, tightly edited, sound designed and finished digitally. The result is a hypnotic fluctuation between abstraction and documentation.” –Severance
• Madison Brookshire (Film/Video MFA 07) – About 11 Minutes (World Premiere)
  “A musical made of 15,625 frames of continuous material analyzed and interpreted by a machine to produce both light and sound for 10 minutes, 51 seconds.”–Brookshire
• Andrew Kim (Film/Video MFA 13) – Society of Motion (World Premiere)
  “Intently look at the flame. Do not think of think of qualities of the flame, of the light. Just look at the flame. You don’t look at the candle. You don’t look at any objects around. Just the flame. Take a few deep breaths. Then close your eyes. This may be of help to you…” –Kim
• Kate Brown – Utah (World Premiere)
  “I traveled from the Southwest to the Northeast of Utah filming and recording sound, over several years. Most editorial decisions were made in the camera. Shots are seen in their original order and length. The film goes from summer to winter, and day to night. I was not looking for monumental Utah, but for the state as I found it. This is part of a filmmaking and curatorial project to make films of the 50 US states, using 16mm.”–Brown
• Cauleen Smith (Visiting Faculty) – H-E-L-L-L-O (West Coast Premiere)
  “This film uses charged historical sites in New Orleans to track the sounds and history of Bass throughout the city. The musicians all play Bass Cleff instruments. Each was asked to riff off of the 5 note musical sequence prominent in the Spielberg’s film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind—a note sequence used by the aliens to say ‘hello’ to earthlings.” –Smith
• Laura Kraning (Film/Video MFA 10) – Port Noir (West Coast Premiere)
  “Within the machine landscape of Terminal Island, the textural strata of a 100 year old boat shop provides a glimpse into Los Angeles Harbor’s disappearing past. Often recast as a backdrop for fictional crime dramas, the scenic details of the last boatyard evoke imaginary departures and a hidden world at sea.” –Kraning
  
• Lee Anne Schmitt (Film/Video MFA 03) – womannightfilm (US Premiere)
  “A meditation. The menace of night and the memory of trauma. A film about violence and the trace it leaves.’There is a woman that watches me, who watches me from her window. She watches me. Every night she watches me. Until one night, she is gone.’Shot on 16mm over a number of years, the film rephotographs and rephotographs, until the image itself is a ghost. It is moment in time, and then that moment is gone.” –Schmitt
• Julie Murray (Visiting Faculty) – End Reel (West Coast Premiere)
  “End Reel convolves certain aberrations in two image-making technologies—film and video—to produce a complex and largely abstract image without detaching entirely from the narrative contained in the reel. The final minutes of a 35mm Hong Kong action film examined over a light-box on an editing bench with hand-crank rewinds and recorded with a lo-res pocket camera shows fuzzed out fight scenes in an epic triumph of good over evil but lingers just as often on the scars and water damage blooms in the film emulsion itself. Sounds move between sync (creaky rewinds + scraping reels) and added recordings. The decay on the film surface, blur of its movement and arbitrary stop and starts on image frames, create unpredictable associations. The pulsing of the pocket camera’s AWB (automatic white-balance) and the native 60Hz pulsing pattern between the video and the light-box’s florescent bulb add to this, too. These spontaneous textures of unfolding process, like human imprints in sand, form the heart of this moving image work.” –Murray
• Janie Geiser (School of Theater Faculty) – The Hummingbird Wars (West Coast Premiere)
  “A theatrical fiction, collapsing time and place: turn-of-the-last-century performers apply stage makeup as if for war, to engage in battle for the soul of the world. The injuries are more emotional than physical, but cut deeply just the same. A visual/aural collage film, drawing on sources as seemingly disparate as Ibsen’s A Doll House (the spoken text), Japanese Gagaku music, makeup illustrations for actors, the biography of a Shakespearean performer, blooming and decaying flowers, and a World War 1 First Aid Book, The Hummingbird Wars suggests theater in a time of war, which is the theater of any time.” –Geiser

Above is a trailer for Murray’s End Reel.