Program 3: The Shapes of Things
55th New York Film Festival
September 29 - October 15, 2017
Jonathan Schwartz’s The Crack-Up, Alexandre Larose’s Saint Bathans Repetitions, Nazli Dinçel’s Shape of a Surface, Jodie Mack’s Wasteland no. 1: Ardent, Verdant, and Takashi Makino’s On Generation and Corruption
Q&A with Alexandre Larose, Nazli Dincel, Jodie Mack, Takashi Makino, and Jonathan Schwartz following the screening on 10/7
The Crack-Up
Jonathan Schwartz, USA, 2017, 18m
World Premiere
Schwartz’s poetic 16mm work meditates on the sights and sounds of slowly crumbling glaciers, charting an interior dance between desperation and hope. The carefully deployed superimpositions, strident soundtrack, and contrasting tones of intensity and tranquility suggest the unpredictable rhythms of metaphysical transformation.
Saint Bathans Repetitions
Alexandre Larose, Canada, 2016, 16mm, 20m
U.S. Premiere
A series of cinematic portraits shot in domestic spaces in a former gold mining town in New Zealand expand into a tapestry of glistening natural light and vaporous movement, created via a painstaking process of in-camera layering effects.
Shape of a Surface
Nazli Dinçel, Turkey, 2017, 16mm, 9m
Shooting on 16mm amidst the Aphrodisias ruins in western Turkey, Dincel refracts multiple epochs of religious history with mirrors and occluded space, finding figural as well as metaphorical power in the human body’s place within the landscape.
Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant
Jodie Mack, USA, 2017, 16mm, 5m
U.S. Premiere
Jodie Mack’s bracing 16mm montage film juxtaposes gleaming close-ups of electrical circuit boards with hyper-saturated images of a flower-littered landscape. In its rapid-fire presentation, the film offers a swift metaphorical representation of technology’s inexorable march.
On Generation and Corruption
Takashi Makino, Japan, 2017, 26m
In this Aristotle-inspired audiovisual panorama, a fathomless void slowly accumulates rippling digital textures, and waves of watercolor pastels wash atop barely perceptible images of natural phenomena. When the darkness returns, only the droning soundscape is left to point the way forward.
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