Mush! To The Movies! The Los Angeles Premiere of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, with In the Best of All Possible Worlds and Break
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen
The Velaslavasay Panorama & Los Angeles Filmforum Present
Mush! To The Movies! : A Polar Film Club –
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, and In the Best of All Possible Worlds
Saturday June 18, 2015, 7:30 pm
At The Velaslavasay Panorama, 1122 W. 24th St. LA, CA 90007
Filmmakers Steve Rowell and Kate Lain in attendance! Los Angeles premiere!
The Velaslavasay Panorama and Los Angeles Filmforum are proud to present the Los Angeles premiere, after almost a decade, of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the follow-up film to Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner, which was recently voted the greatest Canadian film ever. It will screen with Steve Rowell’s short video In the Best of All Possible Worlds and Kate Lain's Break. The screening is the fifth in the series Mush! To the Movies.
Mush! To The Movies! Is a selection of films spanning over 90 years of glacial activity and handpicked by Los Angeles Filmforum's Director Adam Hyman and Sara Velas & Ruby Carlson of The Velaslavasay Panorama. The series features six events with free popcorn offered to all, along with an opportunity to visit the Nova Tuskhut, an installation of the only Arctic Trading Post on the North American Continent, located on the grounds of the Velaslavasay Panorama. Attendees will be given a unique souvenir Polar Passport and those who attend all six screenings will receive a surprise gift and a chance to win a night’s stay in The Nova Tuskhut!
For more event information: www.panoramaonview.org, or 213-746-2166
Tickets: $10 general, free for Filmforum members. Available by credit cain advance from Brown Paper Tickets at http://journalsofknud.bpt.me/
VPES & LA FILMFORUM members get free tickets with advance RSVP to EVENT@PANORAMAONVIEW.ORG
Steve Rowell is a research-based artist who works with still and moving images, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts. Currently based in Los Angeles, he has lived in Berlin, Chicago, and Washington DC, over the past 20 years. His transdisciplinary practice focuses on overlapping aspects of technology, perception, and culture as related to ontology and landscape. Rowell contextualizes the built environment with the surrounding medium of nature; appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist.
In addition to being Program Manager at The Center for Land Use Interpretation (Los Angeles) since 2001, he has collaborated with SIMPARCH (Chicago) and The Office of Experiments (London). Steve's work (collaborative and solo) has been exhibited internationally at a range of galleries and museums. In 2013 he received awards from Creative Capital and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. http://steverowell.com
Kate Lain is a Los Angeles–area artist working in digital video, super 8 film, photography, paper, fabric, and other media. She explores intersections of human and nature, science and art, feminine and masculine, stillness and motion. Her video and film work verges on documentary and spans a wide range—from essay film to single-frame collage to impressionist portrait. Her works have screened at festivals and venues internationally including the Black Maria Film + Video Festival, VIDEOEX Experimental Film & Video Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the Davis Feminist Film Festival. Kate has an MFA in Science & Natural History Filmmaking from Montana State University. She works in video and digital media as the New Media Developer at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. katemakesfilms.com
Remaining Mush! To The Movies! Screening:
Saturday, August 15th, 2015 7:30pm - Eskimo (1933)
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen
Written and directed by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn
Canada, 2006, digital projection, 112 min.,
Los Angeles premiere !***
The second film in the Fast Runner trilogy, from the same makers of Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner. Unlike Atanarjuat, which was set in a mythic past, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen is set among Inuit in 1922-1923, as the shaman Avva and his children face the conversion of many Inuit from their home community to Christianity. We follow the Inuit view of the visitation by Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen, on his 5th Thule Expedition across the Canadian Arctic, accompanied by writer Peter Freuchen. With beauty and pacing to match Atanarjuat, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen allows us an alternate view of the encounters between Inuit and explorers from Europe. Incredibly, this is the Los Angeles premiere!
In the Best of All Possible Worlds
By Steve Rowell
USA & Norway, 2011, digital projection, 6 min.
A short video from a larger research project "The Cold Coast Archive", in collaboration with artists Signe Lidén and Annesofie Norn. Both this video and the collaborative project use the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) as a starting point for investigations into and extrapolations from the broader meaning of a remote landscape of contingency and preparedness. Built to withstand catastrophe, the SGSV is the most robust food-crop seed vault on Earth, buried in a frozen mountainside, on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, one of the most remote and pristine places on Earth. The Seed Vault was opened in 2008 and is currently hosting seeds from nearly every nation on Earth. Filmed in February 2011, during the first week of sunlight for that year.
Audio: Field recordings made inside the vault and at various mountaintops and fjords around Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen.
Voice: Professor Roland von Bothmer, Public Relations Officer for the SGSV (recorded inside the vault by Signe Lidén during a August 2011 interview). For more information visit: coldcoastarchive.org ***Filmmaker Steve Rowell in attendance!***
Break
Break
Break by Kate Lain
USA, 2015; Paper, ink, gelatin, to digital; 2:15 loop. World premiere!
Homemade gelatin is a fragile material, and I had recently begun using it in my printmaking. I was fascinated by the ways the gelatin block was impacted by the making of each print and suspected that if I made enough successive prints, I would be left with some sort of beautiful record of something completely falling apart. I ended up making 136 prints from a single block. I scanned the set of prints, each a unique record of a particular moment in the process of disintegration. The scans are what you see here. The scans have come alive, the prints sit quietly in a box, the gelatin is gone. The sounds are recordings of ice breaking apart. I made this in a broader context of global warming, melting of the polar ice caps, great personal unrest and change, and the deterioration of the health of a few people close to me.