Disappearances (2023) by James Edmonds
Saturday, August 31, 2024, 1:00 pm
CROSSROADS 2024 – program 3
depending on the light to make a difference
Morgan Quaintance’s ruminations on subjectivity, isolation and the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa cap a program weaving interiorities and transhistorical eruptions. Traumatic political histories rattle the windows, falling through silence, punctuated by shock, reflecting how it is to be broken. Program dedicated to the memory of filmmaker Vincent Grenier (1948–2023).
SCREENING:
Interieur Interiors: To A. K. (1978) by Vincent Grenier (US/Canada); 16mm, black & white, silent, 15 minutes, print from the Film-Makers Cooperative. Half Light (2024) by Ryan Marino (US); 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes. Disappearances (2023) by James Edmonds (Germany/UK); Super 8mm, color, sound, 5 minutes. Nomadtitude (2021) by Zulaa Urchuud (Mongolia); digital video, black & white, sound, 6 minutes. Arena (2024) by Khalil Charif (Brazil); digital video, color, sound, 3 minutes. A Sense of Nothing (2024) by Francisco Rojas (Chile); digital video, color, silent, 5 minutes. Efforts of Nature (2023) by Morgan Quaintance (UK); digital video, color, sound, 20 minutes, exhibition file from LUX. TRT: 62 minutes
PROGRAM TICKETS: $12 General/$10 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
FESTIVAL PASSES: $110 General/$88 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
program community partner: Artists’ Television Access
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CROSSROADS 2024
Interieur Interiors: To A. K. (1978) by Vincent Grenier
With special assistance of Ann Knutson. “Grenier’s great skill is that by means of shifts of focus, by subtly altering light level and shadow, by moving the camera axis, by playing upon grain, contrast and surface texture, he can provoke constant mystery as to what exactly we’ve just seen, are seeing, will see next.” (Simon Field, Time Out, May 1980)
Half Light (2024) by Ryan Marino
Shot over a period of three years in a single interior space, this film explores sensory perception through the textural surface of expired film stock, light and layered images. Ephemeral moments meld into voids of grain. (Ryan Marino) bay area premiere
Disappearances (2023) by James Edmonds
On my first visit to England after a gap of two years, it’s as if I’m discovering each subject for the first time. Objects picked up one by one. Every form seems to contain its dissolution, a premonition of loss. Holding on to the edge of a cloud, a hungry ghost throws its wishes to the sea. (James Edmonds) bay area premiere
Nomadtitude (2021) by Zulaa Urchuud
Using footage from socialist era Mongolia, Nomadtitude deals with the transition of the traditionally nomadic people to a lifestyle of urbanization. A changing of roads throughout the years and the movement of people from all across the country to the cities. A timeline of changing physical and spiritual paths. Primary instincts of the nomads, such as having a deep respect for natural surroundings, were forcefully replaced by socialist dogma and, later, capitalist machinations. This work presents the roads taken and not taken by the Mongolian nomads up until now. (Zulaa Urchuud) bay area premiere
Arena (2024) by Khalil Charif
In a world where freedom is constantly under threat, democratic societies are always on the lookout to ensure that the hard-won conquests of the historically recent past are not rolled back, but rather evolve towards individual and collective freedoms of expression and coexistence. (Khalil Charif) bay area premiere
A Sense of Nothing (2024) by Francisco Rojas
A film motivated by nothing (but daily life and (my) vision). It represents nothing, it signifies nothing. There’s no hidden meaning, no defined subject, no predetermined objective. Inside and outside. Just angles, textures and flashes of color. A whole different empire of vision, impossible to put into words. “Nothing” as anything outside common visual knowledge, anything that defies the logic of naming the world; a possibility for a new way of thinking; of dealing with our visual world. (Francisco Rojas) world premiere
Efforts Of Nature (2023) by Morgan Quaintance
Combining low resolution footage, 16mm film and satellite imagery, Efforts of Nature considers the passage of time, processes of change and dissolution from two distant perspectives: the existential level of the body and the planetary level of shifting geological conditions. (Morgan Quaintance) bay area premiere
Vincent Grenier (US) (1948–2023) was a native of Quebec City, Canada. In the early ‘70s he began to make films in San Francisco where he worked as the programmer for San Francisco Cinematheque. After moving to New York City he was a frequent contributor to the Montréal art scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s. He received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2010 and the Stan Brakhage Vision Award in 2019.
Ryan Marino (USA) is a New York-based filmmaker whose films have screened at a variety of film festivals and venues, including: Anthology Film Archives, New York Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Fracto Experimental Film Encounter, RPM Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Uplink, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Spectacle Theater, and WNDX Festival of Moving Image, among others. By day, he works as an audio and moving image archivist.
James Edmonds (Germany/UK) is a filmmaker and artist from the UK, currently living in Berlin. His work is driven by personal observations of his immediate surroundings and a poetic approach to the everyday that is both formalistic and lyrical. The varying qualities of light, our subjective experience of time, space and memory are often thematically present in the visual resonance of his films and paintings. His films have been shown at various international festivals including Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Museum of the Moving Image New York, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen,Curtas Vila do Conde, Open City London, FICUNAM Mexico City, and EXiS Seoul. Solo presentations have taken place at (S8) A Coruña, Experimental Filmtage Frankfurt, Cinéma Parenthèse Brussels, Nocturnal Reflections Milan and Ausland Berlin. He also writes short texts and poems, teaches workshops, and has organised various screenings and events including the film series Light Movement (2015-2018) and the exhibition series Grass Harp with Petra Graf (2016-present).
Zulaa Urchuud (Mongolia) Zulaa Urchuud is a Mongolian artist. She creates found footage experimental short films and art installations. Zulaa is one of the 71 artists participating in the Whitney Biennial in 2024 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (March – September 2024). Her works have been screened and exhibited internationally, such as at the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland), International Festival Signes de Nuit (France), Floating Cinema Festival (Italy), Anthology Film Archives (USA), and Athens International Film & Video Festival (USA).
Khalil Charif (Brazil) is an artist, born in Rio de Janeiro, in 1967. He studied at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, and obtained a postgraduate degree in Art History at PUC-Rio. He was one of the recipients of the awards: Prêmio Interações Florestais (Brazil, 2011), ExperimentoBIO (Spain, 2013), Special Prize in the Arte Laguna Prize (Italy, 2017 and 2020). Among his exhibitions are: Triennale of Contemporary Art (Czech Rep., 2008), Bienal de Cerveira (Portugal, 2017 and 2020), BIENALSUR (Argentina, 2019 and 2021), Media Art Biennale WRO (Poland, 2021).
Francisco Rojas (Chile) was born in Coyhaique, Chile, relocating to Santiago in 2002. He studied film at Universidad Mayor from 2013 to 2020. Since 2019 he has been working under the discipline of avant-garde/experimental cinema, most specifically abstract cinema. He is programmer at Cineclub La Región Central, a space to shown experimental cinema rarely exhibited in Chile and South America. He also contributes writing to Chute Film Coop and Revista Desistfilm. His films have been shown at festivals and exhibitions like FICValdivia, Frontera Sur, Wide Open Film Festival, Pan-Cinema, Millenium Film Workshop and Microscope Gallery.
Morgan Quaintance (UK) is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including MOMA, New York; the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, The Wire and The Guardian and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.